This week Sun continued its tradition of April Fool's pranks with Jonathan on the receiving end [19726]. Get a more serious update from Sun marketing in April's "Good News" [19652] and from the OpenSolaris community's Review of March 2008 [19727].
Check out some of the BigAdmin [19728] article recommendations. For HPC, there is an article on the Lustre File System [19521] and a link to the new HPC PodCast [19677].
MySQL articles appear in the developer section [19709], [19553] and the SysAdmin section [19557].
DTrace articles for developers [19538] and Sys Admins [19594] demonstrate why this is an award winning technology. One DTrace one-liner can show, system wide, commands (and their arguments) when they are started. Another can show every file open.
Sun and the New Media Consortium (NMC) have signed a two-year collaborative agreement aimed at launching the Open Virtual Worlds Project to ease learning, working and exchanging ideas in virtual space. Collaborative plans between Sun and NMC are to extend the Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland virtual world platforms through the development of open-source, open-content educational spaces, content and objects.
At Sun's Customer Advisory Council held in March, Mark Herring in Sun's Application Infrastructure made some interesting observations on trends that seemed to emerge from these three day discussions with senior executives from some of the company's valued customers. Open source and paying for services were two noted trends as well as offshore development, information risk management, consolidation and a few more.
April Fool's Day seldom passes unobserved at Sun Miocrosystems. Scott McNealy once had his office transformed into a par four golf hole; Eric Schmidt, one-time product development chief, found a VW Beetle in his office one April 1st; and Wayne Rosing, then head of Sun Labs, found his office relocated to a tank at the San Francisco Aquarium. This year was no different, as Jonathan Schwartz became one of the targets in a prank whose details are recorded on video.
The "Good News" from Sun for April 2008 includes: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded Sun $44.29 million in funding for a 5.5-year research project focused on microchip interconnectivity; OmniTI saved $400,000 on initial license fees and $200,000 on annual maintenance fees by migrating from Oracle on Linux to PostgreSQL and MySQL; Scripps Networks easily responds to massive, unpredictable peaks in demand, serving up to 300 million revenue-generating ads per day, after deploying Sun Fire T2000 and Sun Fire X4600; 2000 server significantly outperformed the HP DL580 by 2x in an OLTP benchmark and had 8x better SWaP
System News posts items of interest for Sun users on a regular basis on the System News For Sun Users blog. A quick recap of posts for the last week includes: A sneak peak at OpenSolaris (binary release); download of "Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology"; Sun MD 20 wins FOSE award; HA MySQL on Sun Cluster; Free Solaris Express Developers Edition DVD; McNealy to Government - what's your exit strategy?; T2/MySQL/SugarCRM; HPC multi-media whitepaper.
Tim Foster recently summarized what the OpenSolaris community has been talking about: New logos and Mascots, xVM updates, Install, WiFi, Crossbow Beta, Indiana, Trip report from dtrace.conf, changing root's home, The OpenSolaris Small Live CD, OpenSolaris Developer Summit, SBD and KMF, Paravirtualized Drivers for Fully Virtualized xVM Domains, OGB Election Results, Changing the "SunOS" name (:-))
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) writes Michael Hardy, Washington Technology associate editor, is entrenching itself as the model for future IT networks, and open standards are playing an important role in the move away from proprietary solutions. With the current and developing technology, there is no longer a reason to stash data in information silos rather than allowing it to flow down to personnel at the operational level.
It used to be the case that the soldiers in the U.S. Army, the Army National Guard and Army Reserve, all of whom are responsible for annually reviewing his or her Official Military Personnel File (OMPF), did so by relying on the mail to perform the updating and correcting of their personal information, an expensive and time consuming operation. Now, the Army has moved to an interactive Personnel Electronic Record Management System (iPERMS) that uses clustered Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000 and T2000 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) as web tier servers.
In its effort to stay ahead of the market, Sun inaugurated the Sun Small Programmable Object Technology (Sun SPOT) project, a hardware and software platform designed to overcome the challenges that currently inhibit the development of the emerging network of things. Project Director Roger Meike sees the field as promising, saying, "These little devices may be something where you have hundreds of them in your car and thousands of them in your home and office and they're just surrounding you every day. Al Riske writes about the Suns SPOT project.
The Lustre File System, which was first implemented in Spring 2003 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on its Multiprogrammatic Capability Resource (MCF) cluster and The Sun Constellation System, currently being deployed at the Texas ADvanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin, are the respective subjects of two recent white papers on HPC computing with Sun solutions.
Sun HPC comes to iTunes with its first installment of Sun Radio HPC, which is entitled, appropriately enough, Program #1: Intel on Sun, HPC News, and Sun Grid Engine. Tony Warner discusses the first year of the Intel/Sun alliance with Laura Crone, Intel's VP Global Account Manager. He also catches up on Sun HPC news with Rich Brueckner and gets an update on Sun Grid Engine with Dan Templeton.
Sun StorageTek T9840D Tape Drive is the 4th generation of the platform since its introduction in 1998. This latest release boasts 75 GB native capacity, 30 MB/second throughput and, for the first time, the T9840D is encryption-capable.
