A new original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and support agreement between Sun and HP will make Sun a strategic HP ProLiant OS distribution partner and Solaris will be part of the lineup of key operating environments for the HP ProLiant platform. Announced February 25, the expanded multi-year partnership agreement will allow HP to distribute and provide software technical support for Solaris 10 OS on the HP ProLiant server and blade system platforms.

Sun is now a member of Intel's Embedded and Communications Alliance (ECA), which is one of the world's most recognized embedded and communications ecosystems providing customers with a trusted supply line of Intel-based products and services. Its membership will help align the two company's technical development and continues the collaborative efforts between Intel and Sun. For customers, this alliance means that next generation systems can be expected to include more balance in performance, energy efficiency, and greater memory and I/O performance.

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.

The U.S. Army Intelligence Center (USAIC), the professional training school for military intelligence, provides cross-branch training to as many as 17,000 personnel annually. In an effort to improve overall efficiency and reduce costs, the USAIC migrated its training system from a PC-based solution to a distributed client-server solution based on 6,000 Sun Ray thin clients, Sun Ray Software and 200 Sun Fire X4600 M2 servers running 2,500 virtual machines.

Here is a five-step process for IPv6-enabling a network, given that IPv4 Internet addresses are becoming exhausted. Dan Anderson explains the procedure in a recent blog, where he shows how to configure a Solaris system using Hurricane Electric's (HE's) free IPv6 over IPv4 tunnel service, which uses IP Protocol 41.

When Jim McHugh spoke with Paul Krill of InfoWorld a few months ago, he was confident that Solaris would more than hold its own against possible inroads by Linux. The Sun VP for Solaris Marketing said the anecdotal evidence was mixed, given that, for every Unix-to-Linux convert, it was fairly easy to identify a user who made the trip in the other direction.

Those individuals still using UFS rather than ZFS with their databases will want to have a look at Neelakanth Nadgir's argument that they might instead use UFS DirectIO with MySQL in particular.

The recent release of Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS) 6 Update 1 brought with it many new features and enhancements, including platform-level enhancements, product/component-level enhancements, and the addition of the Sun Intelligent Event Processor and Sun Data Mashup Engine. Java CAPS provides a standards-based, open, extensible platform for developing software infrastructures using a service-oriented architecture approach.

If you're interested in learning more about the Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), then you need to take a look at a blog series by Dirk Grobler, who explores multiple facets of the open source virtualization software, including its architecture, client access, desktop broker, directory integration, xVM VirtualBox, open storage access, and VMware.

Garth Goodson et al. have authored an introduction to standardizing storage clusters using the pNFS (parallel NFS) protocol as part of the NFSv4.1 specification to bridge the gap between current NFS protocols (versions 2, 3, and 4) and parallel cluster file system interfaces. While current NFS protocols force clients to access all files on a given file-system volume from a single server node (which can become a bottleneck for scalable performance), pNFS as a standardized extension to NFSv4 provides clients with scalable end-to-end performance and the flexibility to interoperate with a variety of clustered storage service architectures.

Consolidate up to 128 servers on one Sun CoolThreads system using Sun's Logical Domains (LDoms), which provides built-in and no-cost virtualization capabilities for Sun's CMT server portfolio. With more than 60 world records to date on key enterprise and HPC benchmarks, Sun servers with CoolThreads Technology deliver better performance, price/performance and overall TCO in head-to-head systems comparisons, Sun reports.

Sun has added new enhancements and modules to its Sun StorageTek Enterprise Backup Software (EBS). Version 7.5 features virtual environment support for auto-discovery and VMware environments, visual representation of the VMware environment within EBS, and further integration with de-duplication technologies. This latest version offers simplified licensing and management, new Sun Virtual Server and VMware management, and a new module for Microsoft applications.

The second OpenSolaris Storage Summit, held on February 23, 2009 in San Francisco, hosted a number of interesting presentations. One of the key designers of the Sun Storage 7000 Series, Mike Shapiro, kicked off the event with his talk "Sun Open Storage 2009-2010" that included a road map for the next year or so on Sun's Open Storage solutions. The talk's slides are available online along with other Summit presentations such as Adam Leventhal's "ZFS, Cache, and Flash"; Ben Rockwood's "ZFS in the Trenches"; Mike La Spina's "Storage Re-provisioning with COMSTAR"; and many more.

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 3, the top 10 articles were:

• Video Discussion of ZFS as a Root File System [21224]
• Why Sun Ray [21280]
• How to Create a Customized Boot DVD for Solaris OS [21273]
• Guidelines for Optimizing the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems for Oracle Databases [21281]
• VDI Solution Demo and Cookbook [21278]
• JavaFX Seeks to Capture RIA Market Space from Adobe, Microsoft [21269]
• 100,000,000 Downloads of JavaFX Registered [21382]
• Sun in the Open Source Storage Market [21282]
• VirtualBox and MySQL Win Products of the Year [21396]
• "Storage in the Cloud" - Video Presentation by Ben Rockwood, Joyent [21223]

The longer version of this article has list of top ten articles for the last 8 weeks.

Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open-source officer, was interviewed by Alex Serpo of ZDNet.com.au on the subjects of the MySQL acquisition and community engagement in both OpenOffice.org and OpenSolaris. He spoke about the long-term consequences of acquiring MySQL and praised the community contributions to both OpenOffice.org and OpenSolaris.

OpenID.sun.com: A Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 Reference Deployment

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.

http://sun.com/bigadmin

If protecting your data against "rot" is important to you, then why not use ZFS file system to protect against it, writes Kevin McAleer in his blog entitled "Using ZFS to Fight Data Rot, the Silent Killer." ZFS checksums all data written to and read from it, McAleer points out, discovering instances of data corruption as they occur.

Developers working on Java ME mobile projects need to give serious consideration to using JavaFX and JavaFX Mobile in their next applications, writes Bruce Hopkins in a recent Sun Developer Network (SDN) article. Hopkins describes JavaFX as a feature-rich platform that allows both developers and now designers to create rich and compelling user interfaces for mobile devices.

Few people can be expected to know more about the nature of JavaFX Mobile than Sun's VP of the Client Software Group Jeet Kaul, which is no doubt why Frank Sommers put questions on the subject to Kaul in an interview recently published in Artima. In brief, Kaul defined JavaFX Mobile as "a platform for creating rich Internet applications for mobile devices."

Responding to a number of questions raised by enterprise architect James McGovern in his blog "Insecure Federated Identity Deployments," Sun federation architect Pat Patterson answers them in a lengthy blog of his own that he entitles "Secure Federated Identity Deployments."

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