Sun released Solaris 10 10/09 with new and enhanced features, such as up to two Tbytes disk support for installing and booting the OS, ZFS and Flash installation support, updates to setting ZFS user and group quotas, support of L2ARC, power management capabilities to leverage the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, a "P2V" (Physical to Virtual) method, faster patching and parallel zone patching, etc. There are many more system administration, installation, system resources, device management, system performance, driver, and freeware enhancements included.

"Maintaining Solaris Systems with Solaris Live Upgrade and Update on Attach," a Sun BluePrints Online paper, explains how to use Solaris Live Upgrade and the Solaris Update on Attach feature, with Solaris Zones, Solaris Cluster, and the ZFS file system for software maintenance in general and the application of operating system patches in particular.

Andy Bang, founder of Sun's MySQL Enterprise Tools team, and Mark Matthews, architect for the MySQL Enterprise Tools team, answered some questions about their area of responsibility and expertise for the MySQL Developer Zone feature, including a preview of the MySQL Enterprise Fall 2009 release.

Get some insight on whether cloud computing is right for your business from Santhosh D'Souza, CTO, Sun Microsystems India, who explains more about the cloud model and if it is necessary for businesses to subscribe to it in an interview with CXOtoday.

Several best practices for building super scale clusters utilizing Sun Grid Engine software are shared in the Sun white paper "Extreme Scalability Using Sun Grid Engine Software," which also reveals practices to avoid. The 27-page paper authored by Daniel Templeton explains distributed resource management (DRM) systems, of which the Sun Grid Engine is a part, and focuses on the Sun software's features and architecture.

The OpenSolaris Security Summit is set for November 3, 2009, at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront in Baltimore, MD. Coordinated to run during the Large Installation System Administrator Conference (LISA) '09, the free day-long event will be focused on security in large system installations with speakers from CTO, technical leaders, customers and community members.

New configurations for the Sun Storage 7410 offer six-core AMD Opteron processors for up to 256GB RAM per node. The Assemble-to-order (ATO) option provides a choice of three base configurations consisting of a fixed number of processors and RAM. With this announcement, Sun plans an end of life for the existing configurations using the four-core AMD processors.

The Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System comes with snapshot, clone, rollback, and replication features. Learn how to use these components of Sun's open storage system in array-based backup and recovery operations for VMware ESX Server and VMware vSphere virtual machine environments in a BigAdmin feature article by Ryan Arneson.

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 5, the top 10 articles were:

• Just What Did Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Say
• Virtualizing the Mac Desktop With VirtualBox
• The Solaris OS and Intel Nehalem-EX
• Bechtolsheim Shares His View on the Rise of 10GbE
• Sun Ops Center 2.5 Released
• New Release: Sun Java Communications Suite 7
• Employing Open, Simple, and Scalable Storage
• Updates to COMSTAR and Synchronous Write Bias Property
• Considering a Migration to the Cloud?
• Sun Nehalem Servers Get Good Marks from ZDNet Asia and eWeek

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

Exchanging ODF-based documents with users of Microsoft Office 2003 has proven to be not only easy but a real cost saver for the Danish Arhus University Hospital in Risskov. An OpenOffice.org facility for the past five years, the hospital has experienced the improvements the open source software suite has made in the exchange of ODF documents with Microsoft's proprietary alternative and reported in a recent article that the free Sun ODF plugin has solved any issues.

In their Sun Developer Network paper on "Delegating XML Gateway Runtime Authorization to OpenSSO" Francois Lascelles and Rick Palkovic describe how access control rules defined in OpenSSO can be enforced at runtime by SecureSpan XML Gateway through its native OpenSSO integration agent. XML Gateways, they explain, are dedicated applications that enable a centralized approach to security and identity enforcement.

String searching or pattern matching are important to a variety of commercial, government and HPC applications. One of the core functions needed for text identification algorithms in data repositories is real-time string searching. A recent Aho-Corasick algorithm for string searching was used for benchmark testing the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220, T5240 and T5440. See the results along with ones from IBM and HP.

Upgrading to the Solaris 10 OS?

Find out why it's a good idea, what's involved, what you'll need to know, what to do with your legacy applications, and what resources are available to help you through it. (For example, with Solaris Containers, you can upgrade to the Solaris 10 release from Solaris 8 or 9, even if you are running applications that cannot be ported to the Solaris 10 OS.)

BigAdmin Overview of New Features in the Solaris 10 10/09 OS"

ZFS features include ZFS flash archive, ZFS cache devices for storage pools, and ZFS user and group quotas.

Patching improvements include parallel patching for containers and turbo charging svr4 packaging.

According to Dr. Matjaz B. Juric, the most important benefits of a process-centric SOA approach are better alignment between business and IT, fewer errors, and faster development cycles. These benefits are outlined in a case study he covers as part of the "Enterprise Solution Cookbook" article series hosted by Oracle. His writing focuses on process-driven SOA development and how to develop end-to-end business process support following the full SOA life cycle.

The Sun Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 72 joins the Sun Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 648 and Sun Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 36 in Sun's third generation family of InfiniBand (IB) switches. The one rack unit (RU) switch is a complete, ultra-slim, ultra-dense switch fabric solution for Sun server clusters up to 72 Quad Data Rate (QDR) IB nodes. Most importantly, the switch integrates with the Sun Blade 6048 InfiniBand QDR Switched Network Express Module, scaling up to over 576 end nodes.

Sun Chief Architect for Client Software Danny Coward highlights some of the significant new features in the upcoming JDK 7 in a deep dive presentation taped in July. The nearly 25-minute video replay covers modularizing the JDK, supporting non-Java languages at the VM level, and making developers more productive through various small changes to the Java languages. Code examples and demonstrations are provided.

Sun OpenSSO Express 8 is an interim release of Sun OpenSSO Enterprise. This release allows users to try out new features without having to wait for the next full OpenSSO Enterprise release. OpenSSO Express Build 8 is available with multiple new features, including one-time password capabilities, Fedlet support for .NET applications, MySQL user data store, Entitlements Service, task flow for federation with SalesForce.com, an administration console (beta), plus much more.

With all the publicity surrounding the September launch of the Exadata Version 2 solution based on Sun hardware and Oracle software, Sun Microsystems Federal CTO Mark Perkins decided to remind readers that the two companies also have three other Sun/Oracle optimized solutions: Sun Optimized Oracle CRM Solution, Oracle Optimized Warehouse Solution, and Enterprise Grid Solutions from Sun and Oracle.