Sun Microsystems Inc. this week is planning to give users of its Solaris operating system a sneak peek at the next version and its new file system. Among the many new features of Solaris 10, due by year’s end, is the DFS (Dynamic File System)—a 128-bit system that will automate many common tasks for system administrators.
Sun Sets Sights on Solaris File System
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NOT!…haha!.
First “Fire Engine” now DFS, what’s next? Glad to know my Solaris skills will be needed to migrate Linux data centers back to Solaris.
“before we see all these Linux fanatics saying how Solaris suck and all?”
Not faster than the Solaris pimps!
Anyways this looks pretty neat. Does anyone have the release date for Solaris 10 handy?
and how much will it cost for home users?
Non-commercial use is free, sign up and grab an ISO. 🙂
“and how much will it cost for home users?”
depends on migration costs, tco and stuff but ya the download is free
“Non-commercial use is free, sign up and grab an ISO. :-)”
Wish I had broadband. No way to get it on CD?
“Wish I had broadband. No way to get it on CD?”
hopefully you can if sun doesnt change its strategy again
Finally, something out of Sun that doesn’t attempt to cast aspersions on it’s competitoras and actually focusses on the merits of what sounds like a useful product.
I am a little puzzled about the ‘mirrored disk space for 3 users’ bit though – it doesn’t make a lot of sense to talk about the time taken to do various operations when no mention of disk space is made – i mean, is that 40 minutes-down-to-10-seconds the time taken to allocate 10MB per user, or 10TB per user, or does this refer to something else entirely?
Solaris was lacking a decent filesystem. Now all Solaris needs is a nice GUI tool like smit on aix or SAM on HP-UX. How does linux factor into this article?
“As for streamlining development tasks, the DFS reduces the number of separate tasks it takes to create a file system from 28 to five.”
Am I missing something? whats wrong with ‘mkfs -t type /device’
Perhaps they meant partitioning and all that entails
“Solaris was lacking a decent filesystem. Now all Solaris needs is a nice GUI tool like smit on aix or SAM on HP-UX. How does linux factor into this article?”
When was the last time you used Solaris, 10 years ago? Jeez..
“Solaris was lacking a decent filesystem. Now all Solaris needs is a nice GUI tool like smit on aix or SAM on HP-UX. How does linux factor into this article?
”
solaris now has jds based on gnome. so linux does factor in. howoever i wish they dont ship the ugly cde interface
Sun was late in the game to deliver journaling and it wasn’t turned on by default nor was there an option to enable it during installation. It could only be done by editing /etc/fstab.
And that was all within the last 4 years.
Journaling was first available in Solaris 7 and was buggy. It only in Solaris 8 – which I consider to be a big step forward
for Solaris ( especially on x86) that journaling could be considered stable.
I’ve been beta testing it for a few months, through the Sun beta program, not the public Express version. It’s pretty sweet. UFS logging is turned on by default in 10 and DFS will be a big step forward. The most interesting features so far are the security and of course zones features. Solaris 10 will be a HUGE leap forward and way ahead of what Linux can do. With the annoucement today that Sun and Fujitsu partnering to build the next gen systems for eachother, one can only imagine what improvements could be coming down the pike.
“Solaris 10 will be a HUGE leap forward and way ahead of what Linux can do. With the annoucement today that Sun and Fujitsu partnering to build the next gen systems for eachother, one can only imagine what improvements could be coming down the pike.”
rather than pulling out buzzwords like dfs and ufs can you explain what makes it a huge leap?
For any reasonable sized disksystem with redundancy today you need to use a volume manager product, either Veritas or the Solaris Logical Volume manager (aka, ODS, SDS, SVM, Disksuite) and/or hardware RAID. This is in addition to parititioning up the disk with format and then creating filesystems.
Whether you use harware RAID or software RAID all the meaningful context of what filesystem level operation is being requested by the application is lost by the time you get to the RAID layer. This is because RAID software is just an interposer on the block level interfaces that are nominally “below” the filesystem.
The new file system from Sun changes this by brining the two layers together. By doing that you retain the context of the application requests and can thus optimize the operations as appropriate. It means that POSIX APIs like fallocate() and fadvise() can actually be much more useful, because both the filesystem and the RAID layer get to provide input (because they are the same layer now). Even without the application using any special APIs other than read/write the filesystem AND RAID layer can now “see” the real data so it can do the reads and writes appropriately, something you can’t do in the current model.
Because the filesystem can see the data as written by the application and because it is also the RAID layer it can self heal because it knows which version of the data is correct in all cases (unlike current RAID hardware/software which suffers from a number of silent data corruption failure cases).
This isn’t just a journaled filesystem ontop of a new compeditor to Veritas, it is a complete changing in how you manage filesystem based storage.
According to the article, it should be in the September (9/04) build of Solaris Express. Just brilliant – and I just downloaded 5/04. Oh well, here we go again =) (not really).
On the topic of Solaris FS, does anyone have any news on ZFS?
Thanks
Victor
Although still in beta, anyone have any performance information on it? How does it compare to say XFS or JFS? USF is getting old, but so is HFS too – but Apple is supposively replacing it in Tiger.
Christopher: It’s still locked up in some ultra-secure military-run compound, somewhere in the depths of Sun =).
We won’t get a chance to try it until the September build of Solaris Express (http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/solaris-express/sol_index.html).
So just wait until September, and then go to the link above.
Hope that helps.
Thanks,
Victor