This week Sun made several additions to its
storage portfolio with the J4000 storage family, SAS controller and an enhanced "thumper", the
Sun Fire x4540. Customers are testing the waters of
Open Storage with some success.
Learn about possible futures for collaborative work environments -
Project Wonderland.
Ashlee Vance claims to have a scoop on the next generation of
Niagara 3 chips.
Chris Wood, Sun's CTO for Data Storage Management Practice, shares some ideas about the
role of tape in current enterprise settings.
The T9840D tape drive [] provides great backwards compatibility. The new
Sun StorageTek 1U Autoloader with LTO3 and LTO 4 provides 12.8TB of capacity in a small form factor.
Sun’s J4000 storage family is ideal for customers looking to manage growing data and keep a grip on datacenter costs. Compatible with Solaris, Windows and Linux platforms, the J4000 family offers heterogeneous, scalable, reliable storage that can be used as the building blocks for cost effective storage systems.
OpenSolaris offers free, built-in features that help you build, debug, and deploy new applications faster. You get access to unique Solaris 10 features, including Dynamic Tracing, Solaris Containers, and Predictive Self-Healing. Plus, you also get the ZFS file system for data protection, scalability, and hardly any administration.
The storage announcements from Sun this week were:
Sun Storage J4200 system: With up to 12 drives per tray and up to 48 SAS/SATA drives;
Sun Storage J4400 system: Offers 24 drives per tray, up to 6 SAS ports, up to max 192 3.5" SAS/SATA drives;
Sun Storage J4500: Four rack unit offers an industry-leading 48 drives per tray, up to four SAS ports and up to 480 3.5" SATA Drives;
Sun StorageTek SAS RAID HBA: Host based RAID HBA allows the Sun Storage J4000 systems to connect directly to servers through one or more high speed interfaces for highly scalable external storage expansion. (Solaris, Linux, or Windows)
Customers can also trade in old storage systems. The Sun Upgrade Advantage Program provides trade-in credit for qualified storage systems resulting in savings of up to 20%.
Sun has just unveiled Project Wonderland for Immersive Education, an open source virtual world toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds in which users in the education community can communicate with audio and share live applications such as Web browsers, OpenOffice.org suite documents and games. The debut featured secure and flexible virtual learning environments created by Boston College, the University of Essex, the University of Oregon and Saint Paul College, pioneer users of the platform for educational purposes. The demonstration was coordinated by the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative and the Sun Immersion Special Interest Group (Sun ISIG).CommonNeed, Sun’s hosting partner for Project Wonderland, also participated.
Writing in The Register, Ashlee Vance reports that "Sun Microsystems looks poised to lead the 'mainstream' multi-core race for at least a couple more years. By late 2009, the server maker should deliver a third major revision of its Niagara processor which will have 16 cores and an astonishing 16 threads per core."
Sun currently sells an eight-core "Niagara" chip that can handle eight software threads per core, she continues, noting that customers can fit two of these UltraSPARC T2+ chips, as they're officially called, into a server, providing up to 128 threads in a 1U system.
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:
Automatic Data Migration (ADM) with ZFS
Sun Identity Manager 8.0 Podcast
Configuring J4000 and ZFS in Ten Minutes
Sun Cluster 3.2 2/08
System Administrator Resources for Sun’s CoolThreads Servers
Sun Ray Software 4 Update 3 0 - With Video Support
Java ME HP iPAQ 900 series: Sun & HP Partner
XCP Firmware for SPARC Enterprise M4000/M5000/M8000/M9000 Servers
OpenSolaris Storage Community Update
Proceedings of the OpenSolaris Developer Conference, June 25-27th, 2008, Prague
Gartner Vendor Rating for Sun Microsystems: Positive
Robots all but took over the Del Mar Fairgrounds near San Diego in late June as Sun, Wintriss Technical Schools and the San Diego Java User's Group partnered in sponsoring the inaugural International Autonomous Robot Contest (iARoC). "All but took over" is an overstatement because these robots were well behaved, having been programmed to perform specific tasks by the contestants, students from grades five through 12. At the heart of each robotic application was the Sun SPOT hardware platform, a small, battery operated, wireless device running the Squawk Java Virtual Machine (VM). The VM acts as both operating system and software application platform.
In a recent blog, Taylor Allis recounts the experiences of some early adopters of Open Storage. He refers readers to his earlier "Open Storage Adoption White Paper," which also included customer reactions to Open Storage.
High Performance MySQL is the definitive guide to building fast, reliable systems with MySQL. Written by noted experts with years of real-world experience building very large systems, this book covers every aspect of MySQL performance in detail, and focuses on robustness, security, and data integrity. Learn advanced techniques in depth so you can bring out MySQL's full power. The second edition is completely revised and greatly expanded, with deeper coverage in all areas.
