Figures are just in for Sun's full fiscal year and Q408, showing total gross margin as a percent of revenues for the full fiscal year of 46.5 percent, an increase of 1.3 percentage points over fiscal year 2007. The report also showed an increase in revenues of 0.1 percent over fiscal year 2007, which totaled $13.880 billion. Revenues for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008, $3.780 billion, marked a decrease of 1.4 percent from the $3.835 fourth quarter fiscal year 2007 revenues, however. Similarly, gross margin for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008 was down 2.9 percentage points to 44.3 percent from the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007.
Audio replay, slides and a transcript of the Sun earnings call are available.
JavaFX Preview
Provides Runtime,Tools and Technologies to Create Dynamic, Visually Compelling JavaFX Applications
A preview release of JavaFX is now available from the
JavaFX Home psge.
JavaFX is a family of products for creating rich internet applications (RIA) with immersive media and content. It gives users the ability to create interactive content, applications and services from the desktop to mobile devices to the living room. Included in this family is JavaFX Script, which is created for Web scripters, designers and developers to quickly build and deliver the next generation of RIAs for desktop, mobile, TV and other consumer devices. It compiles its simple scripting code to the same byte code that Java does, which means JavaFX can run in the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and anywhere Java does, including on smart phones, PCs, and servers.
Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix. One might think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. This article introduces Wine and demonstrates how to use it to run Windows in OpenSolaris 2008.05.
The Sun white paper "Making Clusters Easier with Sun Infiniband Technology" explains the advantages to be found in using Infiniband technology for HPC implementations that need to scale. In its introduction to InfiniBand technology, the paper focuses on its ability to scale application performance and consolidate network infrastructure.
Paul Murphy (for one) ponders the reluctance of the powers that be at Linux to provide a DTrace port, as Apple, QNX, and the FreeBSD project have done. He blogs on the subject, bringing in DTrace developer Brian Cantrel for backup. An open source Sun product that made its debut with Solaris 10, DTrace "has since been ported to MacOS X and various other BSD derivatives. IBM is reported busily copying it into AIX (along with containers, zones, and whole bunch of other things they ridiculed when Sun introduced them"), Murphy writes.
LinkedIn, the world's largest professional networking site, has chosen Sun technology -- specifically the Sun MySQL Enterprise database subscription -- to support its network that now numbers more than 25 million professionals in more than 170 countries and that requires a high-powered infrastructure to increase the speed and performance of the open source database that powers the company's public web site.
This blueprint describes how system administrators can use Sun xVM Ops Center to manage systems that are installed with Solaris Containers. It provides an overview of the software and technology used and includes pointers to additional information.
The technology described in this blueprint covers Solaris Containers, Sun xVM Ops Center software, and JumpStart Enterprise Toolkit (JET) templates.
If you're looking for Solaris ACLs, you might want to have a glance at Ben Rockwood's blog on the subject of when to use POSIX and when to use NFSv4 in your search. Ben's quick summary is:
There are TWO types of file ACL's in Solaris: POSIX and NFSv4
NFSv4 ACL's are very granular and powerful
ACL's are a pain
NFSv3 ACL support (POSIX) does not work when sharing a ZFS filesystem; Use NFSv4
GUI's are an ACL's best friend, sad but true
Avoid them if you can, but if/when you need them, they are there
For secure and cost effective communication/collaboration capabilities, the Sun Java Communications Suite 6 is the program for a wide variety of businesses to pursue. Some of the ways the Suite 6 can bring a company to the next level of professional computing is by utilizing the new programs communication features.
The Sun Ray Remote Control Toolkit (RCT) is a set of scripts developed by a community that takes advantage of the open source tools to provide administrators of Sun Ray servers a set of tools that can help exceed the remote control functions of other systems with multiple users.
In a blog Daniel Cifuentes developed a script that he coined “A USB Drive daemon for Sun Ray Sessions (V2)”. Cifuentes was hoping to capture the reader interested in better presenting USB disks via the Sun Ray platform, or users of version one, which Daniel previously blogged. The first version allows users to see thumb drives and other drives attached to Sun Ray on JDS/CDE/Windows. The new version of this implementation includes many more features.
Among the presenters at the Sun HPC Consortium in Dresden, Germany, on June 15, 2008, was Peter Bojanic of Sun who provided an update on the Lustre Roadmap.
Bojanic explains that Lustre is a parallel, scalable shared POSIX file system whose key benefits include:
Petabytes of storage with one name space
Tens of thousands of clients
High performance heterogeneous networking and routing
The Sun Storage and Archive Solution is designed to achieve the balance an enterprise needs between high performance data access and economical long term data storage. Users of computational-intensive infrastructures or of technical analysis and engineering data as central to the enterprise will find help in the Sun HPC solution through improved economics that allow more dollars to be committed to computing and through being able to customize solutions around exact business needs.
The Sun white paper “High Availability in the Datacenter” considers the role of the Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000, M5000, M8000 and M9000 servers in reducing TCO for IT departments while also delivering an end-to-end solution for helping organizations realize the most demanding availability requirements. With Sun SPARC Enterprise servers, Solaris Cluster software, XSCF Control Package firmware, Sun Management Center software, and an extensive line of enterprise-class services and training, minimizing TCO becomes a reality.
