Volume 129, Issue 4 - Ryan Optimistic on Sun; Jonathan blog; OpenSolaris 11.08; Buyer’s Guide For IDM; Developer Presentations

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November 24th, 2008 — November 30th, 2008
System News System News for Sun Users  
Volume 129, Issue 4
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See Peter Ryan's talk from the Sun Analyst Summit and learn why he is "optimistic and positive about the future". Read Jonathan's latest blog and learn about Sun's new Data Protection Services offering.

Eight presentations, 266 slides in total, from a November 2008 Solaris/Developer Days event have been posted online.

Learn more about OpenSolaris 11.08, ZFS compression, Enterprise Flash Technology, GlassFish Enterprise Server and Designing an Adaptive Security Architecture.

Read about the Highlights for Sun at Supercomputing 2008, The Complete Buyer’s Guide For Identity Management, and why it's not s easy to replace high-end UNIX with Linux.

News
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Execution On Innovation (Video with slides) - Selling at Sun
Talk by Peter Ryan, Executive VP Global Sales and Services (GSS)
Peter Ryan, Executive Vice President, Global Sales & Services, delivered a talked called "Execution On Innovation" at Sun's recent "Sun Analyst Series (SAS) 2008" event.

Peter opened his talk by saying that his goal was to give the audience of analysts a perspective of what Sun is seeing in the field, with partners and with customers and why, "frankly we are optimistic and positive about the future." He continued, "I'll try to give you proof points about why we're confident and what we are seeing out there. The one thing that's missing in lots of the discussion that takes place in the chat rooms and blogs is factual details. I'll try to give you some context there."

JS Blog: (Another) Win for Open Storage...
Wikipedia Win
In his new blog, Jonathan talks about Sun's recent success at Wikipedia which he calls a great example of a "redshift" application ("a segment of the market that's growing faster than the technology industry's capacity to innovate").

Jonathan also states that. "most of the planet's largest web sites (just look at the top 100) are built atop Sun's MySQL database. Which is why we've just introduced a line of systems platform designed specifically to run MySQL - at up to 3x the performance of whitebox alternatives."

Sun Data Protection Services, Data Erasure
Sun Announces New Data Erasure Service for Data Protection and Security
Sun announced the Sun Data Protection Services, Data Erasure, a new on-site service to help enable customers to remain compliant with internal corporate data erasure policies during the removal, redeployment or relocation of equipment containing sensitive data. The service also empowers customers' to become compliant with the ever increasing policies of regulatory agencies for the removal or destruction of data, by providing a global, audit-ready solution that erases data at the platter level.
Features
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Sun MD Powers China’s Earthquake Readiness
Sun Donates Blackbox to CNDRC
Sun donated a Sun Modular Data Center (Sun MD/Blackbox) to the China National Disaster Reduction Center (CNDRC) to help “Chinese officials develop an early warning system for earthquakes, hoping to minimize the impact of temblors like the one that devastated Sinchuan province earlier this year.”
Replacing high-end Unix with enterprise Linux? Not so fast
Some customers are finding that they have a place for both and that Linux isn't necessarily an economic no-brainer
An article appearing in Computerworld.com said: "Migrating from high-end Unix-based systems to commodity x86/Linux platforms has been a popular idea for the past few years, at least in theory. But it turns out that not everyone thinks going full-on with Linux is the best solution -- at least not yet."
OpenSolaris
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It is Time to Take OpenSolaris Seriously
Solaris Vs. OpenSolaris

Charlie Schluting wrote an article on the Enterprise Networking Planet, how he can take his favorite server operating system and merging it with his favorite desktop OS using OpenSolaris, an the open source version of the Solaris operating system from Sun Microsystems (and the OpenSolaris community). Since 2005, both Sun engineers and community coders have hacked on OpenSolaris. What has resulted is a drastically improved Sun OS.

This article is an overview of OpenSolaris article is the start of a three-part series. Next will be a technical review of the latest OpenSolaris, and finally Schluting will offer an IT manager's strategy guide.

RedMonk Previews and Demos OpenSolaris 11.08
Interview with Tim Cramer, Director of Core OpenSolaris Engineering
Watch the Tim Cramer, Director of Core OpenSolaris Engineering, RedMonk Previews interview about OpenSolaris to learn more about what this November 2008 release brings. Sun is working on rapidly innovating OpenSolaris. Listen for a sneak peek into the “Crossbow Project” and other projects that are on the dashboard for the upcoming release in April/May 2009.
Solaris
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Slides from November 2008 Solaris/Developer Days
Event Was Held in NYC and in Edison, NJ
Isaac, the UnixMan, Rozenfeld has posted the slides from an, "action-packed day of events held on 2 consecutive days in NYC and in lovely Edison, NJ."

