Darryl Taft with eWeek has assembled a slide presentation entitled "10 Reasons Why Sun is Still Relevant (an One Reason Why Not)". He states the questioning of Sun's relevance began when acquisition of the company started back in April with Oracle's proposed buyout. "But there are still a lot of factors that demonstrate how Sun's products and technology remain relevant and in demand in the IT industry," he writes. "This eWeek slide show illustrates why Sun still has a strong market influence."

The more than 250,000 artists and other music professionals who rely on the web-based platform provided by Germany's SoundCloud to send, receive and distribute their music find the experience enhanced by the company's use of Sun servers, Open Storage and the Startup Essentials Program, which have enabled SoundCloud to achieve a monthly growth rate of 25%. SoundCloud availed itself of the services of Sun Startup Essentials to migrate its Web server stack to a solution that includes virtual servers and a hybrid storage pool built with Sun technologies.

ZFS and hybrid storage pools (HSP) is the subject of a recent posting by Sun blogger "Thin Slice," who writes about the collaboration between Sun and Intel that has delivered the combination of ZFS and high performance, flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) to offer enterprises cutting-edge HSP innovation that can reduce the risk, cost, complexity, and deployment time of multi-tiered storage environments.

Orgad Kimchi reports on a performance study of MySQL's behavior within a Xen virtualized environment based on the xVM hypervisor and how the database software makes use of the UFS and the ZFS file system. The system performance benchmark SysBench was applied to test base performance for the configurations used in this experiment.

The Sun Wiki "Deployment Example: Sun Java Communications Suite 7 on a Single Host" describes how to install Sun Java Communications Suite 7 software on one computer for a functioning deployment. This document is intended for any evaluator, system administrator, or installation technician who wants to install and evaluate the services delivered by these components.

The Lustre User Group 2010 conference is set for April 14-16, in Aptos, Calif. on Monterey Bay. Registration for the event, which is ongoing, will be limited to 150 people to ensure the conference remains conversational and interactive. The first day of the conference will consist of a Lustre User Advanced Seminar and the following two days will cover a variety of topics, lead by both Sun experts and Lustre users.

CLUMEQ is a supercomputing consortium of universities in the province of Quebec, Canada. It includes McGill University, Universite Laval, and all nine components of the Universite du Quebec network. CLUMEQ supports scientific research in disciplines such as climate and ecosystems modeling, high energy particle physics, cosmology, nanomaterials, supramolecular modeling, bioinformatics, biophotonics, fluid dynamics, data mining and intelligent systems. Sun is providing the technology for this HPC implementation.

"How much longer will current RAID techniques persevere?" asks Adam Leventhal of Sun Fishworks in his paper for the Association for Computing Machinery entitled "Triple Parity RAID and Beyond." In the course of answering his question, the author examines RAID and its history, its rate of capacity growth in the hard-drive industry, and the need for triple-parity RAID as a response to diminishing reliability.

A quick start guide shows how to deploy the Oracle Database using the NFS protocol with the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System release 2009.Q3. Authored by Sridhar Ranganathan and Jeffrey Wright, this 25-page BigAdmin feature provides the procedures and configuration details on this deployment scenario along with figures and screenshots to ease understanding.

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:

• Deep Dive into ZFS
• Java Application Platform SDK: Overview
• Solaris 10 10/09 Appliance Image for VirtualBox
• Sun Systems for Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 with MySQL Reference Architecture
• Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe Card
• GlassFish White Papers
• Sun's Open Source Cloud Security Tools
• OpenDS 2.2 Released
• Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 5 Feature Release
• Vdbench Test Results for Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe Card

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

A three and a half minute Sun-sponsored video introduces Sun Shared Shell - a collaborative service tool that allows Sun Services engineers to remotely view and diagnose customers' computing issues. As part of the Sun Spectrum Support Service, Shared Shell is a Java application providing secure, shared, remote access. To demonstrate how it works, the video brief walks through the steps of how to access the tool and invite participants. It also presents the various communication tools available during these sessions that make collaboration easy and help overcome noise or language barriers.

Community Article: Plex Mirroring for Business Continuity With Veritas Volume Manager and the Solaris 10 OS

This community-submitted article shows how to configure a business continuity setup for a small IT environment using Veritas Storage Foundation version 4.1 (VxVM) from Symantec and the Solaris OS. The author used vxmake to create the individual elements such as subdisks and plexes. This article can provide an idea of how to handle the virtual entities of Veritas Volume Manager.

Community Tech Tip: How to Leave Scripts Running When You Log Off

A BigAdmin user posted this on our community wiki. The tech tip highlights the usefulness of the trap command for trapping the SIGTERM, 1, signal to enable scripts to keep running after the user who started the process logs off. It also shows the usefulness of trapping the SIGTERM, 15, signal and running commands just before a script exits.

http://sun.com/bigadmin

Learn how to set up a single x86-based system with OpenSolaris, configuring a training and development environment for Solaris 10/Solaris Cluster 3.2 and using VirtualBox to set up a two node cluster. These instructions can be found in the white paper "Practicing Solaris Cluster using VirtualBox" by Thorsten Frueauf. The presented configuration can be used to practice using various technologies such as Crossbow, COMSTAR, ZFS, IPsec, software quorum, and zone clusters.

"Solaris 10 Security Essentials" describes the various security technologies contained in the Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems. The book describes how to make installations secure and how to configure the OS to the particular needs of your environment. The authors present the material in a straightforward way that makes it accessible to system administrators at all levels.

A Sun white paper discusses typical datacenter inefficiencies, commonly used strategies to resolve them, and how available technologies, like the Sun Ops Center, can lower costs over the lifecycle of a solution. "Sun Ops Center: Changing the Economics of Datacenter Operations" examines how the Sun Ops Center addresses monitoring frameworks, point-in-time provisioning - specifically OS provisioning tasks, software lifecycle management, and virtualization management, and how its approach is quite cost-efficient.

President and COO of Sun Microsystems Federal Bill Vass writes about developments at Sun in the area of enforcing Mandatory Access Control (MAC) with virtualization to confine Internet services with simple security configurations using the Solaris OS. Featured in the blog are the remarks of senior Sun researchers John Weeks and John Totah that explain how, in addition to enforcing MAC provisions, they also layered the MAC protection with what users ordinarily expect from employing all of the other Solaris security features combined with virtualization, eg. zones, and Internet community sponsored configuration guidelines such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks.