Sections in this issue:
News, Solaris, Software, Workstation, HPC, Storage, Top10, BigAdmin, Sysadmin, Virtualization, Java Technology, JavaFX, Security, Oracle, Trademarks
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Oracle completed its purchase of Sun and outlined its stategy for the company's product line. Free eBook on Oracle Database 11g highlights its latest features.
Logical Domains (LDoms) 1.3 has been released. A Sun BluePrints article focuses on best practices for LDoms I/O.
Another best practices guide provides direction on upgrading to Solaris 10, while a third Sun BluePrints paper discusses Sun systems for Sun StorageTek Enterprise Backup.
New technical article shows how to use the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System as a repository for MySQL with SugarCRM. A detailed how-to explains the procedures for using Live Upgrade for Veritas Volume Manager and/or Solaris OS.
Also get information on zpool splitting, dynamic resource reallocation and Apache Hadoop with Sun Grid Engine, Service Management Facility feature of OpenSolaris, and virtualization for HPC.
New build-to-order containerized data centers are being offered.
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News
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Oracle Completes Purchase of Sun
Executives Review Oracle-Sun Products Strategy
Oracle is hiring 2,000 salespeople and engineers to sell not just software but hardware, now that Oracles acquisition of Sun, which was completed on Jan. 27, transforms it from a software company to a systems company. In a five-hour event, Oracle executives assured the IT industry it will accelerate the investment in Suns SPARC/Solaris server and storage hardware.
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Build-to-Order Containerized Data Center Solutions
May Include 20, 40, or 53 Foot Shipping Containers
The Sun Modular Datacenter (MD) S20, D20, and supporting options will now be offered as build-to-order configurations versus fixed configurations. The new build-to-order containerized data centers will be designed and manufactured according to specific customer requirements, which may include 20, 40, or even 53 foot shipping containers with over 1000 RU of capacity. This solution will be available through the Sun Professional Services Datacenter Efficiency (DCE) Practice.
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Solaris
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Using Live Upgrade for Veritas Volume Manager and/or Solaris OS
A Detailed How-to Explains the Procedures
This blog post presents the detailed procedure for upgrading Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) and/or Solaris using Live Upgrade. Gerry Haskins explains that Solaris Live Upgrade is the feature that performs an operating system upgrade with no downtime. The upgrade is done on an alternate disk using the current boot environment (BE). After the Live Upgrade, the alternate disk has all the information from the current BE and just one reboot will bring the system up on the alternate disk with the upgraded Solaris Version.
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Best Practices Guide for Moving to Solaris 10
Sun BluePrints Provides Overview of Technologies, Approaches to Upgrading
A best practices guide to upgrading to Solaris 10 OS provides an overview of the technologies and approaches available for those aiming to bring the latest innovations from Sun's OS into their datacenters. Brian Down, Ken Pepple, and Jeff Savit discuss the upgrade options available, issues to consider, planning the upgrade, and strategies for implementation.
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Software
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Dynamic Resource Reallocation and Apache Hadoop with Sun Grid Engine
Latest Release Takes Sun Solution to the Next Level -- the Cloud
In its latest iteration, Sun's Grid Engine comes of age -- the cloud age, that is. According to Steve Wilson's blog the new version both enables dynamic resource reallocation and the ability to use on-demand resources from Amazon EC2 as well as deep integration with Apache Hadoop at the enterprise level.
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Workstation
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Sun Ray Thin Clients and Software Save Corporation an Estimated $270,000
Sun Solution Increased User and IT Productivity, Security and Added Easy Remote Access
In September 2008, medical products maker ResMed decided to replace 160 PCs with Sun Ray 2 Thin Clients, and purchased two SPARC Enterprise T2000 Servers with chip multithreading, and four Sun Fire X4440 Servers to support its new solution. According to ResMed, IT productivity has increased by the equivalent of two additional IT staff, and the company has saved about $267,850. The Sun solution also increased security and substantially reduced energy costs as well as the noise-level.
