An article at Phoronix discusses more recent layoffs in Sun/SPARC-related teams at Oracle.

Solaris 11 GA released

Today marks the release of Oracle Solaris 11, the first cloud OS.

Oracle Solaris 11 delivers ground-breaking features for secure and agile deployment of services in large scale cloud environments and enterprise data centers. With over 4,000 different new features, Oracle Solaris 11 raises the bar on enterprise operating systems. Oracle Solaris 11 is 7 years in the making and a whole new set of capabilities, from advanced network virtualization to high performance cryptography and virtualization, dependency aware software packing and installation technologies.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/overview/whats-new/index.html

Download: http://oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/downloads/index.htm

Release Notes: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E19963-01/index.html#release-info

Documentation: http://oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/documentation/index.html

According to this article, Oracle and NetApp have agreed to settle their patent dispute regarding ZFS.

“Announced this morning via NetApp’s website, the companies have agreed to dismiss their pending patent litigation, which began when NetApp sued Sun Microsystems in September of 2007 and became Oracle’s problem when it acquired Sun last year. NetApp and Oracle are tight-lipped about the matter only stating that they both “seek to have the lawsuits dismissed without prejudice” and that the terms of the agreement are confidential.”

This Register article talks about ZFS getting data deduplication capabilities later this year.

Sun has introduced new Flash-based solid state disks (SSDs) built around Intel technology. The new disks are available on Sun Blade, CMT, and 64 servers and storage systems.

The SSDs are available in a capacity of 32G and use Single-Level Cell (SLC) NAND Flash memory. Form factor is the industry-standard 2.5″, and sequential I/O performance is up to 250M/sec for reads and 170M/sec for writes.

Sun has relesed the Sun Storage 7000 series of unified storage systems. The systems use a “hybrid storage pool” consisting of solid state disks, hard disk drives, and RAM to improve performance over traditional HDD-only units.

The Sun Storage 7110 has 8GB of RAM and provides 2TB of storage in a 2U form factor.

The Sun Storage 7210 provides up to 44TB of storage in a 4U form factor.

The Sun Storage 7410 scales up to 576TB with multiple expansion arrays.

In addition, Sun has released a simulator for the units as a VMWare virtual machine image.

Sun today released new Open Storage product offerings.

The Sun Fire X4540 second-generation “Thumper” server features dual quad-core Opteron processors, a maximum of 64G memory, and up to 48TB of storage in a 4U enclosure.

The Sun Fire X4240 has one or two AMD Opteron processors (2-8 processor cores), a maximum of 64G memory, and up to 2TB of storage in a 2U enclosure.

The Sun Fire X4140 has up to two AMD Opteron processors (2-8 processor cores), a maximum of 64G memory, and up to 1TB of storage in a 1U enclosure.

The Sun Fire X4150 has up to two Intel Xeon processors (2-8 processor cores), a maximum of 64G memory, and up to eight SAS drives in a 1U enclosure.

The Sun Storage J4200 Array is a SAS JBOD tray that holds from 146G to 36TB of storage (2-12 disks) in a 2U enclosure.

The Sun Storage J4400 Array is a SAS JBOD disk shelf that holds from 876G (in a single 12-disk 4U tray) to 192TB of storage (24 disks in two 4U trays).

The Sun Storage J4500 Array is a SAS JBOD disk shelf that holds from 24TB (in a single 48-disk 4U tray) to 192TB (4 trays in 16U)

Sun has put documents related to the NetApp lawsuit (regarding ZFS infringing on their patents) online.

Update: Joyent’s Jason Hoffman has posted his thoughts on the matter.

Jonathan Schwartz’s blog has another good entry about the ongoing NetApp vs. ZFS debate.

So last week, I reached out to their CEO to see how we could avoid litigation. I have no interest whatever in suing them. None whatever.

Their objectives were clear – number one, they’d like us to unfree ZFS, to retract it from the free software community. Which reflects a common misconception among proprietary companies – that you can unfree, free. You cannot.

Second, they want us to limit ZFS’s allowable field of use to computers – and to forbid its use in storage devices. Which is quizzical to say the least – in our view, computers are storage devices, and vice versa. So that, too, is an impractical solution.

We’re left with the following: we’re unwilling to retract innovation from the free software community, and we can’t tolerate an encumbrance that limits ZFS’s value – to our customers, the community at large, or Sun’s shareholders.

So now it looks like we can’t avoid responding to their litigation, as frustrated as I am by that (as I said, we have zero interest in suing them). I wanted to outline our response (even if it tips off the folks at Net App), and for everyone to know where we’re headed.

And to be clear, once again, we have no interest whatever in suing NetApps – we didn’t before this case, and we don’t now. But given the impracticality of what they’re seeking as resolution, to take back an innovation that helps their customers as much as ours, we have no choice but to respond in court.

So later this week, we’re going to use our defensive portfolio to respond to Network Appliance, filing a comprehensive reciprocal suit. As a part of this suit, we are requesting a permanent injunction to remove all of their filer products from the marketplace, and are examining the original NFS license – on which Network Appliance was started. By opting to litigate vs. innovate, they are disrupting their customers and employees across the world.

Update: NetApp’s Dave Hitz has posted his response and the email sent to NetApp employees.

As detailed in Dave Hitz’s blog, Network Appliance (NetApp) has filed suit against Sun.

NetApp claims that Sun’s ZFS technology infringes several of the patents covering NetApp’s WAFL filesystem.

Update: Jonathan Schwartz’s initial response is here.

Second Update: Dave Hitz’s response to Jonathan is here.

Third Update: Dave’s additional response to Jonathan’s post is here.

According to this MacRumors article, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said today that Apple will be making ZFS the default filesystem in the next version of its operating system, superseding HFS+.

The formal announcement is expected next week at the yearly Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in California.

Post-WWDC Update: Apparently Jonathan was misquoted; Apple intends to use ZFS as a “large data store” filesystem but not as the primary filesystem for OSX 10.5.

Dominic Kay has a couple of blog entries comparing ZFS to VxFS: Setup Complexity and Time and I/O Benchmarks

(thanks to JamesD for the pointer)

Robert Milkowski compares ZFS’ software RAID-Z to hardware RAID in a great series of articles: Part 1, Part 2.

These tests show that software RAID-5 in ZFS can not only be as fast as hardware RAID-5 it can even be faster. The same is with RAID-10 – ZFS software RAID-10 was faster than hardware RAID-10.

James Dickens has a good comparison of ZFS and WAFL on his UNIX Admin Corner weblog.