Sun released the Sun Modular Datacenter (Project Blackbox) along with a suite of services and named recent customers favoring the mobile datacenter [19365]. A feature story highlights a startup planning on setting up these types of mobile datacenters aboard decommissioned ships [19276].
In other Sun news:
Gartner weighs in on Sun's MySQL acquisition [19372].
European Commission awards Sun a $141 million contract [19373]
STAC Benchmark Council adds Sun as a new member and innovation sponsor to the STAC Lab [19366]
This week Sun's Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program released details and judging criteria for each communities' individual programs [19367]. Also newly announced this week, Sun will not only be open sourcing Sun SPOT's Java-ME compliant virtual machine (Squawk), but also Sun SPOT's hardware and software [19343].
The Sun Blade X6250 beat all posted results for FLUENT benchmark test suites [19341].
Learn why the Patch Check Advanced (PCA) may be the only tool you'll ever need for Solaris systems patch management [19208] and how the Service Management Facility for the Solaris OS simplifies management of UNIX operating system services [19207].
Save up to 73 percent when you purchase BakBone NetVault bundled with Sun StorageTek 2540 Disk Array, Sun StorageTek 2530 Disk Array, Sun Fire X4500 Server, Sun StorageTek L24 Autoloader Library and/or Sun Storagetek L48 Tape libraries.
Get a 20 percent trade-in allowance toward the purchase of Sun Blade 6000 chassis or modules, including the new Sun Blade T6320 based on the UltraSPARC T2 processor, by trading in qualified IBM, HP or Dell servers or blade servers. This Sun Upgrade Advantage Program promotion is available now through March 31, 2008.
Save 30 percent off the list price of a new Sun Ultra 45 Workstation and 20 percent off the list price of a new 20- or 24-inch Sun LCD monitor, when you trade-in any Sun Blade 1500 Workstation along with any Sun or non-Sun monitor. This promotion is available now through March 30, 2008.
The Sun Modular Datacenter (Sun MD) S20 or Project Blackbox is available starting at $559,000 (US list price), announced Sun, which also released a suite of services to assist in the planning, deployment, and management of the Sun MD.
In a recent article, "MySQL Acquisition Edges Sun Closer to a Complete OSS Stack," Gartner states, "the MySQL purchase immediately casts Sun in the role of a major open-source database management system vendor with heterogeneous operating system solutions. IBM, Oracle and Red Hat will likely feel some market pressure."
The European Commission awarded Sun a $141 million contract to supply servers conforming to version 3 of the Single UNIX OS Specification to the European Union institutions, bodies, and agencies participating in the open call for tenders.
The Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC) welcomed Sun as member of its Benchmark Council at the end of January. This membership means Sun will be helping define standard performance metrics for trading technologies. Sun also has become an Innovation Sponsor for the Manhattan-based STAC Lab, which is a research facility where end-user firms can evaluate new technologies under simulated trading conditions.
System News posts items of interest for Sun users on a regular basis on the System News For Sun Users blog. Some of those items will become detailed articles in this newsletter. A quick recap of posts for the last week includes Time to Upgrade to Solaris 10; Sun SPOT Open Sourced, Discounted Pricing for Education Announced; Sun to Distribute QLogic SANbox 9200 Fault Tolerant Director Switch; Sun and CommVault to Provide Advanced Data Management Solutions; and more.
Even before the onset of spring training, Paul Desmond of Network World reports "A virtual hit for MLB Advanced Media," that he predicts will play a major role in MLB's new data center. According to Desmond, virtualization has enabled MLB Advanced Media director Ryan Nelson to find room in the nearly tapped out datacenter for the introduction of new products that fans will see from the new datacenter in Chicago set to open in time for the 2008 season.
Sun's Project Wonderland is a useful candidate system for facilitating collaboration among a company's far-flung employees. From the outset, Project Wonderland was planned with business collaboration in mind, according to architect Paul Byrne. Project Wonderland is a new kind of virtual world, one that mimics the physical realm when it needs to but improves on it when that's what is called for.
A new perspective on floating point operations comes from the plans of International Data Security (IDS) which aims on housing datacenters aboard decommissioned cargo ships. IDS plans as many as 50 of these installations, 22 of which are planned for North America.
Veteran blogger Andre Wenas has assembled a blog that outlines Sun VM, including products, installation instructions, and using Windows XP on Sun xVM. The blog includes hyperlinks to several xVM-related sites. Wenas defines Sun xVM as a family of technologies that addresses both desktop and server virtualization, leveraging work from open source communities like Xen that is being built on proven Sun technology.
