Sun Ultra 24 Workstation, a single socket (dual or quad core) workstation powered by Intel processors, are now available. Dual core configurations start at $995, with quad core starting at about $1,445 [18869].
Also just released is Solaris 8 Migration Assistant (Project Etude) [18803].
The Sun Fire X4500 (Thumper) has recorded two world record price/performance results on the TPC-H benchmark [18823] and the SPARC Enterprise T5120/T5220 servers continue to reign in record setting, now beating all other single-chip results published on SPEC CPU2006 [18820]. The UltraSPARC T2 also blew away the competition on the RSA/AES Cryptography Benchmark [18821]. Get a technical perspective on the T2 processor and Solaris OS [18782].
Find out the latest on Scott McNealy since he moved upstairs to the chairman's suite [18840].
Sun recently reviewed its roadmap for JavaFX, Java SE and the still viable Java ME [18847].
In Sun Java System, learn how to deploy the Directory Server as a naming service [18793], install App Server 9.1 in Solaris Zones [18829] and deploy Access Manager 7.1 in less than 10 minutes [18770]. Recovery techniques [18849] and log file rotation strategies [18850] for the Messaging Server also are included.
The Sun Ultra 24 workstations are Sun's first quad-core x64 workstations powered by Intel Core 2 Duo, Intel Core 2 Quad and Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core processors. They are designed for high performance and can easily handle processor-intensive tasks in demanding multitasking environments; plus they offer six workstation-class graphics accelerator cards, including the NVIDIA Quadro FX5600 graphics board, and the new PCI-Express Gen2 graphics bus for maximum graphics performance.
The Sun Fire X4500 (codenamed Project Thumper) has recorded two world record price/performance results on the TPC-H benchmark. One was achieved with the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) and Sybase IQ 12.6, resulting in $8.11/QphH@1000GB. The other was with the Solaris 10 OS and IBM's DB2 9.1, which recorded a price/performance of $29.39 per QphH@3000GB.
Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz says Sun will respond to storage vendor Network Appliance's suit filed last month that claims Zettabyte File System (ZFS) violates its company's patents with a countersuit, which will request "a permanent injunction to remove all of (NetApp's) filer products from the marketplace." Schwartz says he initially attempted to resolve this dispute with Net App CEO Dan Warmenhoven, but his demands are infeasible.
The SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers running at 1.4 GHz have recorded a 78.5 result on the SPECint_rate2006 and a 62.3 result on the SPECfp_rate2006, beating all other single-chip results published.
The Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub), an application-level protocol for publishing and editing web resources using HTTP and XML 1.0, has been published under Request for Comment (RFC) 5023. This protocol is important because it will make it easier to post to the web, commented Tim Bray, Sun's director of web technologies and co-chair of the standard.
SNI Editor-in-Chief/CTO John J. McLaughlin posts items of interest to Sun Users on a
regular basis on his blog. A quick recap of John's posts for the last week, include Sun To File Suite Against NetApp; The New Quad-Core x64 Sun Workstation, the Sun Ultra 24; Solaris 8 Migration Assistant 1.0 (Project Etude); Logical Domains (LDoms) 1.0.1; Sun's Open Source Massively Multiplayer Online Games; 10GbE on Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120/T5220; 10 Things IBM Likes About Solaris 10; and Try and Buy New Sun Servers.
Sun's Startup Camp event in New York City earlier this month brought together some 300 entrepreneurs to network, share advice and learn from the experiences of other startups and vendors. Information Week's John Foley found the event not only provided emerging companies with advice on how to be successful, but also on what to avoid, which he summarized into seven deadly startup mistakes.
What's happened at Sun since Scott McNealy moved upstairs to the chairman's suite? Successor Jonathan Schwartz has presided over the open sourcing of
the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS), Java language and the SPARC processors, Marguerite Reardon reports in CNET News.com. Not incidentally, Reardon notes, Sun has returned to profitability. She interviews McNealy on the transition.
Sun engineers Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore shared their insights into the dynamics of file systems in an interview with ACM Queue, covering such aspects of the subject as data integrity, scalability and administration. Bonwick is Sun's CTO for storage. With co-lead Moore, a Sun Distinguished Engineer, he was instrumental in the development of ZFS. Pawel Jakub Dawidek, a FreeBSD developer, also contributes to the discussion, which was moderated by David Brown of Sun's Solaris engineering group.
Heinz Kabutz, a widely recognized Java programmer, answered Janice J. Heiss's first interview question on "good code" authoritatively, saying, "Don't read too much into microbenchmarks. Performance advantages come from good design and an appropriate architecture."
A four-part feature article series on BigAdmin describes in great detail how to setup the Sun Java System Directory Server 6.0 as an LDAP naming service for Solaris 8, 9 and 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) clients as well as AIX 5.3 and Red Hat Linux Release 4 Update 4 clients. There are many uses and advantages to using LDAP as a naming service over NIS or individually managed servers.
Readers interested in installing Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 in Solaris Zones will be interested in the article written by Sathyan Catari, Elena Asarina and Rick Palkovic, which explains the possible installation and upgrade scenarios, their limitations and how to overcome them.
In less than 10 minutes, you can now install, configure and deploy the Sun Java System Access Manager 7.1 on the Sun Java System Application Server. The engineering team has repackaged its components so they can be deployed as Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) applications and conveniently deployed as a single web application.