For those interested in becoming MySQL certified, the new MySQL 5.1 Cluster DBA Certification Study Guide can be a useful tool in preparing for the Certified MySQL Cluster Database Administrator exam.
Sun's Chief Architect for xVM, Mike Wookey, spoke with Virtual Strategy Magazine about the evolution of virtualization at Sun. Virtualization, as Wookey sees it, is largely an issue of resource management, bringing the best available resources to bear on the applications a user might be running. He suggests that the Solaris OS, even in its early iterations, represented that kind of thinking, which has now matured and continues to evolve in the virtualization efforts that Sun pursues with such solutions as xVM.
The release of is the subject of a recent blog by Sriram Natarajan. This release includes new features, more performance enhancements and as usual bug fixes, he writes, adding that with these enhancements the solution retains the focus on the reliability and scalability that customers have come to expect from Sun.
Sun announced the availability of 8Gb/sec Fibre Channel Switches from Brocade including the Entry-level Brocade 300, Mid-Enterprise Brocade 5100 and the Enterprise Brocade 5300 switches.
These switches double the throughput over Brocade's current 200E, 5000, and 4900 4Gb/sec switches.
The 32-port and 48-port 8Gb/sec blades are now qualified and available for the Brocade 48000 Director.
The new family of Brocade 8Gb/sec SAN switches include:
Brocade 300 Entry-Level Switch, scaling from 8 up to 24 ports
Brocade 5100 Mid-Enterprise Switch, scaling from 24 up to 40 ports
Brocade 5300 Enterprise Switch, scaling from 48 up to 80 ports
Wanting to show off the capabilities of the Sun Ray 2 with the embedded VPN feature to customers requiring wireless networking, Frank Wickham devised a series of steps that enabled the Sun Ray as the users wished, which he reports in his security blog.
ZDnet columnist Paul Murphy looks at the cost of acquiring 1000 desk top systems in a recent blog post, “Costing Sun Ray vs Wintel“. He compares the Sun Ray thin client to a popular low-cost Dell desk top and concludes that the hardware costs are lower for the Sun Ray solution.
However, the big savings are in the lower costs of administration and the lower power consumption (8 watts + screen for Sun Ray vs 180 watts + screen for Dell Optiflex 755).
In his article on current trends in HPC, Chris Preimesberger sees parallels between NASA, whose technology gave rise to satellite television, Velcro, laser pointers and instant fruit drinks, and the HPC segment of IT, from which have sprung such innovations as high-performance disk drives, super-fast I/O channels, petabyte-capacity storage, deduplication, and virtualized servers and storage. He calls HPC the innovation engine of enterprise IT.
Sun's Business Development Manager for HPC, Phillippe Trautmann, presents a video survey of Sun's HPC efforts in Europe. Sun's HPC European presence is headed up by the new Executive Briefing Center and Solution Center based at Linlithgow, UK. Staffed by HPC experts, customers can learn all about the latest, innovative Sun technology used in HPC solutions, do proof of concept builds and run benchmarks.
The Sun Fire X4540 storage server is useful when it comes to enhancing data access speeds. It offers the ability to speed up access time in a very compact package. The Sun Fire X4540, a 4RU server, has eight cores of AMD Opteron processing and 48TB of storage. Sun makes this product available at $1.20/GB. The competition offers about half the capacity at about twice the cost.
The Sun Fire X46000 M2, which supports two quad core processor models, can now scale up to 32 cores in one 4U server.
With support for the new quad core processors, the Sun Fire X4600 M2 server now supports the following features, in addition to supporting the existing capabilities:
2, 4, 6, or 8 quad core processors in a single system.
2.3GHz quad core with average power of 75W.
Up to 256GB of memory (when fully populated with 8 processors).
Processor modules support Dual Dynamic Power Management ("split plane").
AMD Balanced Smart Cache (with L3 cache on each processor).
Doing more with less has become the mantra of IT departments. Fortunately, the words express more than a mandate or mere wishful thinking. Doing more with less is entirely possible by employing consolidation through virtualization on Sun's x64 servers.
Each blade in a Sun Blade 6000 or Sun Blade has two dedicated PCI Express Modules.
The blade servers allow for additional I/O with 2 or 4 PCI Express Network Express Modules per chassis.
By combining two FC and two GbE onto a single ExpressModule HBA, Sun offers customers more flexibility and expandability.
This HBA is full duplex. With 4 lanes at 2.5Gbps, the max throughput 800 MB/sec half duplex, 1600MB/sec full duplex.
With the Sun Storage Tek OEM 1U Autoloader’s up to 12.8 TB of backup available its 2:1 Compression makes a small footprint for very high capacity. Also the need for IT resources can be cut, due to web based remote management feature.
Sun has released the 16GB High Density Cache Memory Modules for Sun StorageTek ST9990V and ST9985V storage systems that utilize higher density memory chips maximizing Cache Memory. With this increase, systems can be sized to support greater workloads.
