Sun and Emerson Electric Co., an electrical products manufacturer, announced they will partner to offer businesses technology that improves energy efficiency in data centers. This global sales alliance will have Sun's data center efficiency consultants working directly with Emerson's local Liebert power, cooling and services specialists worldwide to assess, develop and maintain solutions for a variety of customer data center problems. The companies promise to deliver plans along with products and services for improved data center productivity and efficiency.
A new hardware and software system for the deployment of Business Intelligence (BI) infrastructure called the Sun Business Intelligence Solution for Web Infrastructure brings together Sun’s Open Networks Systems with Infobright, the open source data warehousing company, and Pentaho, the commercial open source alternative for BI. This solution can save customers up to 90% in acquisition costs over proprietary software, reports Sun, while providing scalability starting at less than $1/GB.
By working with Sun Startup Essentials program, MusicMetric of London paid 50% less than it originally estimated for the cost of hardware and cut server power-consumption 60% by choosing Sun over Dell. Networking is another benefit MusicMetric has reaped with the Sun Startup Essentials program. "We try to go to as many Sun events as we can," commented MusicMetric's Greg Mead. "It's a really good way to meet other people dealing with similar challenges and Stewart Townsend, a Startup Essentials Manager, has introduced us to some great business leads."
In his contrarian minds interview with David Vengerov, writer Al Riske characterizes the Sun Labs researcher as "part of an emerging consensus that large-scale systems need to be self-managing and self-optimizing." The complexity of systems is so vast that setting tuning parameters has become all but impossible to accomplish perfectly. "The only thing people can do now to make these systems work well is to set by hand multitudes of different parameters and policies," Vengerov told Riske.
Evolution of the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System is validation (though none is truly needed) of Peter F. Drucker's view of how large enterprises deal with innovation. It was his belief that "a couple of guys in a garage" are not the only source of innovation but that, instead, disruptive technologies could as easily emerge from the laboratories of large enterprises if the culture is conducive to their development. Rick Wartzman, director of Claremont Graduate University's Drucker Institute, considers the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System and the Sun culture from which it grew for BusinessWeek.
"One of the most compelling features in OpenSolaris 2009.06" is the Crossbow network virtualization system, which allows OpenSolaris administrators to provide individual network services or virtual machines with their own virtualized network adapter and stack, writes Jason Brooks in his eWeek review.
The book "Pro OpenSolaris", published in April 2009, by Harry Foxwell and Christine Tran focuses primarily on the key OpenSolaris features that the authors believe should be learned and used for Web development. Based on OpenSolaris 2008.11, the book targets readers that are comfortable with the user and development environments of GNOME and Linux. Scott Dickson shares his impressions of the book in a quick review, and offers an abbreviated comparison to "OpenSolaris Bible."
Sun Systems engineers describe deploying the MySQL 5.1 RDBMS on a Sun Fire server running Microsoft Windows 2003 Server in a BigAdmin article entitled "MySQL 5.1 Database Deployment over CIFS on Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System". In the presented scenario, a volume of a Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System is mounted using CIFS as a repository for database files. This is a technical paper and meant for those with an understanding of Microsoft Windows and MySQL.
Virtual BackOffice is a virtual IT infrastructure that is highly scalable and available. Created by Merkl IT, this solution gives customers access to their data and applications from almost any location with very little hardware required onsite. When Merkl IT began working on what has now become its core product a few years ago, the company knew that it needed hardware that would help provide high resiliency, scalability and fast response times for its customers. Although it considered other products, the company decided to rely on several Sun products for its solution.
Sun GlassFish Web Stack 1.5 is now available. New in this release are:
Web Stack Enterprise Manager that offers users the ability to start, stop and restart web tier components, and allows monitoring statistics of the components in graph form
support for fully relocatable IPS(5) based Update Center distribution
Sun GlassFish Web Stack is an integrated stack of popular open source web tier infrastructure technologies such as Apache HTTP server, MySQL, memcached, PHP and Ruby On Rails, optimized for Solaris, OpenSolaris and Linux platforms.
Increase performance per watt by up to 34% from quad-core AMD Opteron processors with the new six-core processors in the Sun Fire X4140, X4240 and X4440 servers. The six cores provide better performance and power efficiency when running multi-threaded applications, and the AMD Opteron processors incorporate HyperTransport Technology Assist (HT Assist) and Coherent HyperTransport 3.0 Technology (cHT3) - all of which help boost performance. Additionally, Sun is offering 8 GB DIMMs as an option for Sun Fire X2270 servers.
