In the HPC section, learn more about the Sun xVM Virtualization Portfolio in a white paper and about
the new release of Sun HPC ClusterTools 8 software.
In his most recent blog Jonathan Schwartz reviews developments in the storage segment of Sun's product family. He cites several developments, including the acquisition of MySQL, discussions on flash memory, archiving, the Lustre parallel file system, each of which is contributing to Sun's efforts at increasing its prominence as a provider of storage solutions.
In response to a question for an analyst who asked when will Sun see revenue from its Open Source strategy, JS said, "Last year. You're seeing it accelerate."
Sun and Xilinx have made available a new microprocessor that is the industry's first 64-bit, open-source, multi-core, multi-threaded and built with industry leading 65nm Virtex-5 high performance FPGA. This platform will provide academic researchers and hardware developers with a flexible OpenSPARC-based platform to create, customize and deploy next-generation applications for a broad set of end markets including supercomputers, industrial, scientific and medical (ISM), aerospace and defense, and storage and networking.
There are some new faces in the leadership roster of Sun's Network.com cloud computing initiative, as reported in Sun's "On the record." In July, David Douglas became Senior VP and head of Sun's cloud computing initiative. Douglas handed Ingrid Van Den Hoogen the marketing, adoption and business strategy responsibilities for Network.com to her other responsibilities and, most recently, appointed Lew Tucker as VP and CTO of Sun's Cloud Computing initiative.
The UK's Betfair is the world's leading online betting exchange, logging more than 6,600 page views and processing 1,000 transactions per second. By adopting Sun technology, Betfair was able to accommodate growing from two billion page impressions a week to four billion page impressions a week in the same physical datacenter space, while also achieving a 60% reduction in power and storage-cooling costs and cutting the power required to run 60 databases from 16 kilowatts of power to 3 kilowatts.
Sun has released the OpenSolaris distribution which is a brand new way of distributing Solaris using a live CD with even more software available on network repositories.
A self-directed, one-day, self-paced, OpenSolaris training course by Roman Strobl
is now available.
During this training participants will learn how to get started with OpenSolaris and get a good understanding of its benefits. It also offers a unique hands-on experience with many of the advanced technologies which come with OpenSolaris.
Sun's recently announced open, Internet-scale xVM Server Software and xVM Ops Center 2.0 are significant additions to the company's virtualization portfolio, targeting the Windows, Linux and UNIX virtualization markets.
Patching the Solaris OS by using Sun xVM Ops Center 1.1 is the subject of
Shanthi Srinivasan's BigAdmin article that shows how to accomplish this on both x86 systems (for the Solaris 10 OS) and on SPARC systems (for Solaris 8, 9 and 10).
With the certification of Windows for the Sun xVM Server and of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V support for Sun Ray Thin Clients, the collaboration on cross-platform virtualization technology between Sun and Microsoft has intensified, making it easier to integrate and interoperate with Sun's xVM portfolio. Reciprocally, Solaris has become a certified guest OS on Windows Server 2008.
A new version (5.1) of Sun Java System Content Delivery Server (CDS) is a market leading product that allows mobile operators, service providers and enterprises to deliver a variety of content to mobile users. CDS provides a single content catalog that can support multiple storefronts on phones and PCs, as well as content pricing, promotion, preview, payment and delivery services.
The Sun white paper "Sun xVM Virtualization Portfolio: Virtualizing the Dynamic Datacenter" summarizes the benefits and challenges of traditional virtualization strategies, the advantages of Sun’s approach, and the core capabilities of the Sun xVM portfolio. It also describes the key services and support offerings that will be available for Sun xVM products.
Sun continues to demonstrate its commitment to the HPC community with the new release of Sun HPC ClusterTools 8 software. Sun HPC ClusterTools 8 software enables customers to solve their complex, compute-intensive applications on Sun systems and clusters of Sun systems: the most cost-effective and flexible high-performance computing systems available.
Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.0 is based on Open MPI 1.3 and it is the first release of ClusterTools to include support for Linux platforms as well as Solaris. It also provides support for MPI application profiling with Sun Studio Performance Analyzer (available in Studio Express 7/2008).
Now it is possible to increase server utilization, efficiency, and ROI while at the same time shrinking server footprint. And users can do this at no cost by adopting Logical Domains (LDoms), one of the enabling technologies for Sun xVM, and the most open virtualization technology available. Unlike proprietary virtualization technologies, LDoms can save users over $3,600 per system without the need for additional hardware to manage or control virtual machines. It's true: The more servers you virtualize, the more you save and benefit.
The Sun Fire X2250 server demonstrates Sun's commitment to deliver one of the most compelling entry-level HPC 1U rack-mount servers in the industry. The Sun Fire X2250, with no redundant PSU & fans, is a 2-socket server based on Intel's "Stoakley" platform.
