Internet Archive migrates digital library to Sun MD
Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the Australian National University choose Sun Constellation systems to create one of the largest HPC environments
Blue Sky Studios, Clemson University, Last.fm, Marteleron, Northern Arizona University, and Reliant Security select Sun Fire X64 servers to power deployments.
OneDoc uses Sun Startup Essentials to realize a credible development and deployment environment
See how Sun's GUI-based virtual datacenter deployment tool works in News Bites that also offers information on SuperNAP datacenter, Project Wonderland, and more.
For the fourth year in row, Sun has been among the Top 100 Best Corporate Citizens on Corporate Responsibility Officer's (CRO) annual list, which claims to be "the world’s best-known apples-to-apples comparison of Russell 1000 companies’ performance in environment, climate change, human rights, employee relations, philanthropy, financial and governance." There has been some debate on the manner in which the CRO weighs particular categories in its methodology and also in the methodology itself, which changed during this year's research. Sun's Director of CSR Marcy Scott Lynn is one calling into question what a Corporate Citizen really means.
How does a company like Sun efficiently connect technology adoption and commercial opportunity? That is what Jonathan Schwartz sets out to clarify in the fourth and final video blog in his series explaining the essence and direction of Sun. The company's mission statement - the Network is the Computer - is key, according to Schwartz, who hopes to translate it into Sun's business model.
Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Software 3 is available for purchase for as low as $40 per user/per year, or a free 90-day trial of the software can be downloaded for a test drive. The latest version of Sun's VDI software is said to offer ground-breaking VDI storage economics, built-in virtualization capabilities, and support for a wide variety of virtual desktop operating systems, including Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2000, OpenSolaris and Ubuntu.
As one of the fastest growing digital libraries in the world, Internet Archive decided it needed a more flexible and open storage architecture. The non-profit organization looked to Sun to help with two important technological challenges: storing massive amounts of data and ensuring this data will be preserved in the future. It selected the Sun Modular Datacenter (Sun MD) platform, comprised of open storage technology like Solaris ZFS and Sun Fire systems, as the basis of its datacenter.
Providing compute, bandwidth and storage on demand is among the first priorities Sunay Tripathi argues for in his recent blog, "Crossbow: Virtualized Switching and Performance." There he also argues for a move to open standards, open technology and off-the-shelf hardware as a means to realizing his aim. "The cloud needs to be built in such a manner that a user can take his physical network and migrate it to an operator's cloud and at the same time have the ability to build their own clouds and migrate stuff between the two," he writes.
This Sun Startup Essentials success story involves OneDoc, a private British company that provides collaboration and compliance software with technology based on the Microsoft software platform, making multi-user editing and sharing of Microsoft Word and other documents safe and effortless while also providing a brilliantly simple compliance solution. OneDoc's software tracks the changes to multiple Word documents by multiple users – and allows easy electronic collaboration for document review and editing.
There are several steps companies can take to improve the energy efficiency of their data centers in short order, writes Darrell Jordan-Smith in his blog "Greening the Data Center." Given that the demand for data center capacity will likely continue to increase at a dramatic rate, cutting energy costs is an essential consideration, he notes.
Part 2 of the series on Masood Mortazavi expands into his experience of managing projects in Open-Source communities and database communities, Java applications, and advice on how to be better developer, handle platform changes, work with Java, and write code. Article exposes his vast knowledge on these mentioned topics with developer tips.
A Sun blog on how to upgrade from OpenSolaris 2008.05 to 2008.11 details the processes and commands, the devices and media and the steps involving network connections for this upgrade.
Delivering the service by a zone in conjunction with denying write access to the binaries or configurations and vastly locking down the privileges results in a really secure environment -- in a word "Immutable Service Containers (ISC)," writes Sun Distinguished Engineer Glenn Brunette, adding, an ISC embodies at its core the key principles inherent in the Sun Systemic Security framework including: self-preservation, defense in depth, least privilege, compartmentalization and proportionality. In his posting and his pdf Brunette discusses ISCs based on Solaris Zones.
DLight offers a brand of instrumentation that enables users to take advantage of the Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) debugging and performance analysis functionality in the Solaris 10 OS and in OpenSolaris, writes Ann Rice in the introduction to her DLight Tutorial.
For businesses requiring a cost-saving solution for delivering fast, reliable information access, Sun's Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems may provide the answer. Being eco-friendly, easy to manage, and scalable this storage system has an open-systems approach. It uses general purpose servers and storage components, along with innovative technologies and storage software.
