The Solaris 10 OS has been successfully booted on the Rock processor, a significant milestone in the development and shipping schedule of the processor and the systems that will ship with it. See the News story number [18046]. David Yen also discusses this accomplishment in article [18045].
More on processors is presented this week with a look inside the new SPARC64 VI processor [18041]. The processor is in the recently announced SPARC Enterprise servers; there is a promotion to refresh the system for the next generation - see [18037].
A new Sun BluePrints document discusses updates to the Dynamic Reconfiguration feature on the new servers [18026]. Some new benchmarks show the Solaris 10 OS outperforming Linux [18032] and a world record for the Sun StorageTek 2540 [18036].
NetBeans Software Day is on Monday, May 7th, so here is a NetBeans tip [18011] and a new NetBeans book to look at [17954] in between sessions if you are attending or to check out if you are not attending. We'll have more from the JavaOne Conference next week.
Enter the GlassFish V2 Beta Download Contest by sharing your experiences with the GlassFish V2 Beta and get a chance to win an Apple iPod Nano. This contest runs until May 18, 2007. Winners are selected every two weeks.
Buy one of the new Sun SPARC Enterprise servers and, after 24 monthly payments, you can return the system to Sun and renew the 30-month financing contract for a new, similarly sized, "next generation" Sun system, when such system is made available by Sun. Anytime during months 25-30, customers may trigger this "return & upgrade" option.
If you have used GlassFish in a production deployment or are planning to, then write about it in a blog for a chance to win a 52-Inch LCD HD TV. The contest ends on June 15, 2007.
Sun has successfully booted the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) on its high-end Rock SPARC processor for the first time. David Yen said this keeps the shipment on track of the first systems based on Rock in the second half of 2008.
Each month Sun Marketing produces a "good news" report. This is the April report, published on May 1. The sections of the report are:
Evidence of Growth and Momentum
Sun Chosen Over Competition
Business Results from Customers
Sun's Competitive Advantage
Evidence of Technological Innovation and Leadership
What Others are Saying
Evidence of Growth and Momentum
Sun delivered another quarter of growth, increasing
revenues 3.3%. Software and services grew 12% and 7%, respectively,
reflecting the growing adoption of the Solaris software platform. >> Read more
Gartner gave Sun an overall "Positive" in its recent vendor rating, including rating the Solaris OS a "Strong Positive." Source: "Vendor Rating: Sun Microsystems," By Paul McGuckin, et. al, Gartner Inc., April 23, 2007
Sun moved up in the Fortune 500 rankings to #187 in 2007 from #211 in 2006. >> Read more
Fortune magazine has declared Sun the greenest computer company, with David
Kirkpatrick saying "...Sun is ahead of its peers in the scope and
seriousness of its multi-tentacled environmental efforts." >> Read more
Web deployment hosting services are now available for eligible U.S.-based members of the Sun Startup Essentials program. Built upon Sun systems and storage, and powered by the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS), this web hosting service can assist emerging companies in deploying their Internet services and web applications efficiently and economically.
International access and new features have been added to Network.com, including "Network.com Internet Access" which makes it possible for applications running in Network.com to securely access external data and services over the Internet. A limited time offering is now in effect that gives new users who sign up for an account 200 CPU-hrs free.
Sun Alert ID 102720 (May 02, 2007) states a security vulnerability in the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) may allow a remote unprivileged user to cause a Denial of Service (DoS) to the GIMP application or execute arbitrary code with the privileges of a local user when that local user loads an XCF image file supplied by an untrusted source. To avoid this issue, do not load images from untrusted sources.
The Thursday April 26, 2007, edition of Innovating@Sun features Henk Goosen, the Director of Engineering, Systems Group, and Bob Sokol, media architect in Global Sales and Services, who discuss the Sun Streaming System with host Hal Stern.
The release of Sun High Performance Computing (HPC) ClusterTools 7 provides developers with a complete integrated environment designed to address complex, compute-intensive applications on Sun systems and clusters of Sun systems. This free download provides middleware to manage a workload of resource-intensive applications and delivers an end-to-end software development environment for parallel distributed applications.
Sun N1 System Manager 1.3.3 adds new hardware support for the Sun Fire V125 Server, Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 Servers, Netra X4200M2 Server, Sun Fire X4600 M2 server and Sun Blade X8420 Server Module.
The new SPARC64 VI processor found in the Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000/M5000/M8000/M9000 servers consists of two SPARC V9 cores with two vertical threads per core. This dual core version of the SPARC64 V is replacing Sun's Sparc4+ and Fujitsu's Sparc64 V processors. Get technical details of the processor in a white paper online.
"How quickly will iSCSI networks running 10 Gigabit Ethernet hardware become mainstream? Which applications will it be used in?" asks a recent ComputerWorld article. The Sun Dual-port Multithreaded 10 GbE Networking card provides ten times the throughput at one-third the cost per gigabit. Take a look at the other advantages and applications of this Sun hardware.
David Yen, the head of Sun's Microelectronics group, said one of the challenges Sun is facing is finding a partner to make Sun's processors since Sun's long-time partner Texas Instruments (TI) has decided to rely on foundries to develop next-generation semiconductor process technology, according to an interview with Yen on EETimes.com.
The May meeting of the OpenSolaris user groups will be held on May 14th, 15th and 16th in Ft. Lauderdale, Tampa and Orlando. The speaker will be Bill Nelson (VP Professional Services, GCA Technology Services), author of Sun's Web, Directory, and Identity Manager courses. Bill will talk about Identity Management.
