The Hot Chips 21 Conference held August 23rd-25th at Stanford University had Sun chip designers discussing the company's next-generation multithreaded UltraSPARC T2 processor, codenamed "Rainbow Falls," and a security coprocessor that they say will reduce encryption costs for applications such as VoIP calls and online banking web sites. Rainbow Falls will feature 16 cores, each with its own L2 cache and four Coherency units. The security coprocessor will be included on the same silicon as Rainbow Falls which will virtually eliminate latency.
Speaking to the Sun Inner Circle, executive coach and IT industry expert Susan Cramm reports seeing two perspectives among the leaders she talks to on the effects the recession is having on the IT industry. Operations-level managers remain excited about their current projects, she says, while executives take a darker view of the economic situation. Generally, Cramm observes, the more experience a corporation has with dire economic conditions, the more positive the views expressed by their leadership. An executive's role is to exercise leadership, she maintains, which is what subordinates seek in their managers.
Thanks to Sun's Project Crossbow, which enables full virtualization of the Solaris network stack, network interface cards (NICs) can now be virtualized into one or more virtual NICs (VNICs). These VNICs can then be individually configured and tuned to take advantage of the physical NIC's in-hardware capabilities and workload needs. So writes Ben Rockwood in his article for Search DataCenter.com, "Solaris Project Crossbow Offers Virtualized Network Management."
The Sun Java System Web Server is a multi-process, multi-threaded, secure Web server built on industry standards. The most recent available download is version 7.0 Update 6 offering performance and stability improvements, OpenSolaris 2008.11 support and more. All users of Java System Web Server 7.0 and any updates are encouraged to upgrade.
A number of new configurations and options are being offered for the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120, T5220, T5240, T5440 servers and the Sun Blade T6320 server module based on the Chip Multithreading technology (CMT) UltraSPARC T2 and T2 Plus processors. These include 1.6 GHz UltraSPARC T2 and T2 Plus processors, 800 MHz 4 GB DIMMs, pre-installed Logical Domains (LDoms) 1.2, Solaris 10 05/09 (Update 7), Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM) 3.0, and more. Pricing for some of these new offerings also are being made available at special rates.
Interested in better understanding storage I/O workloads? Then take some time to learn more about SWAT and Vdbench. In two separate BestPerf blog entries, Henk Vandenbergh describes the storage agnostic Sun StorageTek Workload Analysis Tool, known as SWAT, detailing its features and the disk and tape I/O workload generator called Vdbench.
Sun StorageTek tape libraries received the top Quality Award in both the midrange and enterprise categories from Storage Magazine. This is the third time Sun finished first in the enterprise grouping of the service and reliability survey, and the second win in the midrange competition. The Storage Magazine Quality Awards are designed to identify and recognize products that have proven their quality and reliability in actual use. Results are derived from a survey of its qualified readers.
The Sun white paper "Sun Open Storage: A Lower-cost, Higher Performance Alternative for the Enterprise" argues that the high cost and inherent lack of flexibility of proprietary enterprise storage solutions lends compelling appeal to Sun's Open Storage offerings. Using industry-standard components and open-source software, open storage enables enterprises to build highly scalable, reliable, and flexible storage systems to fit their growing demands - all at a fraction of the cost of traditional, proprietary storage, the white paper maintains.
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 138 Issue 3, the top 10 articles were:
Learn how to create a customized template using OpenOffice.org 3 to produce an extensive document of 50 pages or more with Writer. A recently released guide by Sun describes the process of incorporating a template so users can customize a style that remains consistent throughout a large document, such as a thesis, research report, manuscript, etc., and eliminate the need to insert page breaks, resize graphics or adjust fonts.
In the article "A Primer on Europe for US-Based Open Source Communities and Vendors," Sandro Groganz, founder of InitMarketing and an acknowledged expert in the field of Open Source marketing, outlines the differences in open source adoption levels between the US and Europe in order to help open source software vendors develop strategies to bridge the gap and begin testing and developing new markets and communities within Europe.
Sun's cutting-edge innovations is one of the reasons many universities collaborate with the vendor. British Columbia's Simon Fraser University (SFU) is an example. In a nine-minute video, Sun Staff Engineer Eric Saxe discusses SFU's collaboration with Sun on OpenSolaris with Alexandra (Sasha) Fedorova, SFU assistant professor in the School of Computing Science, who shares why she believes the open source OS is a great research and teaching tool.
Interrupt Resource Management in the OpenSolaris OS
Interrupt Resource Management (IRM), which optimizes the use of interrupt vectors to improve IO performance, is available in OpenSolaris build 107. Find out more in this tech tip from a Sun engineer.
Updated: Interoperability Resources for System Admins
Here's our expanded resource center on interoperability for Sun and third-party products. Topics include multiple boot environments, running Solaris and OpenSolaris on non-Sun hardware, using non-Sun software with Sun gear, and related virtualization and Web 2.0 technologies.
Pentaho Open Source Business Intelligence (OSBI) Suite is an open source business intelligence product comprised of reporting capabilities, data analysis capabilities, dashboards and data mining capabilities. Krishnan Shankar has written an article covering a sizing study of the Pentaho OSBI Suite on a Sun platform consisting of Solaris 10 5/08 OS, MySQL database and a Sun Fire X4540 server. Shankar's guide is meant to be used as a reference point when considering a Sun platform for BI applications.
In the Sun BluePrints Online document "Sun's Reference Architecture for Next-Generation Data Backup," Dean Halbeisen in Sun's Enterprise Storage takes readers through a reference architecture consisting of Symantec NetBackup software, Sun CoolThreads servers and the Solaris Operating System. A key objective was to achieve a competitive price/performance metric for the NetBackup solution. Another goal was to determine performance and sizing characteristics of the proposed architecture.
A newly published Sun eBook addresses the economics of open source technology looking at the pluses and potential minuses companies may encounter if they are not educated about what comprises open source software. Mission-critical areas of enterprise IT environments where open-source software is becoming more and more pervasive are discussed, as are the types of companies that deliver open-source products and services. The publication provides guidance on how to get started with open source, including a look at licensing fee structures and support costs, and relates the advantages of Sun's open-source software solutions.
Sun's Mikael Lofstrand defines the principles of a new Sun network architecture called VeriScale and demonstrates how it meets the requirements of elasticity, scalability and five other detailed conditions making it ideal for a modern, self-provisioning datacenter. In a soon to be released Sun BluePrints that Lofstrand is authoring and sharing on his blog, he defines the VeriScale architecture including its functional components, its nontraditional method of automation, OpenSolaris Dynamic Service Containers, network optimization and Sun's service delivery network architecture.
In his InformationWeek review of Sun's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) 3.0, Randy George finds a lot to praise along with a rather significant caveat, which has to do with Oracle's yet unannounced plans for the Solaris OS.
"Sun Solution for the Public Sector: Maximizing the Value of Stimulus Fund Investments" is a white paper that surveys the Sun solutions eligible for the the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which has allocated funds to state and local governments, particularly in the areas of municipal, educational, and healthcare projects.
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