  • Storage Product Update (25 slides)
  • Software Performance and Solaris Observability (11 slides)
  • Solaris 10 10/08 [Update 6] Highlights (60 slides)
  • xVM Server/OpsCenter Update (62 slides)
  • x64 Product Update (33 slides)"
  • xVM Desktop Virtualization (33 slides)
  • Zones & OpenSolaris Update (20 slides)
  • Cloud Computing Initiative (22 slides)

8 Presentations, 266 slides in total.

Solaris Cluster Support for the Netra T5440 and Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000
Solaris Cluster 3.1, 3.2 or 3.2 2/08
The Sun Netra T5440 is Sun's high-efficiency rack server platform based on the second generation of Chip Multi-threaded Technology (CMT) UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor. The Netra T5440 offers extreme reliability and high throughput, at the same time offering processor core, memory and I/O densities to enable expansion and flexibility. This makes is a great platform for mission-critical applications enabled by Solaris Cluster.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000 server is the latest addition to the M-series portfolio and brings extreme RAS, and extreme performance, in an ultra dense footprint at an entry-level price point. The mainframe-class reliability features of the M3000 and Solaris Cluster makes the combination a perfect solution for mission critical datacenter deployments.

MySQL
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Details of A MySQL Query Analyzer Use Case
How Clickability Obtained A 1.9x Performance Improvement
Jeff Freund, CTO of Clickability, has a success story that he shares with readers in his blog entitled "Details of our MySQL Query Analyzer Use Case."
Deploying MySQL Database in Solaris Cluster Environments
Provides a Mechanism for Fault Monitoring and Automatic Failover of the MySQL Database Service
Increased high availability is attainable, writes Ritu Kamboj, in his Sun BluePrints Online paper entitled "Deploying MySQL Database in Solaris Cluster Environments for Increased High Availability." Kamboj assumes that readers will have a basic understanding of Solaris Cluster and MySQL database installation and administration.
Software
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Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server High Availability Reference Configurations for a Virtualized Environment
White Paper [pdf, 13 pages, 241kb]
Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v2 includes advanced high availability features that enable enterprises to deploy GlassFish in business-critical environments. This white paper provides valuable insights into possible reference topologies that meet a variety of deployment needs from a high availability perspective in a virtualized environment.

IT departments are asked to deliver a continuous stream of new business services into a constrained, if not shrinking, IT budget. GlassFish, together with Solaris 10 Containers and Sun Fire T2000 servers, can enable IT departments to deliver these services under budget. GlassFish offers the cost-efficiency and productivity of open source products, while Solaris 10 Containers on Sun Fire T2000 servers minimize the number of manage nodes.

HPC
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Highlights for Sun at Supercomputing 2008
Next-Generation Sun Constellation And More
At SC08, Sun showed its latest HPC technologies and services that are reinventing the HPC cluster. Highlights include the next-generation Sun Constellation System -- with double the storage capacity, double the cores and double the compute nodes of the original Sun Constellation System, the "Genesis" storage array, new "Magnum" switch solutions, the "Glacier" cooling door and storage flash arrays. Sun also announced HPC hardware and software solutions that are designed for easy entry into HPC.

This article has links the announcements and products discussed at SC08.

Sun at SC2008: The Register Reports an HPC Order Backlog in Petaflops
Sun Seeks to Latch on to the Growth in the HPC Market

Writing in The Register, Timothy Prickett Morgan reviews the Sun products on view at SC08 and ponders the effect of the just announced layoffs on production at Sun.

Servers
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Sun Offers Enhancements to the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 Servers
Improved Motherboard, Hard Disk Expansion Options, Power Supply, and More
Sun has announced product enhancements to the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 Server platforms based on the Chip Multi-threaded Technology (CMT) UltraSPARC T2 processor. The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 CoolThreads servers based on the UltraSPARC T2 processor continue to enable IT groups to securely, reliably and eco-efficiently serve millions of new customers and communities while saving millions, through a virtualized, environmentally responsible data center infrastructure.
Performance Considerations For Developers Utilizing Sun SPARC Enterprise M-Series Servers
Sun BluePrint Reviews Characteristics of M-Series; Making the Right Choice Made Easier
Patrick McGehearty has written a Sun BluePrints Online paper on "Performance Considerations for Developers Utilizing Sun SPARC Enterprise M-Series Servers."
Storage
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Understanding ZFS: Compression
Remember the Options, Says Ben Rockwood
In a recent blog Ben Rockwood speaks to practitioners of bulk data archiving about the virtues of the compression capabilities built in to ZFS. His first point is that compression has a contribution to make in the area of I/O, as well as disk space.
OpenStorage
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Solution Brief: Enterprise Flash Technology
Higher Throughput Rates with a Lower Cost per IOPS
The Sun solution brief "Enterprise Flash Technology: Revolutionizing Enterprise Storage Infrastructure" explains how users can reduce the CPU-to-storage bottleneck by incorporating Flash technology in a new fast, low cost and rugged storage tier that can be combined with hard disk drives into an integrated, hybrid storage pool managed with Solaris ZFS that delivers massive capacity and enhanced performance.
Top10
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Top Ten Articles for last few Issues
Vol 129 Issues 1, 2 and 3; Vol 128 Issues 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5;
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 129 Issue 3, the top 10 articles were:

