Dibbler's Net

So a while back Symantec bought Veritas. Like many other mergers this has led to in my opinion worse support, and delayed product development. For a long time the standard for System Clustering and Failover was Veritas Clustering Tools. Even with the Symantec buyout and the problems that caused there were not alot of options for Clustering. Sun has long had Sun Clustering but it has always been a version or two behind Veritas and lacked certain features and real commercial adoption like Veritas had. Well in the last year I have seen a real shift. Sun has had time to catch up as Veritas 5 has been only a minor improvement on 4. To add to all this Sun has done something very new. As part of their open source movement Sun has released their clustering software as open source and now with version 3.2 has released what looks to be a real contender to Veritas. http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/cluster/features.xml

Sun has added support for Oracle with RAC and several other commercial applications that it was previously missing. The interesting part is that Sun is making this less expensive than a similar Veritas install and now has a very comparable and in some ways better product. We are used to price giving you better quality but that is something that is changing more as vednors are drastically changing how they market their products.

If your using Veritas then I would recommend taking some time and downloading Sun Cluster and giving it a try. If your using vxfs then also look at Sun SAM +QFS for that replacement. Eventually we will see the best of QFS in ZFS which will then really trump vxfs but until then the SAM+QFS works well.

D~

Not so much the company itself just more along the lines of Large Corporations and Unions. Have a T1 at a local office here. For the last 8 days it has died 6 times. Each outage lasting at least 10 hours. RFO’s range from cleared while testing (my favorite) or bad wire cross connect or nothing found. The amazing part has been that for the three times they have needed to send a tech onsite they seem to only be able to get one here after 1am. Most of the time the circuit dies at noon. So 12 hours to get a tech dispatched. The Verizon call center in California try but say they can’t force the techs to dispatch because of the union rules in VA. Meanwhile I have no circuit.  **** the unions. They had a place and reason at one time and they still have a place in many smaller countries or developing nations but I really can’t see what they do to help the true workers in the US anymore other than protect the lowest common worker. Also *** the large corporations. I like being able to know the people I work with and have someone responsible for the product provided.

Okay so more details on the fun with new hardware. I have seen several pics on T5220 and tried to figure out the difference. Sun is selling both a Netra T5220 and an Enterprise. The pic in the previous post is the Enterprise. The other nice part on these servers is they use the new T2 processor. This one has doubled the threads per Core so you get 64 threads on an 8 core box. This hardware makes for a nice platform when working with LDOM’s and zones which is what I will be doing soon.

D~