In a two-day closed-door hearing that began Dec. 10, Oracle defended its planned acquisition of Sun before the European Commission, and a company lawyer said he's "confident" about the company's defense of its planned $7.4 billion purchase. The European Commission has threatened to block the acquisition because of concerns that Oracle, the world's second-largest software maker, might be able to eliminate Sun's MySQL database product as a competitor.

The Japanese online map search service Mapion recently standardized its systems environment on Sun, running Solaris 10 and deploying Sun servers, Sun StorageTek 9985V system for storage, and Solaris Containers to improve performance in its data center. Mapion Mobile leveraged MySQL Cluster Database to create a database with 99.999% availability; while Mapion BB for its broadband users deployed open source technology using the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server to reduce application management time.

The first phase of Solaris 10 Branded Zones (otherwise known as Solaris 10 Containers) was successfully integrated into OpenSolaris build 127 in late October of this year, reports Jordan Vaughan in his blog. These Zones, he explains, enable users to host environments from Solaris 10 10/09 and later inside OpenSolaris Zones. These Zones are being developed so that users can consolidate their Solaris 10 production environments onto machines running OpenSolaris and take advantage of many innovative OpenSolaris technologies (such as Crossbow) within such environments.

Senior Engineer Rickey C. Weisner has written a tutorial on DTrace to illustrate how the diagnostic tool can be used to help analyze real-world applications. With an emphasis on practical use, Weisner employs DTrace to analyze several applications and uses mpstat and prstat information to show which questions one should ask and how one can use DTrace to answer these questions.

The Sun/MySQL white paper "A Visual Guide to Importing and Exporting Data Between Microsoft Excel and MySQL" discusses the process using MySQL’s ODBC Connector in conjunction with Excel 2007 and Access 2007’s native import/export capabilities.

Sun Grid Engine is a distributed resources management (DRM) system that maximizes resource utilization and workload throughput while adhering to resource allocation policies and business rules. Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 4 release is the latest available version. It is a bug fix update release and delivers no new features. Anyone interested in the DRM system may want to read a blog entry authored by Dan Templeton that provides the basics on the Sun Grid Engine to help new users get started.

The Sun Tech Days worldwide developer conference for 2009-10 is a multi-city world tour designed to showcase how the developer community can leverage Sun technologies, services and products to drive the next generation of industry innovation. Each Tech Days event for 2009-10 has four tracks: Enterprise Computing, Client Technologies, OpenSolaris and Hands-on Labs. There also is a demo showcase of open source technologies and Sun partners' solutions as well as lighting talks.

When the South African government launched its largest (both in South Africa and the continent as a whole) supercomputer at CHPC in Cape Town, Marc Hamilton, Sun VP of Americas Systems Practice was there to interview Naledi Pandor, South African Minister of Science and Technology, on the system and the Sun technology at its core - the second generation Sun Constellation System.

Ensuring that critical, decision-quality information flows seamlessly, securely and expediently in the most demanding field conditions, Tadpole Rack Mount Servers offer rapidly deployable, mobile-rugged computing systems to meet current systems needs as well as those planned for the future.

The expense and complexity of supporting existing infrastructure investments through a standard program life cycle has become increasingly challenging as rapidly evolving requirements are demanding support for multiple IT environments. Tadpole systems support SPARC and x64 environments as well as multiple OS options, providing a universal building block to extend the life of existing infrastructure while laying the groundwork to deploy next generation requirements.

Flexibility in the Tadpole Rack Mount Servers provides users with the capability to meet new demands and engage emerging trends like virtualization and cloud computing, along with a choice in operating systems and long-term support.

Learn about Tadpole's year end promotion.

The power to achieve better performance with fewer drives - lowering acquisition, support and operational costs - is what Sun proposes the Sun Storage 6180 Array offers customers. It also scales and integrates seamlessly all the way up to the flagship Sun Storage 6780 Array. Offering redundant components, the Sun Storage 6180 Array provides automated I/O path failover, and extensive online configuration, reconfiguration and maintenance capabilities.

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 142 Issue 1, the top 10 articles were:

• Oracle to Meet with EU on Dec. 10th
• Sun VirtualBox 3.1
• Sun's OpenStorage Product Plans for 2010
• Solaris Cluster 3.2 11/09
• Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Software 3.1
• Sun Storage 7000 for Oracle Database Consolidation
• Business Value of Deploying Flash Systems
• Datacenter Lifecycle Management with Sun Ops Center
• SPECmail2009: New World record on T5240 1.6GHz Sun 7310 and ZFS
• Some Best Practices for Secure Use of MySQL on the Web

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

The new Sun Fire X4640 server delivered outstanding performance on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark, which represents the critical tasks performed in real-world ERP business environments, and the SPECompL2001, which represents workloads consisting of medium and large problem sets that stress the computer's processor, memory, compilers and OpenMP implementation. The Sun Fire X4640 is an 8-socket modular x64 server in a single 4U chassis that supports up to 48 cores.

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Community-Submitted Article: Upgrading From the Solaris 8 to 9 OS With Sun StorEdge SAN Foundation Software

This scenario uses Solaris Live Upgrade to move from the Solaris 8 to 9 release, on a server with Sun StorEdge SAN Foundation Software or SFS (known informally as Leadville). A member of the BigAdmin community explains that SFS uses different packages and patches for the Solaris 8 and 9 releases.

How to Set Keyboard Layouts Explicitly in the OpenSolaris OS

Need to control which keyboard layout is selected for a machine that runs the OpenSolaris OS? This tech tip from Sun engineer Tim Cheng describes how to manually configure the keyboard layout for systems with OpenSolaris.

The much anticipated Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6) has been released. New additions include Java Context and Dependency Injections (CDI), Java EE Profiles, the new Web Services and Interoperability (WSIT) features that came from the Microsoft collaboration, and many new APIs for REST-based services, and REST-based administration of enterprise applications. Additional updates to the platform include Servlets 3.0, JSF 2.0, EJB 3.1, Java Persistence 2.0, Java EE Connector API updates, among others.

Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 is the latest release of Sun's commercial Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application server. Its open source counterpart is GlassFish v3. The Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 provides features to help improve start-up time and reduce resource utilization, and introduces new features to its management and monitoring capabilities including fine grained and low overhead monitoring. It fully supports the new Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6).

NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) 6.8 just released not only expands PHP support, tightens integration with Project Kenai, improves C/C++ profiling and interoperates better with JavaFX, it also provides complete support for the newly released Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6) and Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3.

An Oracle white paper explains how the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (Oracle BI EE) Release 10.1.3.4 performs under high user-loads, and how well it scales vertically and horizontally on two Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 servers running Solaris 10. The two identical T5440 servers, each with 4 x 8-Core 1.6 GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors delivered the best performance of 50,000 concurrent BI EE users at around 63% CPU utilization.