McNealy/Ellison Keynotes, F5100 Flash Array, 6180 Array, GlassFish Comms Server, Oracle on Sun Benchmarks, Mickos to EU, MySQL on VMware, SPARC64 V11, VDC, CDMI
Oracle OpenWorld 2009 brought Sun executives and technologies to the center stage during the five-day event held in San Francisco's Moscone Center. Sun co-founder Scott McNealy made the final keynote on day one of the conference to a packed Hall D Moscone North. He reflected on the top 10 innovations from Sun, and the technologies that will get even more funding from Oracle following the acquisition. Following McNealy on stage, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said combining Oracle and Sun's technology would let Oracle "do things neither company would be able to do by themselves."
Former CEO of MySQL Marten Mickos has written a letter of appeal to Neelie Kroes, the European Union's competition commissioner, urging that Oracle's pending acquisition of Sun be approved for the good of the market and MySQL. "Every new day of uncertainty is potentially very harmful to the various businesses of Sun, reducing competition in the market," Mickos writes. "A delay in the closing of this transaction is therefore only going to work against the respectable goal that you set out to achieve when launching the probe into this acquisition."
A series of OpenSolaris security videos presented during the Open Source Conference (OSCON) held in July are available for viewing. Topics covered include Solaris privileges, the cryptographic framework, Solaris Containers, and a general question and answer session on security involving OpenSolaris.
Monmouth Independence Network (MINET) is a public utility that delivers voice, data and cable services to 3,500 customers in the cities of Monmouth and Independence, Oregon, using Sun technologies. Faced with the need to expand services while minimizing costs, providing for high performance and availability and scaling to support rapid growth, MINET looked to Sun for the servers, unified storage, flash memory, thin clients, and virtualization necessary to meet these business needs.
Anyone running or considering running MySQL Server on VMware Infrastructure should take some time to read a best practices and performance guide by Mike Frank, Jennifer Glore, and Adina Kalin. The three cover recent testing conducted by Sun/MySQL and VMware where virtualized instances of MySQL Server instances running on VMware ESX were compared to non-virtualized MySQL Server instances running on an equivalent hardware server.
The SNIA has published a Work-in-Progress draft version of the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) for public review and feedback. This functional specification is being proposed to act as the interface that applications will use to create, retrieve, update, and delete elements from the Cloud. The Cloud Storage Technical Working Group, which approved the CDMI for public review and comment, expects that most existing cloud storage offerings will be able to implement the interface.
Information on support, licensing, and installation of the recent release of the Sun Java Communications Suite 7 is available. This release of the Communications Suite brings the end of life for specific part numbers associated with earlier releases, namely Calendar Server, Instant Messaging and Messaging Server in the Communication Suite 6 Update 2. Support will continue to be available for the release, Sun announced, emphasizing that the EOL is applicable only to the part numbers that pertain to perpetual licenses and those that are version specific.
Netherlands business service provider IBN-groep helps people who live at a distance from the labor market to find paid work. IBN-groep recently moved to a virtual desktop solution based on Sun hardware and software that enables employees to access their personalized Windows XP desktop from any Sun Ray thin client or from their home network using Sun Secure Global Desktop Software. Because desktop data is now centralized, the solution is boosting efficiencies and simplifying administration.
New quad-core SPARC64 VII processors offer 25 percent better performance than previous version and an enhanced memory controller for the SPARC Enterprise server line, Sun and Fujitsu announced. The new processors are the second in-box upgrade delivered for this product family and are available as an option for existing SPARC Enterprise servers needing an upgrade.
The glowing review of the Sun Fire X4170 in PC Pro by Dave Mitchell cites little to find fault with in Sun's Xeon-5570 powered processors, allowing that there is merit in the claim that the X4170 holds its own against competing 4U solutions. This level of performance, he notes, comes with a TDP of 95 watts while also supporting Hyper-Threading and Turbo-Boost. He adds that the 5570s support memory speeds up to 1,333MHz and have the highest speed QPI of 6.4GT/sec.
