Volume 122, Issue 3 - 1,680 packages at Blastwave; MySQL 5.1 & Workbenck; More on T2+; Solaris 10 5/08; LDoms 1.0.2; Solaris 8/9 Containers - System News
1,680 Open Source binary packages are ready to be installed at blastwave.org.
Sun has been also busy this week. The company released the MySQL Workbench [19801], announced new certifications for the MySQL Certified Storage Engine Program [19794] and introduced the upcoming MySQL 5.1 [19796].
It also announced the new Sun Eco Advantage Program for partners [19794], the formation of a Sun Media Advisory Board [19788] and has added to its Sun Streaming System product portfolio [19790].
Find out more about the UltraSPARC T2 Plus Processors [19773], [19786] and its benchmarks [19766].
Recent and upcoming releases: Solaris 10 5/08 [19789], Logical Domains 1.0.2 [19784], Solaris 8 and 9 Containers [19785], Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition 6.3 [19738], Sun Java System Web Server 6.1 Service Pack 9 [19663], Java 6 Update 10 [19772], among others.
Sun introduced the upcoming version of MySQL 5.1, which is expected to be generally available sometime this quarter, and offered up an early sample of the open source database with the availability of the near-final release candidate of the GPL software during the sixth annual MySQL Conference and Expo held April 14-17, 2008, in Santa Clara, Calif.
New server and storage platforms, along with Sun Streaming Software Release 2, are now part of the Sun Streaming System product portfolio, and Sun now claims with these new platforms it is offering the industry's broadest scalability and flexibility to service providers building out new video delivery networks.
Identifying and solving key challenges found in today's digital media distribution industry will be the objective of the newly formed Sun Media Advisory Board (MAB), whose steering committee consists of senior executives from MLB Advanced Media, Turner Entertainment Networks and HBO Communications. The board has already identified media transformation, content identification and video storage optimization as key business challenges facing the industry today, and projects to address these issues are underway.
Sun Labs Open House last week focused on the many and varied projects the research teams at Sun are working on. One of these is the research platform Project Caroline. Richard Zippel described this team project, of which he is a part, as "...a really cool platform that allows you to programmatically control all of the infrastructure resources you might need in building a horizontally scaled system."
The Sun Java Real-Time System 2.0 (Java RTS) and the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) have been selected as the software development platform for ITT Corporation’s Eglin Control and Signal Processing Upgrade (CSPU) program.
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 Next Release of OpenSolaris Expected in May, Sun Releases MySQL Workbench, Kickfire Database Appliance Based on MySQL Breaks Data Warehousing Price-Performance, MySQL 5.1 Expected for Release Later This Quarter, New Features in the Upcoming Solaris 10 OS 5/08, Sun Expands Sun Streaming System Product Portfolio, Sun Media Advisory Board, Space Surveillance Radar Relying on Sun Java Real-Time System, Second Life Video Covers UltraSPARC T2 Plus Processor Servers and Project Caroline, Other Research Projects.
The new Sun Eco Advantage Program (EAP) offers members the tools, resources and training they need to build their own eco IT practices, enabling each participant to meet the growing customer demand for energy-efficient IT strategies and solutions and to increase revenue-generating opportunities with their product lines. Sun's expertise and experience in developing IT services that reduce customers' energy, cooling and space costs is now available to partners wishing to incorporate these innovations into their product lines.
Sun has announced new certifications in its MySQL Certified Storage Engine Program to include InnoDB, Kickfire, PBXT, and BrightHouse. The program enables commercial and community database engine developers to certify that their software has been tested and is compatible with Sun's MySQL Database Server – helping to assure MySQL users that these certified engines have reached high-level standards of usability, performance and integration.
The latest update to the Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition (DSEE), version 6.3, is a patch release to version 6.0, 6.1 or 6.2. It features performance improvement, increased flexibility and security for deployments, reduced disk space usage, an improved Directory Proxy Server, support for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and HP-UX 11.23 and more flexibility in product installation on Windows.
The Sun Java System Web Server 6.1 Service Pack 9 contains important security fixes and is strongly recommended for all users of the Sun Java System Web Server, in particular for those with sites that use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS). It is freely available to download.
MySQL Workbench is a new visual database design tool integrating data modeling, physical database design, database creation, change management and documentation capabilities. It is available in two versions: MySQL Workbench Community Edition, which is a free download, and MySQL Workbench Standard Edition, which is the commercial extension that adds specialized plug-in modules with advanced features.
The Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) 5/08 was just released a few days ago. In an earlier blog, Joerg Moellenkamp offered details of what users can expect in the way of new features:
Logical Domains Manager 1.0.2 was recently released, adding support for the UltraSPARC T2 Plus-based platforms and up to 128 domain support. This server virtualization and partitioning technology also offers up to 64 domain support for UltraSPARC T2 based systems and includes libvirt management interface software.
