On June 20th, 2008 Gartner issued a vendor rating for Sun Microsystems: “The overall vendor rating is positive”.
The Gartner definition for “positive” is:
Demonstrates strength in specific areas, but execution in one or more areas may still be developing or inconsistent with other areas of performance. -- Customers: Continue planned investments. -- Potential customers: Consider this vendor a viable choice for strategic or tactical investments, while planning for known limitations
"Sun Microsystems has improved in several areas, including revenue. It also has made progress toward sustainable profitability, product innovation and Unix server market leadership. The overall vendor rating is positive" - Gartner
Sun's general counsel Mike Dillon recently blogged about the status of the lawsuit between the two firms. First NetApp sued Sun claiming that ZFS infringed on NetApp's patents. Sun counter sued saying that NetApp infringed in 22 of it's patents. Sun reached out to the community to help find examples of prior art then submitted six reexamination requests on the patents asserted by NetApp. Mike says, "Reexamination is a procedure in which a party submits documents (prior art) relating to a patent to the US Patent Office (PTO) and asks that it reconsider whether that patent should have ever been issued."
So far, the PTO as granted the first 5 requests finding that multiple "substantial new question of patentability (SNQP)" exist for each patent. For one other NetApp patent, "the PTO has issued a first action rejecting all the claims of this patent."
Sun and Intel posted the results of a benchmark that shows a Sun server running Reuters Market Data System 6.0.3 (RMDS). The results show a million+ message per second at a record-breaking low latency on a gigabit Ethernet link. The benchmark was conducted using Intel-based Sun Fire X4150 servers with dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon X5460 3.16 GHz processors, running Solaris 10 OS technologies and utilizing a 1Gb Ethernet network infrastructure.
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. Here's a quick recap of posts for the last week:
PowerHouse for Sun Modular Datacenter S20 - Network.com Makes Best Cloud Apps - BBC
Managing Third Party Integration with Sun Systems
Sun Incorporating Symantec Storage Virtualization Software
Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) on Solaris OS
Video Series: Optimizing OpenSolaris on Intel Xeon Processors
The newest platforms can easily handle large data volumes like video, voice and RFID. Sun’s reliable Solaris OS is the choice platform for running mission-critical computing. Oracle’s leading Database and Applications have made them world leaders. When you put the two companies’ technology together the possibilities are endless.
Rafael Vanoni Polanczyk, from Sun's Solaris Kernel Performance Group
delivered a 40 minute talk called, "OpenSolaris and NUMA Architecture", at the Open Solaris Developer Conference.
The team of Advanced Micro Devices, Sun Microsystems, and TACC is pleased to announce an upgrade to Ranger. All 15,744 AMD 2.0 GHz, quad-core processors (62,976 cores) are being replaced with 2.3 GHz processors to create an upgraded system that will provide the user community access to a resource with a theoretical peak performance of approximately 580 Teraflops.
100 meters under the ground in Japan, Sun along with ten other IT firms are building a datacenter. The datacenter is located at such a low depth to take advantage of the cooler air as a means to bring the 40 percent of energy usage, for cooling, down a few notches.
For a company with less than 1,000 employees, Sun is now offering
GlassFish and MySQL for an unlimited number of servers across that company's enterprise. No counting sockets or cores, support incidents, servers; No auditing or true-ups. Tiered pricing is available for firms with more employees. A firm with under 1,000 employees could save about $3 million over three years compared to using WebLogic Enterprise Edition and Oracle Enterprise Edition.
Brian Nitz has written a Sun BigAdmin Feature Article outlining the procedures for optimizing the Sun Java Desktop System 3.0 for Sun Ray Clients With the Solaris OS. Nitz describes the installation procedures and configuration changes recommended to optimize the Sun Java Desktop System 3.0 in the Solaris 10 Operating System for Sun Ray environments.
To run Sun’s award-winning data centers, a modular design containing many "pods" was implemented to save power and time. The modular design aids the building of any sized datacenter. Inside of each pod, there are 24 racks. Each of these 24 racks has a common cooling system as does every other modular building block. The number of pods is limited by the size of the datacenters. Large and small datacenters can benefit from using the pod approach.
If reducing 152 datacenters to 14 and 202,000 square feet of real estate to 76,000 isn't sufficiently impressive, then consider that the design of Sun's datacenter in Santa Clara, Calif. saved US$9 million in future construction costs and delivered an 88% reduction in overall real estate costs. Rafael Ruffolo of IT World Canada reports that Sun will also realize savings of at least US$1.1 million in power costs annually while reducing power load by 60%.
Sun announces the Sun Datacenter Switch 3x24 (Sun DS 3x24), an ultra-dense single rack unit InfiniBand switching platform designed to complement the Sun Blade 6048 Modular System by providing connectivity directly to the InfiniBand Switched Network Express Module with a Sun 12x-12x cable. Up to 4 Sun DS 3x24 switches can be used together supporting up to 288 blades. The Sun Blade 6048 Modular System has been designed to accommodate up to 2 Sun DS 3x24 switches with top-of-rack mounting brackets X4730A.