Get fully-integrated Flash-based storage with Flash-optimized software in the new Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array that strives to accelerate Oracle and MySQL database workloads and optimize storage architectures. It features up to two terabytes of solid-state Flash capacity, 1.6 million read and 1.2 million write IOPS performance. Available in a single rack unit (1.75 inches), the new array consumes 300 watts of energy, Sun reports.
The Sun Storage 6180 Array is a high-performance, enterprise-class, full 8 Gigabit per second (Gb/sec) I/O Fibre Channel solution with backend loop speeds of 2 or 4 Gb/sec. It is modular, rackmountable, and scalable from a single dual-controller tray (1x1) configuration to a maximum configuration of 1x7 with six additional CSM200 expansion trays behind one controller tray. Sun reports that this new array delivers 50% more performance than Sun's previous generation, and over 70% better price/performance than the IBM DS5020.
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 140 Issue 1, the top 10 articles were:
In his blog entry "Security and Privacy Feature Improvements in upcoming OpenOffice.org 3.2" Malte Timmermann considers features users will find in the next release of the solution.
Sun is working closely with Verizon Wireless to help foster the recently launched Verizon Developer Community (VDC). Sun is providing key technologies and services to support VDC and help build the V CAST Apps storefront, scheduled to launch later this year. Developers who have created apps for platforms such as Java, BREW, Android, Windows Mobile and others are welcome to join the VDC and submit concepts and applications for V CAST Apps.
Curious about the impact of virtualization on benchmarking results? Jan Brosowski blogged in SAPonSun about testing two "half-box" virtual machines on the same box. He discovered a striking difference.
A new world record TPC-C benchmark result has been set for Oracle Database 11g running on Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 servers with CMT technology, along with Solaris 10 and the new Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array. Oracle reports this world record proves that the Oracle-Sun combination runs faster than IBM DB2 running on IBM’s flagship Power 595. Oracle believes so much in Sun hardware, it is offering companies $10 million if one can prove Oracle Database 11g runs at least twice as fast on IBM's fastest computer.
The BigAdmin blog entry "Features Removed from the Solaris 10 OS" links to a list of obsolete features that are no longer supported in the new Solaris 10 update. It also aggregates BigAdmin information on the latest Solaris update, such as New Patching Features in Solaris 10 10/09 OS, New ZFS Features in Solaris 10 10/09 OS, and Solaris 10 Resources for System Administrators.
Over 100 New Translated Technical Articles
This entry links to BigAdmin's new translations of docs from Sun and the sys admin community. The BigAdmin Multilingual hub offers a range of technical information in Spanish, French, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.
Joerg Moellenkamp does the math to demonstrate that latency does indeed matter when there is SAN between your server and your storage. He pits a direct-connected storage-server configuration that uses a 10 meter long cable against a second configuration that uses a director or a switch and two five meter cables.
VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also open source. There are a number of performance and stability improvements in the newly released VirtualBox 3.0.8. Download it free.
Key new features in the Sun GlassFish Communications Server 2.0 include SIP session replication, rolling upgrade and Diameter support. The open source telco-grade application server expands platform support to include AIX 6.1 with IBM JDK 6 in this release. Based on the latest version of the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server 2.1.1, Communications Server 2.0 offers a scalable, standards-based platform aimed at simplifying development of value-added applications and services such as: VoIP, IPTV, virtual PBX, and fixed mobile convergence.
The Oracle Database garnered another honor with the world record it set on the SAP Sales and Distribution-Parallel Standard Application Benchmark with the SAP Enhancement Package 4 for ERP 6.0 (Unicode). Set on a cluster of four-node Sun Blade X6270 server module nodes, each with two Intel Xeon x5570 quad-core 2.93 GHz processors and running the Solaris 10 OS, the performance was near linear in scalability.
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