Sun's plans for its Open Cloud Platform were revealed during the company's CommunityOne East Developer Conference. Sun also announced this week carrier grade Linux has been ported to the UltraSPARC T2.
The integration of Sun Fire X4500 server and storage components, Greenplum database software, and Force10 Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch/routers provides a complete super-capacity data warehouse solution.
The Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage System scores high in a recent InfoWorld review.
In Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz's video blog series reviewing the company's three major strategic imperatives, he tackles the second one identified as Commercial Innovation in his third installment of four. The 11-minute video discusses the datacenter systems market; the convergence of the servers, storage, and networking industries; general purpose vs. proprietary technologies; Sun's Systems business report card; and the money-making aspect of the open source market.
The furor at Sun's CommunityOne East Developer Conference was all centered around the company's unveiling of its Open Cloud Platform - a set of core technologies, APIs and protocols. During the two day event held in New York City, Sun previewed plans to launch the Sun Cloud, its first public cloud service targeted at developers, students, and startups. Sun's strategy is to bring openness and interoperability to the cloud computing market, the company said.
As Sun has been saying for over a year now, its 16-core Rock server chip is expected to hit the marketplace in the second half of 2009 with delivery coming sometime this fall. John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Sun, said in an interview with IDG's Agam Shah, "The processor is in various stages of debug. We're getting close [to release]."
Carrier grade Linux (CGL) has now been successfully ported to Sun's chip multi-threaded (CMT) UltraSPARC T2 processor. The Wind River Linux 3.0 and Workbench development suite is now available on Sun's open CMT processor platforms and on Sun Netra T5220 servers, Netra CP3260 ATCA Blade Servers and the UltraSPARC T2 Reference Design Kit.
Today’s data centers are constrained by smaller budgets and IT executives continue to look for
ways to drive down costs as the load on data warehouses continues to grow. Designed for
high performance and large scale data warehousing, the combined solution enables customers
to integrate Sun Fire X4500 server and storage components, Greenplum database software, and
Force10 reliable Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch/routers into a complete super-capacity data warehouse solution.
What has happened since the prototype port of OpenSolaris to the IBM mainframe under z/VM ("sirius") that occurred several months ago? Jeffrey Savit's blog reports on the developments since then, and reveals what's still in the works.
Bill Vass, president and COO of Sun Federal, sees light at the end of the tunnel, and that light will soon dawn on the federal government opening itself to the improved security, procurement speed, quality and reduced cost available with open-source solutions. He announces in a recent blog that he expects all of this to happen during 2009.
Watch the short CNN Money.com video "Cooling down server farms" (about 3 minutes) that tours Sun's Broomfield, Colorado Datacenter. Take a look at how smart designs can significantly decrease operating costs while maximizing efficiency.
An analysis of "Improving MySQL Database Scalability" is provided in this online article. Single server databases have evolved the need for scalability by driving software development toward multi-server scaling. MySQL databases can be scaled on an optimized platform that provides massive scaling, lower administrative costs, and datacenter space and energy efficiency.
According to Owen Allen's recent blog on disconnected mode, its utility, given that it enables the use of Sun xVM Ops Center without an Internet connection, lies in allowing one to utilize all of Sun xVM Ops Center's features, including up-to-date patching, at sites where Internet connections are not allowed for security reasons.
There is now a media kit for Sun Java Mobile Communication 1.0 that will enable users of leading edge phones to synchronize in real time over-the-air with calendar and contact data stored on Sun Communication Suite servers. This solution expands Sun's client spectrum from desktop and webtop to mobile devices. SyncML devices can be configured to accept push updates, and users can manually "pull" the updates from the server as well as send local changes back to the servers.
The Intel PRO/1000 PT (PCIe) Desktop Adapter is available as an XATO option for the Sun Ultra 24 Workstation. This adapter can maximize system performance and increase end-user productivity through the use of auto-negotiation technology, which allows the adapter to run at the highest available network speed (10, 100 or 1000 Mbps) while maintaining full bandwidth capacity with the dedicated 2.5-Gbps bandwidth of a PCI Express (PCIe) input/output (I/O) bus.
There have been some recent success stories involving the federal government's use of virtual desktop solutions, writes Sun Microsystems Federal CTO Mark Perkins. His conclusion is that virtual desktop solutions are proving their worth to the federal agencies that have adopted them.
Update 1.1 for Sun Ray Connector for VMware Virtual Desktop Manager 1.0 has been released. This update certifies VMware View Client to use Sun Ray as a client device for VMware View 3 and the software is localized into Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. Sun Ray Connector for VMware View Manager allows Sun Ray users to connect to Windows virtual machines via the VMware View Manager.
South Africa's largest HPC environment at the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town will offer 27 teraflops - or 27 trillion floating point operations per second - of performance supported by Sun hardware and software solutions, including massive SPARC-based servers. Sun, along with local partners Eclipse Networks and Breakpoint Solutions, will provide the infrastructure for Phase II of this world-class high performance computing facility.
There is now a new 32GB (4X8GB) memory Pick-to-Order (PTO) configuration and a new 4x8GB DIMM memory X-option for the SPARC Enterprise M3000 single processor server available from Sun and Fujitsu. This new factory PTO configuration increases the M3000 DIMM density to 32GB (4x8GB) with the ability to add a memory X-option of 32GB (4x8GB) to achieve total system memory of 64GB.
Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 and M9000 Data Center Servers now offer double the maximum memory capacity with a new 8GB DIMM memory option. Using the new higher density memory CPU/Memory Boards (CMUs) enables customers to double the maximum system memory in the SPARC Enterprise M8000 and M9000 Servers and up to 4 Terabytes of system memory in the largest M9000-64 configuration. New Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000/M9000 CMU boards with the new 8GB DIMM memory options are available now for both new factory configured systems and can be ordered separately and added to existing systems.
When compared to traditional hard disk drives, Sun Enterprise Solid-State Drive (SSD) delivers 70 times faster response time, 38% less power/GB, 98% less power/IO, and more shock resistance. Nine Sun server systems now offering 2.5-inch 32GB SATA SSD) include Sun Blade X6250, 6320, 6340, 6450, and Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120, T5140, T5220, T5240, T5440. Currently SSDs are available only as X-options and for inclusion in the ATO (assemble to order) process.
The Sun Flash Analyzer is a tool that offers users insight into the workload and performance data of their systems to help identify disks/luns that could benefit from solid state devices (SSDs). Recently Analyzer, also known as SSD Configurator, was added to the Sun StorageTek Workload Analysis Tool (Swat) version 3.02. Find out more about how these tools work together and where to go to download them.
In the eyes of InfoWorld's Paul Venezia, the Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage System is a winner. The combination of 48 drives, SSD log storage, broad protocol support, ZFS, and amazing GUI make for one great filer, he writes, labeling the solution "a tank in every sense of the word,"... that carves out a niche for itself in a wide variety of infrastructures.
"Open storage refers to storage systems built with an open architecture using industry-standard hardware and open-source software," writes Aaron Newcomb in his blog entitled "What Is Open Storage Anyway?" He continues with comments on open source software, open standards and open architecture, all in an effort to address the concerns potential users might have concerning the illusion that reliability is a quality found only in the proprietary realm.
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 2, the top 10 articles were:
Using three Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000 Servers and a single Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 Server, Sun conducted a self-service benchmarking exercise involving Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Resources Management System (HRMS) 8.9 whose results demonstrate superior performance in most considerations over a similar exercise using a configuration involving the IBM z990 2084-C24 and eServer pSeries p690 servers, which was conducted separately. Giri Mandalika blogs on the results.
Logica, a leading IT and business services company employing more than 40,000 people, has run a benchmarking test of its Logica All Payments Solution (LAPS), the company's new payments hub, with the Sun T-series and Sun SPARC Enterprise M-series servers. A report appearing in BusinessWire relates the success of this benchmarking exercise, which provided capability in excess of 50 million payments per hour.
In this article, a Sun engineer describes how to install the latest Kernel Update patch, or any patch, with a SPARC or x86 miniroot image for the JumpStart installation program. (The Solaris 10 5/08 OS is used here, but the procedure is similar for other Solaris 10 releases.)
The concept of a platform-specific routine (PSR) library, already found with the Solaris 10 OS, is extended on chip multithreading (CMT) systems using UltraSPARC processors. On these systems, PSR capability has been enhanced to support multiple PSR versions: one per processor, per platform. This allows a platform to support multiple processors, and each processor can be optimally utilized.
"Leveraging Identity with GlassFish and MySQL" is a 40-page white paper that shows how to Leverage MySQL and GlassFish in an Identity Manager deployment, building on the earlier announcement of Sun Identity Manager 8 on MySQL. The paper provides an overview of the function of Sun Identity Manager and explains how to install it with GlassFish and MySQL. The combination of the three provides a very compelling value-proposition.
This Sun Whitepaper examines the potential cost savings of StarOffice 9 and OpenOffice.org over
Microsoft Office 2007 by providing a direct cost comparison of an office suite deployment. This study focuses on examining the costs by analyzing an organization with 1,000 desktops with a typical number of documents and Microsoft Office macros.
An article by Rickey C. Weisner, Sun senior engineer, describes the challenges of enabling legacy applications to scale on Chip Multi-Threading (CMT) architectures, specifically for multicore architectures. He provides possible architectural changes to the application and makes his recommendation as proposing virtual environments as the quickest path to scalability.
Learn how Sun servers equipped with Flash-enabled solid state drives (SSDs) improve HPC, Web 2.0, and data center application performance in the March 2009 white paper "Unleashing Application Performance with Solid-State Drives and Sun Servers". Sun servers equipped with SSDs can be configured to use fewer HDDs and still deliver the same storage I/O performance, Sun reports, resulting in lower capital and operating expenses.
This Performance White Paper is designed for users requiring general guidance for initial tuning values in order to improve their application performance on the Sun GlassFish application server v2. Provided are the Introductory Steps to achieving better performance for this application server with descriptions of the Eleven tuning parameters.
Sun's BluePrint online addresses the crucial issue of identity infrastructure and whether it can be deployed in a cost-effective, scalable way that will offer the best possible return on investment. This paper examines ways for enterprises to build and maintain the identity and access management infrastructure that can support growth for the short and long term.
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