Seven new Sun x64 servers and blade systems powered by the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series and flash-ready were revealed as part of the company's Open Network Systems strategy that promises huge gains in application performance, efficiency, and scalability for today's and tomorrow's data centers and clouds. Embedded in its new Sun Fire x64 servers and Sun Blades are low-latency, high performance networking technologies in the form of the Sun Virtual Network Express Module and Sun Quad Data Rate IB that Sun reports will dramatically reduce cost, complexity, and simplify large scale blade server deployments into existing network fabrics.
Resources for the various products and technologies announced at Sun's Open Network Systems launch have been gathered by Tushar Katarki, who provides a comprehensive list from Sun engineers and blogs as well as a comparative, side-by-side chart on the blades and servers introduced.
Two features of PackageManager 2009.06 -- Start page and WebInstall -- are discussed in John Rice's blog "PackageManager for 2009.06." A faster Start Page and a Package Manager that can be launched in a new mode to process a new mime type are part of 2009.06.
OpenSolaris has been developed to make the most of the potential in the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series (code named Nehalem), or so Nischal Rao would have the readers of his blog "OpenSolaris Unleashes the Power of Intel Nehalem" believe. He cites several examples of the strengths to be found in OpenSolaris as the Nehalem processor of choice.
Adam Burke with National Public Radio (NPR) tours the "SuperNAP" Switch Communications Datacenter, Las Vegas, NV, that hosts the Sun Cloud systems. Review the radio broadcast for grounding of this concept of leveraging compute power into a datacenter and using this power to feed our digital culture.
Rock musician, sought-after conference and trade show speaker, principal engineer at Sun Microsystems, co-inventor of XML, contributor to Project Concordia, the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), the Liberty Alliance, the Universal Business Language (UBL), and DocBook ... it all adds up, and the sum justifies the label Dave Kearns gives Eve Maler in his NetworkWorld article "Eve Maler: Renaissance Woman".
Readers involved in configuring ZFS for the first time will find Don Turnbull's "ZFS Overview and Guide" a helpful resource. Sun Microsystems' newest method of managing storage in the Solaris 10 Operating System, ZFS incorporates a volume management system with a POSIX-compliant file system and a rich set of management tools. From the perspective of applications, the file system behaves exactly as traditional file systems behave but offers much improved performance and capacity.
Imagine a quicker way to patch a system with many zones and decrease application downtime. Jeff Victor's Blog, "Patching Zones Goes Zoom!" provides a documentation of these methods and a description of two performance enhancements.
A panel of four experts addressed the issue of "Security in the Cloud" at the recent symposium hosted by The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS). The speakers included Lorenzo D. Martino, College of Technology, Purdue University; Keith Watson, CERIAS, Purdue University; Dennis R. Moreau, Configuresoft Inc.; and Christoph Schuba, Sun Microsystems.
Computing.co.uk gives its spin on how Sun is using open source to launch cloud computing and HPC platforms. Although Sun is planning to remove about 6,000 jobs worldwide, Sun is positioning itself over the competition to weather the tough economy with the emergence of Cloud Computing, according to Marc Hamilton, Sun VP of Americas Systems Practice.
The VirtualBox 2.2 Beta 2 release is ready for testing and evaluation. Bob Netherton, in his Weblog "How Cool is That," provides a list of fixes and links to download this Beta 2 version and ways to learn more about VirtualBox.
The new version of Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Software 3 is available both as a perpetual license and as a subscription. Whether a startup or large enterprise is interested, Sun is offering its open architecture VDI at a price point that fits within an organization's parameters.
Take full advantage of the Lustre file system by integrating the software quickly and efficiently into an HPC environment via the Sun Lustre On-site Implementation Services. This offering allows Sun to design, rapidly deploy, and perform acceptance testing for the pre-defined configuration of Lustre to meet HPC customers' particular IT and business needs.
At the Sun Open Network Systems launch, the company introduced servers, integrated open storage, and high-performance networking designed for the HPC market as well as other customers wanting to take advantage of high performance technology capabilities that address high performance, high throughput, large memory, and fast I/O. Sun reports that with these new HPC systems, customers can simplify their environment from less highly integrated solutions -- reducing cabling by 84 percent, switches by 97 percent, and rack space by 75 percent.
Looking to save money on IT? Joerg Moellenkamp has found a way in adding up the respective costs of HP vs. Sun 10GBit/s in Blades. The difference is pretty striking.
