System News for Sun Users http://sun.systemnews.com System News for Sun Users http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/opt-sysadmin/22927 SysAdmin News Bites ZVOLs and Write Cache Resetting the root Password for ZFS Managing sendmail.cf Across Upgrades Communications Suite: Messaging Server Administration Guide Solaris Cluster Resources for System Administrators Oracle Solaris Video Blog http://blogs.systemnews.com/ http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/news/22951 Oracle Works to Assuage the Anxieties of Its Customers Writing in eWeek Europe about the audience reaction to the presentation made by Oracle executives to 500 Sun customers and partners in London, Peter Judge assessed the response positively, saying, "The most surprising thing about the event was the complacency. Many of the delegates suggested that this merger, billed as one of the most cataclysmic ever (in a good way or a bad way), might simply lead to business as usual, with the products and support coming from the usual partners and executives, and the roadmap continuing." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/storage/22908 The Importance of Information Storage and Management The February 27, 2010 issue of The Economist contains a special feature on the data deluge assembled by its Tokyo correspondent Kenneth Cukier, who observes, "Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits but also big headaches." Statistics show the average American is bombarded with 34 gigabytes of information per person per day. The biggest data hogs were video games and television while, in terms of bytes, written words are insignificant, amounting to less than 0.1% of the total. Data, The Economist reports, is accumulating at a rate that exceeds the capability to store it. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/news/22973 Oracle Gets Approval from Russia on Sun Merger Reuters reported that Russia's anti-monopoly regulator, the Federal Antimonopoly Service or FAS, has approved a $7 billion takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle on condition that the company continues to develop Sun's MySQL database. "FAS has reviewed the application and ... has decided to approve the application," the regulator, said in a statement, adding that the approval would only be valid if Oracle continues to develop Sun's MySQL database. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/opt-dev/22871 Sun POJO Service Engine User's Guide "Using the Sun POJO Service Engine" is a guide to the tools available in the Plain Old Java Objects (POJO) Service Engine that enable users to build business integration applications based on JBI standards and using Plain Old Java Objects. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/news/22952 Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center Released Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center is the newest addition in the Oracle Enterprise Manager family. It is used to manage both physical and virtual systems, and manages across the entire system lifecycle from discovery to provisioning, updating, monitoring and management. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/motw/22928 Summary of the Week: March 15-21, 2010 http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/trademarks/22929 Copyrights and Trademarks (c) 2010 System News, Inc. All rights reserved. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/feature/22931 Suits and Their Countersuits With his tenure in Sun's executive suite behind him, Jonathan Schwartz exercises his new found liberty to disclose two incidents involving Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and their respective threats to sue Sun for patent infringement. Schwartz relates how Sun successfully played the countersuit card, staving off the threatened litigation. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/OpenStorage/22940 Sun Storage 7000 2010.Q1 Quality and Features Wiping the sweat from his brow, Fishworks Engineer Bryan Cantrill reflects on the release of the new major Sun Storage 7000 series software update, known as 2010.Q1. Producing this release was no mean feat, Cantrill writes, given that it involved building enterprise-grade storage on commodity components, incorporating entirely new elements like Flash, and creating an ambitious management stack entirely from scratch. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/ja/22890 PSA Deploys GlassFish in the Manufacture of Peugeot, Citroën Vehicles GlassFish figures prominently in the IT infrastructure car maker PSA, which produces Peugeot and Citroën vehicles, where it is used in support of the company's wide-ranging set of internal and external Java applications and as part of the company's strategic use of open source, writes Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine. PSA's production deployment of GlassFish follows a stringent evaluation and qualification process including setting up consolidated development environments leveraging the domain and node-agent architecture of GlassFish for an overall optimized utilization of GlassFish v2.1. The administration tools (both web console and the asadmin CLI) are key features here, the blogger adds. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/Virtualization/22915 Running VirtualBox VMs as Services in Windows With the VBoxVmService, users can easily create up to 127 VMs and run them as a service in any flavor of Windows, or so says Joe Mocker in his Weblog. Mocker tried it with Windows 7 on x64. He did have to implement a workaround to have his VMs identified by name, but other than that, he now has his VirtualBox VMs running in the background with no console windows or anything else. Plus, VBoxVmService can start virtual machines without anyone having to login first. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/bk/22919 "Solaris 10 ZFS Essentials" As the title reads, this book is an essentials guide to Solaris 10 ZFS. Numbering only 144 pages, the slim paperback is designed to show its readers how to deploy and manage ZFS file systems. It is particularly useful for those users who are new to Solaris or are using ZFS for the first time. It is easy to get ZFS up and running on a home system or business IT infrastructure by following the simple instructions in this book. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/pr-partner/22945 A More Direct Channel Model Planned for Oracle-Sun Oracle plans to continue Sun's roadmap practically unchanged, but it will move towards a direct channel model, said Nicky Sheridan, country manager at Oracle South Africa (SA), who believes this will improve service to customers and take away part of the "less value-added perspective of the business" from channel partners. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/OpenSolaris/22894 Oracle, OpenSolaris, and Solaris In no uncertain terms, the Director of Solaris product management at Oracle, Dan Roberts, says OpenSolaris will continue as an open source entity and Oracle will actively support and participate in the community. There are some questions regarding which direction Oracle will take in open sourcing some of OpenSolaris' technologies and the level of support that will be offered, but generally speaking, all is well, affirms Roberts. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/ja/22872 Mobile Desktop Grid The Mobile Desktop Grid is a project designed to interconnect institutions that have clustered and non-clustered computers, with the objective to assist researchers who are addressing global issues in completing their intensive computational jobs in a shorter period of time. Basically, the MDG project aims to assist those requiring the intensive computational power of clustered systems, but are unable to purchase the technology due to financial constraints. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/Oracle/22922 Flash Storage in Exadata V2 Cuts Query Processing Time Significantly Christopher Chelliah, general manager for Exadata and Appliance solutions, Oracle Asia Pacific, said the flash storage integration within the second iteration of Oracle's Exadata Database Machine eliminates the need to source data from storage disks and cuts query processing time significantly. "Coupled with the hybrid columnar compression feature which groups data by column before compression, the flash storage can fit up to 50 terabytes of data," said Chelliah, as reported by IDG. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/FOSS/22906 Document Freedom Day Set for March 31st Document Freedom Day 2010 is March 31st and there will be events all over the world. Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for document liberation. It will be a day of grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Open Document Formats (ODF) and Open Standards in general. Learn more about DFD and how to get involved by visiting the DFD's main page. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/tr/22925 Online Training Services Information for Recently Acquired Oracle Employees Former Sun employees now working for Oracle may be interested in the personalized online training their new employer does offer. In a question posed on Oracle Mix, an inquisitive newcomer gets a couple of hints from Oracle veterans. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/Virtualization/22917 Oracle Management Connector for Ops Center The Oracle Management Connector for Ops Center enables users to view event information in the Oracle Enterprise Manager console. With the Connector, Ops Center notifications are displayed as Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control alerts. Benefits of such an integration for system administrators include faster resolution times, more immediate root cause analysis, and faster communication flow between IT departments. