The European Commission issued a Statement of Objections on November 9th opposing Sun's acquisition by Oracle. According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing from Sun, the open-source MySQL database software is the sole issue of concern in the matter. In response, Oracle issued a statement saying the objection "reveals a profound misunderstanding of both database competition and open-source dynamics" and the company "plans to vigorously oppose the Commission's Statement of Objections as the evidence against the Commission's position is overwhelming."
Sun reported results for its first quarter of fiscal 2010, which ended September 27, 2009, in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing November 6th. The company narrowed its first-quarter loss to $120 million, or 16 cents a share, from $1.68 billion, or $2.24 a share, in the year-ago period. Lower operating expenses helped Sun curb its fiscal first quarter loss, Reuters reported.
There is a newfound interest in reselling Sun hardware despite the European Union’s investigation into the Sun-Oracle deal, writes John Taylor, Sun business unit director at Interface Solutions. In a column for CRN, Taylor states that “wise” resellers are realizing the potentially wider benefits of working with Sun post-acquisition by Oracle, and he details why.
Specifics about performance tuning and cloud computing figure importantly in the work of Java Champion Kirk Pepperdine, who told Janice J. Heiss that generic advice is useful but only if it is evaluated in terms of particular situations. "Performance tuning," Pepperdine contends, "is still an art where limits are stretched and one goes to places never gone to before. It's an experimental and creative realm with no one-size-fits-all answers to performance problems. It's highly localized."
A Sun white paper sets out to explain how to maximize the Sun GlassFish Portfolio in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) public cloud environment, with a focus on running applications using the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server in the EC2. The Sun GlassFish Portfolio is an open platform based on the Project GlassFish software, an open-source application server that implements Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE platform) technology.
To be sure, virtualization cuts real estate costs drastically since the practice eliminates the need for incremental growth of datacenters. But, if users create one virtual machine after another, they are doing little to ease the task of provisioning, monitoring, analyzing and optimizing workload performance across both their remaining physical and growing virtual resources. That's where Sun Ops Center 2.5 comes in handy, as Jean Bozman, Gary Chen and Mary Turner point out in their brief IDC paper, "Sun Ops Center 2.5: Managing Mixed Environments in Virtualized Sun Infrastructure."
The Sun white paper "Sun Secure Global Desktop Software: The Adaptive Internet Protocol (AIP)" characterizes the subject software as designed to provide optimal performance over complex network routes with varying bandwidths, employing heuristics to determine the type of device and network connection used and using these parameters to dynamically adapt and optimize performance.
Sun Ray Software 5 Released
Expanded Client Device Choice and Peripheral Connectivity, Adobe Flash Multimedia Acceleration
The new Sun Ray Software 5 is now available via download, while the physical media kit is expected to be released December 4th. This release improves the end user experience with a broader choice of end client devices, improved Adobe Flash performance and expanded support for USB peripheral devices. Additionally, Sun Ray Software 5 improves application server support, by adding support for Windows Server 2008. With the release of Version 5, Sun announced the end of life for Sun Ray Software 4 10/08.
Marty Itzkowitz and Yukon Maruyama describe how to use the Sun Studio Performance Tools to understand the performance issues in single-threaded, multi-threaded, OpenMP and MPI applications, and the techniques used to profile them. Presented at the Third Parallel Tools Workshop held in Dresden, Germany back in September, this technical paper outlines techniques implemented in the Sun Studio Performance Tools to profile HPC applications. The 30-page PDF is hosted on Sun's developer's site.
Sun Fire X4170 and X4270 Servers along with the Sun Blade X6270 Server Modules to offer 500 GB 7.2K RPM, 2.5-inch SATA disk drive with Marlin brackets. The 500 GB SATA disk drive provides greater on-board storage capacity, making these Sun Fire and Sun Blade servers even better equipped to handle data-intensive applications.
The Sun Ops Center 2.5 comes with the ability to patch Windows operating systems through Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manager. A recent screencast highlighted by Owen Allen in the Ops Center blog takes viewers through the Windows update process, which involves configuring Ops Center to work with SCCM 2007 instance, discovering and managing the Windows systems and then using the Reports section for the actual Windows update.
