EU Ruling, 4QFY09 Earnings, 2Q09 Server Sales, Web Server, Ruby & GlassFish, GlassFish Webstack, Oracle DB 11g R2, Oracle BI EE, Immutable Service Containers
The European Commission will be taking an in-depth look at Oracle's proposed $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun to ensure the database market remains competitive. The Commission, which is the European Union's executive and regulatory branch, set a Jan. 19, 2010 deadline to make the decision on whether to sanction the move or propose some modifications. The focus is on whether Oracle will have the potential of building a dominant position by acquiring MySQL. Oracle is the market leader in proprietary databases, while Sun's MySQL database product is the leading open-source database, the Commission said.
In its fiscal fourth quarter ending June 30, Sun recorded a $147 million net loss, or 20 cents a share, compared with a profit of $88 million or 11 cents a share in the same period a year earlier. Reporting these numbers in a regulatory filing after the market closed on August 28, the company said its loss would have been 3 cents per share excluding employee stock-based compensation and other expenses.
Sun and Belgacom engineers collaborated on a proof-of-concept environment to show how to effectively and efficiently cool carrier-grade servers, namely Sun Netra servers, using only ambient air. Erik Vanden Meersch and Ravi Sanjeev with Sun, along with Johan Vanderhaegen of Belgacom, reveal their discoveries in a Sun BluePrints Online article "Conserving Energy and Increasing ROI with Sun Netra Servers and Full Free Air Cooling."
"...an awful lot of what goes into a modern operating system is just taking up space -- space that could be put to better use," writes Al Riske in his interview of Sun Senior Staff Engineer Mick Jordan, who is currently at work on a project called Guest VM, which involves the use of hypervisors to study the better uses that might be made of a modern operating system.
Sun is the best at sharing information about its operating system's vulnerabilities and patching them, reports IBM's "X-Force 2009 Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report," which provides an analysis on various online threats and vulnerabilities. Not only did Sun disclose the most regarding vulnerabilities in Solaris, which accounted for only 26 percent of the total number of OS vulnerabilities acknowledged in the first half of 2009, its patch rate was deemed impressive with only four percent left unpatched.
The Sun BigAdmin paper "Case Study: Provisioning MySQL Enterprise Server Using Sun xVM Ops Center v2.0" by Hunter Li uses the MySQL solution by way of example in the process of provisioning a user application to the target servers in a datacenter using Sun xVM Ops Center v2.0. Li writes that the intent of his article is to provide some ideas about different implementations. Readers are assumed to have basic knowledge about Sun xVM Ops Center, its installation, and configuration, none of which is covered in detail in the article.
New memory options were expected to be made available in August for the Sun Blade X6270 Server Module and Sun Fire X4170, X4270 and X4275 Servers providing 8GB DDR3-1066 and 2GB DDR3-1333 for all the above listed servers. These memory kits would give users up to 144GB of main memory in these servers.
Factory revenue in the worldwide server market declined 30.1% year over year to $9.8 billion in the second quarter of 2009 (2Q09), according to the latest numbers from market-research firm IDC. This is the fourth consecutive quarter of revenue decline and the lowest quarterly server revenue since IDC began tracking the server market on a quarterly basis back in 1996.
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:
A deep dive look at OpenOffice.org 3.1 by PC Pro Contributing Editor Simon Jones praises the latest version's new features, adding that, although considered a minor upgrade, this release brings "polish to the nearest thing Microsoft Office has to a competitor." Jones particularly likes the improvements in the anti-aliasing of graphics, which makes the clarity of charts and drawings much better, and the showing of shadow objects while dragging. He writes that "these two features alone make OpenOffice look much more professional."
The Sun white paper "First Steps to Develop and Deploy Ruby on Rails Applications with GlassFish" explains how JRuby brings the power of the Java libraries to Rails applications while GlassFish brings the power, scalability, and ease of use of a mature Java EE application server to these applications. The white paper lists the steps one needs to get started through GUI, command line and NetBeans IDE with JRuby applications on GlassFish.
BigAdmin's What's New and Recently Updated Section Has Scripts and More]
Here are the latest submissions from Sun and from readers, including resources suggested by the sys admin community. (Scripts and tech tips from the community are shared as examples, not for use in Production environments.)
To search by category or scripting language, see the BigAdmin Scripts collection.
You can also find a Shell Command section.
BigAdmin Fans on Facebook: 600 and Counting]
The BigAdmin blog takes a "tongue in cheek" look at the meaning of social networking and explains how to find BigAdmin in Facebook and Twitter. You can see our FB updates without logging in, and check out our growing sys admin community
"Sun Web Server: The Essential Guide" is regarded as the authoritative, comprehensive guide to the Sun Java System Web Server 7.0, also known as the Sun Web Server. Authors William Nelson, Arvind Srinivasan, and Murthy Chintalapati provide the essentials on implementing and supporting the Web Server within a single node or across an entire server farm. The book promises to answer the needs of developers, administrators, and architects alike.
Virtualization has transformed the data center. The cost savings and efficiencies virtual machines (VMs) feature along with the ease in implementing them within an infrastructure have blinded many into acting versus planning for the technology. Anil Desai has written a best practices guide on implementing and managing a viral infrastructure. His article provides recommendations for managing virtual environments and for preventing issues related to VM sprawl.
Sun's supported (L)AMP distribution, the GlassFish WebStack, has been released and the team members -- Irfan Ahmed, Jeff Trawick, Brian Overstreet, and Amit Gupta -- have several new posts on the new Enterprise Monitor for Apache.
The newest features in NetBeans 6.7 involve the integration of Project Kenai - a collaborative environment for developers to host their open-source projects - native Maven support and Hudson integration. This release also offers enhancements for Java, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, Groovy and C/C++, among others, and brings support for SVG Rich Components, remote debugging in Ruby and the latest version of GlassFish. Update 6.7.1 is also available. It is considered a minor update although it does add support for the latest features of JavaFX.
Immutable Service Containers (ISC) are defined as an architectural deployment pattern for highly secure service delivery designed to protect virtualized environments. Sun Distinguished Engineer and Chief Security Architect Glenn Brunette discusses ISCs and how building them along principles of stronger security, greater integrity, and simplified security configuration and management is a viable solution for organizations looking to safeguard their virtualized environments in an episode of Innovation@Sun with Hal Stern.
New high-value content services are hitting the market in order to bring down infrastructure costs and allow mobile operators and service providers to compete with low-cost competitors. The challenge is in managing these services. Content delivery systems can help manage the complex content services lifecycle, from submission right through to billing, contends Darrell Jordan-Smith, Sun VP of NEP/OEM in the Sales & Industry Group, who shares that the Sun Java Content Delivery Server is rivaling Qualcomm's Brew.
As reported in August, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server with 1.6 GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors, Solaris Containers and Oracle Database 11g software, delivered outstanding performance with 28,000 concurrent users on the Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Suite Enterprise Edition (EE) test. A closer look at this benchmark and what its results mean are presented by a couple of Sun bloggers, one of which also offers up a few best practices for Oracle BI EE on Sun.
Release 2 of the Oracle Database 11g features enhancements to grid computing, storage management and administration capabilities. It improves storage use, speeds queries by up to 10 times, and on the whole doubles the productivity of Oracle DBA employees, the company said. This release is only the second for the Oracle Database 11g database, which originally launched in July 2007.
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