Tom Atwood, Group Manager at Sun had a Nettalk presentation that briefed Sun users on Improved Versions of the Sun SPARC Enterprise Servers. Atwood includes how
the Mseries has broken world records and he included graphs and a scaling run down of the size of the different Mseries servers and their usage strong points.
Sun offers the Sun Netra T5220 ATO (assemble to order) in both AC and DC versions. The server is based on the second generation of Chip Multi-threaded
Technology (CMT) UltraSPARC T2 processor with up to 8 cores with 8 threads per core. This is the first processor to increase performance by scaling with threads, rather than frequency, minimizing power consumption. The Sun Netra T5220 offers extreme reliability and high throughput, at the same time offering processor core, memory and I/O densities to enable expansion and flexibility within a compact 2U form factor. All of this makes the Sun Netra T5220 the ideal platform for virtualization and a good replacement/alternative to the Netra T2000 or the Netra 240 and Netra 440.
"A D2D2T infrastructure allows the archival and non-critical data to flow out to a lower cost and lower energy medium (tape), while delivering backup and recovery performance to meet enterprise SLAs for the VTL. A D2D2T environment also enables the data center to retain older back-ups for a longer period without a significant impact on the TCO," writes David Reine, an analyst for The Clipper Group, in a white paper about making Use of Virtual Tape in a D2D2T Environment.
David concludes that, "a VTL alone cannot satisfy all of the demands of a modern data center, mall or large. A D2D2T solution, however, can provide your data center with all of the latest standards in data protection as it delivers high performance, high capacity, and reliability, while controlling the TCO of the IT infrastructure."
Hitachi Data Systems and Hitachi, Ltd., have tested and
evaluated guidelines and backup and recovery best practices for using Automatic Storage Management (ASM), a new feature introduced in Oracle Database 10g, to simplify Oracle database file administration on the
Hitachi Universal Storage Platform family of products while optimizing performance. Results are reported in the 42-page Hitachi-Oracle application brief "Oracle Database 10g Automatic Storage Management Best Practices...."
"Oracle Database 10g ASM provides storage cluster volume management and file system
functionality at no additional cost. ASM increases storage utilization, performance, and availability while eliminating the need for third-party volume management and file systems for Oracle database files. As a result, ASM provides significant cost savings for the data center."
Are your licensing and maintenance fees for NAS costing you too much? Not happy with being locked in to a vendor's proprietary OS and protocols? Tired of paying for such standards-based tools as NFS, CIFS or NDMP? Then have a look at Anatol Studler's blog on how to bring those costs down.
The Sun StorageTek SL500 Library has just been updated by Sun with the New Capacity Licensing Option. The SL500's new improvement provide a scalability, simplicity and now many other options via the capacity license keys for all Drive Expansion Modules(DEM’S).
Based on the highly reliable, enterprise-class Sun StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System, the midrange StorageTek SL500 maintains reliability regardless of the number of expansion modules, features redundant, hot-swappable components, and scales from 79 to 460 TB.
The experience today's students have had with such consumer web services as Google, Amazon, and iTunes has created high and demanding expectations among them in their transactions with various online learning environments. The Sun White Paper "Moodlerooms and Sun Reference Architecture: The Next Generation of Learning Management" explores these expectations and the response of the IT technology community.
The white paper "Disaster Recovery with Solaris Cluster" explores how Solaris Cluster can help organizations recover quickly from a disaster by enabling application and data access continuity across unlimited distances.
The wide ranging collection of FAQs on how to configure the CHAP and RADIUS security features on Solaris iSCSI pulls together some well-known and not-so well-known information on the subject. While the blog is relatively comprehensive on its announced subject, it does not claim to be the complete FAQ on other aspects of iSCSI configuration.
This Sun Alert, "Security Vulnerability in the DNS Protocol may lead to DNS Cache Poisoning," cautions against a security vulnerability in the DNS protocol that may allow remote unprivileged users to cause named(1M) to return incorrect addresses for Internet hosts, thereby redirecting end users to unintended hosts or services.
Leslie Lambert, Sun's chief information security officer, spoke with Al Riske for an article entitled "Managing Security in an Open World." Riske characterizes Lambert's job as "managing a paradox," and a worldwide one at that.
With a community of users (including Sun resellers and partners) that numbers in the neighborhood of 80,000, Lambert and her staff have plenty of "friends," who need access in order to do their jobs.
Riske reports that Sun has more than 4,000 bloggers, more than 6,000 Facebook friends, and no fewer than seven islands in Second Life, and that it has staged numerous public and private events on the site, including a virtual town-hall meeting involving Sun's top executives in avatar-to-avatar interactions with employees around the world.
Deploying Solaris Trusted Extensions in a corporate environment is the subject of Robert Bailey's BigAdmin article written, he says, for the layman to promote an understanding of the interactions between systems with this technology and those that do not. Solaris 10 OS 11/06 and later is the version that figures in the article.
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