SCALE and Zumastore 2
I’m spending this weekend at SCALE. As always, the conference is great, and better than the year before. The talks are spilling out in to the halls, often multiple talks at a time (right now Chris DiBona’s talk has so many people attending and the spill over is so great, that it makes more sense to catch the mp3 of it at a later date).
One of the coolest things so far was my friend Daniel Phillips’ announcement of the Zumastor project. It looks like this Google sponsored open source project is finally going to give Network Appliances some real open source competition.
I was intrigued by a presentation on SystemTap. This is the first system I’ve seen that looks like it can give DTrace a run for the money, and most importantly it runs on Linux. It isn’t all there yet, but it’s close enough I’m going to start playing with it.
I was also impressed to see the Squeak folks making an appearance, both with a booth and a BoF later tonight. Looks like that project still has a decent amount of momentum.
Sun had a presentation talking about their open source stack (software and hardware). It was fun listening to just how much Sun gets the message that just five years ago I thought was falling on deaf ears there. It was also neat seeing a graph from a study that was done showing who was contributing to open source. Sun is the clear leader in terms of the amount of code and total man hours they’ve contributed (multiples of what most others have done). People don’t always grok that.
UPDATE: Found the study on who contributes to open source. Thanks to Matt Ingenthron (who did the presentation at SCALE) for getting me a pointer even before his slides make it out to the SCALE web site.
Is Solaris 10 the new Linux? 2
I don’t think so, but I have to admit that lately I’ve been having a hard time coming up with reasons for me to use Linux instead of Solaris 10 beyond “I know the technical underpinnings of Linux better” (which admittedly is a very good reason, but one that wouldn’t exactly be there for everyone).
Yes, the CDDL license isn’t ideal, but for most cases, it fits the category of “good enough”, and Sun appears to be considering relicensing under GPL. Yes, the hardware support isn’t as extensive as Linux, but so long as it works with my hardware, I could care less.
On the plus side, Solaris’ BrandZ virtualization beats it’s Linux equivalents for my needs (if you need a different kernels, then Xen would be a better choice, and if you want to debug Linux kernels UML would be a better choice). Solaris scales more smoothly than Linux, ZFS looks like it might be nicer than LVM/[ext3], etc.
Most importantly though, Solaris has DTrace. DTrace is one of those developers tools that just makes you drool the first time you have it explained to you. Heck, you can even use it now to figure out why all that AJAX/DHTML crud on a web page is so slow. You just know that one day DTrace is going to give you a great war story.
I was thinking of all this as I read Theo’s recent blog entries.
So what’s the catch? Well, I haven’t tried using Solaris 10 yet. In fact the last Solaris I dealt with much was probably Solaris 7. So I wonder how much of this is “grass is greener” and will seem much worse once I get to know it. So, I’m going to spin up a vmware image with Solaris on it and try it on for size a bit. For realistic work I will have to set it up on a box at some point, but this is the most painless way to get up and running with it. I’ll let you know what it’s like.