The white paper "Tiered Storage and Sun Java System Messaging Server" explains how using production products, such as Sun Communications Suite software, the Solaris ZFS file system, and a Sun Storage array, can cut user mailbox storage costs for service providers by half, while performance (measured by messages per second) can be increased by more than 50 percent in environments with millions of users.
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 137 Issue 5, the top 10 articles were:
OpenSolaris for the Linux User
Sizing Up Intel Xeon 5500s and Six-Core AMD Opterons as Tools for the Cloud
Look Before You Leap into Data DeDupe
Test Driving Six-Core AMD Opteron Processors on Sun Fire X4140
The Remote Replication Feature of the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System
Approaches to Backup and Recovery for Oracle Databases
How to Deploy the AMP Stack in a Virtualized Environment
OpenSSO Express Build 8.0
Configuring Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System as a Storage Target
Two New PTO Options for Sun Fire X4540 with Six-Core AMD Opteron Processor
The longer version of this article has list of top ten articles for the last 8 weeks.
Today's budget constraints are sending more and more organizations toward incorporating open-source software. However, managing and supporting a range of disparate software solutions can be a challenge. Sun has scripted a guide on using open-source software for web infrastructure and introduces the Sun GlassFish Portfolio as a viable option. The open web application platform offers organizations what Sun considers the best variety of open source innovations and enterprise-class support. This 14-page white paper addresses choosing the "right" open source platform while looking at different open source offerings, and provides an overview of open-source projects along with recommendations.
A recent TPC-H benchmark produced the impressive performance and price-performance result of 1,050,556.20 QphH @30000GB with a price performance of $2.86/QphH @30000GB for a Sun/ParAccel cluster of 43 Sun Fire X4540 servers, each equipped with two AMD Opteron 2356 2.3 GHz processors, running ParAccel Analytic Database on Sun OpenSolaris 2009.06, reports blogger Guido Ficco on Sun's BestPerf site.
World record SPEC CPU2006 rate results were attained by a Sun Constellation system composed of 48 Sun Blade X6440 server modules in a Sun Blade 6048 chassis, running OpenSolaris 2008.11 and using the Sun Studio 12 Update 1 compiler. Gnanakumar Rajaram reports on these results.
Monitoring Performance Counters for UltraSPARC T2 Plus External Coherency Hub Architecture
You can use the "busstat" command in the Solaris 10 OS to monitor performance counters for the external coherency hub on the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 Server. This tech tip provides references for further information on the UltraSPARC T2 Plus Crossbar coherency hub architecture (also known as "Zambezi").
Community-Submitted Content on BigAdmin
Recent submissions from BigAdmin readers cover sys admin and developer topics. For example, "Using Java Stack Trace as an Aid During Development Tasks" shows how Java stack trace can be used for more than debugging tasks. Another tech tip ("Using Sun QFS File System in a Disaster Recovery Setup") describes mounting Sun QFS at a disaster recovery site from a replicated or cloned disk.
Don't have any use for single-node clusters? Well, think again. Sun Cluster Geographic Edition (SCGE) Architect Steve McKinty serves up a couple of useful ideas for the lone node cluster. One thought is to use it as part of an SCGE Disaster Recovery (DR) configuration, and the second is to use a single-node cluster when developing cluster-based software. McKinty explains this in the Sun Cluster Oasis blog.
A best practices Sun BluePrints offers advice on moving a SAP environment from one system to another in a heterogeneous environment. Specifically, from a non Sun platform to a Sun environment. Authored by Sun Senior SAP Solutions Architect Himesh Bhatt, the 27-page PDF describes procedures, techniques and recommendations that can simplify and expedite the migration.
The Sun BluePrints article "Tuning Symantec Brightmail Antispam on Sun Servers with Coolthreads Technology" provides background information on SBAS software and CoolThreads technology-powered servers, the configurations used for performance measurements, the challenges presented by benchmarking anti-spam software, and the actual steps used to tune the hardware/software combination to achieve the reported performance levels.
Sun is now offering Brocade customers more choices with the addition of Brocade 8Gb/s 10km Fibre Channel SFPs and Brocade 4Gb/s 30km Fibre Channel Extended Long wave SFP for various switches and directors. Brocade 4Gb/s and 8Gb/s SFP's in both long wave and shortwave lengths can be intermixed.
An Illuminata Spotlight piece considers the trend of virtualization moving into business applications, and how that is both reflected and enabled by the latest generation of Sun servers based on the new six-core AMD Opteron processors. The evolution of virtualization software, processors and systems is covered. Sun systems discussed include the Sun Fire X4140, X4440, X4640, Sun Blade X6240, X6440 and 6048.
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