USENIX Update

Talk given by Bryan Cantrill of Sun Microsystems at the 23rd Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA '09). System administrators have long been unable to meaningfully visualize the run-time performance of their systems. This is not (merely) an interface problem—the data available to visualize has not historically extended beyond basic counters and the ability to visualize the performance of the system has therefore not extended much beyond simple graphing of these scalar values. However, with the introduction of DTrace and its ability to perform ad hoc instrumentation of production systems, the data available to visualize has become essentially limitless, with the possibilities only constrained by our ability to build facilities that can ask the right questions and cogently display the answers. This talk describes one such DTrace-based system visualization facility: the appliance analytics found in the new Sun Storage 7000 series. This talk will demonstrate the facility, explain its innards, and provide examples of the ways visualization has allowed new answers to old questions and has itself posed new questions about our systems.

Today kicks off the first in a series of interviews with the USENIX ’09 Tutorial Instructors.

First up: Peter Baer Galvin

New! – Solaris 10 Administration Workshop 1: Administration – (hands on)

New! – Solaris 10 Administration Workshop 2: Virtualization – (hands on)

New! – Solaris 10 Administration Workshop 3: File Systems and Security - (hands on)

Peter is the Chief Technologist for Corporate Technologies, Inc., a systems integrator and VAR. Previously he was the Systems Manager for Brown University’s Computer Science Department. He is currently a columnist for ;login:. He has written articles for Byte and other magazines, as well as columns for SunWorld and Sys Admin magazines. Peter is co-author of the Operating Systems Concepts and Applied Operating Systems Concepts textbooks. As a consultant and trainer, Peter has taught tutorials on security and system administration and has given talks at many conferences and institutions on such topics as Web services, performance tuning, security, system administration, and high availability.

And now the questions…

1. What is your class about? What can attendees expect to take away from it?
It’s all about the new features in Solaris 10 – ZFS, Containers, General administration, and security. Dtrace isn’t included as there are other great full day and multi-day tutorials on that.

2. Aside from your own class, what do you consider the most useful/exciting thing happening at USENIX ’09?
The “hallway BOF” is great – striking up interesting conversations about what works, what doesn’t, what’s new with other attendees.

3. What other cool new technologies are you most interested in?
What works in virtualization and large facility management are hot topics.

Find out more about Peter’s classes here.

Note: Peter teaches jointly with Marc Stavely.