Software and hardware parts for the Sun StorageTek Virtual Tape Library Plus (VTL Plus) System 2.0 were to be general available on March 29th. This VTL Plus 2.0 availability is for the VTL Plus 2.0 1200 model, which is replacing the VTL Plus 1140.
Bob Porras has an idea he'd like to share with you, which concerns A Completed Open Source Storage Stack, the storage code base recently posted at opensolaris,org in the area of hierarchical storage management (HSM). And this is not just standard backup, he asserts, but rather a solution that addresses automated data management via policies driven by data and metadata. HSM drives some of the largest data repositories out there in the industry today, he added.
Project Honeycomb, a.k.a. Sun StorageTek 5800, receives the scrutiny of Mario Apicella, senior analyst at InfoWorld Test Center in a recent test. The findings are very positive --InfoWorld
IBM System z10 server will now be supported by Sun's Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) family of virtual tape, tape libraries, access and capacity tape drives, the Sun StorageTek 9990V and 9985V disk systems, and the Shared Virtual Array (SVA) family of Virtual Disk.
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 4, were:
Open Source and Profit, Put in Plain and Simple Terms [19664]
Cheat Sheet for Picking the Right Solaris OS Installation for You [19596]
Learn to Create Web Apps Using MySQL Database in 30 Minutes [19647]
Sun Wins $44.29 Million Department of Defense Research Contract [19701]
Security researchers Tiller Beauchamp and David Weston with the engineering firm Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) have developed a way to turn DTrace into a rootkit-like, reverse engineering tool that can be deployed to quickly locate application vulnerabilities and create exploits.
What will the acquisition of MySQL mean for developers? Rick Palkovic decided to present what he believes developers can expect from this open source database joining the Sun team in a Sun Developer Network article.
Developers were expected to be able to download GlassFish V2 with the MySQL Community Server 5.0 (5.0.51a) and MySQL JDBC driver 5.1.6 in a software bundle beginning March 26. This open source bundle will be made available for all the major software platforms including Solaris, Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.
Sun's BigAdmin site is an excellent resource for Sun system administrators. This article contains links to some recent articles, promoted on BigAdmin, that caught my attention:
Using Kerberos to Authenticate a Solaris 10 OS LDAP Client With Microsoft Active Directory
Tutorial on BART in the Solaris OS
Tutorial on Solaris Auditing
Tutorials on RBAC and Privileges
Learning To Use ZFS
Recovering a System to a Different Machine Using ufsrestore and the Solaris 9 or 10 OS
Now that MySQL is part of the Sun team, many are interested in trying out the database. For Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) users, Luojiia Chen has written an article that explains how you can maximize the performance of MySQL on the Solaris platform through configuration and tuning of the database server, along with optimizing the Solaris OS for MySQL.
Robert Weeks has posted a summary of handy DTrace shell commands created by Brendan Gregg called one liners. These script commands can show you each time a new process is started (with arguments), when files opened and by which process, syscall counts by program, syscall counts by syscall, syscall count by process, read bytes by process, and many more.
According to Richard Marejka, the life of a Java ME developer
can be greatly improved with support for source-code management and application deployment. In a SDN article, Marejka shows how using the NetBeans IDE, the open source source-code management (SCM) product Subversion (SVN) and the Sun Java System Web Server give developers real benefit by simplifying these tasks.
The book "Java EE Development using GlassFish Application Server" by David Heffelfinger was well-received by GlassFish insider Ken Paulsen, who says this well-written tutorial shows novices how to build applications and schools readers on each of the app server's major components.
Eric Arseneau, principal investigator of the Squawk virtual machine, and his team are working on pushing Java as far as it can go in the micro-embedded space, looking beyond Sun SPOTs to targets devices like SIM (Subscriber Identification Module) cards and similar devices running approximately 16K of Flash and 2K of RAM.
Lana Kovacevic with BuilderAU reported on the Sun Tech Days presentation "Java SE 6 Top 10 Features and Java SE 7" given by Chuk-Munn Lee, who alluded to some of the features that could be included in version 7 of the standard Java platform. Keep in mind that these are still proposals, Kovacevic noted, but if ready by Java SE 7's release, these could help simplify many developer tasks.
When Marina Sum interviewed Sun's Director of Engineering for Access and Federation Management Jamie Nelson, one of his most striking observations was that "...in developing Web applications...identity is often an afterthought." Worse yet, he added, too often, the security portion of an application is typically built in a rush, sometimes with boilerplate community code. The implications for single sign-on (SSO) in such a case are not good, he said.
Sun Distinguished Engineer Glenn Brunette and Principal Engineer Rafat Alvi, members of the Sun Inner Circle, shared their views on the security threats to success in web scale enterprises, examining the subject of asset protection as connectivity expands geometrically. According to Brunette, "because Web scale deployments reach so many people through constantly evolving delivery methods, long-standing security matters can take on new dimensions.”
Pat Patterson, a member of Sun's access and federation management team and community manager for Open SSO, identified the transition from traditional proprietary development to open source as the biggest challenge OpenSSO faces, as he answered questions put to him by Marina Sum. This situation is caused by the need for Sun engineers to be "up front" in their work, out in the open, so to speak, working within the community of outside contributors and with their colleagues at Sun as well.
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