Storage Tiering is nothing new. We use fast 15K RPM disks for high performance applications, slower 10K RPM disks for less demanding applications, and 7.2K RPM SATA disks for archive storage. Recently, solid state disks (SSDs) have also become more common for really high performance needs. The trick is managing it all.

Two or three years ago, if you wanted to implement automatic storage tiering, I would have pointed you in the direction of Sun’s Storage and Archive Manager- SAM and QFS, Sun’s tightly integrated shared file system. SAM-QFS automatically moves files from one storage tier to another based on the SAM policy and transparently retrieves the files when requested. With tape still the least expensive storage available, this is still a great solution for archiving petabytes of documents/files.

Unfortunately, SAM works at the file level so it will not help our databases run faster. What will help us is ZFS.

1. Explain the importance of installing and running portsnap after installing a current version of FreeBSD.

Portsnap is a system for securely distributing the FreeBSD ports tree. Approximately once an hour, a “snapshot” of the ports tree is generated, repackaged, and cryptographically signed. The resulting files are then distributed via HTTP.

The first time portsnap is run, it will need to download a compressed snapshot of the entire ports tree (portsnap fetch) and then a “live” copy of the ports tree can be extracted into /usr/ports/ (portsnap extract). This is necessary even if a ports tree has already been created in that directory (e.g., by using CVSup), since it establishes a baseline from which portsnap can determine which parts of the ports tree need to be updated later.

Recently, I wanted to confirm that I was running the 64 bit version of the MySQL server as opposed to the 32 bit version...

one of my admins had made a symlink from the mysql/bin directory to the 64 bit binary directory. On the command line, you could no longer tell if the mysqld command was run from the 64 bit directory and there doesn't seem to be a built in MySQL command which shows what version is currently running (show status, \s, show variables, etc) In the end I ran...

Oracle just announced a new line of Nehalem based x86 servers and they are beasts:

The long and short of it for me seems to be that the machines are beasts but power hungry beasts. None of the lower power Nehalems really seem to be on the table. Until we see prices, it will be hard to tell if these are worth the pdf's their printed on.

If you're like me, you love the granular permissions capabilities of MySQL but hate the work that goes into managing them...

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anything like groups in MySQL and according to plans won't be added officially until MySQL 7.0

While searching around, I found Securich...