You will be able to attend the May meetings in person, via conference call or via the Web with WebEx. The formal presentation will be at a new time, 5:30pm.
See the web site for the conference call numbers, WebEx/MeetingPlace details and meeting locations.
Sun unveiled its nearly completed prototype of a mobile, virtualized data center: Project Blackbox. The potential uses of the Blackbox range from emergency response situations to military deployments or offshore oil rig deployments.
You can see and tour a Blackbox, which is on tour, at a number of locations including Orlando, Florida:
IT professionals in the greater Tampa area are invited to join Sun, Cisco and Forsythe for breakfast and a seminar which will address the theme of Optimization in the datacenter.
Nick Kloski, SPARC technology specialist with Sun Technical Marketing, has written a Sun BluePrints Online article on updates to Dynamic Domains, Dynamic Reconfiguration and Capacity on Demand. Kloski considers how these updates involve Sun's newly announced SPARC Enterprise Server products. The author also covers the eXtended System Board (XSB), descriptions of the different ways that it can be configured specific new capabilities of DR, and enhancements to Capacity on Demand (COD).
As part of its Advanced Product Line agreement with Fujitsu, Sun is releasing its CoolThreads Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000, Sun SPARC T2000 servers and associated Xoptions. The SPARC Enterprise T1000 and T2000 servers are form / fit / function equivalent to the current Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers, but can now be sold through Sun, Fujitsu and Fujitsu Siemens Computers. The existing Sun Fire products will continue to be sold along side the new SPARC Enterprise brand.
Three server announcements include front-door panel air filters, repriced Sun Fire X2100 and Sun Fire X4500 servers, and a new entry-level configuration of the Sun Fire X4600 M2 server.
The BM Seer blog reports on the benchmarks results of the Sun StorageTek 2540 mid-range product coupled with Sun's 4Gb HBAs: "The Sun StorageTek 2540 has World Record $/performance of $46.26 $/SPC-2 MBPS and best-in-class performance of 730.04 SPC-2 MBPS."
The Sun StorageTek NAS OS 4.21 for StorageTek 5000 NAS Appliances and Gateway Systems is now available with several new features, among which are an assured delete feature for commercial-grade data scrubbing; NDMP v4; various iSCSI enhancements; Connected Network Services (CNS) support for automated case-generation; and support for 5320 expansion unit under the 5300 RAID EU to enable 5310 NAS customers to expand their system capacity.
The Sun StorageTek 6540 and StorageTek 6140 arrays are now available with 300GB 15K rpm Fibre Channel and 750GB SATA-II drive options. The 750GB 7,200 rpm SATA-II configurations allow dynamic expansion to a maximum capacity of 168TB for the 6540 array and 84TB for the 6140 array while requiring no increase in air-conditioning and power requirements compared to the arrays with the 500GB hard disk drives.
Get double the capacity of the SDLT 600 tape drive with the new Sun StorageTek DLT-S4 drives. The new drives also provide almost two times the throughput. The DLT-S4 drive is backward-read compatible to SDLT 600 and SDLT 320 written tapes, so you also get investment protection.
The white paper titled, "SAN Fundamentals: How Fibre Channel SANs Are Built, Secured and Managed," (Updated April 2007) introduces readers to the basics of Fibre Channel and explains how Fibre Channel SANs are built, secured and managed.
Each week, we determine which articles have been most frequently referenced by logged-in subscribers to provide you with a list of the most popular articles for the last 4 issues. The top 10 articles for last week, Vol 110 Issue 4, were:
Sun customers now have access to Multivendor Support (MVS) as a stand alone service and as a support module within a SunSpectrum Enterprise Service Plan to support their IT environments.
Get an assessment of your IT data center to maximize power and cooling: Sun's Eco Assessment Service for Web Tier provides recommendations for key environmental and space planning issues at your site through a comprehensive review of computing technology, facility infrastructure and space planning.
A tutorial on the NetBeans IDE page explains how to set up a connection to Sun's Java DB (which is based on the Apache Derby database) in NetBeans IDE. The steps include configuring the database, registering it and connecting to it, creating tables and adding data and using an SQL script.
Pro NetBeans IDE 5.5 Enterprise Edition explains how to use this NetBeans IDE and its enterprise add-ons, Enterprise Pack and Visual Web Pack, as a professional Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 5 software development platform.
Version 1.0 of Logical Domains (LDoms) software is now available. It can be downloaded from the Sun Download Center for the Sun Fire and SPARC Enterprise T1000 server and T2000 server, Netra T2000 Server and Netra CP3060 Blade.
Proof that Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) is a high performance OS came in from a Pro/E Wildfire 3 OCUS V5 benchmark that showed Solaris 10 OS outperformed Linux.
Greg Nakhimovsky's Sun Developer Network article "Using Dmalloc With the Solaris OS and Sun Studio Compilers" recounts his experience with Dmalloc, which he characterizes as a useful open source debugging package on the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) with Sun Studio compilers.
If you are new to Sun Connection, there is a BigAdmin feature article that explains how to use it and baselines to update your Solaris hosts with patches. The baseline is a collection of patches, patch metadata and tools. Using baselines enables you to easily know the patch level of your hosts.
On the blog of "Chhandomany" there is a link to the April issue of Sys Admin magazine which gave three positive reviews of three technologies from Sun: the Sun Grid Engine, the resource management feature of the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS), and process accounting in Solaris 10 OS.
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