Sun announced new quad-core SPARC64 VII CPUs for its Enterprise servers — M4000, M5000, M8000 M4000 and M9000. With the new CPUs the Sun SPARC Enterprise Server M9000 and Sun Studio delivers more that 2 TFlops.

On the SAP Standard Application Sales and Distribution benchmark which represents tasks performed in real-world ERP environments, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server with 64 processors 256 cores, and 512 threads, supports 39,100 users, which beats the IBM Power 595 (35,400 SD users) by more than 10 percent, and the HP Integrity SD64B (30,000 SD users) by over 30 percent.

The news CPUs extend the server family from 16 cores to 256 cores with 32 to 512 DIMM slots:

• M4000 - 4 CPUs, 16 cores, 32 DIMMs
• M5000 - 8 CPUs, 32 cores, 64 DIMMs
• M8000 - 16 CPUs, 64 cores, 128 DIMMs
• M9000-32 - 32 CPUs, 128 cores, 256 DIMMs
• M9000-64 - 64 CPUs, 256 cores, 512 DIMMs

With 4 GB DIMMS, the support memory ranges from 128 GB for the M4000 to 2 Tb for the M9000.

The virtualization field has become more crowded with the addition of Microsoft's newly released Hyper-V virtualization server. John Fontana reports for Network World that Microsoft has joined VMware, Citrix, Oracle, Red Hat, Sun and Novell in the virtualization marketplace. Hyper-V is being offered free to users with a Windows Sever 2008 license.

Ashok Krishnamoorthy has a dream, one that he shares with the other members of his team at work on microelectronics at Sun. Krishmanoorthy, a Sun distinguished engineer, and his team are hard at work on a project that has caught the attention of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has awarded Sun $44 million to fund research on applying photonics to the problem of optimizing interconnects in computer circuits. Al Riske reports the story.

Corporate Express France, wanting to improve the responsiveness and productivity of their sales team, which had been providing customers information on such things as price quotes, checking on orders, retrieving client information and assigning tariffs manually, moved its catalogs to the internet and equipped its sales personnel with laptops, which enables them to respond to customers using either 3G wireless or EDGE cards for anywhere, anytime response capability. Corporate Express France found the solutions it sought with Sun. With the new system in place, customers of Corporate Express France, such as IT professionals, purchasing staff and selected suppliers, are able to access the business network from remote locations.

Many MySQL customers start by using the community edition and support for the community. As they grow and become successful, they then look for a guaranteed level of support. Marktplaats.nl, the largest E-commerce platform in The Netherlands and part of eBay since 2004, is such a customer.

To enable their fast growth, protect site uptime, and contain IT expenses, the company is using a flexible and scalable infrastructure based on open source technology such as MySQL - backed by Sun's 24x7 global database support team.

In this video, TACC's Karl Schultz presents on the TACC Ranger System, which was recently ranked as the fourth fastest supercomputer on the planet, according to TOP500.org. Recorded at the Sun HPC Consortium in Dresden, Germany on June 20, 2008.

Karl's 41 slides are available.

The Sun Blade X8440 Server Modules feature as many as four third-generation AMD Opteron quad-core processors with integrated DDR2 memory controller and HyperTransport links, creating breakthrough modular server architecture, making them the fastest AMD Opteron quad core blade servers on the market. These blades are also the only ones offering four-socket quad-core processors with 32 DIMM slots (four per populated CPU socket). Sun Blade X8440 Server Modules are for use with the Sun Blade 8000 and 8000 P chassis and may coexist with, or replace, Sun Blade X8400, X8420, X8440 (dual-core) or X8450 server modules.

To manage some real life problems that a customer may encounter while building a database, Sun users should consider looking into the blog of Ryan Arneson. In one of his potentially helpful blogs, he mentions how the Sun Fire X4500 can be used as a large disk cache for disk-based back ups. This can be done by using Sun StorageTek Enterprise backup software.

ADM, Automatic Data Migration, is an OpenSolaris HSM (hierarchical Storage Management) system for Solaris file systems. With ADM, files can be moved to archive storage (disk or tape) to free up space on primary devices. ADM will recall data from the archive storage when needed. The process of capturing, releasing and recalling data to/from archive storage is based on policies set by the administrator derived from file characteristics.

