Sun and Oracle introduced the first database machine for online transaction processing (OLTP) called the Sun Oracle Database Machine or Oracle Exadata Version 2. It is based on Sun hardware, including FlashFire technology, along with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Oracle Exadata Storage Server Software Release 11.2. Designed to significantly speed up OLTP, data warehousing, and mixed database workloads, the companies claim this latest version is twice as fast as Version 1 for data warehousing.

Commemorating and celebrating the rich history and contributions of Sun Microsystems over the past 27 years is a virtual site accessible from the link thenetworkisthecomputer.com where Sun employees are contributing digital artifacts to tell and preserve Sun's story.

Just released is the MySQL Connector for OpenOffice.org 1.0. This OpenOffice.org extension allows Sun's open source office suite to be connected to a MySQL server, versions 5.1 and later. This driver is compatible with OpenOffice.org 3.1.1, StarOffice 9.1, StarSuite 9.1 or newer, including the upcoming OpenOffice.org 3.2.

This 18-page Oracle White Paper covers the basics of cloud computing all the way through the option of creating a private cloud. Beginning with the evolution of the IT architecture and cloud computing's primary benefits as well as building blocks, the paper then moves into the different levels and architectures involved. The authors explain the variations in clouds - public, private, and hybrid - with the suggestion that a private version may be the best business and financial choice for larger IT enterprises.

Sun, along with the National Science Foundation and Iowa State University, has facilitated the institution's second supercomputer known as Cystorm that boasts a peak performance of 28.16 trillion calculations per second. The 3,200 computer processor cores powering Cystorm provide five times the peak of the university's first supercomputer CyBlue, an IBM Blue Gene/L, that uses 2,048 processors to do 5.7 trillion calculations per second.

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:

• Oracle Ad Outlines Some of its Plans for Sun
• Free and Open Source Software Must-haves for Windows
• How to Work with ZFS Snapshots
• Sun-Oracle Deliver World Record on Two-tier SAP S&D
• What Does Virtualization Mean After All?
• Oracle on Sun Benchmarks to be Revealed at Oracle OpenWorld
• A Primer for Linux Users on Role Based Access Control
• Links to Resources for Creating LDAP Client APIs
• InfoWorld's 2009 Best of Open Source Software Awards (Bossies)
• DLight Screencast Demonstrates Profiling

The longer version of this article has list of top ten articles for the last 8 weeks.

Sun engineers have been working with the open source software Terracotta to optimize its technology on Sun solutions. Terracotta is an open-source product, entirely written in Java code, that simplifies scalability for Java applications by synchronizing user defined subsets of Java heap across multiple Virtual Machines for the Java platform (Java Virtual Machine or JVM) on different physical machines. A four-page PDF offers an overview of the business benefits of Terracotta for Java developers, plus some results of testing the team did with Terracotta on both x64 and CMT servers, reports George Drapeau.

The Sun Developer Network paper "Securing REST Web Services with OAuth" by Malla Simachalam and Rick Palkovic explores an example REpresentational State Transfer (REST) application that uses the open-source protocol OAuth to address security issues.

The University of Washington's Department of Mathematics needed a hardware upgrade in order to successfully expand the computational capabilities and overall performance of Sage, an open-source computational software program. A new Sun solution was chosen with Sun Fire X4450 and Sun Fire X4540 servers, providing a powerful, compact server technology for the department’s growing open-source mathematics software engine.

Sun System Software Stacks

Sun systems can run a variety of operating systems, software, firmware, drivers, and applications. The combination or set of these running on your Sun systems can be referred to as the software stack. On BigAdmin, you can find out which software is preinstalled and supported on Sun's servers running on the SPARC platform.

Guides for Using Sun Storage Solutions on the BigAdmin Wiki

We have gathered information for system administrators working with Sun's Storage offerings, including BigAdmin articles and other Sun resources. Read about using Sun gear with Zmanda products, Microsoft Exchange, and other third-party software. We feature a feed from the Storage Stop blog for the latest news and videos.

Ron Graham has written a 10-page PDF for system administrators outlining the basic steps of setting up VMware Infrastructure 3 functionality on the Sun Fire X4150 and implementing shared storage with the Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage System. The quick start guide covers installing VirtualCenter Server and VI Client, ESX Server installation, starting the VI Client and shared storage implementation.

Needing to completely rebuild its Windows-based Web portal and ASP.NET-based applications to support a larger audience with new services, radio broadcaster RTL France began shopping around for a cost-effective, energy-efficient, and easy to manage IT environment that would be reliable and scalable. Open source solutions were its preference. RTL France decided to build a new portal infrastructure using Sun CoolThreads and x64 servers, running Solaris 10. For its applications, Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server proved fast and scalable.

The webinar (55+ minutes) on GlassFish Web Stack 1.5 entitled "Turbo Charge Your AMP Deployments with GlassFish Web Stack," presented by Jeff Trawick provides an overview and demo of the new Enterprise Manager in GlassFish Web Stack and instructs viewers in how to leverage the AMP/SAMP stack with their existing in-house GlassFish Enterprise Server deployments.

The Swiss companies Bâloise Insurance and Bâloise Bank SoBa operate jointly as a focused financial services provider, a combination of insurer and bank. Both entities are known for their integrated solutions in the areas of insurance, pension provision and asset formation for private clients and small and medium-sized businesses. The companies found an improved identity management solution from Sun.

Oracle's first quarter results for fiscal 2010 registered a net income of $1.1 billion, or 22 cents per share, for the three months ending Aug. 31. That was up 8% from earnings of $1.07 billion, or 21 cents per share, a year earlier. Sales for Oracle, the world's third largest software maker, fell 7% to $5.1 billion in the quarter. New software licenses sales dropped 17% to $1 billion, while software license updates and product support revenues rose 6% to $3.1 billion.

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