Sun just announced some SSD based servers. This is just awesome news. We'll hopefully get some of them soon and can start offering it to our customers. Stay tuned.
*think* SSD and ZFS's HSP (hybrid storage pools).
Update: Has anyone tried to use these SSD drives as swap devices instead of using ZFS's HSP? I posed this question to Adam. It'll be a good test to see how ZFS+SSD vs UFS+SSD performs.
If you are wondering what's going on in the OpenSolaris community, the best way to do that is to look at the Changelogs. You can find the latest changelogs for the OpenSolaris dev repository here:
X related:
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/x_win/changelogs/
OS/Net related:
http://dlc.sun.com/osol/on/downloads/
You can also get a Heads up (highlights of some major changes that go in) here:http://opensolaris.org/os/community/on/flag-days/
We have a lot of things in the pipeline. We would still like to continue to provide Solaris zones. We like them. We believe they provide the fastest virtualization technique available (as you know, zones don't use a hypervisor unlike VMware or Xen products). Plus, we believe Solaris has a really good IP stack. Both combined, provide a super duper server that you get to benefit from.
So, how can we improve on what we are doing? Well, we want to be able to provide the zones in a cloud environment. Where, you can easily migrate the zone from one server to another using our web portal. This is not true today, because we have several servers and most of the servers are at different patch levels. This creates a problem for zone migrations (in addition, not all the servers are at a patch level where we can do zone upgrades when attached).
Another big issue is that the zones themselves don't have a full IP stack. This means that you can't have your own firewall inside your zone. This can be a really good feature, especially since VMware and Xen based products offer this.
Our next roll out of new servers and features will solve all of that. We will be going with OpenSolaris. We feel the OpenSolaris is matured and stable enough that we can proceed with that. It solves all of the above problems with the ipkg-native zone brand, and the Crossbow project that has already been integrated into OpenSolaris.
We'll also offer some new desktop "virtualization" in the near future. We hope this along with the new offerings of the zones based on OpenSolaris, we'll be in a better shape then most other competitors. Oh, and the new servers with SSD caches will help quite a bit too.
Check this out http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Top10SQLPerformanceTips.
We would like to announce the availability of a IPv6 based Solaris Zones. The environment is still beta but it should be stable. If you are interested in getting a IPv6 IP, please contact us.