Volume 117, Issue 1 - Sun Continues to make Profits; Seminars in FL; More World Records, New Products, Solaris News, Security Best Practices - System News
Take 45 percent off the list price of new processor boards for Sun Fire X4600 and X4600 M2 servers when you trade-in your older processor boards. Under this special offer promotion, you'll receive more than double the normal trade-in allowance for old Sun Fire X4600 CPU boards while getting hooked up with the latest CPU technology.
The "Armor Your Assets" promotion has been extended to September 30, 2007. Purchase two or more Sun StorageTek T10000 drives, KMS Integration Services, and KMS country kits and choose either a free tape drive, accessory kit or Sun StorageTek Crypto Key Management Station.
Sun reported a first-quarter profit with a net income of $89 million, or 3 cents per share, for the July-September period, which ended Sept. 30. Sales were up 1 percent from last year for a total of $3.219 billion, while its gross profit margin was up five percentage points to 48.5.
With the recent world record set by SAP on Sun T2000 servers, customers can be assured that their IT dollars will be well spent on infrastructure that achieved 10000 SAPS per processor (10850 SAPS/2135 SD User). Scaling was almost perfect with SAP's move from the T1 to the T2 processor, coming in at 1.94. The SAP SD benchmark on the T1 was 1100 and, on the T2, it was 2135, as mentioned above.
Sun Microsystems will be hosting events in the Tampa, Orlando, and Fort Lauderdale area for developers who use Solaris and/or Java to create software. The 2-hour sessions will be held at Sun's office locations. They will include lunch with Solaris and Java experts presenting up-to-date tools, tips, and techniques.
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 CIFS Support Added to OpenSolaris Kernel; ZFS Screencasts; OpenSolaris Community: Storage; Project Indiana Presentation by Dave Minor; and OpenSolaris Developer's Preview (Project Indiana).
A Call for Paper for the 2008 JavaOne Conference has been issued. Proposals for technical and Birds-of-a-Feather (BOFs) sessions are being sought for Sun's 2008 worldwide developer conference set for May 6-9, 2008, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The deadline for paper submissions is November 16th.
The "Good News" from Sun for November 2007 includes the Sun xVM preview, the debuted UltraSPARC T2 servers, the introduction of its first two Quad-Core Intel Xeon-processor-based servers, its certification under J.D. Power and Associates, among others. Also see who has chosen Sun over the competition and why, customers' business results using Sun technology, plus much more.
No, virtualization is not the cure for every data center problem, Rich Green assured Martin Courtney in an IT Week interview. With hypervisor, one must still manage both the underlying hardware and the OS, in addition to dealing with limits involving the computer resources hypervisors consume.
Sun Labs' Project Darkstar, now in open source release, is expected to have a significant impact on the online gaming world. With Project Darkstar, developers can enjoy a "...Java technology-based infrastructure software designed for latency-critical, massively scaled online applications such as online games," explains Jeff Kesselman.
Glenn Brunette's Security Weblog directs readers to the Center for Internet Security document "An Overview of Solaris 10 Operating System Security Controls," which complements the earlier Solaris 10 Security Benchmark from the CIS. That Level 1 document did not offer content or recommendations concerning the security controls available in the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) that are outside the realm of system hardening.
If you've been regarding ZFS as merely a speedy file system, Tom Yager suggests you alter your thinking because, in his view, "Sun's ZFS is close to perfect, but widely misunderstood," as he writes in his InfoWorld article. Learn how much more ZFS can do for you.
Dragon Slayer Jim Laurent takes on an even dozen myths about Solaris on x86 and x64 platforms. With his broadsword, he slays each and every one, leaving the air cleared and the reputation of the Solaris OS unsullied.
George J. Weiss of Gartner finds much to praise in Sun's recent recasting of the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) in the report "How Sun is Recasting Solaris and What it Means to Users." Weiss writes that Sun's efforts over the past few years to drive new marketing programs, functionality, system certifications, packaging, support and developer programs have eclipsed the competition, which remains market-constrained by RISC/Itanium platforms.
StarOffice/StarSuite 7 have reached their end of life (EOL). The last order date is scheduled for January 11, 2008, with a last ship date of April 11, 2008, and end of service life set for April 30, 2013. Replacement products recommended are StarOffice/StarSuite 8 or OpenOffice.org 2.3 Office Productivity Suite.
