InfoWorld has published what its test center staff believes are this year's technologies of the year, and Sun's VirtualBox 3.1 is one. The judges find Sun's high performance, cross-platform virtualization software a compelling alternative to VMware Workstation, noting that VirtualBox definitely supersedes this competitor in scalability.

"Hey, who's driving?" one might wonder about the Audi Autonomous Audi TTS coupe research project involving a car that can safely operate without direct input from a driver. This car is the direct result of work underway at the Volkswagen Group Automotive Innovation Laboratory – or VAIL – a collaborative effort between the Volkswagen Group Electronics Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, Calif., and Stanford University to advance automotive technology.

An IDC white paper written by Jean S. Bozman examines the rise and needs of high availability in a virtualized world. Spotlighted is the Solaris Cluster and how it addresses many pain points experienced by IT operations looking to improve availability for applications and databases, while utilizing virtualization technologies.

Virgin Mobile France launched in 2006. Its business involves purchasing, repackaging, and selling wireless services. Leveraging the Orange infrastructure, Virgin Mobile France relied on a LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python) to drive its business. Even though the MySQL Community Edition performed well, Virgin Mobile France began to consider its options when its number of subscribers approached 1 million.

Ben Rockwood definitely uses a "real UNIX workstation" for his daily work needs; however, he does love his MacBook Pro for a few reasons, one of which is that OS X has UNIX underneath. Believing that there are others who too love Mac OS X, Rockwood lists what he identifies as his "must have apps" for his Mac laptop.

Videos and PDFs are now available from the Sun HPC Consortium meeting held Nov. 14-15, in Portland, Ore. The 20-plus presentations include the opening talk from Sun VP of HPC and Cloud Computing Marc Hamilton, panel discussions on meteorology and climate, as well as high performance data management, HPC software sessions, and much more.

The newly available enhanced SPARC Enterprise M3000 server from Sun and Fujitsu comes with the new quad-core 2.75GHz SPARC64 VII processor that offers 23 percent greater performance than its predecessor, the companies say. The upgraded SPARC M3000 system is an entry-level server with the RAS features of mid-range and high-end servers and can be used to consolidate multiple low-end systems to save money and space.

Veritas Storage Foundation by Symantec is a comprehensive solution for centralized heterogeneous online storage management from one screen. The latest version is 5.1 that offers several new features including zero reboot install and zero reboot upgrade, fully automated Solid State Drive (SSD) optimization, continued focus on enabling a full Thin Provisioning ecosystem, and support for Oracle 11g R2 RAC.

• SNMP Service on Sun Storage 7000 Appliance
• Monitoring the Sun Storage 7000 Appliance
• Logzillas: to mirror or stripe?
• Direct NFS Access to Sun Storage 7410 with Oracle 11g and Solaris
• NFS Analytics Example
• Fishworks Engineers Presentations
• Sun Storage 7000 2009.Q3.3.0 Release

http://blogs.systemnews.com/

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 5, the top 10 articles were:

• Survey Reveals Strong Growth in UNIX Market
• Solaris Auditing (BSM): Dispelling Some of the Myths
• Creating a Solaris 10 x86 OS Bootable DVD or CD
• Aligning Flash Modules for Optimal Performance
• Step-by-step Intro to iSCSI Booting for x86/x64 Platforms
• Efficiencies in Cost, Performance, Production Improve Government Services
• Sun Fire X4140, X4240, and X4440 Server Architecture White Paper
• Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3 Virtual Conference - Replay Available
• Building Customer Trust in Cloud Computing With Transparent Security
• Deep Dive Video: Java Warehouse and Java Store

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

A recent blog from Giri Mandalika shows readers how to go about "Accessing MySQL Database(s) from StarOffice/OpenOffice.org Suite of Applications". In the course of this how-to, Mandalika has readers create a MySQL database with read-only access for the user.

System administrator Peter Tribble is given credit for creating a number of GUI applications designed to help users understand their systems better. These analysis tools are great for beginning and seasoned sysadmins, notes Ben Rockwood who selected a few of his favorites for a blog entry, offering screenshots and short synopses for each.

Handling application changes of state is a capability that Oracle Database outshines SQL at, contends Bruce Hopkins in his Sun Developer Network article "Creating High-Performance Database Applications with Java Triggers and the Oracle Database." What Hopkins offers here is a means for developers to completely eliminate the necessity for polling databases for state changes by using Java triggers in the Oracle database that handle state changes by themselves.

Best Practices for Moving to the Solaris 10 Operating System

This Sun BluePrints article describes technologies and approaches for upgrading to the Solaris 10 OS -- from a simple system upgrade to a consolidation strategy using built-in virtualization technology. The paper discusses the upgrade options available, issues to consider, planning the upgrade, and strategies for implementation.

Deploying Oracle's PeopleSoft Campus Solutions on Sun Unified Storage Systems

Here is an implementation guide for using Sun Open Storage Systems with PeopleSoft Campus Solutions from Oracle, a suite of software designed for higher education institutions. This scenario uses the Solaris 10 5/08 OS (64-bit), Oracle Database 10g Release 2, and Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems (release 2008.Q4).

If you are interested in getting started using VMware on Sun servers, then a quick start guide by Ron Graham is certainly a resource worth reading. This document goes through the basic steps of setting up VMware Infrastructure 3 functionality on the Sun Fire X4150 with the Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage System as shared storage.

"Why doesn't my signed MIDlet work?" is a resource created by the organization Java Verified and is designed to help developers successfully address some of the most common signing issues associated with Java ME applications. The "how to" checklist allows developers to quickly identify and solve four of the most common issues that would cause Java ME applications to work before signing, but not afterwards.

At its outset the blog "IDM Project Methodology" outlines the main goals of an Identity Management (IDM) methodology, including such aspects as basing project decisions on empirical experience rather than abstract formulations and containing all the complexities, and costs of corporate ID management projects as early as possible during the course of a project. Author Kostas Stamatakis writes that IDM methodology should, first and foremost, provide solutions to repeatable problems appearing during Identity Access Management project lifecycles.