In a three-minute video, Antony Wildey, Sales Consulting Director, Oracle Retail, explains just what Big Data is and how Oracle can help retailers gain actionable insight into the improvement of their business. Wildey discusses the use of data from social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and of sentiment analysis to provide seamless insight on product demand.

Storage magazine has awarded top honors to Sun ZFS Storage Appliance solutions for both enterprise and midrange NAS. EMC and NetApp received lesser marks for their storage technologies. Oracle outperformed its rivals in terms of initial product quality, features, reliability, technical support and sales force competence. More than 3.000 customers have discovered that Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliances, the only NAS products engineered together with Oracle Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database, and Oracle’s SPARC SuperCluster T4-4, and optimized for Oracle VM and the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, run fastest and most efficiently on Oracle storage.

In his how-to piece on managing the ZFS Storage Appliance with JavaScript Peter Brouwer covers three approaches: grouping CLI commands in a file to perform batch processing; executing user-defined scripts; and using workflows. Brouwer writes that his article primarily provides details on how to use JavaScript programming features within the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, as well as providing detail on the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance script architecture, the JavaScript interface into the appliance, and methods for executing scripts. The piece is not, he cautions readers, a tutorial for the JavaScript language nor the appliance's CLI command language.

In June 2010, Dell was operating some 1700 servers in various worldwide locations on SuSE Linux when it decided to migrate to Oracle Linux 5.5, leaving the hardware and application layers unchanged. Dell found sufficient capacity on some existing MegaGrid implementations to allow the applications and databases to be migrated to the grid and the SUSE Linux server powered down and decommissioned. Although Oracle does not support heterogeneous Oracle RAC clusters, Dell experienced no issues during the transition with nodes running SUSE Linux interoperating with nodes running Oracle Linux. Dell expects to complete the migration in June 2012.

Within an eight-hour window Oracle used Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing, Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management and Oracle Utilities Smart Grid Gateway – integrated using Oracle Application Integration Architecture and running on Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2, of processing more than one billion records and generating 500,000 customer bills. Data were extracted from 30 billion interval meter reads, one month of historical meter data (30 billion meter readings), and a six-month billing history (60 million bills). The test billed each account using three different rates (simulating “peak,” “shoulder” and “off-peak” rates).

Director of Product Management for Database High Availability in Oracle Server Development Joe Meeks explains in this webcast how Oracle’s maximum availability architecture for Oracle Exadata Database Machine will help protect a company's systems from unplanned outages enabling the delivery of both high availability and data protection at the lowest cost and complexity. Viewers will learn how to achieve the highest levels of database availability at the lowest cost and risk; implement the industry’s most-stringent data protection solutions; and adopt MAA post deployment operational best practices for Oracle Exadata. Registration and log-in are required.

Ten of the top 10 telecommunications providers worldwide have adopted SPARC T4 servers with Oracle Solaris, including Motorola Solutions, Portugal Telecom, Qualcomm, SkyOnline, Telefonica de Espana, United Telephone Mutual Aid Corporation, and Ziggo BV. Oracle recently announced its NEBS Level-3 certified Netra SPARC T4 servers, ideal for next generation telecommunications, providing the performance, scalability and efficiency required for 4G network infrastructures and cloud-based deployments. Oracle Solaris 11 enables telcom customers to take advantage of compelling features, including virtualization of the entire stack, secure, fail-safe boot environments, safe roll-backs, 4x faster upgrades and 2.5x faster system re-boots.

Oracle has shipped more enterprise tape drives than any other vendor in the first half of calendar year 2011, according to IDC’s Worldwide Tape QView 1H 2011 Pivot. Oracle also shipped the most tape libraries, over 1,000 slots, and held over 70 percent market share for LTO libraries over 1,000 slots, according to QView 1H 2011 Pivot. Oracle’s StorageTek T10000C Tape Drive is the world's fastest tape drive, also delivering a 5TB native capacity -- the world's highest -- with a transfer rate of up to 252 MB/second.

We track how frequently each article is viewed on the web site to determine which the readers consider the most important. For last week, the top 10 articles were:

• Simplified Administration with ZFS
• Documentation for Common Sysadmin Tasks
• Oracle Certified Associate (OCA), Oracle Solaris 11 System Administrator
• Solaris 10 OS and ZFS Cut Costs, Boost Uptime as Alternative to RAID
• MySQL: An Introduction for Oracle DBAs
• illumos Meetup at FOSDEM
• Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users
• MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 available on Solaris 11
• World Record x86 TPC-C Result
• Java Spotlight Episode 65: Deployment & Plugin

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

Oracle's Sun Ray 3 Series Clients garnered the 2011 GOOD DESIGN Award given annually for advancing new, visionary, and innovative product concepts, invention and originality. With no moving parts and no local operating system to manage, Oracle Sun Ray 3 Series Clients reduce many of the problems associated with desktop deployments by providing a cost-effective, highly functional thin client alternative to desktop and laptop computers. Part of Oracle's comprehensive desktop virtualization portfolio, the Oracle Sun Ray 3 Series Clients offer ease of administration, higher security, and better access than traditional desktop architectures.

Java Spotlight Episode 66, recorded live at the International Oracle User Group Summit in Redwood Shores, CA, features JUG leaders from five continents (Frank Greco, Daniel deOliveira, Ben Evans, Raj Hegde, Badr El Houari, and John Yeary), experts on everything related to JUGS. Dalibor Topic, Java Free and Open Source Software Ambassador, and Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine, Java EE Developer Advocate, assume their customary seats on the Java All Star Developer Panel.

The summary of a webcast on Building a Secure Cloud with Identity Management provides links to the archived webcast itself. Brian Baird of SaskTel points out how customers can employ the SaskTel architectural model, which makes it simple to consume Identity Management as a service from the SaskTel cloud. SaskTel also makes it simple to bring cloud services back in house, he adds. In addition, Baird suggests that the SaskTel Identity Management Center of Excellence is designed to make it easy to consume critical capabilities offered by the Oracle Identity Management stack such as workflows, self service provisioning etc.