Within its 1U form-factor, the Sun Fire X2250 supports leading operating systems and applications, the fastest processor speed grades available, and the fastest memory available. All of this makes the Sun Fire X2250 ideal for companies with massively parallel technical computing workloads.
Sun has changed the memory supplier manufacturing process. Systems now need to contain only single-rank or all dual-rank memory. However, If single-rank and dual-rank memory are mixed in a Sun Fire X2200 M2 server, customers will experience performance degradation by up to 10 percent.
The new Sun Fire X4600 M2 servers are identical to the existing standard configurations with the exception that they now use registered single-rank DDR2-667 memory. 4GB (2x 2GB) memory kits, registered single-rank DDR2-667, new XATO and X-options and 16GB (2x 8GB) memory kits, registered DDR2-667 DIMMs, new XATO and X-options are all also available.
The Sun Fire X4600 M2 now can have an unprecedented 512GB memory capacity for processing the most memory intensive workloads.
Hitachi Data Systems announced that its Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V (Sun StorageTek 9990V) attained the highest Benchmark 2 performance result, topping all storage systems in its class by an eight-fold factor. The USP V achieved an aggregated average of 8,724.67 SPC-2 MBPSTM using a single storage controller.
Scott Tracy spoke to the June 2008 meeting of FROSUG on OpenSolaris Tape enhancements.
With Scott were Randy Ralphs, who has been working on tapes for almost 30 years and is the primary developer
the Solaris tape drive for many years, and Dan Maslowski, manager in charge of their group.
Scott started by stating that, contrary to popular opinion, tape is not dead and that much of our data is out there, somewhere on tape. Compliance, backup and DR continue to drive the need for tape.
Most developers just expect tape to work. Scott jokes that they only get noticed when stuff does not work.
The Sun StorageTek T10000B FICON Tape Drive with a native capacity of 1TB on existing T10000 media are available for the SL8500, SL3000, and L180/L700/L1400 Tape Libraries. Some new features of the T10000B FICON Tape Drive are:
1TB native capacity, doubled from 500GB, on existing T10000 media.
Supports legacy read of existing T10000-written media.
4Gb/s FICON interfaces.
Ability to re-purpose T10000B drives from FICON to Fibre Channel and from Fibre Channel to FICON.
Encryption-ready and qualified with Sun's KMS 2.0.
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 127 Issue 1, were:
Sun & Mitel Produce World's First Unified Voice / Data Ultra Thin Client Desktop [20494]
xVM VirtualBox 2.0 and New Enterprise Support Subscription [20545]
Why you should avoid placing SSDs in traditional Arrays [20525]
The MySQL database and GlassFish application server are the choice of the Belgian company
Stésud, a leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) software vendor. With this deployment, Stésud becomes one of the most recent companies to adopt these Sun products as a lower-cost, higher-performance alternative to traditional database and application server software.
OpenOffice 3.0 Release Candidate 1 (build OOO300_m5) is available for developer critique through the OpenOffice.org website. The software is not recommended for production deployment at its current stage. It is recommended for new users to chose one of the previously released more stable versions such as OpenOffice 2.0. The new OpenOffice 3.0 Release Candidate 1 (build OOO300_m5) will contain some updated features
The latest preview release of Sun Studio compiler and tools suite for C, C++, and FORTRAN users, Sun Studio Express 07/08, is now available for download.
This latest release marks an important advance for HPC developers and for anyone interested in extracting high performance from today's multi-threaded and multi-core processors. This release contains support for OpenMP 3.0 APIs, which offers developers a more general approach to multi-threaded programming with task queuing and also integrates with Sun HPC ClusterTools, providing support for performance analysis of MPI applications. Based on the NetBeans 6.1 IDE, developing parallel applications for the multi-core era has never been easier!
In a Community-Submitted Tech Tip on the Bigadmin portal, the NFS Fundamentals for the Solaris OS are organized into bullet lists to get users up to speed using NFS. Network file system (NFS) is a client-server application that lets users view, store, and update files on a remote system as though the files were on a local system. An NFS environment consists of two components:
The NFS server, which contains file resources that are shared with other systems
The NFS client, which mounts file resources that are shared over the network and presents the resources as if they were on a local system
The Sun Netra X4450 server is a high capacity x64 carrier-grade server. It combines the proven ruggedness and reliability of Sun Netra servers with industry-leading performance, efficiency, and expandability. The Netra X4450 server delivers stunning performance and expandability in a 4RU 20-inch deep compact form factor. This carrier-grade server can expand up to a 16-way configuration with four quad core Intel Xeon processors, up to 128GB of memory, and over 1TB of internal storage for consolidation and virtualization.
apoBank, Germany's largest cooperative bank, has implemented a Sun StorageTek information lifecycle management (ILM) infrastructure that includes a Sun enterprise disk storage system with remote replication, tape libraries and management software, all connected via a storage area network (SAN).
The Sun white paper "The Road to Mobile Banking" explains how the climate has changed to make mobile banking seem a viable option for financial services.
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