The Solaris platform has been readied for Intel's new Xeon 5500 processor that was launched this week and Sun products with Nehalem's are expected to be launched April 14th.
Impressive benchmarking results were turned in by the Sun Fire X4600 M2 in running VMware VMark. Sun Fire x4450 servers using Intel Xeon 7460 processors and GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) also have new benchmark performance results. There are some who are questioning whether TPC benchmarks matter anymore. Find out why.
With Intel's launch of its new Xeon 5500 processor (aka Intel Core i7 or codename Nehalem) microarchitecture, Sun announced that its Solaris platform, including the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) and OpenSolaris, has been extended to provide performance, energy efficiency and reliability enhancements for Intel's new processor. Additionally, Sun announced its plans for a major systems launch to be held April 14th with the focus on its approach to Open Network Systems.
Each month Sun Marketing publishes the "Good News" about Sun. This month there are 17 items and three groups:
Customers Choose Sun: Solaris and Intel's Xeon 5500 Series, Sun Modular Datacenter, Sun Constellation System, OpenSolaris, MySQL, Sun CoolThreads, OpenOffice
Leading Market Conversations: open source, cloud computing, Virtual Data Center, open storage, flash memory, Sun Modular Datacenter
Product Reviews Underscore Innovation: Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage System, Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 Server, JavaFX, Sun Fire X4140 Server
A two-page PDF of the "Good News" from Sun is available in English and several other languages.
Innovation drives success. To stay ahead of the competition, you need to optimize your designs, manage performance data, and automate processes as much as possible to help you rapidly explore designs and make the right decisions. Altair’s HyperWorks offers comprehensive, open architecture computer aided engineering (CAE) solutions that do just that — on Sun, the best designed and innovative platforms in the industry.
Worried over the fact that Solaris 10 OS ships with an OpenSSL version that is earlier than the one released by the OpenSSL Project? Jan Pechanec allays those fears in his blog "On OpenSSL Versions in Solaris."
An alliance is being set up by Sun to rally the community together to create a code of Best Practices for Cloud Computing that serves both customers and providers, with the appointment of Michelle Dennedy, Sun's chief governance officer for cloud computing.
The Open Source Business Conference held in San Francisco at the end of March afforded Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz an opportunity to talk about the company's complete commitment to open source. He emphasized the advantages open source offers for cloud computing, which he contends is the future of business computing.
New solutions are available for the Sun Blade Server Product Group: 16GB (2X 8GB DDR2-667, Dual Rank DIMMs) Memory Kit; Enhanced AMD Opteron Processor Options -- Model 2376 HE for Sun Blade X6240 Server Module and Model 8376 HE for Sun Blade X6440 Module; Support for 300 GB (10K RPM) SAS drives on Sun Blade X6240 and X6250 Server Modules; Sun Blade X6240 and X6440 Server Module Solaris preinstall.
Sun's BluePrint "Virtualizing Desktops with Ray Software and VMWare View Manager" provides an overview on how to configure Desktop Virtualization with Sun and VMware Software. This description of desktop virtualization deployments was developed by technology leaders in desktop virtualization and thin client technology.
The Sun High Performance Computing Consortium (SHPCC), an independent, volunteer-organized, international group of member organizations that own or use Sun computer systems with emphasis on high-performance, technical computing, and visualization, announces the Sun HPC Consortium Hamburg, which will be held in conjunction with ISC09 in Hamburg, Germany, June 21-22, 2009.
Clemson University, South Carolina adopts a High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster that includes blade servers, storage systems, software, and services from Sun Microsystems. Clemson's HPC factory-integrated solution provided faster deployment, and helped solve many challenges, including the need for more compute power, a stable infrastructure, and a higher compute density.
Sun is transitioning the Sun Fire X4200 M2 Server line from its product list. The Sun Fire X4200 M2 is replaced by Sun Fire X4240 and X4250 product families. Many Sun Fire X4200 M2 parts are shared with the currently shipping Sun Fire X4100 M2 and have not reached their end of life (EOL) at this time.
