For a management consultant's view of the prospects for the new Oracle-Sun entity, readers may wish to have a look at "More Than the Sum of Its Parts" by Reshmi Paul on Forbes.com. The author analyzes the Oracle-Sun acquisition from the perspective of both parties and offers suggestions designed to facilitate a smooth, fruitful integration.
Oracle-Sun and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) will end the long-term reseller agreement HDS originally had with Sun on March 31. Announced by HDS via an email to its solution provider partners on March 2, the company wrote "With the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Hitachi Data Systems and Oracle agree that the time is right to evolve this relationship into one reflecting the priorities of the new company."
Oracle says it has not issued an end of life for OpenSolaris, writes eWeek's Chris Preimesberger. Speculation began when a Feb. 24 posting on the Oracle Website entitled "End of Service Life Status for OpenSolaris Operating System" appeared, which addressed general policies involving the service life of a product.
ETSA Utilities, South Australia's primary electricity distributors with 800,000 residential and business customers, faced the task of upgrading its legacy IT infrastructure that hosts the company's ERP system while at the same time improving the processing time of ERP system jobs and increasing the availability of ERP mission-critical systems. In addition, ETSA sought to reduce payroll processing time and improve data load time. The utility found the infrastructure it was looking for in the Sun product line.
Seeking to address some misconceptions on the subject of deduplication, Joerg Moellenkamp's blog "To dedup or not to dedup - that results in a lot of questions" provides a primer on the process. There are two major ways to deduplicate, he writes: synchronous and asynchronous. The synchronous variant does the deduplication while writing to the disks, so duplicates aren't written to disk; the asynchronous variant writes every block to the disk and later on it deletes duplicated blocks by searching possible candidates.
An Oracle Magazine Feature Cast discusses cloud computing with Sushil Kumar, vice president of Product Strategy and Business Development at Oracle. It is a two part podcast entitled "Clouds Bring Agility to the Enterprise." Part one covers where cloud computing is today, what the drivers are, and what are some of the concerns. Part two discusses what the objectives are for Oracle is in this space and where the company is in providing these types of solutions.
The nature and functions of Service Domain Manager (SDM), an add-on component for Sun Grid Engine 6.2u5, are described in DanT's GridBlog. He writes that SDM is designed to allow for services of all types to share resources with each other. He explains that each cluster has a set of performance metrics specified via service level objectives (SLOs). If at any point a cluster is in violation of its SLOs, it appeals to the SDM resource provider service for additional resources. The resource provider will look for resources wherever they're available and, finding them, will re-assign the resources to the cluster in need.
The MySQL Conference & Expo is set for April 12-15, 2010, in Santa Clara, Calif. Chief Corporate Architect at Oracle Edward Screven is set to speak along with Kaj Arno, VP of the MySQL Community; Johan Andersson, a senior manager with MySQL; and a number of other industry professionals. To save $250 off the conference plus tutorials price, register before March 15, 2010.
A new data sheet has been published for the renamed Oracle GlassFish Server. It begins by referencing it as the first implementation of the Java EE 6 specification built on the open source GlassFish Project. The three-page data sheet then mentions its complete commercial deployment support and availability as a standalone or packaged with other Oracle Fusion Middleware offerings. GlassFish Server is now part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware application grid portfolio.
The headline for IDC's press release on the 4Q09 server market sums things up nicely: "Worldwide Server Market Rebounds Sharply in Fourth Quarter as Demand for Blades and x86 Systems Leads the Way." Gartner found that while the worldwide server market recovered in the second half of 2009 from the economic downturn, plummeting sales in high-end systems resulted in a decline in overall revenue in the fourth quarter.
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 143 Issue 4, the top 10 articles were:
What Customers Can Expect from the New Sun
Sun's Niagara 3
Oracle Rebrands Solaris and Associated Products
Oracle Expects Profit from Sun Sooner Rather Than Later
Home Server Users, Here Are Seven Useful Tips
Sun HotSpot Java Virtual Machine and JRockit JVM Will Likely Merge
Inevitably IT will be more open by the end of 2010, contends Evan Powell, who cites these three reasons on why the momentum toward openness is certain:
1. Moore's Law -> abstraction -> freedom and flexibility and openness
"IBM POWER7 SPECfp_rate2006: Poor Scaling? Or Configuration Confusion?" is a blog post by John Henning that casts a skeptical eye on certain aspects of the SPEC benchmark results posted for the IBM POWER7. His overall conclusion? "Scaling POWER7 from 2 to 4 chips is not impressive." He writes that, "As of 23-Feb-2010, IBM's best published 2-chip result and best 4-chip result for SPECfp_rate2006 are, respectively, 586 and 851. The scaling from 2 chips to 4 chips is less than 1.5x (851/586=1.452)."
Learn the installation steps for a 3-node Sun Cluster 3.2 01/09 (or later) configuration running with Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) / Cluster Ready Services (CRS) 11.1.0.7 and a Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage System for high availability in the database, the OS, and the storage system.
If considering moving a virtual machine (VM) from one virtualization platform to another, you might want to think about just creating a new VM on the preferred platform. However, if you would rather avoid a complete reinstallation and are interested in trying a VM migration, then read on to find out some tips on making the move as smooth as possible.
Oracle's Sun Java Wireless Client is now available for Qualcomm's Brew Mobile Platform (Brew MP). This means Oracle's Java implementation for mobile handsets is now pre-integrated with Brew MP, giving handset manufacturers and developers a turnkey solution to incorporate Java technology into mobile devices based on Brew MP in a consistent manner across devices.
Although Geertjan Wielenga has been working with the NetBeans IDE and Platform for some time, he recently was introduced to a few NetBeans IDE Java shortcuts. He will be adding these to the NetBeans IDE Keyboard Shortcut Card, which can always be found under the "Help" menu in the IDE, for version 6.9. He decided to share his top 10 recently realized shortcuts in a blog entry.
Steven Chan, senior director in the Oracle Applications Technology Integration group, advises E-Business Suite systems administrators to review the Oracle Lifetime Support brochures. This is of particular importance to those with Oracle Application Server 10g whose Premier Support is ending this December.
Oracle has been named a leader in predictive analytics and data mining (PA/DM) from independent analyst firm Forrester Research. In "The Forrester Wave: Predictive Analytics And Data Mining Solutions, Q1 2010,” Oracle Data Mining with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 were evaluated. Senior Analyst James G. Kobielus writes that the company positions its PA/DM portfolio as a key enabler for both traditional data mining as well as the new world of real-time decision automation, content analytics, and social network analysis
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