Sun announced this week that it will be working on a $44.29 million research contract for the DoD to develop supercomputers through interconnecting chips with light [19701].
Open source technologies are being recognized as ideal solutions by federal agencies. The U.S. Navy recently announced it will be acquiring only open source technologies and standards [19669]. Sun Federal is working to educate federal government decision makers about Sun's open source approach [19630].
Jonathan Schwartz also took some time to explain Sun's giveaway approach to business [19664].
Looking for ways to implement MySQL? See how to create web apps in 30 minutes [19647] and get a step-by-step approach to optimizing MySQL server on Sun x64 servers and storage [19670].
Also get some quick tips on setting up the Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 2.0 [19685].
Sun will be heading a research project on microchip interconnectivity funded by the Department of Defense to the tune of $44.29 million. The 5 1/2 year project will begin with $8.1 million provided to Sun Microsystems' Microelectronics and Laboratories divisions which will be focusing on microchip interconnectivity via on-chip optical networks enabled by Silicon photonics and proximity communication.
The United States Navy will only be adopting open source technologies and standards from now on, Vice Adm. Mark Edwards, deputy chief of naval operations for communications, announced earlier this month, and the naval services are looking forward to lower costs, rapid technological upgrades and greater scalability with this move.
Sun announced new customers who are relying on its open technologies to scale their growing Internet-based business. New Web 2.0 companies are looking for more compute power, longer archive periods and ways to deal with rising power and cooling costs, and Sun is ideally suited to meet these needs as Flexilis, Gracenote, LinkedIn, RealTime Matrix, Siteworx and SuccessFactors have found.
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 Sun's Enterprise Class Data Storage Solutions Support New IBM System z10 Server, GlassFish & MySQL Software Bundle, Sun Wins $44.29 Million DoD Research Contract and HA xVM Agent Available for Download.
Did you know that there are eight different styles, or flavors as Sun's Sidsel Jensen likes to refer to the variety of Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) available? The particular purpose of one's installation could influence which of these OS options is the right one.
If anyone could explain the economic virtues of open source to the business and finance leaders of the U.S., writes Chris Preimesberger for eWeek, that person is Jonathan Schwartz, who did exactly that before the audience at the recent Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research summit. Preimesberger reports that Schwartz used the experience of an African banker to explain why giving away product is the pathway to profit.
As one of the fastest growing business units at Sun, Sun Federal has about 800 employees and has a president and COO with 28 years of experience in the federal government and commercial industry. Bill Vass recently spoke to Lisa Singh with ExecutiveBiz and touched on some of the latest goings-on in this division.
The Blu-ray vs. HD DVD format battle officially ended February 19 when Toshiba declared it would no longer make or market HD DVD players and recorders. Sun's Chief Digital Media Officer for the Client Software Group Bill Sheppard says the win was not only about vendor support, where the majority of the consumer electronics and movie industries were backing Blu-ray, but also technical capabilities.
Looking for an affordable customer relationship management (CRM) solution? Kat Rollin recommends SugarCRM and OpenOffice.org as an attractive option that can easily adapt to existing environments and that lends itself to customization for an implementation that is typically faster and less costly than proprietary solutions that do the same thing.
Luojia Chen writes about optimizing MySQL Server on Sun x64 servers in this Sun BluePrints Online paper, which also provides an overview of the integrated Sun platform and describes benchmark results for solutions running on Sun Fire X4100 servers.
Tape drive self-identification is a new, standards-based mechanism that can automate tape drive configuration in the Solaris OS. Larry Liu and Grant Zhang provide a how-to guide to the process that shows how the Solaris SCSI tape driver can be made to dynamically retrieve the information required to configure the tape drive. The authors specify the SCSI command interface between the tape drive and the st(7D) driver as part of their article.
Janice J. Heiss asks "Why Develop on the Solaris OS?" and offers the capabilities of the Solaris Express Developer Edition as evidence for a strong affirmative response. The Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE), Heiss points out, is a free quarterly release of the next generation Solaris OS that contains many enhancements not yet available in the Solaris 10 OS. Created for the x86 platform, SXDE contains the tools, technologies and platforms required for creating applications for the Solaris OS, Java application platforms, and Web 2.0.
The recently released Sun Virtual Desktop Connector 1.0, a central management tool, simplifies installation and configuration of the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) stack. Dirk Grobler has written a cookbook explaining how to compose a self-contained demo based on Sun VDI Software.