PC Pro in its online product review claims that the Sun Microsystems Sun Fire X4440 server is, "the one we've really been waiting for," writes Dave Mitchell. Sun sets the X4440 aside from the competition with the delivery of AMD's latest quad core Opteron that is equipped with a range of rack servers.
Wontak Choi writes about the elements of the Internet SCSI (Small Computer System Interface), an Internet Protocol (IP)-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities in a blog simply titled "iSCSI."
Media kits and trial licenses of Tiered Storage Manager 6.1 for the Sun StorageTek 9985, 9990, 9985V, and 9990V are now attainable, offering improved usability and additional platform support. By transparently and interactively migrating data between heterogeneous storage tiers, Sun StorageTek 9990V, 9985V, 9990, and 9985 Tiered Storage Manager v6.1 software enables IT administrators to match application quality of service requirements to storage system attributes.
Sun has announced that new SFF 146GB 10,000 rpm SAS disks are now available for the Sun Blade T6320 and T6340 Server Modules as Assemble-to-Order (ATO) and X-options. These new disks are SAS2 capable and offer better availability. Up to 4 can be supported on the Sun Blade T6320 server module and up to 2 on the T6340 server module.
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 134 Issue 1, the top 10 articles were:
What is Drupal?
A Tool for Web Site Construction for the Non-Techie and Techie as Well
What, Sreejith blogs, is Drupal? His answer is that Drupal is an open source content management system - software that makes the tasks of creating and maintaining a Website much easier for a non-technical person. Drupal can be used to create everything from a simple personal Website or blog to a full e-commerce site like ebay.com.
No one should be surprised to find Sun's VP of Software Infrastructure Marketing Mark Herring urging users to take a look at the proprietary solutions they are currently running with an eye to seeing whether an open source alternative would do as well for less money. And he has a point.
Device and Third-party Device Driver Reference Lists are available for the Solaris and OpenSolaris Operating Systems. Hardware lists include both device drivers that have been tested, and those not certified by the Sun Hardware Certification Test Suite. The x86 device support lists include PCI ID, driver, type, and vendor, categorized by OS release.
Thomas Hanvey (Sun Microsystems) and Paddy Sreenivasan (Zmanda) show how to quickly configure and deploy ZRM for MySQL. In this scenario, ZRM is running on a Sun Fire X4200 M2 server with the Solaris 10 8/07 OS. For more information on using Zmanda with Sun gear, see the BigAdmin blog (http://blogs.sun.com/bigadmin/entry/using_sun_storage_j4400_array).
"Reducing Costs by Improving Server Performance: An IT Director's Guide" is a brief paper that highlights the benefits of consolidation and virtualization, as well as updating the datacenter as steps to take in attaining better server performance.
Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) is Darryl Gove's subject in his blog "NUMA, binding, and OpenMP," in which he considers the effects on memory latency of adding chips to a CPU. The resulting inter-chip communication creates an increase in memory latency, he notes, adding that there are other consequences as well.
When ADP, a leading HR, payroll, tax and benefits administration company, was asked to comment on its experience with Java EE and GlassFish, the result was the detailed questionnaire from which the following responses have been abstracted. The respondent for ADP was Frederic Venturini. Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine's blog introduces the ADP response.
June 2nd - 5th are the days for this year's JavaOne Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The conference schedule has been released, which includes approximately 330 sessions and details on hands-on-labs, Birds-of-a-Feather, and technical sessions. This year the CommunityOne West conference (June 1st - 3rd), which offers numerous sessions on free and open-source software (FOSS) technologies and tools, is taking place in conjunction with the JavaOne conference.
The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany's Baden-Württemberg state, has more than 18,000 students and 8,000 employees for whom the institution wished to maximize the provisioning of network user accounts while ensuring network security across multiple IT systems, as well as supporting new study tools to unify student services. The solution adopted for this situation was the Sun Identity Management Solution.
Firefox, combined with the Live HTTP Headers and HackBar add-ons, is a powerful troubleshooting tool, writes Jim Faut in a three-part article co-authored with Rick Palkovic that covers "Troubleshooting OpenSSO with Firefox Add-Ons: Part 1, Introduction; Part 2, Single Sign-On and Policy Protection; and Part 3, Cross-Domain Single Sign-On."
Founded in 1863, the Slovak National Library, the oldest and largest national library in Slovakia, has chosen the Sun Modular Data Center to support the digitization, access, and long term preservation of the National Library Archives. The Slovak National Library, with a rich history dating back to the middle of the 19th century, consists of 110 libraries and over 4 million titles.
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