Sun shipped its 100,000,000th JavaFX runtime making it the fastest growing RIA platform, Sun says. Schwartz comments on the milestone and marketplace. Find out more about how the competition for space in the RIA arena is heating up with the release of JavaFX.
Sun Distinguished Engineer Harriet Coverston presents "Sun QFS and Sun Storage Archive Manager (SAM)" in an on-demand webinar.
Organizations creating applications on and for Sun's line of Linux servers and clusters can now easily troubleshoot a variety of common issues by using the ReplayEngine product from TotalView Technologies.
Members of LinuxQuestions.org have named VirtualBox and MySQL as their favorites for virtualization and databases.
According to Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Friday, February 13th was the day that Sun shipped its 100,000,000th JavaFX runtime and with the product's availability just reaching over the two month mark, the JavaFX's download rate is the fastest growing Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform on the market. Marking the milestone, Schwartz used his blog not only to congratulate the JavaFX team and its community, but to identify the company's view on the overall marketplace in relation to open source and Java technologies.
Sun issued its first mid-year progress update on its corporate social responsibility efforts this month, living up to promises it made back in October during the annual report when the company noted it was striving to be more transparent and hoped to strengthen its internal data gathering processes and show stakeholders what it has accomplished and where it needs to improve.
The 2008 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award winners have been announced and Sun's VirtualBox and MySQL have both been selected as the number one product in their respective categories of Virtualization and Database. VirtualBox received 61.10% (or 388) of the votes with the nearest contender, VMware, only earning 24.25% (154). MySQL made off with 58.10% (373) of the votes, followed by PostgreSQL with 16.98% (109) and Firebird with 11.53% (74).
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Race conditions, deadlocks, random crashes, and corrupted core files -- native Linux C, C++ and FORTRAN application developers dread to see these symptoms in testing or in customer bug reports. Organizations creating applications on and for Sun's line of Linux servers and clusters can now easily troubleshoot these using the ReplayEngine product from TotalView Technologies.
Bob Worrall, Chief Information Officer at Sun Microsystems, urges the IT community to evaluate ways to be more cost-effective to address the economic situation, focus on the ecological solutions, check out Open Source opportunities, do the research, and be more hands-on. "Recession or not, we will continue to see more pressures on IT budgets," said Worrall.
In her video presentation on ZFS as a Root File System, Sun engineer Lori Alt, project lead of the ZFS Boot Project at Sun, begins with a look at the characteristics of a root file system, such as requiring a boot capability, having robustness, offering installation support along with swap and dump support, and providing ongoing management capabilities. She then gives an overview of ZFS that highlights how ZFS fills the bill on these requirements.
In a recent blog John Cecere writes about creating a customized boot DVD for Solaris. He says the process is relatively simple and that there are utilities in Solaris to do large chunks of the work. He notes as well that the procedure is essentially the same for SPARC and x86, the only difference being the mkisofs command line used to recreate the ISO image at the end.
May 1, 2009 is the last order date for the Trusted Solaris 8 software as the 7/03 and 2/04 releases reach their end of life. The last ship date for the software is July 31, 2009, with the end of service life date set for the same day in the year 2014. The suggested replacement product is the Solaris 10 OS which comes with Trusted Extensions.
Sun xVM Ops Center offers a cost effective, centralized platform for complete physical and virtual machine management and visibility in heterogeneous environments through intelligent automation that can help to significantly lower IT costs. The launch of version 2.0 announced in late January has brought with it many new features and benefits for customers including a complete Virtual Machine lifecycle management for xVM Server, heterogeneous data center support, Virtual Machine File System (NFS/CIFS), and much more.
View the VDI solution demo to learn how the, "Sun VDI Software is the Sun Virtual Desktop Connector which provides seamless integration with the virtualization layer and makes it easy to control the life cycle of virtual machines and assign users to virtual desktop environments."
Why Sun Ray
Considering Sun Ray for VMware VDI Platforms
Rick Vanover writing for SearchVMware.com explains mostly the in's of choosing Sun Ray server software for VMware VDI platforms. While using Sun Ray may bring an extra step in the architecture, reasons to consider why to use Sun Ray are outlined. "A virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution is a collection of three main components…," he writes.
Optimizing Sun's CMT platforms (T5220/T5240 and T6320/T6340 blade server modules) is the subject of Amit Hurvitz's blog in which he recommends addressing application parallelism as a first order of business.
Solaris Cluster 3.1 8/05 and 3.2 now support the Sun Fire X4250 Server. This enterprise-class server is fast, expandable, and energy efficient, making it ideal for Web infrastructure, large single-app implementations, and multi-app consolidations. Since those environments need High Availability, the Sun Fire X4250 is a great platform to combine with Solaris Cluster for customers to deploy mission-critical solutions with high performance and service levels.
Providing cost efficient data management and fast access to large volumes of data in the face of eroding budgets are the principal challenges announced by Harriet Coverston, Sun Distinguished Engineer, in her webinar, "Sun QFS and Sun Storage Archive Manager (SAM)."
The Sun StorageTek ST 9900 Encrypting Backend Director (BED) is a disk adapter to which disk drives are attached and encrypted as data is written to disk and decrypted as data is read from disk. Only for the ST 9985V and ST 9990V, the ST 9900 encrypting BED allows disks written with encrypted data to be removed from these systems with no readable customer data. There is no other competitor that offers an encrypting BED to protect data at rest, Sun reports.