Makia Minich of the Lustre Users Group has prepared an online slide presentation on the Linux HPC Software Stack. The presentation outlines the project goals, which include developing an integrated software stack for Linux-based HPC solutions that is based on Sun HPC hardware and provides a complete set of tools and well-defined processes for configuring and provisioning an HPC cluster that is scalable and that includes tools for verification, management, administration and monitoring.
Sean Cochrane's Sun BluePrints On-Line describes an implementation of the Sun Lustre file system as a scalable storage cluster using Sun Fire servers, high-speed/low-latency InfiniBand interconnects, and additional networking and storage devices. The paper also considers the use of the Sun Lustre file system at a shared government and education research site, including configuration information and details on testing that was performed on-site to evaluate the performance of Sun's scalable storage solution.
Ryan Arneson claims that backup throughput rates in excess of 1TB per hour are attainable by configuring the Sun Fire X4500 server as a disk-cache media server for Symantec Veritas NetBackup 6.5. His white paper outlines the procedure for this configuration using ZFS on the Solaris 10 08/07 OS.
Sun now offers Assemble-to-Order (ATO) configurations to the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 Servers. Customers now have the choice of standard or ATO configurations. ATO configurations allow customers to pick exactly the configurations they want. Typically, ATO systems have longer lead times compared to standard configurations.
The T5240 can be configured with two 8-core, 8-threads-per-core, 1.4GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors, 32 DIMM slots (up to 128Gb), and 16 2.5" SAS disks (with 220V power input).
(Small image shows, on a logarithmic scale, the access time and cost per gigabyte for DRAM, Flash and a 15K disk. See the ACM article for details.)
Adam address the question "Can flash memory become the foundation for a new tier in the storage hierarchy?" by exploring the capabilities of Flash memory, the challenges of existing disks, Log Devices and Read Caches. Adam says, "it's possible to build a flash-based device that can service write operations very quickly by inserting a DRAM
write cache and then treating that write cache as nonvolatile by adding a
supercapacitor to provide the necessary power to flush outstanding data in the
DRAM to flash in the case of power loss."
Flash is suitable to be a second level adaptive replacement cache (ARC)- L2ARC in ZFS terms. A small server with room for 128Gb of DRAMs can easily accommodate 768GB or more using flash SSDs in its internal drive bays. The L2ARC can help take full advantage of the flash SSDs.
Customers facing such key challenges in data management as accelerating growth rates and increased power costs will find some suggestions in Ken Ow-Wing's webcast entitled "Enabling Storage Virtualization: Sun StorageTek 9900V Disk Family." He is product line manager in the Sun StorageTek 9900 program.
The Sun StorageTek 9900 team announced the general availability of S/390 Hyper Parallel Access Volumes (HyperPAV) for the Sun StorageTek 9985V and 9990V. The HyperPAV function potentially reduces the number of alias-device addresses needed for parallel I/O operations since HyperPAVs are dynamically bound to a base device for each I/O operation instead of being bound statically like basic PAVs.
We track how frequently each article is viewed on the web site to determine which the readers consider the most important.
The top 10 articles for last week, Vol 124 Issue 4, were:
In an internet blog by Dan Farber from CNET, Sun’s open sourcing programs are described as a mile marker for the software industry. When Jonathan Schwartz was pitching the business model, he showed statistical proof that open sourcing of MySQL and other popular programs like Java and ZFS gain hundreds of thousands of potential clients a month.
Located in Cobourg, Canada, Blastwave has 40 global public mirrored sights to ensure that from anywhere in the world, downloading is timely. Blastwave used to run Solaris 8, however recently they made the jump up to Solaris OS 10.
"I virtualized critical Solaris 8 production servers and nobody noticed," exclaimed Dennis Clarke, creator and founder of Blastwave.org. "I literally shut the server down, backed it up, created a Solaris 8 Container, restored the environment, and brought the server back up. The process was simple, transparent, and completely flawless."
Here's a nice baker's dozen and a couple more user hints for those of you new to MySQL on the Solaris OS, courtesy of George Trujillo's blog. He promises a mere 10 tips but delivers 15.
Using Solaris Containers to migrate Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 systems into Containers on a Solaris 10 system is the subject of Penny Cotten's BigAdmin article. Cotten notes that Containers can enable users to migrate to the Solaris 10 release from the Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 OSes even if a system is running applications that cannot be ported to version 10.
In his BigAdmin article, Gabriel Simona presents an alternative to the need to reboot the Solaris 10 OS when assigning such resources as file systems, raw devices, tape devices, and IP addresses from the global zone to a non-global zone. What he suggests is initially organizing the zone's configuration and then delivering the administrative operations in a prescribed order. With this procedure, one is not constrained by mission-critical operations or by the presence of a system administrator.
Those readers with an interest in writing device drivers for the Solaris OS will find James Liu's BigAdmin feature on the subject interesting and useful. Liu begins with foundational information about the Solaris kernel architecture in general and device drivers in particular before going through the steps involved in developing a minimal skeleton driver.
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