With the Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 2.0 released earlier this month, the excited masses are looking for quick tips on installing and setting it up. One Sun blog has put together a concise guide that covers preparation, installing an XP image, necessities for the virtual center, the SRSS/SGD server and testing for those eager and ready.
Sun is offering new graphics options for the Ultra 25, the Ultra 45, the Sun Fire T2000 SPARC Servers, Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 Servers and Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 Server. The low-cost Sun XVR-300x8 Graphics Accelerator is powered by ATI's FireMV technology and delivers 2D, 24-bit support for resolutions up to 1920 x 1200.
If you're interested in Sun's roadmap for its HPC software stack, take a listen to a video presentation by Peter Braam, VP of Lustre at Sun, who offers an update in this replay of his presentation given at the Sun HPC Consortium held November 10, 2007, in Reno, Nev.
The HPC Community Portal is a web resource dedicated to information sharing and collaboration on high performance computing. Designed for Sun engineers, partners and customers, the site posts items of interest on topics related to HPC on a daily basis. A quick recap of posts for the last couple of weeks includes: Announcing the Sun Radio HPC Podcast / Now on iTunes, How to use a terabyte of RAM, Sun Deploys Region's Biggest Grid at UAE, OpenFabrics Alliance Releases Latest Enterprise Software, Barcelona B3 Chips Shipping and Perfecting Storage.
During the last quarter (Dec 07, Jan 08, Feb 08), the web site for this newsletter had 130k unique visitors who viewed 281k pages.
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 121 Issue 3, were:
Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Software 2.0 [19631]
New MySQL adopters, and maybe even more seasoned users, should visit the NetBeans Website, which is hosting a tutorial on creating a simple web application that connects to a MySQL database server. The tutorial, which is expected to take users about 30 minutes, also covers some basic ideas and technologies in web development, such as JavaServer Pages (JSP), JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL), the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) API and two-tier, client-server architecture.
Tim Marsland identified the usually overlooked connection between Open Source Virtualization and Project Indiana in his talk at Australian Sun Tech Days as residing in the distro builder, the technology that translates the recipe for a particular distribution, along with its functions and capabilities, into a set of interdependent packages able to perform those functions.
Project Darkstar has published a roadmap covering the next year or so to summarize the work currently being done for the next release, and the core technology development team wants to hear what the community at large thinks about its projected development path.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the basis of Sun's technology DReaM that has been contributed to the Open Media Commons initiative. Project DReaM is an initiative to develop an open DRM solution and reference architecture for multiple domains (media, documents, enterprise, personal, etc.). Four white papers have recently been released detailing the project's goal, licensing and specification, among other aspects.
Dirk Grobler will be hosting an article series on his blog that focuses on improvements and simplifications achieved through desktop virtualization. Part 1 and Part 2 have already been published and cover the deployment of a virtual desktop in comparison to a real one and the idea of automatic deployment of a virtual desktop, respectively.
Joerg Moellenkamp delves into the less known Solaris features to discuss Resource Management. His examination stems from two preliminary questions: How to limit the consumption of the resources of a single application being run with others in a single instance of the OS; and how to prevent a single program from hogging all the resources available.
BigAdmin contributor Victor Feng has submitted two community tech tips that offer sys admins a script to check for used space in Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) file systems and one that automates system checks. The latter has been updated this year from a previous posting done in 2007.
IT managers interested in improving their bottom line will find a useful economy in the BigAdmin article on "Managing the Power Used by Idle Disks in Servers Running the Solaris 8 OS or Above," which notes that idle spinning SAS disks can consume several watts and that managing multiple disks can result in substantial power cost reductions. Some considerations that govern the decision to spin-down or not are reviewed.
Learn how to organize and manage data volumes in Solaris Zones on systems that run the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) from a BigAdmin community tech tip submitted by Mike Thomasson, who has tested this information only with Veritas Volume Manager but suspects it will work with other volume management tools.
If spam is a problem for your IT organization, one possible solution that Alan Yoshida, and Ramin Moazeni (both of Sun) recommend is using Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam (SBAS) on servers powered with UltraAPARC T1 and T2 processors. Given the ability of the UltraSPARC processors to handle highly threaded network throughput-oriented applications and the fact that SBAS is just such a solution, the combination almost recommends itself in the view of the authors.
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