Customers of the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120, T5220, T5140, T5240, and T5440 Servers now have an ATO and X-Option for 300GB 10K RPM, 2.5" SAS hard disk drives. The 300GB drive comes with the largest memory capacity of any disk option that Sun offers in a 2.5" form factor. In a 16-disk configuration, which is available on T5220 and T5240, this new disk drive option allows up to 4.8TB of storage within a compact 2 rack unit (RU) server.
Ben Rockwood, the Director of Systems at Joyent, presents at the Open Solaris Summit on the topic: Cloud Computing. His talk is made up of two parts: 1) What is the cloud and 2) Storage and Virtualization.
According to Carol Sliwa, author of the article "Open-source Storage Explained," written for SearchStorage.com, the rather haphazard manner in which enterprises acquire open-source storage software and then implement storage systems has created a perfect marketing climate for the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems. It is the combination of industry-standard hardware and a software stack that features open-source technology that gives the Sun solution this advantage, Sliwa asserts.
The first open source generic communication protocol between a Key Manager and an encrypting device has been released by Sun, enabling partners to adopt this protocol to securely handle encryption keys without additional licensing. The protocol is implemented as a complete toolkit and is downloadable from OpenSolaris under the project name Crypto KMS Agent Toolkit.
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 132 Issue 2, the top 10 articles were:
"Best Practices for Running Oracle Databases in Solaris Containers" [21265]
A review of cloud computing is contributed by Lew Tucker, VP and CTO of cloud computing at Sun Microsystems. "Tucker said that Sun as a company had evolved its platform from a Unix, Solaris, and Java infrastructure without losing sight of the company's original vision, which is 'the network is the computer,'" writes Roger Smith, InformationWeek.com.
Without too much fanfare, Michelle Dennedy has been appointed as Sun's first Chief Governance Officer for Cloud Computing, leaving behind her role as the company's Chief Information Strategy & Privacy Officer. Admittedly a bit scared and extremely happy, Dennedy stated in her blog that she is ready to roll up her sleeves and take on this monster challenge of building a framework "that will mold the people, process & responsibility aspects of The Cloud."
This is the third article in a series of articles on GlassFish and MySQL by Ed Ort and Carol McDonald. Part 3 shows readers how easy it is to convert the controller layer of the Web application -- that is, the layer of the application that performs the CRUD operations -- into a Web service. Readers will also learn how to create a client for the Web service, which uses GlassFish, MySQL and the Java Persistence API.
The OpenOffice.org Community update for OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 is now available for download, which addresses a few minor issues that have been reported with the current release.
In Part 1 of a three-part article series on "Protecting Java EE Applications with OpenSSO Policy Agents," the authors deal with the basic steps of the process: installing and configuring Policy Agents to enforce authentication, single sign on (SSO) and authorization. Part 2 begins with an overview of the three types of SSO and demonstrate how to achieve same-domain SSO. Part 3, which has not been released, will show how access to predefined resources can be restricted to only certain users.
Read about the system architecture and configuration supporting the OpenID at Work project. Using OpenID.sun.com, Sun employees can seamlessly access web sites that leverage OpenID for authentication purposes. The site is deployed on Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System. (Registration required to access this article.)
What\'s New on the BigAdmin Wiki
The wiki encourages participation from Sun and our readers. Folks from Sun have recently updated the Firmware and Availability pages. The sys admin community has posted tech tips such as Installing VirtualBox 2.1.2 on OpenSolaris Express snv_107, Short Cuts for Solaris Live Upgrade, and Sun Fire X Servers - ILOM Serial Console Configuration.
While developers have for some time been able to work with RIAs using Java technology, the demanding skill set has kept the casual user from that setting. Instead, they have had to rely on Adobe's AIR, Flex and Flash and Silverlight from Microsoft. Now, Jim Rapoza finds the competition for space in the RIA arena heating up with the release of JavaFX.
Sun announced it will be merging the NetBeans Partner Program with the Sun Partner Advantage Program, providing more support for the NetBeans partner community. Along with this reveal, Sun also named new third-party support for the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which will enhance the productivity and choice that developers have with the NetBeans platform.
Solaris Containers on next-generation multi-core platforms is giving customers using Reuters Market Data Systems (RMDS) in Solaris environments increased capacity, improved efficiencies, reduced latency, and overall enhanced performance while also reducing total cost of ownership. Sun and Thomson Reuters claim recent benchmarks have demonstrated that RMDS performs better in a virtualized environment with Solaris Containers, which delivers strong performance improvements across a significantly reduced hardware footprint, than one running RMDS on a number of individual Sun server machines.
"Configuring Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems for Oracle Databases" is a Sun BluePrints Online paper by Jeffrey T. Wright and Sridhar Ranganathan that reviews configuration criteria and discusses some important implementation guidelines. Because the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems offer such tremendous configuration flexibility, storage architects face a number of decisions in designing optimal configurations to meet the Oracle database storage requirements.
Rajarshi Chowdhury blogs about "Running SysBench for Oracle benchmarks" in a recent entry. He documents his experience in running SysBench for Oracle benchmarks (which required more than one try).
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