If you've been interested in trying out OpenSolaris but aren't sure where to begin, take some time to read a Sun Developer Network article that shows you how to give it a try via a Live CD, and move on to actually installing the open source OS if long-term use is preferred.
Facing a looming deadline and a legacy IT infrastructure that just wasn't delivering the goods, Blue Sky Studios, a wholly owned subsidiary of Fox Filmed Entertainment, turned to Sun for the solutions that made it possible to deliver "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" on time and with the promised quality.
The blog "ZFS, Live Upgrade and Flash Archive - happy together at last" extols the virtues of ZFS, claiming, "you can use a mirrored ZFS boot environment to protect against media failures, enable compression to save disk space, take snapshots to preserve the point-in-time image of your system as a safeguard against 'Ooops!', and other benefits."
The MySQL/Sun Technical White Paper "A Guide for Migrating from Microsoft Access to MySQL" provides insight into what is needed for considering a move from Access to MySQL and presents a number of options that help make for an easy transition. Both the business and technical sides of migrating to MySQL are covered. Both managers and seasoned technical developers, business analysts, and DBAs, will find the needed answers to questions that revolve around migrating to the world’s most popular open source database: MySQL.
Oracle and the Cloud
A Cloud Computing Journal Interview with Oracle SVP Richard Sarwal
According to Richard Sarwal, SVP Product Development for Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle will support cloud computing as an enterprise grade offering, whether private or public. He shared this information with Cloud Computing Expo Conference Chairman Jeremy Geelan in an interview published in Cloud Computing Journal. Sarwal describes the role of middleware in cloud computing, detailing how application grid’s automation and dynamic capacity adjustment are primary enablers of cloud architectures.
The newly announced AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service is using Sun's Open Cloud Platform, Sun Cloud APIs and cloud reference architecture as the underlying infrastructure for its cloud offerings. This global cloud-based service is geared at creating an environment to make it easy for developers to build and deploy value-added services, as well as provide companies of all sizes simple on-demand access to scalable computing capacity.
Version 7.0 of the Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition (DSEE) improves performance by more than three times when compared to its predecessor, and improves authentication and modification performance by 60 percent, allowing customers to accelerate their applications without changing one line of code, Sun reports. It is now available for download along with supporting documentation.
With a customer relationship management (CRM) system running on desktop PCs connected to a datacenter, burgeoning U.K. building supplier Screwfix needed an upgrade in speed and efficiency to deal with its expanding customer base. Following a proof of concept, Sun Ray 270 Virtual Display Client terminals were deployed, resulting in a reduction in call help-desk time by 90% and power consumption by 75%. Workplace performance and environment also improved.
The latest Top500 list published in November shows three of the top five supercomputers based on Intel Nehalem CPUs were Sun Constellation Systems. Sun also doubled its number of entries since the June 2009 list with a total of 11 deployments providing nearly 2 PetaFLOPS (PFLOPS). Additionally, Sun announced new products and technologies for high performance computing (HPC), an upgrade to the Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System, new HPC benchmarks and new HPC customers.
Get a new higher performance 2.53GHz quad-core SPARC64 VII processor for Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 and M5000 servers and without any increase in cost. The new quad-core 8 thread SPARC64 VII processor option operating at 2.53GHz includes 5.5MB L2 cache. The SPARC64 VII quad-core options can be mixed and matched in the SPARC Enterprise M4000 and M5000 servers with the current SPARC64 VI (2.15GHz) and SPARC64 VII (2.4GHz and the new 2.53GHz) options.
Sun Storage 7310 and 7110 now come with new configurations containing six-core AMD Opteron processors as part of the assemble to order (ATO) model. With ATO, customers will get a system fully assembled and tested with the additional components ordered. Existing configurations using four-core AMD processors now have a last order date of January 29, 2010, and last ship date of April 30, 2010.
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 2, the top 10 articles were:
"Benchmarking PeopleSoft Enterprise Payroll 9.0 Using Oracle for Solaris on a Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000" reports the results of an exercise measuring the batch performance of the Paysheet Creation, Payroll Calculation and Payroll Confirmation processes in PeopleSoft Enterprise Payroll 9.0 using Oracle 11g on a 4-way Quad-Core Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 database server running Solaris OS 10 5/09.
Deploying Oracle RAC 10g or 11g Release 1 on Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems
This quick start guide shows how to configure Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems
(release 2009.Q3) for Oracle Real Application Clusters infrastructure deployment. Sun Storage
7000 Unified Storage Systems support protocols such as NFS v3, NFS v4, iSCSI, and CIFS,
and offer data service features that provide snapshots, clones, and remote replication.
Booting From SATA DVDs for Solaris 10 8/07 or 5/08 OS on SPARC Platforms
A Sun engineer describes how to add support for booting from SATA DVDs on SPARC systems.
The article explains how to install Kernel Update (KU) patch 137137-09 to the SPARC miniroot image
for the Solaris 10 5/08 or 8/07 release on SPARC platforms.
Mikael Lofstrand, chief technologist of Networking Technologies for Sun’s Global Sales and Services organization, has written a 27-page Sun BluePrints article on Sun’s VeriScale architecture, stating it provides an excellent foundation for cloud computing and can be implemented as an overlay to create a virtual infrastructure on a public cloud, or it can be used to implement a private cloud. He details VeriScale’s defining principles, underlying components, interactions and advantages. Applicable real-world scenarios are also described.
Sun GlassFish Communications Server is a Java EE technology-based converged application server combining enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services capabilities with Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) servlets. Version 2.0 is the latest version, offering SIP session replication, diameter support, rolling upgrade, 64-bit JVM support, multihome support and overload protection.
"Federating to Salesforce CRM with OpenSSO" explains how to simultaneously control access to in-house applications and those hosted by the software as a service (SaaS) provider Salesforce by using OpenSSO. SaaS, a way of delivering applications over the Internet, employs a delivery model in which a commercial vendor develops the software, hosts its operations, provides Internet-based access, and supports applications for its end users and customers.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense CIO recently released policy guidance promoting the use of open source software throughout the U.S. Department of Defense. The DoD is not the only area where the federal government is embracing open source, so is the White House, whose Web site now runs on open source technologies. "By choosing open source software as the defining technology of Whitehouse.gov, it is clear that the President means business," said Bill Vass, president and COO of Sun Microsystems Federal.
An enterprise deployment architecture for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition using Sun servers running Solaris and Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage systems is described in a Sun BluePrints article. The architecture brings fault tolerance, security, resiliency and performance to enterprise deployments, and can be used to consolidate multiple tiers onto a single system through the use of key virtualization technologies.
The Encryption Wizard for Oracle provides transparent data-at-rest encryption for the Oracle RDBMS at a fraction of the cost of other solutions. With robust AES-256 cryptography and schema, table or column encryption and auditing, the Encryption Wizard is the smart choice for Sun/Oracle users to help combat data theft. Built around an intuitive Java interface, the Encryption Wizard has been protecting Oracle/Sun servers since 2002.
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