Thanks to Solaris-based Chip Multithreading (CMT) systems, software billings, x64 server sales, and open storage business, Sun's second quarter fiscal year 2009 results were not as grim as many expected.
See Sun's new state-of-the art datacenter in Broomfield Colorado.
Read Bryan Cantrill's remarks on the striking similarity between the differentiators announced by NetApp in its original business plan and the Fishworks differentiators of today. Find out how Brendan Gregg gets
about 1 Gbyte/sec for streaming disk read, and 500 Mbytes/sec for streaming disk writes, via NFS, from the Sun Storage 7410.
Thanks to Solaris-based Chip Multithreading (CMT) systems, software billings, x64 server sales, and open storage business, Sun's second quarter fiscal year 2009 results were not as grim as many analysts had anticipated. The company reported double-digit growth in all these divisions and gross margins for products were up nearly 4 percent from last quarter. Sun did record a second quarter loss of $209 million, or 28 cents a share and revenue of $3.220 billion, a 10.9 percent decrease from the year-ago quarter.
Sun plans on endorsing the European Code of Conduct for Data Centers to promote data center best practices throughout the European Union. This initiative is designed to inform and stimulate data center operators and owners to reduce energy consumption in a cost-effective manner without hampering mission critical functions.
Sun has put its energy-efficient systems and expertise to the test in the company's new Broomfield, Colo. data center, which incorporates the latest in data center design and power and cooling technologies. Sun estimates it will save more than $1 million in electricity costs and 11,000 metric tons of CO2 per year in Broomfield, and will help reduce its carbon footprint by 6 percent in the U.S.
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Getting to the right technical resources fast can help speed high performance computing application and web services development. Now the power of expert resources and key technology for HPC and Web Infrastructure are just a click away! The HPC and Web Communities offered through the Sun Partner Advantage Program provide centralized access to a wide variety of information -- from blogs and forums to tools, explanations, tips, and techniques that can speed up the programming, debugging, and tuning process for Sun's ISV and Open Source communities developing HPC and Web applications and technology.
Multicore and many core computation is the only viable path for high-performance capability and throughput today. Most existing applications however are ill-suited for this transition as they have been written for historical single core systems and typically run far below their potential performance. The Acumem SlowSpotter performance tool highlights applications’ improvement potential, and instructs programmers how to get there.
Learn how to use Acumem’s easy-to-use productivity tools in less than 5 minutes.
This Sun BluePrint is a starting point in designing dynamic data center architecture by providing a "proof-of-concept exercise." The virtual and dynamic data center infrastructure deployed used the following: Sun Blade 6000 modular system, Logical Domains, and the Scalent V/OE software, with clients running Windows, Linux, and Solaris.
Buying more hardware is not the way to maximize data center efficiency, argues Dr. Christoph Brune, Global Technical Account Manager, SAP Sun Microsystems, in a recent blog. Virtualization is a better, more cost effective approach, he contends.
Project Crossbow is huge. So says Ben Rockwood in his blog, where he further contends that Crossbow "...is a monumental improvement to Solaris and continues to push the bar out of reach of its competitors."
In his video series on OpenSolaris and Intel, Intel Software Engineering Manager David Stewart reveals advances being made with Intel's new Core i7 microarchitecture processor (Nehalem) and OpenSolaris / Solaris. In his six minute YouTube video, Stewart walks viewers through the architecture and then focuses on aspects of Nehalem that are particularly interesting from an OpenSolaris / Solaris perspective.
With the Sun/Micron Technology announcement in December 2008 of the now available and highly durable NAND flash memory featuring single-level cell (SLC) write cycles capable of up to one million write cycles and multi-level (MLC) write cycles ranging up to 100,000 cycles, figuring TCO for solid state disks has become an easier task in the view of Mary Shacklett writing for ByteandSwitch.
OpenSolaris 2008.11 made some impressive gains over 2005.05, according to Anatol Studler in his recent blog, where he claimed that most of the shortcomings in the earlier version have been addressed and that new enhancements are now also part of the release. Is it Linux yet remains the question.
Bill Bradford writes a step-by-step installation guide for Nagios, an enterprise-class network and server monitoring system on Solaris 10 Operating System update 6. His installation runs in 32-bit mode on a VMware virtual machine, though he writes of having run Nagios on everything from Red Hat 7.3 to Mac OS X. As a prerequisite to this installation, readers will have had to install the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU make from the Solaris 10 installation disk.
IBM has released DB2 Express-C that is capable of running on Solaris/OpenSolaris. DB2 is one of IBM’s families of relational database management system (RDBMS) software products. The Express-C version of the DB2 data server is a thinned down version that is free for the community to develop, deploy, and distribute. It can be set up quickly, is easy-to-use, and includes self-managing capabilities.
Enterprise customers are being cautious about wholesale migration to commodity x86/Linux platforms. Robert L. Mitchell of ComputerWorld looks into the question and comes up with some answers. He concludes that it may be a while before the migration shifts into high gear.
The latest version of Sun's open source virtualization system management software has been launched. Sun xVM Ops Center 2.0 has fixed several issues from previous versions and offers the following new features: context-driven browser user interface, WS-MAN API, easier installation, improved performance/scalability/quality, historical data monitoring, disconnected operations, Sun xVM Ops Center Controller Failover, and M Series server support.
Third party systems management vendors interested in integrating with xVM software are in luck. Sun xVM Ops Center has two sets of public APIs and an SDK available just for independent developers and ISVs. The APIs consist of JMX-Remoting API and WS-Management API, while the SDK comes with complete Javadocs of the public APIs and contains functional examples demonstrating how to use the APIs.
The supercomputer to be deployed at the University of Zurich will rank as number 50 in the Top500 list of supercomputers. It is based on 576 Sun Blade servers that are powered by the Intel Xeon processor that is codenamed Nehalem. It is scheduled to go online in late summer 2009. One of the largest HPC machines in Switzerland, the Zurich computer is unique in its compact design, efficient QDR InfiniBand network, ingenious cooling system, fast and high-capacity storage systems. The cluster will also take advantage of the Lustre parallel file system.
Sun's SPARC Enterprise T5440 server received the Bronze Award as the 2008 server product of the year from SearchDataCenter.com. Writing for the online data center media group, Bridget Botelho says this midrange system "packs enough memory and CPU power to deliver up to four times higher performance per watt at about one-fifth of competitive servers".
This helpful compilation of white papers on the role of tape in storage technology comes from Jay Wallace's blog. Wallace provides brief comments characterizing each of the five papers he cites and includes links to all of them.
While Sun Engineer Brendan Gregg has already examined the maximum throughput and IOPS attainable on a Sun Storage 7410 by caching the working set entirely in DRAM in a recent blog post, he now explores the streaming disk performance of the 7410, showing some of the highest throughputs he has seen in another entry of his blog.
When NetApp took on Sun as an NFS rival back in the 1990s, the company's founder and EVP David Hitz probably didn't have in mind the title for his just released book, "How to Castrate a Bull." In an instance of What Goes Around Comes Around, Bryan Cantrill blogs that, with the advent of Fishworks and the Sun Storage 7000 Series, the shoe is once again on the other foot, and the testosterone supply is still ample.
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 131 Issue 3, the top 10 articles were:
Obama Administration Looks to McNealy for Open Source Strategy [21237]
Cloud Computing Architecture Model Described [21173]
Advantages of Solaris and OpenSolaris over Linux [21148]
Cloud computing is not simply a rehash of the shared tenancy computing practiced back in the day of mainframes, writes Sun CIO Bob Worrall in the Sun Inner Circle newsletter. Rather, he continues, cloud computing delivers a number of services, including software as a service, platform as a service, infrastructure as a service and storage as a service, whether through public or private clouds.
Version 2.1.2 of VirtualBox is available now and serves primarily as a maintenance/bug fix release for improved stability performance. Issues in the December release of version 2.1 that have been updated include 64-bit guests, networking on Windows, USB on Linux, and Windows 7 Shared Folders. Sun's xVM VirtualBox software lets users create virtual machines in which they can install their operating system of choice. It is a feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers which is freely available as open source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
The core components of the Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 have been released under a Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license. Open Web Server is a highly scalable multi-threaded HTTP engine capable of handling hundreds of thousands of simultaneous HTTP connections. It is part of the Web Stack community in the OpenSolaris project, and is intended to be the foundation of future Sun Java System Web Server and Sun Java System Web Proxy Server versions.
In their Sun BluePrints Online article "Addressing Systemic Qualities in SAMP Architectures," Marina Fisher and Amanda Waite address developers who are new to creating Web 2.0 applications, presenting some design concepts and considerations specific to SAMP architectures.
Testing on the SAP Standard Application Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark shows the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 with 2.52 GHz SPARC64 VII processors, 32 processors / 128 cores / 256 threads, achieves 24,650 users. Results demonstrate the M9000 gets to 69% of the per-cpu result of the largest configuration of the 32-way IBM p595 (POWER6 5.0 GHz, 64 cores total), reports BM Seer.
The Sun Fire X4450, powered by four 6-core Intel Xeon X7460 processors at 2.66 GHz, has achieved a score of 19.47 @14 tiles, supporting 84 fully fledged VM instances (14 Tiles), reports BM Seer in a recent blog. This result beats the IBM x3850-M2 best result to date of 19.10 @ 14 tiles and all the other Intel-based submissions (Dell PE R900 and HP PL DL580 GS) in the 24 cores category with similar architecture while using equal or smaller memory footprint (80GB) then the other systems. This result puts the Sun X4450 on the leading front of 4-socket/24 cores Intel-based VMware servers.
Sun's ZFS file system provides simple administration for data management compared with traditional Unix Logical Volume Manager or Veritas Volume Manager. Rockwood said, "Memory management is something we all take for granted because complex software masks management away. ZFS was born with the intent to bring the same advantages to storage."
This step-by-step White Paper shows technical personnel how to configure Sun Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition (SCGE) with EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) and run Oracle RAC within this framework. It also provides the setup procedures used for the live demonstration environment.
This document explains how to best achieve, with JavaFX1.0, a dynamic layout (including use with animated transitions) using the 1.0 API. JavaFX1.0 has a full-featured 2D scene graph API for creating dynamic and visually rich interfaces.
This White Paper introduces the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS), and it discusses how the Sun Java CAPS helps to accelerate development, simplify integration, and reduce administrative costs in building standards-based interoperable and secure Web services.
Lead test engineer for OpenDS Gary Williams shares the nuances of testing open-source software and, in particular, OpenDS in a recent article with contributions from Marina Sum. Several challenges have emerged, resulting in unique and often rewarding and dynamic roles for test engineers. There are defined rules, guidelines, and best practices for testing OpenDS, which were created by the community.
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