ADM is being built initially for ZFS to provide many of the functional characteristics of SAM-QFS.

Part II of "A Hands on Introduction to ZFS Pools" deals with Mirrors, Disk Failures and Spare Disks. It continues the limited-resources approach to the subject begun in Part i, which dealt with creating pools [20243]. Readers will learn in Part II how to create a mirror in ZFS; how to expand it; and how to replace broken components.

The open Sun storage J4000 array family combines high performance hardware and open source software. The J4000 family supports Solaris, Red Hat, Linux, Suse Linux, and Windows.

• Sun Storage J4200 array - 2 RUs, up to 12 disks - low entry point
• Sun Storage J4400 array - 4 RUs, up to 24 disks - best price performance
• Sun Storage J4500 array - 4 RUs, up to 48 SATA disks - high density

Learn about the rest of the features.

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 2, were:

• Sun's Niagara 3 to Feature 16 Cores and 16 Threads per Core [20254]
• A Hands on Introduction to ZFS Pools, Part I [20243]
• Sun Fire X4540 Server: 8 Cores, 48 TB Storage in 4RU [20277]
• Open Storage and JBODs [20280]
• Virtual Strategy Magazine Interviews Sun xVM Chief Architect Mike Wookey [19877]
• Debut Demonstration for Project Wonderland [20217]
• Sun Fire X4600 M2 Now Supports Two AMD Barcelona Models [20073]
• Testing the Waters on Open Storage [20245]
• Sun StorageTek 1U Autoloader with LTO3 and LTO 4 Half Height SAS [20267]
• Worried About the Reliability and Cost of Open Source Applications? [20202]

The longer version of this article lists the top 10 articles for each of the last four weeks.

Twenty milliseconds' latency is too much time? Well, yes, if you are building an automated trading system where the trading is done by software and the job of the trader has become to manage the software itself. That narrow window of execution is the parameter Swedish software developer Tocarema had to meet in creating its ground-up solution for an automated trading environment, as reported by Jeffrey Burt in eWeek.

A new "McNealy Minute" audio podcast features Scott McNealy talking with Mike Zafirovski, President & CEO of Nortel, on "… the future of education, and how Sun, Nortel and others are working together to eliminate the digital divide by providing better access to knowledge through network technology, open systems and sharing."

Scott and Mike talk about Nortel LearniT and Curriki.

Four tech tips are available on the BigAdmin site that involve, respectively, zone resource control in the Solaris 10 08/07 OS; tuning the performance of tape drives by determining optimal block size to use during backups and restores; assigning system resources to Solaris 10 zones without rebooot; and setting up a DHCP client for the Solaris 10 OS SPARC Edition or for Microsoft Windows 2003.

Joerg Moellenkamp has written a pair of blogs on some of the less well known features of the Solaris OS. In the first he considers an essential feature of an operating system, which is that it have some mechanisms to stop a process or the complete kernel immediately without allowing the system to write anything back to disk and thus manifesting the corrupted state. In the grimmest possible language, he writes, "This tutorial will cover the most important concepts surrounding the last life signs of a system or an application." In the second blog, "On Passwords," Moellenkamp argues for the importance of robust passwords and advises sys admins to ensure their use.

When a developer has dozens of servers that need operating systems installed, Solaris can be a helpful tool in kneading human error out of the configuration equation. There are features that make it so you can let a computer take over the job, making sure that every system has exactly the same operating system configuration.

"Dojo: The Definitive Guide" by Matthew A. Russell is billed as the most thorough overview of the Dojo toolkit available. Dojo itself is commonly thought of as industrial-strength JavaScript toolkit that enables one to optimally leverage JavaScript and "...write a web application with significantly less code in significantly less time than they would otherwise take," according to Russell.

GlassFish vs. Tomcat: Alexis MP mulls over the virtues of both, noting that, with the advent of Grizzly -- the http frontend of the application server -- one no longer requires the use of Apache web server in front since Grizzly is Java-based and integrated into the application server. (Already easier to use.)