If you didn't attend or haven't viewed the CommunityOne presentation by Ben Rockwood on ZFS, then take some time to tune into a replay of his talk. The nearly two-hour webcast is a thorough examination of the ZFS file system. The talk covers the basics, but Rockwood delves into the subject matter more than many other presentations on the topic. It is directed at beginners as well as individuals who are familiar with ZFS but don't consider themselves quite experts.

Sun Systems for Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 with MySQL is a new reference architecture featuring Sun servers, Flash storage products, MySQL Enterprise Server, the Sun GlassFish Portfolio, the ZFS file system, and a choice of OpenSolaris, Solaris or Linux operating systems. A Sun BluePrints paper describes the hardware and software components of the reference architecture, studies the scalability of the architecture and includes step-by-step directions for setup and configuration.

Leveraging the built-in security capabilities of the Solaris Operating System, including Solaris ZFS and Solaris Containers, Sun reports some of its open source security tools can help in securing data in transit, data at rest, and data in use in the cloud. Sun also has announced its support for the latest security guidance from the Cloud Security Alliance.

The Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe Card is a Flash PCIe card with an integrated disk controller that increases server storage I/O and application performance. Targeted at I/O intensive applications, such as databases with 4K block aligned workloads, the Sun Flash Accelerator delivers I/O performance equaling that of up to 300 disk drives, Sun reports.

In his Sun BluePrints paper, "Sun Business Ready HPC for Altair RADIOSS: Best Practices for Altair RADIOSS Deployments," Dr. Gunter Roeth, of Sun ISV Engineering provides insight into constructing an optimal configuration for Altair RADIOSS car crash simulations using a high-performance cluster of Sun systems equipped with x86/x64 processors. The paper points out how HPC solutions often consist of servers equipped with Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron processors that are clustered together using high-speed, low-latency interconnects. In many cases, Roeth writes, these high-performance clusters can match and even surpass the throughput capabilities of vertically-scalable proprietary solutions.

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 3, the top 10 articles were:

• Oracle Publicly Pledges 10 MySQL Commitments
• Oracle Reports Quarter Profits Up, Sun Deal to Close
• Sun Wins Cases Against Two Intellectual Property Violators
• Study Finds Higher DIMM Error Rates than Commonly Supposed
• 2.88GHz Quad-core SPARC64 VII Processor/Memory Boards
• Zones and Ops Center 2.5
• Hardening the Oracle Database with Solaris Security Features
• New Fine-Grained Entitlement Enforcement Engine and Directory Proxy Server
• Database Study Observes Performance Gains of Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array
• A Look at the Advantages and Risks of Open Storage

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

The Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCle Card is designed to accelerate IO-intensive applications, such as databases, at a fraction of the power, space, and cost of traditional hard disk drives. It is based on enterprise-class SLC flash technology, with advanced wear-leveling, integrated backup protection, solid state robustness, and 3M hours MTBF reliability. A recent BestPerf blog reported on Vdbench 5.0 testing that measured 100% Random Read, 100% Random Write, 100% Sequential Read, 100% Sequential Write, and 50-50 read/write, and that demonstrated the maximum performance and throughput of the storage system.

The Sun Academic Advantage is a joint initiative between Sun and online educational service provider Pearson, enabling instructors to add Sun-endorsed courseware into their curriculum and give students an enhanced classroom experience using the latest Sun technologies. Course materials and online courses cover topics on Java technology, JavaFX, OpenSolaris and open source technologies for students of all levels.

Patching Best Practices for the Solaris 10 OS (With Sam the Solaris Sysadmin)

This Solaris 10 Patching Best Practices Course Reference Guide is a supplement to the web-based training course WS-2700-S10: Solaris 10 Patching Best Practices. The guide presents the key concepts of the course but it does not contain all the content presented in the course itself. The guide is for use as a reference and refresher after completion of the online course.

BigAdmin Blog Responds to Feedback From LISA

"Feedback from LISA 09 in Baltimore" introduces some of the input from the BigAdmin BoF session at this year's Large Installation System Administration (LISA) Conference. See also the entries "The BigAdmin Blog on LISA Feedback: The Tower of Babel" (showing how you can send us more feedback) and "BigAdmin Navigation: Sections and Categories" (explanation of the BigAdmin site's structure).

http://sun.com/bigadmin

The Sun GlassFish Portfolio provides the foundation to develop and deploy Web and enterprise applications and is a cost-effective way to acquire, manage, and maintain critical aspects of a Web platform. Some recently published white papers on GlassFish may be of interest with titles such as "The GlassFish Advantage for Small Businesses," "Comparing GlassFish and JBoss: Which Application Server is right for you?," "A Guide to Cost Savings with GlassFish Portfolio," among others.

With the announced release of Sun OpenDS Standard Edition 2.2 also comes the OpenDS 2.2.0. The open source directory server is LDAPv3 compliant and written entirely in Java. The new release brings several new features and enhancements including scalable import and indexing, external changelog, fractional replication, and more.

Correos is the operator of the public postal service in Spain. Recently, it decided to build a secure email service for up to 140,000 mailboxes for citizens and businesses to send emails and attachments to government offices. With the support of Sun Professional Services, Correos designed and implemented a fully redundant data storage and backup platform for its new email service based on Sun Fire servers and Sun StorageTek technology.

The Sun BluePrints article "Sun Systems for Oracle Coherence" discusses a drop-in implementation of Oracle Coherence running on Sun servers utilizing Oracle Fusion Middleware components. Each major architectural component is described, providing information about the network interconnects, and detailing the functions of each tier in the solution. The paper also covers Oracle Coherence benchmark testing with a detailed review and analysis of the results.