There are three elements essential to cloud computing as it is understood at Sun, elements that differentiate the cloud paradigm from its predecessors, such as the grid, for example. This Sun white paper, "Take Your Business to a Higher Level" discusses these distinctions in a discussion of how cloud computing can contribute to higher levels of performance in the business model.
A $30 million deal between Sun and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) and the Australian National University (ANU) is expected to create one of the largest high-performance supercomputer (HPC) environments in the Southern Hemisphere with two Sun Constellation systems installed at each site running an open source software stack. The HPC environments will host more than 2500 Sun Blade server modules based on the new Intel "Nehalem" Xeon processor. Sun reports that this is a first for weather forecasting.
The Sun Blade X6240 Server Modules can now take advantage of 32GB SATA solid state drives (SSD) as Sun has announced their availability for this two-socket blade server in either an X-option or in the assemble-to-order (ATO) process. The X6240 Server Module can support up to 4 SSDs (in Marlin brackets).
32GB solid state drives (SSDs) are now available for the Sun Fire X4150 and X4450 servers, while a new 300GB SAS disk option is now offered and supported in the Sun Fire X4150, X4250, and X4450 servers. A single SSD delivers the IOPS of 100 hard disk drives while it consumes less than 1/500 the power of hard disk drives (assuming same random I/O performance). However, hard disk drives still hold the lead in raw capacity. Sun gives its customers the choice.
New world record results have been set by Sun's x64 servers on VMmark, TPC-H, and SPECweb2005 benchmarks and customers are taking note. Sun reports several customers have selected Sun Fire x64 servers to power deployments in industries ranging from education to telecommunications to media and entertainment.
In an exhaustive review, ILM Informatique put the Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage System through its paces during a 60-day try-and-buy period and came up with a verdict that should be pleasing to Sun's marketing staff: "The Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage System makes it easier than ever to simplify your storage for less. The easy-to-use appliance is ideal for enterprise workgroups, remote offices or SMBs, and offers enterprise storage at entry-level prices."
While built-in filesystem compression might not be the greatest thing since sliced bread in blogger Dave Pacheco's view, he does assert that it is far superior to using an external appliance between storage and clients to do the job. In his blog "Compression on the Sun Storage 7000" he presents the results of an experiment that demonstrates the utility of the built-in compression feature of ZFS.
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 3, the top 10 articles were:
Focusing largely on the increasing number of OpenOffice downloads, Sean Dodson writes in an article for The Guardian, "Open source apps are no small free beer," that was the case concerning open source early on -- "free" meant users were free to do with open source software as they wished, in the view of Richard Stallman -- the more pressing meaning of free these days has very much to do with the cost of doing business. In support of his point, Dodson cites Gartner analyst Bianca Granetto, who says, "Open source has long been an open question, but the economic recession is making it a viable alternative."
Blogger Anatol Studler discusses the many advantages of the Open Flash Module, which is now available to developers and the OpenSolaris Storage community. It features enterprise-quality and open standard Flash design. This Open Flash Module allows new levels of server optimization and datacenter efficiencies.
In a guest column on Ostatic, Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz appraises the open source market making the point he has made before that many of the Internet's most valuable brands - Amazon, Google, EBay, Skype, Yahoo!, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace, Baidu - are free and, he contends, the same applies in the technology marketplace with Linux, Java, MySQL, Firefox, Apache, Eclipse, NetBeans, OpenOffice.org, and OpenSolaris. "...free is a universal price, requires no currency translation, and reaches the longest tail of the market," he writes. "In the technology world, free and open is the new black."
A recent Sun blog presents what has the look of a comprehensive comparison of the performance of deduped disk vendors, which in fact is its title. In his blog, W. Curtis Preston expresses his belief that this is the first comparison of its kind.
Here's the correct way to use Solaris Live Upgrade to update from the Solaris 8 or 9 release to Solaris 10. Sun engineer Enda O'Connor has revised this article to follow the latest developments.
This page on our wiki is a recent update to "A Script Template and Useful Techniques for ksh Scripts," a BigAdmin article from November 2007. The author, Bernd Schemmer, is the All-Time BigAdmin Bucks Champion (i.e., he has the most points for community-submitted content).
Sun's Logical Domain (LDoms) features now support and certify Oracle 10g for both single instances and Real Application Cluster (RAC) implementations. "With LDoms virtualization technology," said Roman Ivanov, "administrators can achieve great level of resource management and security level at the same time having higher utilization of servers."
Connectathon is a unique forum for testing software and hardware interoperability. Known as a network proving ground allowing vendors to test their interoperability solutions with special emphasis on NFS and Internet protocols, this year's event contained many "Work in Progress" (WIP) topics to engage others into the projects and process. Connectathon 2009 Talks are now available for public viewing online.
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