10 GbE ports can be used with the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120/T5220 servers by either plugging in a dual--port PCI-e Network Interface Unit (NIC) or using the on-chip dual 10GbE Network Interface Unit (NIU). There are important tuning parameters for both the NIU and PCI-e 10 GbE options.
Just made available this week, new Capacity-On-Demand (COD) Uniboards with 1.95GHz UltraSPARC IV+ processors. Available as both factory-configured and add-on options, these boards may be used with the current generation of Sun Fire E4900-E25K servers as well as appropriately upgraded previous generations of Sun Fire E4900-E25K servers and Sun Fire 4800-15K servers.
New riser cards for the Sun Fire V215 and V245 servers change the characteristics of the I/O subsystem for more flexibility in configurations. Two of the new riser cards provide an effective means to change I/O slots from PCI-X to PCIe, while two other ones, PCI-X riser cards, support adapters such as the X1256A-2 serial asynchronous adapter, SAI/P.
Sun is offering a free download of the Hardware Certification Test Suite (HCTS) 4.0. This GUI-based application allows users to certify their systems and controllers for the Solaris Operating System on x86 and x64 platforms
An end of life announcement has been issued for the Sun Blade X8400 Server Module DDR1-400 Memory. The last order date is set for January 9, 2008, with a last ship date scheduled for April 8, 2008 and end of service life for April 8, 2013.
Join a live Sun Net Talk Chat to find out how Sun's revamped lineup of Sun SPARC Enterprise Servers can meet your organization's needs when it comes to virtualization, scalability and datacenter efficiency. This Q&A chat will allow participants to ask questions and get specific answers on these solutions. This event is scheduled for Tuesday, November 13th, at 12 Noon EST/ 9 a.m. PST.
Learn about developing applications for C, C++ and Fortran using Sun Studio 12 IDE, in this one-hour webinar that includes tips for creating and configuring projects, navigating and editing source files, using runtime checking to automatically detect runtime errors (memory access, memory usage, memory leaks) and debugging with the dbx debugger.
With virtualization all the rage, take a listen to four Sun podcasts that address the technology. Hosted by Chris Kawalek, a product manager for Desktop Virtualization, these podcasts bring together the Sun Virtual Desktop team, customers, partners and colleagues to discuss the latest in desktop virtualization.
In a recent blog, BM Seer reports on the Sun Ultra 24 Workstation benchmark in which the Sun product bested competitive platforms from Dell, IBM and HP on the leading software MCAD program, Pro/E Wildfire OCUS V5. Seer describes the benchmark as having a 32-bit "Normal" benchmark and a newer 64-bit "Large Memory" benchmark to show performance on larger new workloads.
The Sun Ultra 24 Workstation attained two new world records for scientific desktop performance. The workstation was a single 3.0 GHz Intel DC Xeon E6850 running the 64-bit SuSE Linux SLED 10 operating system, and the applications were Mathematica V6.0 and the Wolfram Mathematica ISV Benchmark.
The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 server beat all competitors' single chip results on the SPECint_rate2006. When running at 1.4 GHz using the GCC for SPARC Systems (gccfss) compiler, the Sun UltraSPARC T2 server delivered a result 78.0, which is 28 percent better than the results of IBM POWER6 running at 4.7 GHZ with a proprietary compiler.
Sun Fire X4100 server has set world record performance and price/performance results on the TPC-H benchmarks using Paraccel Analytic Database. The Sun Fire X4100 cluster achieved a QphH@1000GB of 315,842, nearly five times the previously reported best performance, and a $/QphH@1000GB of $4.57, which is about twice as good as the previously reported best price/performance.
AMD Opteron Model 8224SE processor (3.2GHz, 120W) is now available as an XATO and X-option for the Sun Fire X4600 M2 server. This processor is the fastest AMD Opteron dual-core processor available. It supports up to 128GB of memory using 32 x 4GB DIMMs with up to 8 x 3.2GHz dual core processors, Sun reports.
Pavel Bures is hosting a series of articles on his blog covering the architecture of the Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM) Pack 3.0 and how it works in conjunction with Sun servers. MOM is a monitoring tool to help manage large numbers of servers. Sun provides a plug-in for MOM on its servers that support the Windows 2003 Operating System.
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 5, were:
Sun xVM Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Software 1.0 [18868]
Sun's First Storage-Server Hybrid to be Released [18912]
Cost of Ownership: Solaris vs RedHat Linux [18878]
Customized news reports about Sun Microsystems. Just the news you need, none of what you don't. 50,000+ Members. 20,000+ Articles Published since 1998.
