Bryan Cantrill, one of the key developers of DTrace, has posted a blog entry that tells the story of the origin of the project that has just produced the new NAS appliances from Sun: the Sun Storage 7110, Sun Storage 7210 and Sun Storage 7410.

Bryan tells how he his "longtime partner-in-crime", Mike Shapiro, pitched an idea to Sun's CTO, Grep P. His blog includes a link to the original PDF presentation that was delivered to and accepted by Greg P.

Their idea was to use Solaris 10 to build fully integrated, special purpose systems, including an NASA appliance. "Not just one product or product line - a foundation for a suite of product lines." Possibilities for future appliances include:-

• IPsec VPN appliance
• SunRay server appliance
• Identity appliance
• SQL appliance

Bryan continues to tell how they formed the new group. He says, "I am especially proud of our DTrace-based appliance analytics. With analytics, we sought to harness the great power of DTrace: its ability to answer ad hoc questions that are phrased in terms of the system's abstractions instead of its implementation." He also provided a link to a presentation on analytics that he delivered last week at Sun's Customer Engineering Conference in Las Vegas.

He also suggests that, "if you're the impatient show-me-now kind, download this VMware image that contains a full, working Sun Storage 7000 appliance, with 16 (virtual) disks. Configure the virtual appliance, add a few shares, access them via CIFS, WebDAV, NFS, whatever, and bust out some analytics!"

Another fine blog by Bryan, "Concurrency's Shysters", addresses the subject of concurrency.

More Information

Fishworks: now it can be told

Presentation to Greg P.

presentation on analytics

VMware image for download

Concurrency\'s Shysters [...read more...]

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