Jason’s .plan

Coming soon…

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Tomorrow (05/28/2008) I'm giving a talk on moving to open storage (i.e. ethernet, OpenSolaris and SATA…in no particular order) at the Diocesan Information Systems Conference in San Antonio. It's a closed event, but here are the slides from the talk…including the talking notes which cover a lot more than I'll probably have time for:
PDF
Slideshare
DigiTar, DISC, [...]

As a company that was heavily populated with Linux zealots, it’s been surreal for us to watch OpenSolaris develop for the past 3 years. While technologies like DTrace and FMA are features we now use everyday, it was storage that brought Solaris into our environment and continues to drive it deeper into our services stack. Which [...]

So you've got a shiny new Indiana DP2 install and you want to load Sun Studio. Hypothetically, let's say you're looking to compile mod_python. Then, half-way through the Sun Studio 12 install you hit a wall:/usr/sbin/patchadd doesn't exist. What's a boy to do?
The problem is that the SUNWswmt package which contains patchadd was omitted accidentally [...]

I'm giving a presentation today at the Boise BizExpo about using OpenSolaris as the foundation for your storage infrastructure. It's a partial re-work of my ZFS talk at FORUM 2007, but focuses more on building a NAS/SAN platform out of OpenSolaris and less on ZFS in particular. If you'd like to see it in person, it's at 11:00am [...]

Awhile back (~July 2006) we moved our core MySQL clusters to ZFS in order to…among other things…simplify our backup regimen. Nearly two years later, I can honestly say I'm in love with ZFS mostly because of how much its simplified and shored-up our MySQL infrastructure. ZFS and MySQL go together like chips and salsa.
Now, backing up live [...]

Nearly a year has passed since our descent into the 9th ring of latency Hades, and I wanted to make an update post on ZFS' interaction with SAN arrays containing battery-backed cache. (For the full details, please check out this older post.)
For one thing, the instructions I previously gave to ignore cache flushes on the STK [...]

General
Today (10/10),  by the graciousness of Sun, I've been given the opportunity to speak on ZFS and all that its meant to us as a company. Overall, ZFS is truly an amazing and unique  technology that can transform any company in ways tailored to it. If you'd like to see the talk live, I'll [...]

NRPE (Nagios Remote Plug-In Executor) is a critical part of a lot of IT environments. In ours it provides to Nagios all sorts of interesting health info local to the host that NRPE is running on. Whether its RAM, open connections, hard drive space or something else, NRPE helps alert you to strange happenings that [...]

One of the quiet parts that powers our logistics infrastructure is PowerDNS. Its a very powerful way to serve DNS records that you need the ability to update programmatically. Unfortunately, OpenSolaris (or Solaris 10 for that matter) isn't exactly considered kosher over in PowerDNS-land. Like a lot of OSS projects, PDNS hasn't kept up with [...]