Joe Sciallo has written a BigAdmin article on Sun Java System Messaging Server Message Store Disaster Recovery Techniques that describes general message store backup and restore policies for the solution. He also details how to recover from specific message store problems with an individual mailbox and multiple mailboxes on a single partition (or an entire partition), across multiple partitions (or an entire message store host) and across multiple message store hosts.
The log files in the Sun Java System Messaging Server can assist system administrators in collecting message statistics, performing trend determination, troubleshooting problems, among other things. Anthony Waldron relates how to configure log file rotation for the Messaging Server service logs, such as the IMAP service, in a Sun Docs article.
The Sun Java System Message Queue is a full-featured message service that provides reliable, asynchronous messaging conformant to the Java Messaging Specification (JMS) 1.1. Updates to this software include version 4.1, a full product install, and version 3.7 Update 2, a full product install of version 3.7 with patches or used as a bug-fixed update to Version 3.7 Update 1. Both downloads are available free.
The Solaris 8 Migration Assistant accelerates migration of application environments from the Solaris 8 Operating System (Solaris OS) to Solaris 10 OS by capturing and converting the entire environment of the Solaris 8 source system and then transferring it to a Solaris Container running on the targeted Solaris 10 system. Try it out now by downloading the software that comes with a 90-day evaluation license.
Get a technical perspective on the UltraSPARC T2 processor and the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) from Steven Sistare, who offers insight into core pipeline and thread scheduling; cache associativity; virtual memory; block copy; and performance counters.
Sun now provides Sun Cluster 3.1 and 3.2 support for the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 Tier 3 servers, the latest CoolThreads servers based on the UltraSPARC T2 chip multithreading (CMT) processor. Sun Cluster is a "Service Level management" platform that facilitates delivery of higher service levels, at lower service level costs and at reduced risk.
Solaris Cluster 3.2 is now supported in Logical Domains (LDoms) I/O domains, which are domains that include physical devices and are not dependent on other domains for their operation. LDoms version 1.0.1 is required as is either Solaris 10 11/06 or Solaris 10 8/07, both with required patches installed.
Users of the UltraSPARC T1- and T2-based systems will want to take advantage of the enterprise-level capabilities of these servers with such applications as Sun Studio 12. The Sun Studio Engineering staff has provided a developer tip on how to best use Sun Studio in developing applications for CoolThreads systems. They helpfully include information on Cool Tools, as well as on other aspects of the subject.
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 116 Issue 3, were:
UltraSPARC T2 Servers Set Floating-Point Single-Chip Record on SPEComp Benchmark [18784]
Sun UltraSPARC T2 Servers Deliver Highest Single Socket JVM Performance [18783]
Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 Posts Industry-Leading Results on Lotus Domino R6iNotes [18822]
Making Storage Think for Itself (or at least for the User) [18700]
Free Download of Logical Domains (LDoms) 1.0.1 [18824]
Download Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager (CAM) 6.0 Free [18830]
Sun Expresses Continued Support of Cluster File Systems Lustre [18800]
Andy Bechtolsheim Talks About Innovating in a Commodity Market [18787]
Sun Acquires J.D. Power and Associates Certification [18838]
John Fowler on the Prospects for Sun's Merged Server, Storage Units [18797]
Sun is enhancing the existing subscription offerings for the Sun Java Enterprise System 5 (Java ES) and Java System Suites to include an optional Premium Plus level of service. Premium Plus support entitles the customer to such additional services as a Customer Focused Support Team and a Customer Advocate.
Sun is repricing its Sun StorageTek 9900 Software Service Plans and passing the savings on to customers. Both the Standard and Premium Sun Software Service Plan contracts for the Sun StorageTek 9900 software are included in the repricing.
In a recent Java roadmap press event, VP and Sun Fellow James Gosling set out to clarify the new client-side technology JavaFX and the future of Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) and wound up scaring Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) developers.
Get improved high availability and horizontal scalability with the enhanced clustering capabilities of GlassFish Version 2. Learn how the latest version of this open source application server's flexible clustering architecture provides ease of use and high administrative control to enhance your experience and facilitate these aspects for you.
If you want to know how to configure the Open Web SSO project (OpenSSO) to authenticate users who access protected resources, an article on "Securing Applications With Identity Services, Part 1: Authentication" may be a good place to start. An example client application built with the NetBeans IDE is used to demonstrate the process.
Sun UltraSPARC T2 CPU running on the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120/T5220 servers along with Logical Domains (LDoms) provides a highly secure and excellent performing deployment. Martin Mueller describes a secure configuration of LDoms with the UltraSPARC T2 in a case scenario for web servers.
The on-chip cryptographic accelerator in the UltraSPARC T2 processor provides a Cipher/hash unit and an enhanced modular arithmetic unit (MAU). This updated design gives the UltraSPARC T2 processor the ability to achieve up to 37,000 RSA 1024-bit signs/s and up to 38.9 Gbit/s of AES-128 throughput in a single processor, as recorded by the RSA/AES Cryptography Benchmark.
This Sun-sponsored webinar will cover standards (SAML, WS-Trust and WS-Security); Federated Single Sign-on (SSO); service gateways; secure token services; and web services security container plug-ins. Presenters will be Dave Linthicum, Linthicum Group; Daniel Raskin and Kevin Schmidt, Sun. The event is scheduled to take place on Wednesday, October 31st at 12 noon (EST).
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