Sun will have a major "OpenStorage" launch on Monday November 10th.
This issue includes the monthly good news from Sun marketing.
Sun and IBM launched ODF Toolkit Union to provide developers with an easy-to-use API for reading, writing and manipulating ODF documents.
Read about a
white paper from Force10 Networks which provides guidance in designing consolidated, virtualized, and SOA-enabled data centers based on the ultra high port-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switch/router products.
Join Sun Microsystems on November 10, 2008
for a live webcast and live chat
and see how Sun is helping to change storage economics for your business with the benefits of Open Storage. Enjoy increased performance and scalability without costly downtime, while reducing power consumption and operational costs to meet your business's storage challenges and needs.
Change Your Storage Economics
Date: November 10, 2008
Time: 3:30 p.m. PT
Watch John Fowler, EVP Systems, and Mike Shapiro, Distinguished Engineer - Fishworks, as they unveil the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems -- a.k.a. Amber Road-- the industry's first Open Storage products.
In his letter to shareholders, which is part of Sun's 2008 Annual Report, President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz announces an expanded gross margin of 1.3 percentage points and an increase in operating income of $63 million. He also notes an 8% jump in product and services deferred revenue amounting to $2.9 billion. The year ended, he notes, with an increase in cash flow from operations of $371 million for a total of $1.3 billion. Sun also bought back 151 million shares of its stock for a reported $2.76 billion in the 2008 fiscal year.
The ODF Toolkit will use an initial software code contribution from Sun to provide developers with an easy-to-use Application Programming Interface (API) for reading, writing and manipulating ODF documents while accelerating additional application development. One part of the initial code contribution is an ODF Validator, a tool that validates OpenDocument files and checks certain conformance criteria. Capitalizing on the open, elegant nature of ODF, the Toolkit targets developers who want to create new applications and solutions ranging from content management, business workflows and activities to Web-based document solutions.
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.
In the past 12 months the web site associated with this newsletter had 630k unique visitors and 1.55 million page views.
A white paper from Force10 Networks provides guidance in designing consolidated, virtualized, and SOA-enabled data centers based on the ultra high port-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switch/router products of Force10 Networks in conjunction with other specialized hardware and software components provided by Force10 technology partners, including those offering:
Server virtualization and server management software
iSCSI storage area networks
GbE and 10 GbE server NICs featuring I/O virtualization and protocol acceleration
The Sun white paper "Minimizing Downtime in SAP Environments" uses concrete examples to describe the architecture of a system landscape based on Solaris Containers and Solaris ZFS technologies. Flexible architectures based on virtualization technologies, such as those from Sun Microsystems, allow enterprises running Solaris to operate an SAP environment at lower cost in a more flexible way, while retaining high availability.
With Zones and ZFS, Sun’s solution for the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) data warehouse was presented by Maureen Chew from Sun's ISV Engineering at the SAS Global Forum 2007 in Orlando, FL. ZFS clones of the Biosense 1TB datasets can be created within minutes in a separate Solaris Container.
Sun’s high-performance infrastructure helps Singapore Ticketing Agency (SISTIC) improve transaction volumes. The solution was provided to handle the following customer challenges: manage higher volume of transactions, support complex real-time applications running 24x7, and to lower the total cost of ownership.
As Stephen Sistare has elsewhere noted [20824], there is a certain amount of give and take between the UltraSPARC T2 Processor that is at the heart of the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 and the Solaris OS. He returns to that theme in his blog on the multitasking capabilities of the T5440, noting the strengths that the Solaris OS brings to the table.
Learn what's new in the Solaris 10 operating system in a brief video update by Larry Wake.
Tested, Integrated update
ZFS enterprise enhancements
Support for new systems from Intel
New Virtualization features
ZFS can now be used for the root file system and booting. ZFS can now be the main file system as it is in OpenSolaris.
Sun has been doing a lot of work with the #2 contributors to OpenSolaris, Intel. Support has been added for Intel's latest multicore Xeon processors and support for Intel NUMA systems has been improved.
Solaris 10 has a broad range of virtualization built in: Solaris Containers, Logical Domains and Paravirtualization support for Xen-based hypervisors. This release has improvements for each.
Sun Systems for MySQL are a set of solutions designed to radically change the economics of Web service delivery for enterprise customers deploying MySQL-based Web Infrastructure on Sun servers. Proven customer deployments have shown the ability to improve performance by 300%, reduce power consumption by 83 percent and offer up to 10 times better price/performance, with higher system reliability and faster time to market. The new solutions integrate MySQL with other innovations from Sun, enabling customers to get to market faster by using Sun's open software, extensive code samples with MySQL, and documented best practices.
Don MacAskil set himself a three-fold task, which was to determine the "best case" compression ration for InnoDB tables; the "worst case" CPU usage for the workload; and to learn all of this by the most quick and dirty means possible. He reports the results in his blog. The result he obtained -- using gzip-9 for the first pass -- was a 2.12X compression ratio over a large and varied dataset.