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HPC
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Sun HPC Solution Ushers in Teraflop-scale Applications for Brazilian Computing Grid
Sun Blade Servers, Lustre Provide Affordable, Scalable Solution to Handle Complex Simulations
High-performance computing (HPC) initiative Petroleo Brasileiro (BR) Network was created to handle computer simulations to aid oil production in Brazil's pre-salt basin. An HPC grid was required to handle the complex project with the goal being a high-performance, affordable solution that could expand easily over the next few years. Sun, IBM, Dell, Bull, SGI, and HP were consulted. After an extensive review process, the group decided that Sun would best meet its goals for performance, scalability, energy efficiency, and cost, the latter of which was 30% less than an offering from the closest competing vendor.
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The Virtues of Virtualization
Benefits for HPC Implementations
Following on his talk "HPC Trends and Virtualization," a presentation given at Sun's HPC Consortium in Hamburg recently, Josh Simons goes further with his blog post "Virtualization for HPC: The Heterogeneity Issue," a subject to which he takes an even-handed approach, conceding at the outset that " ... while heterogeneity is either desirable or to be avoided, depending on your viewpoint, virtualization can help in either case."
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Storage
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Sun BluePrints: "LDoms I/O Best Practices"
Configuring Highly Available Paths from Sun LDoms Guest Domains to Storage
The Sun BluePrints article "LDoms I/O Best Practices - Storage Availability with Logical Domains" by Peter A. Wilson discusses the approaches and trade-offs for configuring highly available paths from Sun Logical Domains (LDoms) guest domains to storage. Topics include I/O availability, multipath I/O with Solaris OS MPxIO, multipath I/O with virtual I/O failover, virtual I/O failover and network file storage, and multipath I/O to network file storage with virtual I/O failover.
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"Sun Systems for Sun StorageTek Enterprise Backup Software"
The Logical Choice for Enterprise Archival Storage
The need to develop data archiving capabilities is a challenge that every enterprise faces these days for any or all of several needs: whether to accommodate explosive data growth; to respond to the pressure to meet promised service levels and backup windows for users; to provide archive data retention and retrieval requirements; and to better manage rising energy costs. Dean Halbeisen's Sun BluePrints Online paper "Sun Systems for Sun StorageTek Enterprise Backup Software" details the openly architected, intelligent and massively scalable general purpose archive solutions Sun is developing to assist enterprise users in meeting these challenges.
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Top10
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Top Ten Articles for last few Issues
Vol 143 1, 2, 3; Vol 142 Issue 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
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:
- Choosing SPARC or Intel Processors
- EU Approves Sun Acquisition by Oracle
- Packaging and Patching, ZFS Enhancements in Solaris 10 10/09
- A Better Benchmarking Tool: vdbench vs. dd(1M)
- Hybrid Storage Pools With Sun Flash Technology and Solaris ZFS
- To Move or Not to Move Applications to the Cloud
- 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) Run on Sun
- New Enterprise Software and Business Application Store, GetApp.com
- OpenSolaris News Bites
- A Solution for Sprawling Datacenters: Sun Fire X4640 Server
The longer version of this article has list of top ten articles for the last 8 weeks.
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BigAdmin
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What's New on BigAdmin
As of January 21st, 2010
Installing SugarCRM With MySQL Database on Sun Unified Storage Systems
This guide shows how to set up a Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System as a repository for a database using the SugarCRM application (an open source customer relationship management product). This scenario uses a Sun Fire X4540 server configured with Ubuntu 8.1.0, MySQL 5.1.30 Community Server Edition, and SugarCRM Community Edition.
