Industry analysts say Oracle’s purchase of Sun is the most game-changing corporate technology play made during the economic downturn, reported the NY Times, with it now being able to provide all the parts needed to be an end-to-end service provider. "It's the most significant deal of the decade," said Dan Olds, an analyst with Gabriel Consulting. "Oracle has a shot here to change the rules of the industry and usher in a new era."
In 2009, multitudes of IT departments had to reassess their datacenters, and many are making enlightening discoveries, like air cooling can be sufficient in keeping systems in optimum condition or 15-30 percent of what is consuming power in their datacenters can be turned off with no harmful effect. So what does this type of complete and thorough datacenter inventorying translate to for the IT industry in 2010? ServerWatch's Andy Patrizio offers his opinion.
A review of best practices on securing companies' and government agencies' operating systems is presented in the six-page PDF "Securing the Foundation of IT Systems." The paper covers commonly used and oftentimes problematic practices adopted by system administrators, and offers some insights on ways to improve security, including a look at Trusted Computer Solutions' (TCS) Security Blanket - a tool that automatically locks down operating systems.
Former Sun channel executive Tom Wagner, who once served as vice president of the company's North America partner sales, has been hired by Oracle to handle the company's new hardware division, reported Joseph F. Kovar for ChannelWeb. As part of Oracle's acquisition of Sun, this new hardware division is expected to continue the production and future development of much of Sun's server, storage, operating system and software business as Oracle has promised to do.
Mind Candy made its Moshi Monsters upgrade happen with Sun Technology: Sun Startup Essentials, Sun Fire X4170 and X4270 servers, Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System and Java SE6. Mind Candy achieved the upgrade with CPU utilization rates cut from 70 to 15 percent; Tomcat Web application server speed doubled; and the implementation of a cost-effective, eco-responsible infrastructure.
Sun OpenDS Standard Edition (SE) 2.2 provides improvement to the core directory server as well as a new proxy server capability to manage requests between LDAP client applications and remote LDAP servers (either Sun OpenDS SE 2.2 or Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition (DSEE) 7.0). It also includes a web-based "Namefinder" lookup sample application to browse users in the Directory.
The benefits of building topology-aware scheduling into Sun Grid Engine 6.2 update 5 are explained in a blog entry by Dan Templeton. Given that an average OS does context switches at a rather high frequency, an application may find itself executing on a different CPU and core every time it gets the chance to run. If that application makes any use of the CPU cache, for example, its performance will suffer for it. The performance might not suffer much, but the difference is usually measurable. Hence, the virtues of topology-aware scheduling.
Registration is currently underway for Oracle Database February Webcasts. These live webcasts feature experts who will be covering various topics involving the database and security, upgrading, and consolidating. Also posted are past webcasts from December and January that are available for replay. Topics covered include clustering, data encryption, security and regulatory compliance, high availability best practices, and transaction processing and data warehousing.
With its 1,088 computing cores, 100TB of data storage tied to a quad data rate Infiniband network and a quoted performance of 13 Teraflops at peak -- equivalent to up to thirteen trillion operations per second -- the new High Performance Computer at Scotland's University of Strathclyde, implemented by supplier Esteem Systems using Sun technology, enables the university's Faculty of Engineering to address complex problems in materials, fluid dynamics and design.
The free Sun Server Management Pack for Sun's X64 servers has an updated release. Version 1.3 has added support for Windows Server 2003 and 2008 support, along with Solaris, Linux, VMware, and additional versions of Windows operating systems. The CLI component has new BIOSconfig utility that supports most of the supported operating systems. The Sun Server Hardware Management Agents and associated Sun Server Hardware SNMP Plugins provide flexible in-band management to monitor Sun x64 Server and Blade module's hardware.
The quick-start guide "Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007" by Ulrich Conrad provides an introduction to the steps for creating and preparing volumes on a Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System (release 2009.Q3) to be published and used by a server running Microsoft Windows for use with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as a common "share."
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:
Oracle's Plans for Sun Products, Technologies
Tutorial on IP Multipathing (IPMP)
Who is the Real Leader on the SAP Benchmark - Sun or HP?
IO Sizes and Alignments with DTrace
Oracle E-Business Suite, Virtualization and Cloud Computing
Java for Business
Sun and Force10 Collaborate to Bring Network Automation to the Masses
JavaFX and Why You Should Give It a Try
A Solution to HPC Application Performance Improvement
PTO Configurations and X-options Available for Enhanced M3000 Server
The longer version of this article has list of top ten articles for the last 8 weeks.
The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is an XML-based file format for representing electronic documents such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. The ISO and IEC International Standard is gaining momentum as more enterprises, governments and organizations adopt it. A January 2010 guide offers suggestions on how to develop an action plan for ODF adoption and collaborate with Microsoft Office users, work with a PDF in an ODF environment, and use connectors for content management systems.
"Proof of Concept for a Simple Storage Service," an article by Carol Zhang and Case Cao on the Sun Developer Network, briefly introduces the components that make up a storage service, describes in detail how to use Apache web server to set up a proof of concept (PoC) for a simple storage service, and touches on issues affecting storage service in the real world.
PatchFinder has two new key features to assist customers in patch searching, reports Gerry Haskins on the blog Patch Corner. The additions are to the Security Filter, which now can identify new security fixes, and a method to search for patches by the objects they deliver. Haskins also alerts customers who use 'wget' to automate patch downloads from SunSolve that they need to login in once to SunSolve and accept the updated software license agreement before they can continue to use it.
A Ziff Davis eSeminar entitled "Architecting Superior Virtualization Performance with Sun and AMD" presents Tim Mueting, product manager, Virtualization Solutions with AMD, together with Ron Graham, technical product manager, Sun, where the two discuss AMD processor technology, its connections with virtualization, and benchmarks showing Sun servers and AMD Opteron processors deliver scalable performance.
GlassFish Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) 2.2 now supports some of the latest platforms, like NetBeans IDE 6.7.1 and GlassFish Enterprise Server 2.1.1, plus it incorporates ten new GlassFish ESB components and multiple enhancements. GlassFish ESB is a lightweight and agile ESB platform that packages the Project Open ESB, the GlassFish application server, and the NetBeans IDE into a commercially supported, enterprise-class integration platform.
The JavaFX and Java platforms are being used as the Official Rich Client Technology by the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC). The historical Winter Games medal results will be available online through an innovative JavaFX application called Medal Wheel.
Juan Loaiza, Oracle senior VP of systems technology, outlined the key technology innovations in both Oracle Exadata V2 and the Sun Oracle Database Machine in a recent interview with Oracle Magazine's Tom Haunert. Loaiza identified three key developments: Intelligent Oracle Exadata storage; Hybrid Columnar Compression; and the incorporation of Flash technology.
Anyone interested in the Oracle VM may want to read Roddy Rodstein's underground manual on Oracle's server virtualization software. Broken down into seven topics, Rodstein, who is a member of the Virtualization and Linux team at Oracle, offers an introduction and architectural review, along with information on hard and soft partitioning, upgrading, OVS repository configurations, guest disk storage options, and manager command line interface.
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