Thank you for attending the Sun Startup Essentials webinar on
Security for Web Applications, here is a list of useful links to learn
more about and start implementing the different technologies that were
covered during the presentation:
Thank you for attending the Sun Startup Essentials webinar on
Security for Web Applications, here is a list of useful links to learn
more about and start implementing the different technologies that were
covered during the presentation:
Reminder, mark you callendar:
Wednesday January 27th, Join the Sun Startup Essentials Webinar on Security for Web Applications.
A key success factor for Web startups is to protect their applications and data from different security threats. Join this webinar to learn about security challenges and about key solutions such as encryption, authentication, certificates, secure and fault-tolerant storage, chrooted environments. The Sun Startup Essentials experts will also cover how to implement these solutions at minimal cost by using standard and open components such as Solaris, Apache, MySQL, ZFS and more.
Registration limited to members of the Sun Startup Essentials program.
Your company is less than 6 year and 150 employee: Join Sun Startup Essentials >>
Cloud computing has been one of the most discussed topic over the year, and the discussion is not over because what is really being discussed is the way we will access computing an storage resources in the future. Even famous French intellectuals are giving their opinion and making predictions. Future will decide on predictions's accuracy.
What is usually less discussed is the technology behind cloud-computing, though this is no secret that virtualization is playing a key role. Cloud data-centers will be loaded with virtual machines each of these machines potentially requiring in disk-space what a complete operating system (OS) requires, which can go up to many gigabytes. How much disk-space does a virtual machine image (vdi) really consum? The only good answer is: too much. Too much because the OS is part of the infrastructure as opposed to the software that really brings value for the user and that
is located at the application level. In short, a good infrastructure reduces its resource consumption to the minimum while bringing flexibility and availability.
This is where ZFS and Solaris get into the picture. ZFS - which already offers compression on the fly - has just been enriched with deduplication while Solaris comes with a really light-weight technology in terms of virtualization: the zones.
Let's go down quickly to some numbers :
Before duplication zpool list returns:
$ zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT rpool 93G 83.0G 9.99G 89% 1.20x ONLINE -
After the vdi duplication:
$ zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT rpool 93G 83.1G 9.86G 89% 1.96x ONLINE -
The pool allocation grew 0.1GBytes (100MB) instead of 4.8GBytes. I am saving 98% of the additional disk-space (note that I also tried dedup with compress=on but the saving was only about 28%).
Now I create a Solaris zone. A zone is another type of virtual machine based on virtualization features available in Solaris (and also in OpenSolaris). The zone vdi is created from the Solaris image that is hosting the zone (ok, a zone does not have a vdi per see, but the objective here is only to measure disk-space consumption). I create a "sparse" zone, which means that it shares part of its image with the host OS. The zone disk-image takes 976MBytes versus more than 4GBytes for the Solaris host (to be precise, I ran my experiment with a Nevada distribution. On OpenSolaris a default zone takes 237MB). I already reduce the disk-space consumption by more than 75%.
From there, I create a second zone by cloning the first one. To do so, I use the zoneadm clone command. Interestingly since both zones are located on a ZFS file-system this command leverages the ZFS cloning capabilities. Yes, nice integration between the zones and ZFS: instead of duplicating the first file-system ZFS creates a clone out of it that shares most of its underlying blocks with the original. The resulting zone vdi takes 7.60M. If I compare this to the 4GBytes of the host OS, I get a saving of 99.8%.
Whichever virtualization technology I am using, ZFS now provides me with features that allow me to save a lot of disk-space when it comes to vdi. Solaris zones demonstrate that their reputation of being a light-weight technology is well deserved.
Whether the future of cloud is public, private, or delivered as an appliance, no doubt that ZFS and Solaris will be part of the picture.
You want to use or to know more about Sun technologies? We propose you free Webinars to improve your knowledge and skills!
To register, just click on one of the following links:
October 14th 2009: Storage for your database: how databases can take advantage of ZFS, SSDs and the Open Storage line of products from Sun to increase data security, scalability, and reduce the price/performance ratio.
Note: Everybody can join. Useful for ISVs and startups using a database in their application.
Note: Everybody can join. Especially useful for ISVs and startups.
Note : Everybody can join. Especially useful for ISVs and startups.