Sun is offering Intel's 32GB X25-E Extreme Solid State Drives (SSD) in a 2.5-inch module that fits into 14 models of Sun Fire servers and Sun Storage 7000 systems. Customers can slide these modules right into their servers and storage bays and reduce energy costs and improve application performance at a starting price of $1,199. Servers with SSD start at $3,240 for the Sun Fire X6250 Blade system.
The second video blog in a continuing series from Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz focuses on the first of Sun's three major strategic imperatives: Technology Adoption. Schwartz explains why adoption of technology and change in IT often is done from the bottom up.
A number of the leading Internet sites in the world rely on Sun IT infrastructure to serve their customers. The sites include Wikipedia, SmugMug, eBay, NBC for its Olympics coverage, Internet Brands and Betfair. Details are available in a Sun feature article.
The Lustre file system was employed to Daimler AG's existing Sun Fire Server set up to allow unlimited scalability by adding more storage servers with attached storage. "We deployed Lustre at Daimler's Aerodynamics and Aeroacoustics Department benchmark on 48TB Sun Fire X4500 storage servers, delivering 1.5GB/s over InfiniBand and removing I/O bottlenecks at the start & final phases."
Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos found a bright spot in the current economic downtrend that he shared with writer Jeffrey Burt of eWeek in a recent interview. According to Papadopoulos cost consciousness is causing managers to have a closer look at cloud computing, virtualization and green IT, a trend that is likely to accelerate, given the condition of the economy, he added.
Physical-to-Virtual or p2v, should make life easier for users who need to migrate their Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 OS based systems into a zone on Solaris 10. Jerry Jelinek's blog explains how
users can create an image of an existing system using a flash archive, cpio archive, a UFS dump, or even just a file system image that is accessible over NFS, and then install the zone using that image. There is no explicit p2v tool one needs to run, Jelinek writes, because behind the scenes, the zone installation process does all of the work to make sure the Solaris 8 image runs correctly inside of the zone.
"Running MySQL Database in Solaris Containers" is the subject considered by Ritu Kamboj and Giri Mandalika in their Sun BluePrints Online paper, the full text of which can be accessed with a Sun online account. The authors discuss the process of deploying the MySQL database in virtualized environments using Solaris Zones partitioning technology.
Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 2 is now available with new features, scalability improvements and memory foot print reductions for HPC clusters, and bug fixes. New features in this update include a GUI installer, Microsoft Windows Vista support, Job Submission Verifier (JSV), Consumable Resource per Job, and Jemalloc Library (on Linux x64).
With this Sun BluePrint, non-Linux experts will have the opportunity to review how to set up a Linux-based Lustre file system. "This paper provides a simple cookbook for non-Linux experts on how to set up a Linux-based Lustre file system using small servers, workstations, PCs, or other available hardware for demonstration purposes."
Five out of six stars and the comment that the Sun Fire X4140 is one classy 1U rack server that has more of everything than the competition and is very competitively priced is the verdict pronounced by PC Pro's Dave Mitchell on this Sun solution. In Mitchell's assessment, with the Sun Fire X4140, Sun has come up with a server that will give both Dell and HP some serious competition at the lower end of the server market.
Global server sales fell 15.1 percent in the final quarter of 2008, to $13.1 billion, with shipments dropping down to 11.7 percent, reports Gartner in its quarterly server survey released in March. Overall, 2008 saw server revenue drop by 4 percent as compared to 2007 figures and shipments increase by only 2.6 percent.
Making the move from Microsoft Exchange 2000/2003 Server to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 is a relatively straightforward process, writes William Malone in his whitepaper entitled "How to Migrate from Microsoft Exchange 2000/2003 to Exchange Server 2007." In fact, the whitepaper substantiates his claim, providing as it does a step-by-step guide to the process. Malone says that his paper builds on Microsoft best practices, making recommendations based around storage design concepts for deploying Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 on the modular family of Sun server and storage arrays.
Fishworks Engineer Adam Leventhal takes issue graciously with Storage Anarchist blogger Barry Burke's interpretation of Sun's recent pronouncements on flash memory as suggesting the technology is not well suited to the server product line. Not so, Leventhal insists, conceding that Sun has not always made the clearest of statements regarding its position on flash.