Transferring Solaris 8 and 9 Operating System (Solaris OS) applications to the latest CMT systems running version 10 of Sun's OS is being made easier with the Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 Containers software. These latest additions to Sun's Container software work by capturing the entire environment of the original source system, either Solaris 8 or Solaris 9, and then transferring this environment to a Container running on the target Solaris 10 system.
Developers using IPv4 and wishing to migrate to IPv6 will find Nagendra Nagarajayya's paper a helpful guide. The piece provides an introduction to IPv6 (unicast addressing) and demonstrates the differences between it and IPv4, along with the recommended coding style to run C and Java programs unchanged on IPv4 and IPv6 networks on the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS).
The Sun Ultra 24 Workstation is Sun's first Intel processor workstation based on the Intel Core2 architecture and supporting both dual and quad core processors. Sun recently announced new configurations and options for the workstation as it called others into retirement.
The multi-platform Sun Ultra 20 and Ultra 40 workstations have several new configurations and options, while some of their others are being retired. Sun also is retiring the Sun Blade X6220 standard configuration and processor option because the AMD Opteron 2212 processor has reached its end of life as determined by AMD in anticipation of future faster processors.
Denis Sheahan blogged on the recent launch of Sun's next-generation chip multithreading (CMT) servers, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers, which are based on the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor, the first CMT processor with in-built coherency links that enables 2-way servers with double the former capacity in the same 1U and 2U form factors to deliver the highest compute density in the server market.
BM Seer is wrapping it up for benchmark watchers interested in finding out how Sun's new UltraSPARC T2 Plus Processor Systems are operating in terms of performance. The new systems incorporate two CMT processors. Each UltraSPARC T2 Plus chip includes eight hardware strands in each of eight cores for a total of 128 CPUs, delivering an unprecedented amount of CPU capacity in 1U and 2U packaging. In recent blog posts, Seer lists six benchmark results.
With all the pomp and circumstance surrounding any new release, much less the new multi-chip UltraSPARC T2 Plus systems - Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 Servers, specific information interested users are hunting for can sometimes be hard to find. Thanks to Sun's Allan Packer, potential UltraSPARC T2 Plus enthusiasts need only visit his blog to find a summary of references on these newest additions to Sun's CMT-based systems.
During the last quarter (Jan 08, Feb 08. Mar 08), the web site for this newsletter had 140k unique visitors who viewed 312k pages. (For the past 12 months: 416k visitors and 1.0 million page views.)
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 122 Issue 2, were:
UltraSPARC T2 Plus Processor Servers Introduced [19764]
Free Solaris Express Developer Edition DVD for x86 Platforms [19750]
Sun Files Another Patent Suit Against Network Appliance (NetApp) [19717]
Free Download of "Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology" [19751]
Download of Solaris Cluster 3.2 2/08 Now Available [19724]
The latest stable release of the blastwave collection of 1,680 software packages is now available. SPARC and x86 binaries are available. To install one or more of these packages, you will probably want to take advantage of pkg-get, the automated download install tool. Once installed, it makes installing any other package here as easy as, "pkg-get install softwarename".
Luojia Chen has written a Sun BluePrints Online paper on "Optimizing MySQL Server on Sun x64 Servers and Storage" that provides an overview of the integrated Sun platform, outlines the steps for optimizing MySQL Server on Sun x64 servers, and describes benchmark results for solutions with Sun Fire X4100 servers.
The Sun xVM Central blog recently produced a series of entries introducing each of the four modules of the Sun xVM Ops Center: Management, Update, Provisioning and Gear.
While not a major release, the update release of Java 6u 10 is nonetheless deserving of user attention according to Ethan Nicholas, who outlines several important improvements in the release that will make the solution even more attractive and functional. There are no changes in the public APIs, Nicholas writes, which has made it easier to get the changes that are incorporated in Java 6u 10 released more quickly than will be the case with the future release of Java 7, when that day arrives.
Java Champion Adam Bien has an extended history with both the Java SE and Java EE technologies, having worked with both since their inception with JDK 1.0 and Java Web Server, as Janice J. Heiss reports. At the outset of the interview, Bien identified three fallacies associated with the Java EE platform: the belief that J2EE is complex; the belief that Java EE 5 is easy; and the belief that distributed programming could be simpler.
With the focus on performance, this second release of JRuby has proven to be quite a contender. "There have been more and more reports of applications exceeding Ruby 1.8.6 performance; we are even beating Ruby 1.9 in some microbenchmarks," reports Thomas Enebo. JRuby is an 100 percent pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language.
Interested in learning to install and set up different profiles in the GlassFish Application Server? Then sign up for a new nine-hour web-based course that will teach you these skills along with how to configure, administer and use Admin Console for various features of the Application Server.
Sun Distinguished Engineer Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart covers the basic of GlassFish, why it is important and how organizations are using GlassFish in their IT environments in a Sun Net Talks Webcast entitled "An Overview of GlassFish."
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