System Administrator Documentation for Sun Products
BigAdmin's new hub can help you find sysadmin docs on docs.sun.com and other Sun web sites. This resource center was a response to feedback at the LISA 09 Conference. For more information, see the BigAdmin blog entry, "Where'd the Docs Go?"
http://sun.com/bigadmin
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Sysadmin
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SugarCRM with MySQL on Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems
Technical How-to Guide
Praneet Tiwari sets out to prove the feasibility of using the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System as a repository for the MySQL database with the SugarCRM application. This technical BigAdmin feature article uses Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System release 2008.Q4 and a Sun Fire X4540 server configured with Ubuntu 8.1.0, MySQL 5.1.30 Community Server Edition, and SugarCRM Community Edition.
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ZPool Splitting
A Less Risky, Less Error-prone Approach
What's a user to do, faced with needing to back up all the data for a business application stored in a zfs pool without that backup causing an impact on the application itself? Mark Musante presents a solution in his blog "Seven Years of Good Luck: Splitting Mirrors," where he writes of an alternative to the traditional risky and error prone practice of mirroring the data locally, breaking the mirror and moving the fragments to a new machine for backup. ZFS will do this for you, he concedes, but not easily.
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Virtualization
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InfoWorld Reviews Sun VirtualBox 3.1
Declared a Winner by Every Consideration
Sun's VirtualBox 3.1 has definitely made a big hit with InfoWorld's reviewer Randall C. Kennedy, who writes, "This is one freebie that breaks the mold and delivers more, not less, than you're expecting." In Kennedy's opinion, VirtualBox 3.1 should give VMware something serious to worry about. " ... after years of wallowing in obscurity, VirtualBox, the desktop virtualisation solution of choice for FOSS groupies and similar anti-establishment types, is causing quite a ruckus," he continues.
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Logical Domains (LDoms) 1.3 Released
New Features Add Speed and Administration Ease
Logical Domains (LDoms) provides built-in virtualization capabilities for Sun Chip Multithreading (CMT) Servers at no cost. The latest free release of LDoms is version 1.3, which now features CPU dynamic resource management (DRM), domain mobility performances improvement, crypto unit dynamic reconfiguration and migration support, link-based IPMP for virtual network, large virtual disk (>1TB) boot support, and more.
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Java Technology
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Java News Bites
Short Items of Interest for the Java Community
- Java Portlet Specification 2.0 (JSR 286)
- Java SE 6 Update 18 and Java EE 5 SDKs Refreshed
- GlassFish Loadbalancer Configurator
- GlassFish Podcast Covers EJB 3.1
- Portable Web Servers with Java Card 3.0
- Java ME SDK 3.0 for Mac OS X
- GlassFish ESB v2.2 Released
- GlassFish v3 Security Features
- Resources and links for GlassFish v3
http://blogs.systemnews.com/
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JavaFX
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New and Updated Java-FX How-to Topics
Sun Docs Team, JavaFX Users Keep Development Information Up-to-date
The Sun Docs team has added some new topics to the Java-FX How-to page. These documents are complementary to the JavaFX tutorials that demonstrate the basics of the JavaFX Script programming language and GUI concepts in JavaFX technology. Some updates in the How-to's came directly from readers' questions and comments. The community's insight is invaluable and the Sun Sun Docs team encourages feedback.
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Security
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Using the Service Management Facility Feature of OpenSolaris
Paper Recommends It as a Building Block for System Security
"Using the (Open) Solaris Service Management Facility as a Building Block for System Security," a paper by Christoph Schuba, examines how the Solaris Service Management Facility (SMF) can be used as a fundamental building block to improve system security. The Service Management Facility is a backwards-compatible extension to the traditional way UNIX services are managed with the rc (run command) utility command scripts.
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Oracle
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Free eBook: Guide to Oracle 11g and Database Migration
Overview of New Features, Issues to Consider Before Making the Move
Internet.com is offering an eBook on the Oracle Database 11g which highlights the latest features of the solution along with an overview of the issues to consider when making a database migration. Registration is required to download the eBook, which also comes with the "Oracle Database 11g Product Family Guide" for an overview of the Oracle Database family of products.
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