  • Jonathan Schwartz Video: Sun Aligns Business to Amplify Growth Opportunities (5:40) [20909]
  • Sun Analyst Series (SAS) 2008 - Videos and Slides Available [20898]
  • Success with OpenSolaris + ZFS + MySQL in Production [20874]
  • Jonathan Blogs on The Inside Story (Java, Microsoft and MySQL) [20890]
  • OpenSolaris 2008.11 pre-release [20864]
  • Sun Storage 7000 Management Software [20866]
  • White Paper: Rethink Storage with Sun Storage 7000 Systems [20868]
  • High Availability In The Datacenter [20808]
  • Three Wins for Sun Consellation System and Lustre File System [20906]
  • StarOffice 9 Software Release Includes Major Updates, Native Support for Mac OS X [20905]
Performance
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SPEComp2001 Sun Blade X6440 x86 world Record
Quad-Socket, Quad-Core AMD Blade with Measured Watts
In a recent blog BM Seer reports the world record breaking results of the Sun Blade X6440 server module (2.7 GHz Opteron 8384 "Shanghai") running OpenSolaris 2008.05 and using Sun Studio Express 11/08 compilers. The Sun Blade X6440 delivered a SPECompM2001 x86 16-thread result of 35896.
T5440 World RecordjAppServer Single Application Server
From BM Seer – Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee
One Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server with four UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors at 1.4GHz, delivered a single system World Record result of 6334.86 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard. The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 consumed an average of 1578 Watts of power to obtain this result for a power-performance rating of 0.25 Watts/JOP.

This benchmark result proves that the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server using the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor performs as an outstanding J2EE application server as well as an Oracle 11g OLTP database server. This result used a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server (four 1.4 GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus chips) in the database tier to obtain this World Record result.

BigAdmin
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What's New on BigAdmin
As of November 6th, 2008
Articles which have been posted to BigAdmin in the last week include:

  • Resources for the Solaris OS on IBM and Dell Servers
  • Identities in a Service-Oriented World: Identity as a Service
  • German-Language Version: Identitaten in einer Service orientierten Welt
  • Solaris 8 Vintage Support and Solaris 8 Vintage Patch Service
  • Solaris Tip of the Week: Managing Self-Signed Certificates

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin

Publications
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'Nagios: System and Network Monitoring, Second Edition' by Wolfgang Barth
O'Reilly Publishes Guide to Helpful Host and Service Monitoring Tool
O'Reilly has published "Nagios: System and Network Monitoring, Second Edition" by Wolfgang Barth, which deals with the host and service monitoring tool, Nagios, that is designed to inform systems administrators of network problems before clients or managers notice. It's robust but also complex, and Barth's book, updated to address Nagios 3.0, will help you take full advantage of this program.
'JRuby Cookbook' by Justin Edelson and Henry Liu
Practical Solutions for Using Java Implementation of the Ruby Language
"JRuby Cookbook" by Justin Edelson and Henry Liu is a new O'Reilly title that offers practical solutions for using the Java implementation of the Ruby language, with targeted recipes for deploying Rails web applications on Java servers, integrating JRuby code with Java technologies, developing JRuby desktop applications with Java toolkits, and more.
Security
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The Complete Buyer’s Guide For Identity Management
49-Page Guide
Released in October 2008, the COMPLETE BUYER’S GUIDE for IDENTITY MANAGEMENT provides the information and tools to help you make the right decision when evaluating identity management solutions. Section one of the guide provides a business primer which examines the role of identity management. Section two provides decision-making tools for business needs and the technology environment.
Designing an Adaptive Security Architecture (20-page Blueprint)
Principles and Characteristics of a New Architectural Approach -- by Joel Weise
Sun has posted a new Blueprint by by Joel Weise. The intro says, "Security threats can reduce the functionality, performance, availability, and integrity of IT systems. These systemic qualities are critical — so much so that they are typically instantiated formally into Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In IT environments, the desire is to reduce potential security threats at least to the degree by which SLAs can be satisfied. This article discusses the principles and characteristics of a new architectural approach -- adaptive security -- which is based in part on the concepts and principles of complex adaptive systems."
Trademarks
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Copyrights and Trademarks
For Volume 129, Issue 4

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