For the first time in five years, storage sales have fallen year-over-year, reports IDC in its Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker. Sales of external disk storage systems declined 0.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, while total disk storage system sales dropped 5.9 percent.
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 133 Issue 1, the top 10 articles were:
Lew Tucker, Sun CTO for Cloud Computing, started with the company as a member of James Gosling's original Java development team so, as you might imagine, he has some familiarity with legacy applications. After an absence of a few years, Tucker returned in 2008 to accept his current position, and he has already laid out his first concern, which is to determine how best to bring legacy applications into the cloud, according to Chris Preimesberger, who interviewed Tucker for eWeek.com.
This BigAdmin resource center gives you a quick overview of the key features of LDoms partitioning technology. The expanded collection of LDoms-related resources includes Sun BluePrints articles, blogs, white papers, and more.
The paper "Early Experiences with a Commercial Hardware Transactional Memory Implementation" by Dave Dice, Yossi Lev, Mark Moir and Dan Nussbaum, which was delivered at ASPLOS 2009, March 7–11, 2009, in Washington, DC., relates the authors' evaluation of the hardware transactional memory (HTM) feature of two pre-production revisions of a new commercial multicore processor (the "Rock" processor), including suggested improvements and an account of the techniques used in obtaining the results.
RAID 6 is the clear choice for data storage needs in the eyes of Said A. Syed, whose whitepaper "Using RAID 6 for Increased Reliability and Performance: Sun Storage 2500 Series, 6140, 6580 and 6780 Arrays" champions that algorithm over RAID 5 and RAID 1+0 for its ability to overcome the shortcomings of both.
New book by Dave Douglas, Greg Papadopoulos and John Boutelle, employees of Sun Microsystems will be coming out in June/July 2009, and it suggests such revelations that "being an engineer today means far more than an engineer." Sun employees have Rough Cut access via Safari Books Online and non-Sun employees may purchase a copy.
Sun GlassFish Communications Server is a Java EE technology-based converged communications application server for developing IP-based multimedia applications. It combines enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web services capabilities with Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) servlets. Based on Project SailFin, the Sun GlassFish Communications Server provides an enterprise and carrier-ready platform for converged applications. It supports SIP Servlet specifics 1.0 and 1.1 and is compliant with JSR 116 and JSR 289.
The Sun whitepaper "Build a High-Performance Open Web Platform for Your Enterprise with Sun GlassFish Portfolio," reviews the strengths that the Sun GlassFish Portfolio brings to businesses with its innovations ranging from leading open-source communities, packaged in a solution that offers flexible subscription-based pricing and enterprise-class support. The Sun GlassFish Portfolio offers enterprises of all sizes the extreme scalability and reliability they need for mission-critical applications.
With 11 Lessons, the tutorial, first in the series, provides the basics for learning the JavaFX Script programming language. Focusing on the fundamentals of non-visual, core constructs that are common to all FX applications, learners, when finished with this tutorial will be ready for Building GUI Applications with JavaFX, the second tutorial in this series.
New features and bug fixes make the Portal Pack 3.0 an attractive download for easy portal development. Compatible with NetBeans 6.5 IDE, Portal Pack 3.0 also supports Sun GlassFish Web Space Server 10.0, which is part of the GlassFish Portfolio.
Sun Identity Manager 8.1 is now available for download. This release introduces the Connector Framework and Identity Connectors, which provide a new, more flexible way for connecting Identity Manager to target systems and resources, along with other new features. Customers interested in learning more about best practices, pitfalls, and mitigating risk associated with software projects may want to sign up for the service offering "Getting Started with Sun Identity Management Workshop."
Global Security Magazine reports that The Madrid Hospital Group has selected SeMarket and Sun Microsystems to establish an identity management and Single Sign On system. The project, which will be implemented by SeMarket, will enable the secure authentication of both employees and patients of the Group by using fingerprint biometrics while taking into account the norms and policies linked to access control systems. Sun Identity Manager solution will be the foundation for the system.
According to Mark Perkins, CTO, Sun Microsystems Federal, business can use Sun's blueprint for "architecture-based solutions" to help organizations achieve high-quality implementations and get to market faster. The architecture was developed from Sun and OEM technologies, people, and processes and includes solutions in the following areas: datacenter, software, security, and specialty, which includes service components.
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