Convert two Sun Storage 7410 Single controllers to a Sun Storage Cluster configuration with the Sun Storage 7410 Cluster Upgrade Kit. The kit contains 2 Cluster cards with 3 cables that enables two Sun Storage 7410 Single controller configuration to become a 2-node Cluster configuration. Customers will need to have two Sun Storage 7410 Single controllers to make this configuration work.
Sun's BluePrint Online "An Economical Approach to Maximizing Data Availability" authored by Mike Shapiro, Storage Engineering at Sun, sheds light on how to maximize data availability with Sun's Unified Storage 7000 Systems. Reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features are met by Sun's integrated storage systems or appliances.
Fishworks engineer Brendan Gregg, who has written previously about Analytics in the Sun Storage 7000 Series, here blogs on its I/O latency features. I/O latency, he writes, is the time to service and respond to an I/O request. Given that clients are often waiting for this to complete, it is often the most interesting metric for performance analysis -- more so than IOPS or throughput. Since graphing average I/O latency can result in misleading results, Gregg chooses instead to provide I/O latency as a heat map.
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 4, the top 10 articles were:
Long-time chronicler of benchmarking results BM Seer adds his voice to the chorus of Forrester critics Noel Yuhanna, Mike Gilpin and David D'Silva, who contend, "TPC Benchmarks Don't Matter Anymore."
This article from the docs.sun.com group describes the management of Solaris Containers using Sun xVM Ops Center, with a focus on global and non-global zones. Topics include discovering, patching, and monitoring zones, as well as provisioning an OS with zones.
If a zone is installed on a disk that is labeled with Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI)/GUID Partition Table (GPT), then the zone and the system cannot be upgraded. Here's a way to move a zone on an EFI-labeled disk to a slice on an SMI-labeled disk, so that you can upgrade the Solaris OS and then move the zone back to its original location.
Many organizations are seeking ways to better utilize computer systems, writes Ellard Roush in the introduction to his Sun BluePrints article "Zone Clusters -- How to Deploy Virtual Clusters and Why" in which he writes that these organizations are discovering that virtualization technologies provide a safe way to consolidate multiple applications on a single system. The paper introduces the zone cluster, a virtual cluster in which a Solaris OS Zone is configured as a virtual node. The zone cluster supports the consolidation of multiple cluster applications on a single cluster.
Brocade DCX Backbones are a family of modular network switching platforms. Its most recent release is the 8U Brocade DCX-4S Backbone. Built for midsize networks, this new offering comes with eight modular blade slots. Four horizontal blade slots provide up to 192 Fibre Channel ports, 1.54 Tbit/sec chassis bandwidth (using 1/3rd local switching), 256 Gbit/sec of aggregate Inter Chassis Link (ICL) bandwidth, and 2/4/8/10Gb FC and FICON connectivity. The remaining four slots are reserved for control processor (CP) and core switching blades shipped with the base chassis.
Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v2.1 is a high-performant, enterprise-ready Java EE 5 server with support for clustering and in-memory based high availability. Free for development, deployment, and re-distribution, GlassFish Enterprise Server is Sun's commercial offering of the open source GlassFish application server and delivers additional platform support, many bug fixes, and re-branding from Sun Java System Application Server.
Professional and student developers alike are invited to submit their best JavaFX applications by May 29th to be eligible to win cash prizes and a showcase spot on JavaFX.com. The JavaFX Coding Challenge requires all entries be submitted as a Netbeans project using NetBeans 6.5 and JavaFX 1.1. Judging will take place between June 1-29 with winners announced the week of June 29.
JavaFX 1.1.1 has been released with downloads for the SDK and NetBeans IDE 6.5.1. This update includes a few bug fixes, including stabilizing Flash video on Mac and Windows platforms, and two new sample applications: Solar System and BookPanel. Also find out some of the other updates recently made to core Java products and technologies.
Sun Fire x4450 servers using Intel Xeon 7460 processors with six cores per CPU running Solaris 10 Operating System and Sun's Java HotSpot Virtual Machine and using GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) have set new benchmark performance results. The combined platform performed 1.8 million reads per second and 1.1 million writes per second, with sub-one-millisecond latency. It also topped 16,000 page generations per second with six-millisecond latency over a local area network.
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