Sun released of a new social networking game for Facebook, allowing fans of the 2008 Beijing Summer Games to compete online, with their friends and for their country, by correctly predicting medal winners throughout this summer's events. Sun is not an official sponsor of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

The application, MyPicks Beijing 2008, allows participants to pick Gold, Silver and Bronze medal winners for each event during the Summer Games and win points for their country with each correct prediction. At the conclusion of the Games, the country with the highest point total will be declared the winner of the MyPicks Beijing 2008 Games. MyPicks Beijing 2008 is available on Facebook today.

Each month, Sun Marketing publishes their "good news", including these stories:

Read on for details.

The articles in this "Vendor Voice" section are authored by sponsors. Learn more about how you may be able to have your company's products and service offerings included here.

A blog posting by Brendan Gregg, co-author of "Solaris Performance and Tools", explains an exciting new ZFS feature L2ARC - the second level ARC.

ARC - Adaptive Replacement Cache - is the algorithm that ZFS uses to keep pages in memory to improve performance). Think of the ARC as that section of DRAM reserved by ZFS for buffering. Brendan observers, "An ARC read miss would normally read from disk, at millisecond latency (especially random reads). The L2ARC sits in-between, extending the main memory cache using fast storage devices - such as flash memory based SSDs (solid state disks)."

In this podcast edition of Innovating@Sun, host Hal Stern, VP Global Systems Engineering, interviews Bob Brewin, VP, Sun Distinguished Engineer, to discuss Project Hydrazine--a back-end infrastructure service that offers a new and open approach to application development and deployment.

Steve Wilson, Vice President, xVM and Connected Systems, writes in a recent blog entry that Sun is approaching the release of version xVM Server 1.0. Steve says, "today I'm announcing that we're starting the first part of our early access program for the product. We've signed up companies from sectors such as financial services, manufacturing, high-tech and government who will be the first to start using xVM Server. We will be sending Sun engineers on site with each of these customers to collect first-hand feedback. I expect we're about one month away from a publicly downloadable version of xVM Server (including binary and source code bundles!) so that anyone can start to work with the full product."

Sun has announced that it is open sourcing the core components of the Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 and Sun Java(TM) System Web Proxy technologies under a BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) license in the Web Stack sub-project of the OpenSolaris community. The Web and Proxy source code will be available in CY08Q3.

The Sun Datacenter Switch 3x24 (Sun DS 3x24) is designed for smaller and mid-size commercial HPC deployments. This ultra-dense single rack unit Infiniband switching platform binds Sun's blade servers and storage systems into a highly scalable, space-efficient, flexible, high-performance supercomputer. Using the Sun 12x-12x cable it connects directly to the Infiniband Switched Network Express Module complimenting the Sun Blade systems.

The JavaFX family of products includes the tools and platform SDK that developers, web scripters, and designers need to create dynamic applications for the next generation of web-delivered content. Sun recently released a JavaFX Preview designed to help early adopters become familiar with JavaFX.

If you have a question about the JavaFX Preview, post your questions during this session and get answers from three key members of Sun's JavaFX engineering team: Josh Marinacci, Martin Brehovsky, and Larry McDonough.

In this video, Sun's Prasad Pai presents the Sun xVM Ops Center system management software and how it can be used to automate the management life-cycle of HPC clusters.

This video recorded at the Sun HPC Consortium in Dresden,Germany on June 16, 2008. The agenda is:

• Sun Cluster Portfolio
• Sun xVM Portfolio
• Life-cycle Management
• Sun xVM Ops Center (Capabilities; Value Proposition; Integration)
• Futures

Prasad observes that Sun's management solution for HPC clusters is for multiple platforms and is an integral part of Sun's complete cluster portfolio.

There is now a new standard configuration available for the Sun Fire X4100 M2 Quad-Core with AMD 2356 2.3 GHz Processor that includes the repricing of the processor X-option and ATO option parts. This is the first Sun Fire X4100 M2 Quad-Core Standard Configuration to be offered. This reprice sets a 15% lower processor price on the Sun Fire X4100 M2 and Sun Fire X4200 M2 Quad-Core configurations.