Now available from Sun is a 1TB 7200 RPM Fibre Channel Hard Disk Drive (HDD) priced lower than expected. It is compatible with the StorageTek ST9990V and ST9985V storage systems. The new Fiber Channel HDD can be applied to your system to add capacity for applications requiring optimized reads for large files.
Chris Wood, Sun's CTO for Data Storage Management Practice, has some ideas about the role of tape in current enterprise settings, and he shared those in a Sun Inner Circle newsletter that examined "the allure of tape." The three forces Wood sees as driving the increasing need for long-term data archiving are increased regulatory compliance requirements, the need for good corporate governance, and the realization that historical information can be a competitive weapon. Each year, the volume of archived data doubles because of these three influences, he said, adding that it is critical for managers to distinguish between material that is backed up as opposed to material that is archived.
Sun offers the 5th generation T9840D tape drive in the
L700e, L1400, SL3000, and SL8500 tape libraries. The T9840D has the ability to read legacy T9840A, B, and C written media. The T9840D can also write on write on the old media in the new format.
At At Glance
Fourth-generation tape drive using same media greatly reduces TCO
Available with FICON, ESCON, and Fibre Channel interfaces
Uses encryption technology to secure data onsite, offsite, and in transit
Moves data at 30 MB/sec
Stores up to 75 GB on a single cartridge
Accesses data in 16.5 seconds
Fast, cost-effective alternative to disk
The T9840D tape drive can be used in both Open Systems and Mainframe environments.
Sun has again made a name for itself by releasing the World’s first one terabyte Tape Storage Drive. For better datacenter efficiency and also cutting the cost per Gigabyte, the Sun StorageTek T10000B Tape Drive offers customers an entire terabyte of capacity. This new storage device works with open or mainframe systems and stores on a single cartridge.
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 125 Issue 1, were:
Budget-minded CIOs and CTOs will perhaps find their anxiety over the cost and capabilities of GlassFish Application Server (and open source solutions in general) in Sriram Lakkaraju's blog that explains the industry's enthusiasm for that particular solution. He lists 10 reasons.
The recent announcement from Sun, "New GlassFish and MySQL Offering Starting at $65K / Year" [20230], makes for a very strong business proposition for GlassFish.
Glassfish and MySQL combined is perfect for cutting total cost of ownership. They enable you to take full advantage of the open source initiative, and maintain a reasonable software budget. Together they significantly reduce deploying costs and time managing application platforms and database software. The Unlimited Glassfish and MySQL Enterprise allows clients to play a flat fee for support that depends on the size of their staff rather than on the size of their datacenter.
SourceForge, Inc. announced the finalists of its second annual SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards. "The awards recognize open source projects which not only have the most supportive community following, but also those which the SourceForge.net community's members believe are built with the highest quality, productivity and ingenuity. "
44 projects have been nominated in 12 categories. 25 projects were nominated two more more times. The 4 projects nominated most frequently, with the number of nominations, were:
Next-Generation java Plug-in Technology (available in the java SE 6 Update 10, has breathed renewed life into Java applet technology for delivering programs over the web. At least that is what Dana Nourie and Kenneth Russell contend in their article entitled "Next Generation in Applet Java Plug-in Technology." Nourie and Russell write that the next-generation Java Plug-in offers a completely redesigned architecture that provides powerful new capabilities to applets in the web browser, while improving the overall reliability and functionality of applets in a backward-compatible manner.
NetBeans has evolved considerably since it was acquired by Sun in 1999 and open-sourced in 2000. The NetBeans IDE is an open-source integrated development environment written entirely in Java using the NetBeans Platform. The NetBeans IDE runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris. NetBeans IDE is open-source and free. NetBeans supports many languages, including C, C++, Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl and JavaScript.
Sun Blogger Kunal, in a recent post, lists some of the NetBeans features that qualify it to be the "Ultimate Linux IDE".
The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a "storage for the Internet". A web services interface can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Sun and Amazon are collaborating to offer OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2. The two supported releases are OpenSolaris OS 2008.05 and Solaris Express Community Edition.
Saving and Restoring ZFS Snapshots to and from Amazon S3.
Sean O’Dell has posted a
blog entry that shows how to use ZFS snapshots to save and restore filesystems from one Solaris EC2 instance to another.
Sun Technology for Partners provides a three-part hands-on tutorial that introduces readers to ZFS Pools. Part I, summarized here, involves "Getting Started (Pool Creation, Export, Import)." One of the virtues of this tutorial is that it approaches the subject so as to be useful to users with limited resources. Only two extra components are involved: a single 7-port USB 2.0 hub and six 1GB USB 2.0 memory sticks.
Sun Java CAPS
Composite Application Platform Suite 6 Release
The Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (CAPS) Release 6, aligns with Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 UR2 and NetBeans 6.1, providing a pluggable architecture based on Java Business Integration.
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