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Archived Solaris Articles
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18 May 2013
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Oracle Solaris 11 and PCI DSS [31007]
Meeting PCI DSS Compliance with Oracle Solaris 11
"This paper provides guidance to IT professionals who are implementing Oracle Solaris 11 within their Cardholder Data Environment (CDE) and to the Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) assessing those environments. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) applies to all organizations that store, process, or transmit cardholder data. This includes entities such as merchants, service providers, payment gateways, data centers, and outsourced service providers.
This guidance is not intended as an in-depth technical assessment of Oracle Solaris 11 or an installation guide, but rather an analysis of its ability to meet and support the PCI DSS requirements. In evaluation of Oracle Solaris 11 and its security capabilities, Coalfire has determined that it is fully capable of supporting PCI DSS compliance.
The Oracle Solaris 11 features highlighted within this document specifically address PCI DSS compliance; however, the same basic tenets can be used for meeting other regulatory environment standards such as the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA), Sarbanes Oxley (SOX), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA)."
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22 Apr 2013
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Massive Solaris Scalability for the T5-8 and M5-32 [30727]
By Steve Sistare
Steve Sistare writes, "How do you scale a general purpose operating system to handle a single system image with 1000's of CPUs and 10's of terabytes of memory? You start with the scalable Solaris foundation. You use superior tools such as Dtrace to expose issues, quantify them, and extrapolate to the future. You pay careful attention to computer science, data structures, and algorithms, when designing fixes. You implement fixes that automatically scale with system size, so that once exposed, an issue never recurs in future systems, and the set of issues you must fix in each larger generation steadily shrinks.
The T5-8 has 8 sockets, each containing 16 cores of 8 hardware strands each, which Solaris sees as 1024 CPUs to manage. The M5-32 has 1536 CPUs and 32 TB of memory. Both are many times larger than the previous generation of Oracle T-class and M-class servers. Solaris scales well on that generation, but every leap in size exposes previously benign O(N) and O(N^2) algorithms that explode into prominence on the larger system, consuming excessive CPU time, memory, and other resources, and limiting scalability. To find these, knowing what to look for helps."
Read of more details.
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22 Apr 2013
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Solaris 11 outperforms RHEL 6 on 2 socket Intel servers [30731]
Compare SPECjbb on servers with same Intel chips
Along time Sun employee writes, "I've often heard the term "Slow-laris" applied to Oracle's premier Unix operating system. Most frequently this was in comparison to the Linux OS running on small two socket servers. I will admit that in the Solaris 8 and 9 timeframe engineering decisions were made to benefit scalability to 64 sockets that sometimes penalized smaller servers. In addition, because of Solaris long history and derivation from ATT and BSD Unix code, there was undoubtedly a bit of code labeled, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
With the advent of Solaris 10 and Dynamic Tracing, (DTrace) we actually hunted down and killed a number of those legacy code segments using a new philosophy labeled internally, "If Solaris is slower than Linux on the same hardware, it's a bug."
As a result, Solaris 11 provides higher performance than Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 on basically identical 2 socket hardware as measured by the SPECjbb benchmark..."
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22 Apr 2013
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How Oracle Solaris Engineering Thinks [30532]
Solaris Engineer Liane Praza Pulls Back the Curtain
In two brief videos (both about two minutes long) recorded at Oracle Solaris Innovations Workshop, Solaris Engineer Liane Praza explains why Oracle Solaris engineering continues to build virtualization capabilities into the OS instead of adding more features and better management to the hypervisor and then explains what it is about Solaris that makes it such a good platform for managing virtual machines . As Rick Ramsey notes, this is a perfect opportunity to glimpse how Oracle's engineering staff think about Solaris and the other solutions that emerge from their shop.
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22 Apr 2013
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Oracle Solaris and SPARC Performance [30626]
Larry Wake draws attention to Steve Sistare's three-part blog
Larry Wake draws attention to Steve Sistare's three-part blog "Massive Solaris Scalability for the T5-8 and M5-32," in which he discusses scaling a general purpose operating system to handle a single system image with thousands of CPUs and tens of terabytes (TB) of memory; in Part 2 he explains how improvements to Solaris enable superior performance and scaling on T5 and M5 systems, and in part 3 he focuses on enhancements made in the Scheduler, Devices, Tools, and Reboot areas of Solaris.
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22 Apr 2013
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Upgrade Paths to Solaris 11 for Solaris 10 Customers [30524]
Collection of Video Interviews with Solaris Engineering Team Members
There is a collection of six brief videos by various hands that consider Solaris innovations from the engineering point of view. Speakers include Bart Smaalders of Core Solaris Engineering on why engineering did not provide a direct upgrade path to Oracle Solaris 11; Markus Flierl of Solaris engineering on innovations in Solaris for Oracle database and middleware; Liane Praza of Solaris engineering on Manageability and Analytics throughout the "stack"; Don Kretsch of the Solaris Studio team on SPARC T5 optimizations; Larry Wake of Solaris Product Marketing on continued business value of SysAdmin skills; and Mike Palmeter of Solaris Product Management on OS relevance.
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