The Sun Microsystems Webcast Series is featuring the UltraSPARC T2. Sun Senior Staff Engineer and Host Angelo Rajadurai talks with Sun Distinguished Engineer Denis Sheahan about the UltraSPARC T2 and its architecture covering commercial systems that are available with it, its core, additions, running it on the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS), Logical Domains, tools, performance, and more.
The sixth annual Lustre User Group meeting is scheduled for April 28-30, in Sonoma, Calif., where users gather to share best practices about Lustre technology and get advice on specific Lustre implementations from experts and peers. The Call for Presentations is being taken through March 15, and early bird registration is effective until March 31.
For those of you interested in learning more about the Sun xVM Ops Center or with information to contribute, Sun is inviting you to join this growing community by registering at the new Sun xVM Information Center wiki. Offers access to webinars, presentations, articles, and more.
Sun's Project Caroline is an advanced research project of a hosting platform for development and delivery of dynamically scalable Internet-based services targeting small- and medium-sized software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. A recent edition of Innovating@Sun discusses Project Caroline and virtualization, and a JavaOne Online Technical Session also details the project.
Once again, Sun hardware has set new benchmark results on the FLUENT benchmark test suites, besting all other results posted at the FLUENT web site at each core level from one up to the maximum sixteen cores that were available on the X6250 cluster, as reported in BM Seer's blog.
A dual-core Intel Xeon processor for Sun Fire X4150 server is being offered as a new standard configuration. Dual-core Intel Xeon processors are manufactured with state-of-the-art 45nm technology to increase performance at the same power level, and large L2 cache resulting in higher performance - 3MB per core versus 2MB per core.
Sun has introduced new volume configurations for the Sun Fire X4150 and X4450 Intel Xeon-based x64 servers. These are thin configurations with high end processors that customers and partners can build upon, customize, and receive better flexibility and faster turnaround.
Now you can get up to 128GB or 256GB of memory for the Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 and M5000 servers, respectively, under a new X-option offering 4GM memory modules. Trade-in allowances of up to 20 percent are being offered to customers upgrading from 2GB DIMM to 4GB DIMM modules on existing M4000 and M5000 systems through the Sun Upgrade Advantage Program (UAP).
The paper written by Manish Shah et al., entitled "UltraSPARC T2: A Highly-Threaded, Power-Efficient, SPARC SOC" introduced the processor to many in attendance at the Asian Solid-State Circuits Conference in Jeju, Korea in mid-November 2007.
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 119 Issue 4, were:
Top Ten Articles for Vol 119 Issue 4
Schwartz Addresses Questions on MySQL Acquisition [19330]
Status of Lustre Since Sun's Fall Acquisition of Cluster File Systems [19319]
Investigating the Capabilities of the Lustre File System [19303]
The six Sun-sponsored open source communities taking part in this year's Open Source Community Innovation Awards program, where cash rewards will be given to the most interesting initiatives, have released more details on each of their individual program rules and judging criteria.
The Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME)-compliant virtual machine used in the Sun Small Programmable Object Technology (Sun SPOT) platform has been open sourced and can be accessed under Squawk located on java.net. Squawk is an open source virtual machine for the Java language that examines better ways of building virtual machines.
A recent entry on the OpenDS wiki explains how to build, debug, and run the current version of OpenDS from the Netbeans 6.0 IDE. The OpenDS community is working toward building a comprehensive, next generation, open source directory service.
Sun's Tim Boudreau describes NetBeans 6.0 profiler's support for heap dumps in his article "Walking the Java Heap with NetBeans 6.0 Profiler: Pre-crisis quality control" hosted on JDJ.
Martin Paul designed the Patch Check Advanced (PCA) patching tool for the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS). It can be used in small environments where Sun patch management tools are not needed. Or, as one user comments, "Use this tool when you need to manage multiple hosts in an easy reliable manner... it's easy to adapt to individual situations."
Sun has created the Service Management Facility (SMF) to simplify management of UNIX operating system services. These are typically software programs not associated with any interactive user login that listen for and respond to requests to perform certain tasks, such as delivering email, responding to ftp requests or permitting remote command execution.
Bernd Schemmer, a frequent contributor to BigAdmin, has created a template for Korn shell (ksh) scripts designed primarily for the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS). Initial support for such other operating systems as AIX and Linux is included as well.
Sun BigAdmin has two resource pages that system administrators may want to bookmark for future reference: Virtualization Resources for System Administrators and Logical Domains (LDoms) hub. Both provide links and resources for system administrators who are interested in learning more about the emerging technology of virtualization and/or deploying Sun's (LDoms) technology.
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