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. This article has links to:

• Documentation
• ZFS Resources
• Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager (CAM) Resources
• Solution Briefs & White Papers

See also: main page for the J4000 family

Availability of the Sun StorageTek (TM) T10000B Fibre Channel Tape Drive with a native capacity of 1TB on existing T10000 media has just been announced. The same announcement also includes T10000B, T10000 and T9840 conversion bills, media and encryption part numbers.

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 5, were:

• Using Wine to Run Windows Programs in OpenSolaris 2008.05 [20220]
• Good News from Sun - July 2008 [20356]
• Sun Reports Final Results for 2008 Full Fiscal Year and Q408 [20359]
• DTrace and the Linux bunker mentality [20340]
• Managing Solaris Containers With Sun xVM Ops Center [20327]
• Oracle 10g ASM Best Practices with Hitachi Replication Software [20319]
• Access Control Lists on Solaris OS with ZFS [20113]
• Update on the Lustre Roadmap (1.8 through 4.0) [20281]
• Sun Java System Communication Suite 6 [20330]
• JavaFX Preview [20360]

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

As of April 1, 2009, the Solaris 8 Operating System (Solaris OS) will enter Phase 2 of its End of Service Life (EOSL), after which customers whose systems are running the Solaris 8 OS will no longer be able to receive patches -- including security patches -- developed after this date unless they purchase the Solaris 8 Vintage Patch Service.

Articles which have been posted to BigAdmin in the last week include:

• Sun Fire X4500 Server as a Magnetic Library for CommVault Simpana Software
• Installing HA Containers With ZFS Using the Solaris 10 5/08 OS and Solaris Cluster 3.2
• Use Solaris Cluster 3.2 software and the Solaris 10 5/08 OS to install high availability (HA) Containers with ZFS
• Installing Branded Zones in Solaris 10 OS From a Flash Archive
• Funzionalita di base per la creazione dei domini in Sun Java System Application Server
• Sun Java System Application Server consente di creare vari domini, con molte funzioni

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin

In a Sun blog by Lawrence Spracklen, users of UltraSPARC with T1, T2 processors and up can find how to use hardware cryptographic accelerators. His article focuses on the Userland Cryptographic Framework (UCF) which is used by Solaris to access cryptographic accelerators for non privileged applications. The Userland Cryptographic Framework exposes a PKCS#11 [2] compliant API to non-priv userland applications.

The text editor is held sacred by the users of Unix and Linux. Vi is the usual editor of choice, as it has been for almost 30 years, and it is now growing popularity with the Windows community. There is a guide to vi that has been keeping up with the times. The 7th edition of "Learning the Vi And Vim Editors" by O’Reilly will teach text editing basics and other tips that many people might find quite useful

Sun Java System Mobile Enterprise Platform (MEP) is a comprehensive mobility solution that enables offline data access, data synchronization and secure access to applications. MEP has out-of-the-box support for a variety of backend systems including Siebel, Oracle, Peoplesoft, SAP and is device agnostic with support for Blackberry, PalmOS, and Windows Mobile devices.

JavaFX Script is a new scripting language that developers can use to create dynamic graphical content. While the language provides libraries on the desktop to help you use the Swing user interface (UI) toolkit and Java 2D APIs conveniently, it doesn't replace either Swing or Java 2D; the goal is to make those APIs more accessible to rich content developers. In other environments, such as mobile systems, JavaFX Script makes use of user interface technologies other than Swing. This tutorial series on JavaFX Script enables you to write visually rich applications that run across platforms and operating environments.

In a recent blog, Glenn says, "Way back when, I posted an update to the original Solaris 10 Security Deep Dive presentation that included support for Solaris 10 Update 3 (11/06). Well, it has been entirely too long since the last update, so I am happy to say that the wait has ended! A new version of the talk is ready for download! This has been quite a journey and a lot has changed in Solaris since it was first released back in 2005."

Glenn has now posted an updated 93-page presentation that covers:

• Solaris Security Goals
• Solaris 9 Security Review
• Solaris 10 Security Deep Dive

Glenn covers many Solaris 10 related security topics ...

For the tenth consecutive year, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) has awarded the SWIFTReady Label in the category of Financial Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) to Sun Microsystems for its Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS). SWIFT has been raising the bar annually for EAI vendors, asking them to fully adopt the SWIFT standards in order to enable SWIFT participants to achieve better straight-through processing (STP) rates over the SWIFT network. The imposition of increasingly demanding standards makes this tenth consecutive award to Sun no small accomplishment.