Infiniband IPoIB datalink partition and IP interface configuration is easy and painless using the same network BUI page or CLI contexts as ethernet, says Fishworks blogger Cindi in her update on "Infiniband for Q3.2009." Port GUID information is available for configured partitions on the network page, she continues, which makes it easy to add Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System HCA ports to a partition table on a subnet manager.
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 141 Issue 1, the top 10 articles were:
Terry Gardner reports that a Sun Netra x4250, dual-CPU, 8-core (2.13 Ghz), 64 GB RAM running Solaris 10 update 7 using internal disk drives and a Gigabit Ethernet accommodated 13,800,000 entries loaded into the Directory Server database in 2 hours; sustained 17,000 searches per second over 8 hours with an average latency of less than 2 milliseconds with no update (replication) traffic; and sustained 11,000 searches per second sustained over 8 hours with average latency of than 2 milliseconds in the presence of update (replication) traffic.
Sun Java Communications Suite Resources for System Administrators
This resource center links to documentation, videos, blogs, white papers, and other information on Sun Java Communications Suite 7, which offers secure, scalable communication and collaboration products for email, message management, calendar management, time and resource management, and real-time collaboration.
C and Fortran Development and Deployment Tools for the Solaris 8, 9, and 10 OS
Find out how you can develop, maintain, and support a software product on Solaris 8, 9, and 10 releases simultaneously, on one machine. This scenario uses Sun Studio compilers and tools for C, C++, or Fortran applications; for Message Passing Interface (MPI) applications, you can use Sun HPC ClusterTools software. (This tech tip was reprinted from the BigAdmin newsletter of November 5, 2009.)
Sun's VirtualBox and Sun Ray thin clients helped solve Germany travel operator Gebeco's IT environment challenge of maintaining its own OS/2-based reservation software while introducing new software simultaneously, and at a cost savings of nearly US$11,000 per year in electricity. Other benefits Gebeco has experienced with the Sun solution includes simpler and remote maintenance, time savings for administrators, improved failover and overall stability, increased employee flexibility, accelerated client login and reduced heat build up in its offices.
A duel in the Suns of sorts involving a Sun Fire V40z and a Sun Fire X4450 connected back-to-back was performed to discover their ability to exchange UDP or TCP messages with a round-trip latency under 100 ms per message. In addition, both servers were occupied with some business logic, to bring the overall CPU utilization to 60-80% on each machine. Both were running Solaris 10 Update 5 and Java RTS 2.1 (build 1.5.0_16_Java-RTS-2.1_fcs-b11_RTSJ-1.0.2). Frederic Pariente reports the results in his blog "Real Time opens system and network surveillance to Java," a proof-of-concept to evaluate Java RTS 2.1 on Solaris 10.
A five-part Sun Developer Network article series explains how to analyze and troubleshoot OpenSSO deployments with the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Jim Faut along with contributions from Rick Palkovic begin with an introduction and configuration description, followed by these OpenSSO deployment examples: single sign-on and policy protection, cross-domain single sign-on, service provider initiated Fedlet single sign-on and identity provider initiated Fedlet single sign-on.
Sun Distinguished Engineer Glenn Brunette has created a new Solaris 10 Security Deep Dive training mediacast updated for Solaris 10 10/09 or Update 8. Items added to this new version include: ZFS user and group quotas, ZFS pre-defined ACL sets, NTPv4, and nss_ldap shadowAccount support. In addition, there was a bit of cleanup throughout and a new example was added for Trusted Extensions. There is also a recent update to Immutable Service Containers (ISC) for OpenSolaris 2009.06.
The Sun Oracle Database Machine is a million IOPS-capable platform. Why would a CIO consider it as a solution when a particular datacenter may not require so much I/O? Performance Architect in Oracle's Systems Technology Group Kevin Closson gives reasons and applies these to what really goes on in real world production datacenters, touching on chaos, IOPS, latency and Flash.
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