The Sun Rack II product line represents a new generation of data center optimized cabinets, including a selection of innovative low profile, highest density Power Distribution Units (PDUs) available in 12 different models, from 5kVA to 37kVA in single and three phase, low and high voltage versions. This allows as many as 42 C13 & 6 C19 outlets and 45 C13 & 9 C19 outlets on a single PDU. The Sun Rack II product line will enable higher than ever density of IT equipment within a standard 42RU rack footprint.
Stephen Sistare comments on a number of new features in the UltraSPARC T2 processor and the nature of the support these features require of the Solaris OS. The necessary enhancements to the Solaris OS are all available in the OpenSolaris repository and in the Solaris 10 8/07 release and are automatically applied by the OS as used in the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5x20 server family. Sistare titles his blog "The UltraSPARC T2 Processor and the Solaris Operating System."
A Sun white paper entitled "Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000 Server Architecture" introduces readers to the entry class model of the Sun SPARC Enterprise server line. The M3000 shares benefits such as operability and manageability with its siblings, featuring a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) processor, 32GB memory subsystem, and high-throughput I/O architecture. Running the Solaris 10 OS and including the latest virtualization technologies, the M3000 Server can ensure core business operations. By offering Solaris Containers technology, the server brings sophisticated resource control to an open systems compute platform.
The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 Server has found a fan in InformationWeek's Jeff Ballard whose review declares that the server "...runs rings around more expensive devices when performing a lot of tasks concurrently. It's ideal for databases and virtualization and excels at encrypting and decrypting data thanks to on-board security co-processors." He adds the observation that "Sun has groomed the T5440 for heavy data center chores and virtualization."
Bill Moore, Sun's Chief Engineer, Storage Systems, delivered a 30 minute presentation at the Open Storage Summit, September 2008. The topic was flash performance in storage systems and,
"The problems we see, the solutions we see, and where we think the industry is going."
Topics include the Performance gap, a background on Flash, and Sun's Flash Architecture including the mini-DIMM, ZFS Intent Log (ZIL) and ZFS cache (ARCL2).
Bill also discusses a ZFS Hybrid Pool example and explains how ZFS is the first I/O stack optimized for flash.
Jay's Blog challenges users to learn about how tape storage, offered by Sun provides Eco-Friendly Enterprise Storage Solutions. He reviews the white paper recently released by Fred Moore, President of Horison, Inc., that provides insight into what has been happening in the tape industry in the past few years.
We track how frequently each article is viewed on the web site to determine which the readers consider the most important. For last week, Vol 128 Issue 5, the top 10 articles were:
Hugo Rivero's weblog, entitled "ERP, The Open Way" celebrates the ease with which he was able to download and install Openbravo ERP, a Java-based open source solution that is among the most active projects on sourceforge and that has won the praise of both Infoworld and LinuxWorld.
The Wiki page includes links to books, articles, sunscreencasts, blogs, and other sources of information that Solaris and OpenSolaris software developers might find useful. The site offers developers the ability to add any other resources they find useful ad to the content of the page. There are many topics included with many detailed links.
Yet another benchmarking record for Sun solutions. This time it is the 2-chip world record SPECjbb2005 Sun Blade T6340 and Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 that take the prize. BM Seer reports the results in his blog.
With a result of 224595 SPECjbb2005 bops, 112298 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM for all 2-socket AMD systems on the SPECjbb2005 benchmark, the Sun Blade X6240 outshone the Dell M805 result of 219269 SPECjbb2005 bops, 109635 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM, reports BM Seer in his
blog. Dell's entry used 2 Opteron quad-core processors at 2.5 GHz and the BEA JRocket JDK 1.6.0_03.
The Sun Blade T6340 server module, the latest addition to the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor family of systems, showed slightly better performance using the latest software stack when compared to the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 servers as shown by SPECompM2001, reports BM Seer in a recent blog.
RedMonk Radio Episode 51 offers an interview with Danny Coward on Java SE 6 Update 10, JavaFX, and improving Client-side Java. The Episode is available for download directly through the People Over Process site. Here, users may also subscribe to the podcast feed to have it automatically downloaded, or the radio interview is available for instant play.
Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server version 3 Prelude is a lightweight Web application server that is based on a modular OSGi architecture. GlassFish is one of the leading open source application servers in the industry today with more than 14 million downloads since its first release in May 2005, more than 225,000 registrations in 2008 and hundreds of production deployments around the globe. With features, such as: ease of installation and management, modularity and extensibility and enhanced JRuby support, GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 Prelude allows developers to easily scale their projects from small Web-tier deployments to large-scale mission critical architectures, simplify complex development and production tasks and increase productivity.
Christoph Schuba and Glenn Faden collaborated on a chapter in Trent Jaeger's new book Operating System Security, which they've entitled "Case Study: Solaris Trusted Extensions." The chapter is available as a pdf. The book itself is part of the Synthesis Lectures on information Security, Privacy, and Trust.
Customized news reports about Sun Microsystems. Just the news you need, none of what you don't. 50,000+ Members. 20,000+ Articles Published since 1998.