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/OpenOffice/22921 What's in Store for the Oracle Office Product Family A rebranding is in store for StarOffice and StarSuite, and a web-based office suite is in the works that will be tightly integrated with the OpenOffice.org desktop version, allowing users to access their documents from basically any browser and from any device. This information is from Michael Bemmer, former Sun staffer and now head of the new Office Global Business Unit at Oracle, who presents a brief summary of the future of OpenOffice.org and office productivity at Oracle, along with how the Sun Oracle merger will benefit customers and users. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/3/opt-dev/22914 Design Priniciples for Thread-based Systems A java.net article discusses design principles to follow when the objective is to build an efficient, thread-safe application. In the article "Rethinking Multi-Threaded Design Principles" Dibyendu Roy asserts that careful design and adherence to a well thought out underlying policy is essential for productive thread-based systems. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/Solaris/22881 Deploying Solaris 10 Zones and Choosing Network Configurations Exactly how does one go about deploying a large number of zones on an M8000 Enterprise Server, especially given that twelve separate links would be needed for the different networks and twice that number for IPMP. In the course of answering this question for a customer, Steffen Weiberle came up with a number of suggestions in his blog "Solaris 10 Zones and Networking -- Common Considerations." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/opt-sysadmin/22869 Facilitating Hierarchical Storage Management System Migrations As certain Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) systems do not scale as well as others, users frequently need to migrate to more capacious solutions in order to meet their storage needs. In his blog post, Israel Pacheco "The Challenge -- Migrate HSM Systems" offers some suggestions for migrating large volumes of data from old to new HSM systems in a timely fashion. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/server/22888 Review: Oracle Sun Fire X4170 Server For the most part, the Oracle Sun Fire X4170 found favor with the reviewer for V3.co.uk, Alan Stevens, who pronounced the server " ... A good choice for companies looking for maximum performance from a 1U package," and a prime candidate for virtualization service. The X4170 compares quite favorably with its chief competition, the HP ProLiant DL360 G6 and the Dell PowerEdge R610. Stevens gives the Oracle Sun product such high marks in part because " ... it's a dual-processor server capable of accommodating the same range of dual-core and quad-core Xeon 5500 Nehalem chips." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/Virtualization/22893 Oracle Announces Some of Its Bets There have been many questions raised recently about which of Sun's products will have a life after Oracle. Some of these questions are answered in the post "The Oracle VM Product Line Welcomes Sun!" by Adam Hawley, who writes, "We are tremendously excited to combine our portfolios and work side-by-side with our extremely talented Sun brethren to advance the state-of-the art in virtualization." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/MySQL/22902 Can MySQL and Oracle Database Coexist Under Oracle? An assessment of the Oracle-Sun acquisition in terms of the future for the open source database MySQL is presented by Steve Evans of CBR in the article "What now for MySQL?" He reviews the hard fight Oracle eventually won to become owner of MySQL, and offers why the EU's decision should assuage some of the worries of the open source community. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/trademarks/22913 Copyrights and Trademarks (c) 2010 System News, Inc. All rights reserved. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/motw/22912 Summary of the Week: March 8-14, 2010 http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/Performance/22868 PeopleSoft Benchmark on Sun x64 Hardware Running Oracle Enterprise Linux Results of the PeopleSoft Campus Solutions 9.0 benchmark on Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 and X6270 blade servers are available. This benchmarking report is particularly significant, writes Giri Mandalika in his Scratchpad blog, because the workload has both online transactions and batch processes and, furthermore, it is the first time Sun has published a PeopleSoft benchmark on x64 hardware running Oracle Enterprise Linux. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/opt-dev/22891 Use the Deployment Toolkit for Successful Applet Launches Across Mixed Environments The browser-based applications that present the kinds of engrossing user interfaces (UIs) and content previously found only in desktop applications -- otherwise known as Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) -- are becoming increasingly popular with developers, writes Sun Developer Network staffer Ed Ort, in part because of the ubiquity of the Internet and also because of the improved uniformity in the way different browsers handle RIAs. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/ja/22857 Glassfish Enterprise Server Version 3's Embedded Server Learn how to deploy a secure application with protected methods on Oracle-Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server Version 3. Nithya Subramanian shows how to provide authentication credentials to the embedded server - a key new feature offered by this version of GlassFish - before invoking the protected methods in a recent blog entry. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/news/22903 Oracle's Third Fiscal Quarter Earnings Due March 25 Oracle's third quarter fiscal year 2010 results will be released on Thursday, March 25th, after the close of the market. Oracle plans on hosting a conference call and live web broadcast at 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time to discuss the financial results. The live web broadcast will be available from the Oracle Investor Relations Web site. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/ev/22924 Java EE, Oracle VM-VirtualBox Integration, Ops Center The lineup for the next three shows of Oracle Technology Network's TechCast are as follows: March 16: Roberto Chinnici, principal engineer, Java EE, will discuss Java EE 6. March 30: Wim Coekaerts, VP Linux and VM Development, will discuss Oracle VM and VirtualBox integration. A demonstration is expected to be presented. April 13: Steve Wilson, VP, Systems Management, will discuss Ops Center. Tune in to The TechCast Show hosted by OTN Senior Director Justin Kestelyn at 10 a.m. Pacific Time on the dates listed above, and listen in live. Questions can also be posed via Twitter, Facebook, or the native chat offered. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/FOSS/22911 Oracle's Open Source Initiatives With its acquisition of Sun, Oracle is now the world's largest purveyor of open source software. However, as Ken Hess notes on the DaniWeb Forum Index, Oracle's support didn't start with its purchase of InnoDB, MySQL or Sun. The company has a history of supporting free and open source software and has done much for the FOSS community. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/Virtualization/22901 Oracle's Xen-based Server Virtualization Could Challenge Competitors The Oracle virtualization portfolio got a boost with the company's acquisition of Sun, and it has signaled a willingness to take on VMware. Oracle VM 3, which is expected this spring, will give Oracle credible Xen-based server virtualization that could challenge VMware, Microsoft and Citrix Systems Inc. -- at least in the tens of thousands of Oracle database and application shops. A SearchServerVirtualization.com article explores Oracle's virtualization play. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/Oracle/22874 Oracle SOA Governance 11g Oracle's SOA Governance solution strives to ease the transition of an organization to service-oriented architecture (SOA). The solution automates essential SOA governance processes, regardless of the status or progress of an SOA transformation. The most recent release is Oracle SOA Governance 11g, which Oracle states is the "most complete, unified approach for governing service oriented architecture and application integration projects." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/opt-sysadmin/22873 Oracle Database 11g vs. IBM DB2 Enterprise 9.5 A recent study conducted by the Edison Group titled "Comparative Management Costs Study—Oracle Database 11g vs. IBM DB2 Enterprise 9.5" quantifies how Oracle widens the manageability lead against IBM. Points made in the 78-page report: 43% annual savings in database management; typical administrative functions are 40% faster; 49% fewer steps for the same set of standard RDBMS tasks; and save up to $35,155 per year per DBA. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/storage/22918 Sun Unified Storage System 2010.02 Is the 2010.02 release of the Sun Unified Storage System imminent, asks Joerg Moellenkamp after stumbling upon the wikis.sun.com page that offers release notes for the 2010.Q1.0.0 expected major software update for the Sun Storage 7000 series appliances. Although it was not yet downloadable for the public at the time of this writing, the software update promises to support the Sun Storage 7110, 7210, 7310, 7410, and 7000 Simulator. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/feature/22870 Sun Certification Under Oracle The Oracle Certification page has posted FAQs on Sun certification. Paul Sorensen offers answers to some of the most pressing inquiries, such as whether Sun certification will continue to be valid; does one need to be recertified since Oracle has acquired Sun; can someone still become Sun certified, along with many others. In a separate entry, Sorensen also provides information on Oracle Database 11g certification. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/JavaFX/22904 "JavaFX: Just Getting Started" In this Oracle Technology Network's TechCast, Nandini Ramani, director of Java Development at Oracle, brings news about innovation, evangelism, and adoption in the JavaFX area. The video runs 25:40. Watch it now. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/news/22846 eWEEK's Top 25 Technologies Of The Decade A special eWEEK report names the products, applications, and technologies of the last decade that have changed the way people work, play, and live. Limiting the list to 25 of the most significant technologies and products, eWeek found OpenOffice.org and the Solaris 10 Operating System to be two important solutions making a mark in the last 10 years. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/OpenSolaris/22895 Differences Between OpenSolaris and Linux An OpenSolaris Information Resources article describes what its author determined were the most important differences between OpenSolaris and Linux to assist new users interested in transitioning to OpenSolaris. The article covers the user interface, sudo command, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), top command, prstat command, and file systems. This article offers a brief overview of differences and does contain resource links on the topic for more indepth information. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/2/sw/22841 New Oracle-Sun Downloads The Oracle-Sun downloads page offers the latest downloads along with a list of the top software visitors have downloaded. The page also offers its featured downloads, such as Java, NetBeans, GlassFish, JavaFX, OpenOffice.org, VirtualBox, and more. This article lists the most recent and top downloads, and links to access them. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/feature/22756 South Australian Utility Implements ERP Upgrade Solutions from Sun 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/sw/22849 How Service Domain Manager Works 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/Performance/22879 IBM POWER7 SPECfp_rate2006 Scaling Results Scrutinized "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)." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/news/22877 The Keys to Combining Two Very Different Organizations 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/CloudComputing/22899 Oracle Magazine Feature Cast: "Clouds Bring Agility to the Enterprise" 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/trademarks/22885 Copyrights and Trademarks (c) 2010 System News, Inc. All rights reserved. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/Solaris/22838 Pondering the Dedup Process: Synchronous or Asynchronous 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/HPC/22887 HPC News Bites HPC in 2010 Lustre File System Update Oracle to Participate in ISC and HPC Consortium NFS Tuning for HPC Streaming Applications HPC Application Performance with Flash Storage How Flash Storage Fits into HPC http://blogs.systemnews.com/ http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/pr-partner/22897 Oracle-Sun and Hitachi Data Systems End Reseller Agreement 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." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/FOSS/22900 Will IT Be More Open in 2010? 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 2. Tight budgets -> open minds 3. Open source critical mass cannot be stopped Visit Powell's blog for details. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/server/22883 Gartner and IDC Release Worldwide Server Market Reports 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/Oracle/22837 Oracle's Lifetime Support Policy 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/ja/22850 Sun Java Wireless Client Pre-integrated with Brew Mobile Platform 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/NetBeans/22884 NetBeans IDE Java Shortcuts 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/Virtualization/22836 Virtual Machine Migration 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/Oracle/22878 Oracle Leads in Predictive Analytics and Data Mining, Forrester Reports 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 http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/ev/22788 MySQL Conference and Expo Set for April 12-15, 2010 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/server/22880 Oracle GlassFish Server 3 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/OpenSolaris/22882 Oracle Clarifies No End of Life Set for OpenSolaris 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/145/1/opt-sysadmin/22856 Installing Sun Cluster Running Oracle RAC/CRS and Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/4/NetBeans/22851 Developing Access Control Software on the NetBeans Platform FERMAX is a Spanish company that produces Audio/Video Door Entry and Access Control Systems, using NetBeans for one critical aspect of the process. Oswaldo Rubio, who is a software developer in the FERMAX R&D department, explains to Geertjan Wielenga why the company chose the NetBeans platform for its development tasks in an interview published in NetBeans Zone. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/4/OpenSolaris/22853 Home Server Users, Here Are Seven Useful Tips Seven tips for OpenSolaris ZFS home server users are offered to readers by Constantin Gonzalez, one of Sun Germany's principal field technologists. These are tips, he writes, that he found useful in performing his own home server planning, building and installing. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/4/opt-sysadmin/22855 How to Spec (or not) with HTML5 as an Example Readers with an appetite for controversy will find Tim Bray's blog on HTML5 engaging and will certainly like to read the voluminous comments the piece generated. Suffice it to say, the jury is still out on HTML5, so the debate goes on. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/4/ja/22863 Sun HotSpot Java Virtual Machine and JRockit JVM Will Likely Merge Although in the short term, development will continue in parallel on both the Sun HotSpot Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the JRockit JVM that Oracle acquired from BEA Systems, the most informed speculation is that, eventually, a single JVM based on both technologies is expected within the coming 18 months to two years, or so writes Paul Krill in InfoWorld. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/4/hw/22847 Sun's Niagara 3 Sun's Niagara 3, a one billion-transistor, 16-core processor, and the IBM POWER7 are the subject of Jon Stokes's Ars Technica piece that introduces readers to the floorplan of both chips. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/4/trademarks/22862 Copyrights and Trademarks (c) 2010 System News, Inc. All rights reserved. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/4/Virtualization/22866 VirtualBox Joins Oracle's Enterprise Virtualization Portfolio Oracle plans to make VirtualBox part of its enterprise virtualization portfolio, right alongside its server virtualization hypervisor Oracle VM, according to a SearchServerVirtualization.com article. Oracle aims to integrate Sun's VirtualBox hypervisor (rebranded as Oracle VM VirtualBox) with Oracle VM, allowing administrators to use VirtualBox as a sandbox to create virtual desktops and deploy them to Oracle VM pools. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/4/Solaris/22860 Solaris News Bites How to Back Port Solaris 10 iSCSI failover with COMSTAR Oracle DB 11gR2 Certified on Solaris Steps for Installing Any Native or Branded Zones Solaris Boot Process Threads and Interrupts Solaris 10 5/09 OS Receives Security Certification Solaris Volume Manager Command Overview patchanalysis_gather script Make the Most of an SSD with ZFS ZFS Deduplication Notebook Backup http://blogs.systemnews.com/ http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/4/MySQL/22844 MySQL Training Hits the Road Learn how to use MySQL and/or tweak your expertise in a specific area by attending MySQL training. Available classes include MySQL for Beginners, MySQL for DBAs, MySQL for Developers, MySQL for High Availability, MySQL Performance Tuning, MySQL Bootcamp, MySQL Cluster and on-site dedicated training. These classes are available around the world. Get more details on your specific class of interest and whether it is scheduled for a stop in a city near you. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/4/ev/22876 Oracle OpenWorld Super Saver Pricing Ends March 19 Get $700 off Oracle OpenWorld 2010's full conference registration price by securing a spot before March 19. The conference is scheduled for Sept. 19-23, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. More than 1,800 sessions will be held along with 400 partner exhibits and hundreds of demos. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/4/ja/22843 JavaOne Conference Call for Papers Issued March 14 is the deadline for those wanting to submit papers for the JavaOne 2010 conference. This year's conference will be co-located with Oracle Develop during the week of Oracle OpenWorld. Set for Sept. 19-23 in San Francisco, JavaOne 2010 will be offering the following tracks, and proposals to speak are being accepted under them: Core Java Platform; Java SE and Desktop Java; Java EE and Java for Enterprise Applications; JavaFX and Rich User Experience; Java ME and Mobile; Java for Devices, Card, and TV; and The Java Frontier. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/4/opt-dev/22858 Exploring Web Service Simulation In a java.net technical article, Adhir Mehta proposes using servlets to assist developers in maintaining their web service based assignments. He offers an algorithm to generate a file name using the input message, and then demonstrates how to use it in a configurable manner so there isn't a need to write any java code. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/4/news/22867 Oracle Expects Profit from Sun Sooner Rather Than Later After accepting keys to the city of San Francisco in tribute to him and his racing team BMW Oracle for winning the 33rd America's cup match this February, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said he expects Sun's formerly unprofitable operations to become profitable "right away" as part of Oracle. Following the Feb. 20th celebration, Ellison basically reiterated what he said during the Jan. 27 Oracle + Sun Strategy teleconference: "And how soon will [Sun's profitability] occur? How long do investors have to wait? Not at all; not at all. We'll be profitable this - in February. We'll be profitable in March. We'll be profitable in April - and when I say 'we': the Sun business. We'll be profitable in May." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/4/Virtualization/22852 Installing Solaris 10 OS as a VM Under an Oracle VM Environment A few tips on how to install Solaris 10 OS as a virtual machine under an Oracle VM 2.2 environment have been posted by Honglin Su on Oracle's Virtualization blog. All of the steps are accompanied by screen snippets so readers can compare their results with his. He also includes links to downloads and documentation throughout the blog, helping ease the process. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/4/feature/22848 What Customers Can Expect from the New Sun It's safe to say that only Larry Ellison and a few of his top level Oracle executives really know "what's next for customers at Sun," but there is plenty of room for intelligent speculation on this score, and that is what Paul Murphy provides in his brief blog post on that topic. By and large, what Murphy sees will be welcomed by Sun customers. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/4/Oracle/22814 Oracle Partitioning in Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Oracle Partitioning can improve the performance, manageability, and availability for applications, the company asserts. Part of the Oracle Database, Oracle Partitioning is the subject of a white paper that discusses the latest partitioning techniques, enhanced scalability, and extended manageability capabilities now available in the latest Oracle Database 11g Release 2. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/4/sw/22854 Oracle Rebrands Solaris and Associated Products Rebranding has begun for Sun products. One of note is the Solaris Operating System, which now reads as Oracle Solaris. This name change filters down to associated products such as Sun Studio, which now is officially called the Oracle Solaris Studio. In regards to Oracle Solaris, Barbara Darrow with SearchEnterpriseLinux.com, identifies it as Oracle's new high-end data center appliances running the Oracle software stack, while Vijay Tatkar discusses the newly named Oracle Solaris Studio. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/sw/22786 Using Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition or OpenDS with Compressed Data The benefits of having compact entries in the database are available today with Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7 and Sun OpenDS Standard Edition 2.2, writes Ludovic Poitou in his blog "Sun Directory Compresses Data for Better Performance," adding that both solutions are helping customers to reduce the overall cost of ownership of the directory services. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/opt-sysadmin/22804 Installing Oracle 11g R2 on Solaris 10 with EMC PowerPath The task of installing a multi-node RAC cluster of Oracle 11g R2 on Solaris 10 with an EMC PowerPath has acquired the reputation of being a troublesome assignment. In the interests of sparing readers some of the tribulations, Dossy Shiobara has written a guide to the installation that gathers heretofore difficult to find suggestions in a single, how-to source. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/JavaFX/22818 A Glance at the New UI Layout Control Components in JavaFX 1.2 "JavaFX 1.2 UI Control Components: Part 1, Layouts" by Robert Eckstein, java.sun.com senior staff writer, discusses the new user interface (UI) control components that are features of JavaFX SDK 1.2. He explains that these components replace those in earlier versions that were derived from Swing and that limited users to the desktop profile. The new control components, Eckstein writes, enable developers to create more compelling graphical capabilities with the JavaFX scene graph. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/Solaris/22825 In the Linux vs. Solaris Debate, Watch out for Scalability FUD Yet another entry in the Linux vs. Solaris scalability debate. This time it comes in Garrett D'Amore's blog "Scalability FUD", where he argues that, at least in the HPC arena, most operations involve "user" rather than "sys" time and, therefore, the calls to inter-thread synchronization are relatively few. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/hw/22828 What is Flash Memory and Where Will Flash Technologies Lead? The basics of flash memory are the topic of a blog entry in The Zone Manager. Engineer Brad Diggs attempts to explain why flash through the ZFS secondary cache, or L2ARC, and ZFS Intent Log (ZIL) can improve overall directory performance. He also asserts the use of flash memory and ZFS will enable "radical" new directory services architectures, and explains further in a secondary posting. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/trademarks/22840 Copyrights and Trademarks (c) 2010 System News, Inc. All rights reserved. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/news/22831 Oracle's Financial Analyst Discussion (Transcript) Oracle Investor Relations VP Ken Bond and CFO and Executive VP Jeff Epstein outlined the plans for Sun Microsystems within the Oracle organization and then fielded questions from the press in a session on the Oracle + Sun Strategy Update/Financial Analyst Call held on January 27, 2010. Here are some highlights. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/sec/22832 Security News Bites Oracle and Sun Directory Services Oracle's Sun Identity Management Strategy “Identity Management: Securing Information in the HIPAA Environment” ZFS Crypto Project OpenSSO REST Interfaces for Entitlements Service DPS Coherence Plug-in Drupal with AMP Stack AMI build on Hardened Security OpenSolaris 2008.11 AMI http://blogs.systemnews.com/ http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/CloudComputing/22830 Oracle's Cloud Computing Forum Oracle's Cloud Computing Forum will kick-off its North American leg of the tour on Feb. 23, in L.A., while simultaneously continuing its Europe, Middle East, and Africa tour and Asia Pacific tour on the topic with events in London, Munich, and Seoul on the same day. The event stands in contrast to CEO Larry Ellison's well-publicized mocking of cloud computing, which he has deemed a rebranding and conflation of existing technologies. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/feature/22813 Cutting Carbon Footprint Is Only Part of the Payoff in Data Center Design "Greening Your Data Center: The Real Deal," an article on eWeek.com by Matthew Sarrel, reports on the interesting current phenomenon in IT, the "greening" of the data center. Striving after ever bigger market share is only part of the motive in this game, Sarrel writes. The other elements involve being able to offer customers both reduced carbon footprints and reduced IT costs as well. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/Oracle/22812 Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression (EHCC) A new technical white paper on Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression (EHCC) explains what Exadata compression is and how it works. Considered an important feature for data warehouse customers, Exadata compression increases performance while reducing the overall cost of storage. Warehouse compression and archive compression are two new Oracle Exadata Storage Server features highlighted in this December 2009 eight-page Oracle white paper. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/Oracle/22808 "Optimizing and Protecting Storage with Oracle Database 11g Release 2" A 22-page Oracle white paper focuses on key Oracle Database 11g capabilities that its authors believe can help IT departments better optimize their storage infrastructure and enable administrators to deliver a cost effective, scalable information management platform, which is easy to manage and delivers the required performance and availability needed for their datacenters. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/storage/22800 Learn How to Install ADempiere With PostgreSQL on Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System Step-by-step instructions have been published for using the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System (release 2008.Q4) as a repository for the PostgreSQL database for the ADempiere open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) application. Penned by Praneet Tiwani, the technical article provides all the configuration details as well as installation of ADempiere and test procedures. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/pr-partner/22835 Oracle Agrees to Acquire AmberPoint and Convergin Oracle is planning on extending its portfolio in middleware and telecommunications, with two new proposed acquisitions: SOA specialist AmberPoint and telecoms solution provider Convergin. Oracle expects AmberPoint to strengthen its Oracle Fusion Middleware SOA Suite and Oracle Enterprise Manager with best-in-class SOA management capabilities; while Convergin's real-time service brokering solutions will complement Oracle Communications’ integrated product suite. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/ja/22822 Demonstrating How to Use GlassFish ESB 2.2 Go through the build, integrations, and some of the design patterns used in creating an online demonstration based on GlassFish Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) 2.2. In a series of blog entries, readers will be taken through the process of building Oracle-Sun's UK-Pre-Sales team's new Cars Online Demonstration. Originally built using the SeeBeyond ICAN product set, it was decided to try and build the demo using GlassFish ESB 2.2 to leverage its functionality and flexibility. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/opt-sysadmin/22827 How Hybrid Storage Pools Provide Greater Performance and Efficiency for Less Hybrid storage pools (HSPs) enable users to deploy multiple types of storage media together and manage them as a single pool. An Oracle-Sun white paper provides insight into HSPs and discusses their primary benefits, including increased throughput without a full-scale SSD deployment; simplified and centralized management of hybrid storage environments; increased flexibility and scalability for future performance or capacity issues; and much more. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/MySQL/22826 "Creating a Simple Web Application Using a MySQL Database" Learn how to create a simple web application that connects to a MySQL database server in a tutorial authored by Troy Giunipero, who also covers other web development technologies in his piece, such as JavaServer Pages (JSP), JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL), the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) API, and two-tier, client-server architecture. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/news/22820 Oracle Positioned in Gartner's Leaders Quadrant The Gartner Magic Quadrant has positioned Oracle as a leader in the 2010 Business Intelligence (BI) Platforms, Corporate Performance Management (CPM) Suites, and Data Integration. Gartner's Magic Quadrant depicts the information technology research and advisory company’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace at and for a specific time period. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/OpenSolaris/22801 "Fast Track to OpenSolaris" India's largest IT magazine Digit published a special 96 page mini book entitled "Fast Track to OpenSolaris" that covers Install, ZFS, DTrace, Source Juicer, and more. Kumar Abhishek, leader of the Mumbai OpenSolaris User Group, authored the piece, described as a "quick and dirty guide to OpenSolaris". The mini book is now available for download. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/ev/22834 Learn More About the Combination of Oracle and Sun Technologies If you'd like to hear directly from Oracle and Sun executives about the combination of the two companies' technologies and what it might mean for you and your company, then consider attending a special Welcome Event being presented at select cities around the world. Designed as an informative session, this event will explore Oracle's plans to engineer and deliver open and integrated systems - from applications to disk. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/3/OpenOffice/22833 OpenOffice.org 3.2 Available for Download OpenOffice.org 3.2 for Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and Solaris is now available for download. This version is both a feature and bug release offering faster start up times, enhanced ODF 1.2 compliance, improved MS Office compatibility and support, and over 750 bug fixes. Numerous enhancements have been made in both stability and speed. For example, Writer and Calc have both reduced 'cold start' time by 46% since version 3.0 was released just over a year ago, the OpenOffice team reports. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/sw/22784 Topology-aware Scheduling in Sun Grid Engine 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/HPC/22811 New HPC Installation Goes Online at University of Strathclyde 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/VendorVoice/22807 Best Practices on Securing Enterprise Operating Systems 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/storage/22799 "Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007" 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." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/JavaFX/22829 JavaFX Platform Is the Official Rich Client Technology for the 2010 Winter Games 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/trademarks/22815 Copyrights and Trademarks (c) 2010 System News, Inc. All rights reserved. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/Oracle/22803 What's New in Oracle Exadata V2? 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/ja/22771 Sun GlassFish Enterprise Service Bus 2.2 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/sw/22770 Sun OpenDS Standard Edition 2.2 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/OpenOffice/22789 Implement and Integrate the OpenDocument Format into Your Environment 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/Virtualization/22754 "Architecting Superior Virtualization Performance with Sun and AMD" 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/opt-sysadmin/22806 Updated PatchFinder Adds Two New Features 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/ev/22821 Oracle Database February Webcasts 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/server/22785 New Sun Server Hardware Management Pack 1.3 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/feature/22755 Mind Candy Upgrades Moshi Monsters IT Platform with Sun Technology 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/news/22824 Oracle's Game-changing Corporate Technology Play 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." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/opt-dev/22781 Outline for a Proof of Concept for a Simple Storage Service "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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/news/22810 Hot Datacenter Technologies in 2010 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/pr-partner/22817 Former Sun Channel Executive Hired by Oracle 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/Oracle/22809 "The Underground Oracle VM Manual" 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/2/Healthcare/22772 Sun StorageTek Infrastructure Helps Healthcare Provider Achieve 30% Faster Backup Geisinger Health Systems upgraded its IT environment with a Sun StorageTek tape solution that strengthened the organization's regulatory compliance while improving performance and data integrity at its primary and remote datacenter sites. The new back up and recovery solution stores and encrypts healthcare records from its mainframe system for more than two million patients. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/1/VendorVoice/22795 Sun and Force10 Collaborate to Bring Network Automation to the Masses Customers are looking to vendors for ways to address the pervasive data center virtualization and ever increasing demands for scale. Sun’s Project Crossbow (Sun’s Crossbow) and Force10 together are bringing a unique answer to the market in an open standards approach. Sun and Force10 are able to demonstrate to customers that VLAN Automation as a first step into complete Network Automation is within reach and does not require proprietary hardware or software stacks. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/1/feature/22688 Rapidly Deploy Mission-Critical Services Out-of-the-Box If rapid deployment of strategic, mission-critical applications in a non-datacenter environment is a necessity, then the Tadpole Mobile Enterprise Kit (MEK) may be the right solution for your organization. Tadpole MEK is a complete, prepackaged mobile datacenter that provides immediate availability with an out-of-the-box, working infrastructure in the field utilizing pre-staged applications for the deployment of mission critical services. The mobile-rugged computing solution consists of a high performance, dual socket, AMD Opteron powered VM2200a Mobile Server/Workstation with a Tadpole M1400 Ultra-Thin Client. Housed in a hardened transit case, Tadpole MEK allows organizations to run and securely access essential Solaris, Linux, and Windows-based applications in native environments or supported virtual environments under the most demanding field conditions. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/1/Performance/22787 Who is the Real Leader on the SAP Benchmark - Sun or HP? How valid are HP's claims of pre-eminence in SAP SD benchmarks? In a Sun Performance and Best Practices blog, Guido Ficco comments on significant SAP SD 2 Tier results and HP claims. According to Ficco, HP's claims rely on data skewed to establish their result. In defense of his position, Ficco cites the results for the latest version of SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode). http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/1/sw/22777 Veritas Volume Manager and File System Now Supported on SPARC and X64 Platforms Get support for the latest version of selected Veritas Storage Foundation software components with Solaris Cluster. Veritas Volume Manager and File System, part of Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1, are now supported on SPARC and X64 platforms with Solaris Cluster 3.2 11/09 and 3.2 1/09. Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) 5.1 Cluster Functionality (CVM) is supported on SPARC only. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/1/opt-sysadmin/22742 "IO Sizes and Alignments with DTrace" Using DTrace to secure a more comprehensive view of IO sizes and alignments than is possible with iostat, for example, is the subject of Lisa Noordergraaf's blog "IO Sizes and Alignments with DTrace." The problem with iostat, she writes, is that while that utility does show the total number of reads and writes, it does not provide the necessary detail about individual sizes and alignments (start addresses) of the IOs as DTrace can. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/1/trademarks/22792 Copyrights and Trademarks (c) 2010 System News, Inc. All rights reserved. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/1/Solaris/22782 Tutorial on IP Multipathing (IPMP) Joerg Moellenkamp has published an "IPMP - Tutorial Sneak Preview" for those interested in learning more about IP Multipathing (IPMP). He discusses the IPMP implementation in both Solaris 10/older versions of OpenSolaris as well as the current releases of OpenSolaris (Build 107 and up). Beginning with definitions and basic concepts, which are then followed through with more specific details, Moellenkamp offers insight into using IPMP, ending with tips and tricks even seasoned users may not know. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/1/tr/22776 New Featured Training Offerings New listings of Sun Learning Services instructor-led and live virtual class were recently noted. Some of these classes cover topics on Developing Web Applications using JSF technologies, Virtualization and Cloud Computing Concepts, Solaris 10 Patching Best Practices, and Sun Ops Center Administration. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/1/news/22805 Oracle's Plans for Sun Products, Technologies The Jan. 27 Oracle presentation on its product strategy for integrating Sun hardware and software produced a lot of information on a variety of solutions and technologies. In this article, readers will find links and references from many different sources to help find material on their valued interests. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/1/server/22764 Server News Bites T5140/T5240 Better IO Redundancy Than IBM Power 520 Server Updating Firmware on ILOM-based Sun Servers New 2TB SATA Drives for Sun Storage J4200 and J4400 Arrays Hot-pluggable, 2TB, 3.5-inch, 7200 RPM SATA Drive for Sun Fire X4275 Servers Sun Fire X4540 Controller Module ATO Option with 128 GB Memory http://blogs.systemnews.com/ http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/1/Oracle/22790 Oracle E-Business Suite, Virtualization and Cloud Computing In a five-part series on virtualization and cloud topics, Ivo Dujmovic, an architect in Oracle's Applications Technology Integration group, offers a detailed view of the Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.1 for prospective and current users. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/1/JavaFX/22761 JavaFX and Why You Should Give It a Try Java Champion and Rock Star Adam Bien, author of "Real World Java EE Patterns," shared his views on JavaFX with Janice J. Heiss in interview published in January 2010. Getting right to the heart of the subject, he identified the inclusion of "good skinnable components" in version JavaFX 1.2 as a welcome improvement. "JavaFX requires writing less code while it integrates very well with existing business logic written in Java. A reason to go the JavaFX route is better maintainability, and faster development with less code," he said. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/1/HPC/22783 A Solution to HPC Application Performance Improvement The Sun Storage Solutions white paper "Turbo-charging HPC Application Performance with Flash Storage: Changing the Focus from Processing to Moving Data Faster" contends that, with ever more CPU cores and more GFLOPS per core, HPC application performance will be determined by the ability to move data in and out of fast processors. This paper examines how Flash technology can be deployed and the effect it will have on HPC workloads. It examines various Flash technologies and compares their performance on leading HPC application benchmarks. Finally, the performance characteristics of the Flash-based Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System is described. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/1/OpenStorage/22528 Sun Unified Storage System Cuts Costs While Increasing Availability and Scalability Global publishing group Elanders provides “infomedia” content in print and online as well as archives documents and images on systems at its main office and two remote sites. With its technology reaching its end of life in 2008, Elander began researching the market and decided to deploy a 66TB Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System. The group reports it has cut administration time by 50%, power consumption by up to 50%, reduced customer costs by 40%, and its infrastructure is 10 times as scalable. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/1/ev/22798 Datacenter Design Really Matters A multi-city tour is planned to discuss datacenter design. The half-day event offers a presentation and panel discussion with information on Sun's experiences in building some of the world's greenest datacenters along with tips on building better datacenter efficiencies. Registration is currently underway. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/1/Financial/22780 Customers Demand RFID Capability for IT Assets RFID has found an application other than merchandise tracking. Now, major financial institutions such as Wells Fargo and Bank of America are using RFID as an asset control technology to track their IT equipment. Responding to the needs of its customers, Sun has begun installing RFID tags in the products it markets at the point of manufacture, reports Mary Catherine O'Connor in RFID Journal. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/1/FOSS/22794 Free Software Appeals to CIOs A recent poll of US and UK CIOS finds that a majority of firms are using free software applications across their networks, and plan to increase their usage of free software. According to marketing-research firm Vanson Bourne, about 76 percent of CIOs surveyed claimed they use free software applications at the organizational level, while 88 percent said they have deployed free software applications at departmental levels. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/1/ja/22793 Java for Business Java for Business is a support offering that provides up to 15 years of support for versions of Java SE that have reached their End of Life (EOL) status and access to releases of software that are unavailable anywhere else. Created for customers who wished to continue using J2SE 1.4.2 after it had reached EOL status, Java for Business allows customers to continue to receive security updates and minor feature updates for up to 10 years with Standard or Premium support levels, and up to 15 years with a Premium Plus support plan. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/144/1/server/22779 PTO Configurations and X-options Available for Enhanced M3000 Server Pick to Order (PTO) configurations are available for Oracle's Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000 Server with new 2.75GHz SPARC64 VII Processor. The newly enhanced server also offers a new 667MHz DIMMs X-option. The M3000 is only available in PTO configurations, therefore upgrading from the 2.52GHz processor to the 2.75GHz processor requires purchasing a new 2.75GHz system. Trade-in allowances for Oracle's Sun SPARC Enterprise servers are available for up to 15%. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/HPC/22753 The Virtues of Virtualization 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." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/opt-sysadmin/22732 ZPool Splitting 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/Solaris/22708 Using Live Upgrade for Veritas Volume Manager and/or Solaris OS 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/news/22766 Oracle Completes Purchase of Sun Oracle is hiring 2,000 salespeople and engineers to sell not just software but hardware, now that Oracle’s 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 Sun’s SPARC/Solaris server and storage hardware. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/trademarks/22768 Copyrights and Trademarks (c) 2010 System News, Inc. All rights reserved. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/BigAdmin/22796 What's New on BigAdmin 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 http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/Virtualization/22748 InfoWorld Reviews Sun VirtualBox 3.1 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/storage/22752 "Sun Systems for Sun StorageTek Enterprise Backup Software" 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/sw/22757 Dynamic Resource Reallocation and Apache Hadoop with Sun Grid Engine 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/ja/22765 Java News Bites 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/ http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/workstation/22720 Sun Ray Thin Clients and Software Save Corporation an Estimated $270,000 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/Oracle/22751 Free eBook: Guide to Oracle 11g and Database Migration 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/HPC/22704 Sun HPC Solution Ushers in Teraflop-scale Applications for Brazilian Computing Grid 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/JavaFX/22747 New and Updated Java-FX How-to Topics 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/news/22760 Build-to-Order Containerized Data Center Solutions 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/storage/22736 Sun BluePrints: "LDoms I/O Best Practices" 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/sec/22727 Using the Service Management Facility Feature of OpenSolaris "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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/Virtualization/22763 Logical Domains (LDoms) 1.3 Released 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/opt-sysadmin/22700 SugarCRM with MySQL on Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/4/Solaris/22740 Best Practices Guide for Moving to Solaris 10 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/news/22739 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) Run on Sun Sun Microsystems of Canada will be responsible for managing the IT infrastructure supporting the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) in Vancouver, Canada. The assignment entails connecting 15 networked venues and three datacenters, running multiple business applications and an integration test lab, and keeping 10,000 media outlets up to date with over 100 TB of data. This technology infrastructure will handle daily operations as well as share real-time data with billions worldwide. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/hw/22702 Choosing SPARC or Intel Processors Are the advances in Intel processor design edging SPARC processors out of the marketplace, asks Karim Berrah in a recent blog entitled "SPARC or Intel?" He offers some points of comparison that result in a necessarily ambiguous conclusion, as each processor has advantages in its favor, according to him. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/Performance/22735 A Better Benchmarking Tool: vdbench vs. dd(1M) Although it was never intended by its developers to be used as a benchmarking tool, the dd utility -- a simple, basic utility -- is nevertheless frequently used as a sequential workload generator for quick tests, writes Lisa Noordergraaf in the blog "Pitfalls of Benchmarking Flash with dd(1M)." She recommends vdbench as an alternative. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/trademarks/22746 Copyrights and Trademarks (c) 2010 System News, Inc. All rights reserved. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/pr-partner/22758 New Enterprise Software and Business Application Store, GetApp.com GetApp.com offers a simple way for enterprise buyers to research applications and a low cost channel for providers to be found online. With GetApp.co business buyers can find, compare, review and choose from a wide range of enterprise applications. Application providers can list their applications for free and reach out to a new global audience of active buyers. With Premium services they obtain high-quality traffic to their website and receive sales leads relevant to their target markets http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/news/22762 EU Approves Sun Acquisition by Oracle The European Commission has issued regulatory approval for Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Inc. for $7.4 billion. Oracle announced the news Jan. 21, and revealed it also expects unconditional approval from China and Russia. It intends to close the transaction shortly. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has scheduled a live event set to take place Jan. 27, to lay out the plans for combining the two companies and their products. Registration for the event, which will be broadcast globally, is currently underway. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/BigAdmin/22773 What's New on BigAdmin Updated: Solaris Cluster Hub on BigAdmin This collection of information and resources for Sun's high-availability and clustering solutions is aimed at system planners, integrators, and administrators who use Solaris Cluster (also known as Sun Cluster). Installing Alfresco With MySQL on Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage System This implementation guide shows how to set up a Sun Unified Storage System as a data store for a MySQL database used by the open source Alfresco content management system. The scenario can use NFS or iSCSI protocols. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/OpenSolaris/22744 OpenSolaris News Bites OpenSolaris Supports Sun Storage J4000 Arrays ZFS send dedup integrated in OpenSolaris Trusted Extensions Support for CUPS iSCI Boot Installing OpenSolaris on SPARC using LiveCD iSCI SAN Enabling xVM on OpenSolaris Creating Paravirtualized CentOS 5.3 DomU Configuring a Home File Server Sun Supported IPS Repositories Setting Keyboard Layouts Other OpenSolaris Tips and Tricks http://blogs.systemnews.com/ http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/opt-edu/22717 "Deploying Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solution on Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems" The Sun BigAdmin paper "Deploying Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions [9.0] on Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System" explains that the solution can be successfully deployed with Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems, provided the underlying application server, web server, and relational database management system (RDBMS) platforms are installed and configured correctly. Author Abhishek Gupta outlines the details of the process required to implement this deployment. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/ja/22729 GlassFish Enterprise Service Bus High Availability and Clustering GlassFish Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a lightweight and agile integration product suite for services-based and composite application development. A recently released Sun white paper details a reference architecture for a typical deployment solution based on a real-world system that manages a customer's loan application process. The solution accepts requests via web services-based interfaces, manages corresponding business processes, handles faults correctly and integrates with existing back-end systems. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/FOSS/22733 What Is the Outlook for Open Source? Simon Phipps and Bob Worrall, two Sun stalwarts who know as much or more than anyone else about the value of open source solutions, share their views of the state of open source in Worrall's Sun Inner Circle column, "Open Source: Where We've Been and Where It's Headed." The column is addressed to the corporate CIOs among its readers. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/OpenOffice/22725 Reasons Behind Accelerating Adoption of OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org has been downloaded more than 100 million times in the past year. A Sun Inner Circle article takes a closer look at the reasons behind the accelerating adoption of OpenOffice.org, and offers a suggested migration roadmap along with advice to those organizations considering a move to the free, open-source, multi-platform, multilingual productivity suite. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/EOL/22693 Vintage Custom Support for Solaris 2.6 and 7 Reach End of Service Life Vintage customer support for Solaris 2.6 and 7 have reached retirement. Support calls will no longer be accepted and patch access will no longer be available for these versions, Sun reports. It is recommended that all customers using Solaris upgrade to the latest release, version 10. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/Solaris/22515 Packaging and Patching, ZFS Enhancements in Solaris 10 10/09 Bob Netherton demonstrates how some of the new features in Solaris 10 10/09 or Update 8 work. He concentrates on SVR4 package commands, Zones parallel patching, installing flash archive from an existing ZFS root system, setting ZFS properties on the initial zpool file system, adding persistent read ahead caches to a ZFS zpool, new cache control properties, applying user and group quotas to a file system, new space usage properties to ZFS file systems, and a few others. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/server/22734 A Solution for Sprawling Datacenters: Sun Fire X4640 Server Get scalable and manageable x64 computing in dense and serviceable rackmount enclosures with the Sun Fire X4640 server. Based on the latest six-core AMD Opteron processors, this server can help scale, virtualize, and consolidate datacenter infrastructure. Learn how in a 44-page Sun white paper that examines the server's architecture, along with its key software components. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/Government/22724 Why Open Source Solutions are Good for Government Governments globally are embracing open source policies. The White House moved its Web platform to open source this past fall with the goal of reducing costs and improving security. Bill Vass, president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems Federal, Inc., shares his views on why governments are embracing open source solutions, relaying six key reasons, and offers some guidelines on evaluating open source products. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/pr-partner/22701 Sun Startup Essentials Member Last.fm Streams Success Last.fm is a popular Internet radio site for music. Founded in 2002, it now claims over 30 million active users based in more than 200 countries. In its early stages of development, Last.fm turned to Sun and the Sun Startup Essentials program to help it get up and running. Over the past two or so years, Sun has saved the organization money, reduced its output, and helped Last.fm scale beyond boundaries it never thought feasible, writes Sun's Stewart Townsend, who shares a blog from Last.fm engineering team member Mike Brodbelt on its Xbox LIVE launch. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/bk/22741 "SOA with Java" - Rough Cut Available The book "SOA with Java" is a comprehensive tutorial that explains and demonstrates how to build and implement service-oriented solutions by combining established SOA principles, patterns, and practices with modern Java services technology. An entire chapter is devoted to OpenESB, a Java based open source enterprise service bus that can be used as a platform for both Enterprise Application Integration and SOA. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/CloudComputing/22738 To Move or Not to Move Applications to the Cloud A Sun white paper discusses points to consider when deciding whether to move applications, services or components into the cloud. It defines a methodology to help enterprises determine whether an application can be ported to run in the cloud, or if it can be refactored or optimized to make the move, and if it is worth it. An example of using the methodology is presented in an assessment of a two-tier Web service, while another example involves an enterprise database cluster. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/opt-sysadmin/22694 Hybrid Storage Pools With Sun Flash Technology and Solaris ZFS Sun staff engineer and technical marketing manager Roger Bitar provides an overview of Flash technology, and discusses its introduction into a new tier of storage infrastructure. In a Sun BluePrints article, Bitar explains how companies can utilize Flash technology and the Solaris ZFS file system to take advantage of the high performance of enterprise solid state drives (SSDs) and other Flash storage devices. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/3/storage/22705 AcceleratIng DB2 On-line Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Data Warehouse Performance If accelerating on-line transaction processing (OLTP) and data warehouse performance holds any interest, then take a look at Sun Technical Staffer Cherry Shu's article on using the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array with IBM DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows. A Sun Blueprints article authored by Shu explains how the combination of flash and disk technology can be applied to overcome disk latency bottlenecks that impede performance for applications such as the DB2 database. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/trademarks/22723 Copyrights and Trademarks (c) 2010 System News, Inc. All rights reserved. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/BigAdmin/22750 What's New on BigAdmin 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). http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/feature/22601 The Autonomous Audi TTS Project "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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/Healthcare/22630 Meeting HIPAA/HITECH Compliance Requirements with Sun Solutions The Sun white paper "Identity and Access Management: Enabling HIPAA/HITECH Compliance" explores the requirements that healthcare organizations and vendors face as they become more reliant on digital information technology and the need to comply with increasing regulatory requirements, which presents a range of challenges. Author Mark Dixon includes best practices for implementing identity management systems that help ensure compliance, and shows how Sun’s pragmatic approach to identity management simplifies the technology environment. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/opt-sysadmin/22642 "Taking Advantage of Wire-Speed Cryptography" The Sun BluePrints paper "Taking Advantage of Wire-Speed Cryptography" provides an overview of how to off-load application security functions that include cryptographic operations in conjunction with Oracle WebLogic Server and Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE platform) application environments in order to accelerate performance while minimizing compromises. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/Solaris/22535 Solaris Cluster Meets Virtualization and High-Availability Requirements 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/storage/22685 Recent Release: Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/MySQL/22587 Virgin Mobile France Subscribes to Sun's MySQL Enterprise Unlimited Offering 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/OpenStorage/22721 Open Storage News Bites 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/ http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/ja/22689 Sun GlassFish Message Queue 4.4u1 The release late last year of the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 brings with it the end of service life (EOSL) of the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 Prelude. Get details on the announcement along with information on the Sun GlassFish Message Queue 4.4u1 and more on Enterprise Server v3. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/opt-dev/22696 Handling Application State Changes in a Database 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/sec/22698 Two Approaches to Identity Management Project Methodology 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/server/22737 Enhanced SPARC Enterprise M3000 Server 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/OpenOffice/22707 Using OpenOffice.org with a MySQL Database 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/opt-sysadmin/22631 Quick Start Guide: VMware on Sun 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/server/22684 Sun Fire X4640 Servers with Six-Core AMD Opteron Processors Sun Fire X4640 servers with six-core AMD Opteron processors have proven to increase performance per watt by up to 34% over previous generation quad-core AMD Opteron Processors, Sun reports. Read more about what this Sun x64 server offers in terms of compute, I/O, availability, management, and performance. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/sw/22610 Must Have Applications for the Mac OS X 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/ja/22628 Java Verified Releases Tips for Solving Java ME Signing Issues "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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/news/22726 Sun VirtualBox 3.1 Earns a Technology of the Year Award 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/HPC/22699 Sun HPC Consortium 2009 Videos and PDFs 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/MySQL/22719 Resources for MySQL on Windows MySQL on Windows continues to be a popular choice for independent software vendors, original equipment manufacturers, hosting providers and organizations developing custom web, departmental and enterprise applications. The MySQL Website has several resources on using the open source database software on Windows, including access to a free, technical webinar set for Jan. 21. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/2/FOSS/22511 Free GUI Applications/Tools to Better Understand Your System 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. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/trademarks/22715 Copyrights and Trademarks (c) 2010 System News, Inc. All rights reserved. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/BigAdmin/22730 What's New on BigAdmin Deploying Oracle 10g or 11gR1 ASM Using iSCSI on Sun Unified Storage Systems This quick-start guide provides an overview of configuring the volumes in a Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System. First the volumes are exported as iSCSI targets, and then those iSCSI LUNs are configured at the database server for use with Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM). Patching With Solaris Live Upgrade: Process Flow Chart A new diagram provides the steps for using Solaris Live Upgrade to patch a system. Other resources for patching have also been added recently to the BigAdmin Patching Center. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/Solaris/22504 Solaris Auditing (BSM): Dispelling Some of the Myths Difficulty is an argument that won't wash with Ben Rockwood when it comes to skeptics on the issue of Solaris Auditing (BSM). It is truly a simple process, he argues. The difficulty is that most of the tutorials available on the subject fail to deal adequately with exactly how to make use of auditing data. In a recent post, Rockwood discusses how to make intelligent use of the audit trails that result. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/opt-sysadmin/22598 Step-by-step Intro to iSCSI Booting for x86/x64 Platforms Sun's Federal Services Chief Technologist Peter Colson has written a post entitled, "Introduction to iSCSI Booting for x86/x64 Platforms." Initially a skeptic about iSCSI booting, Colson is now a convert, having realized that the technique offers better storage utilization, economy, and easier, less risky disaster recovery. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/Performance/22713 Performance News Bites Sun Fire X4640 Sets Record on SPECompL2001 Outstanding Performance of Sun Blade X6275 on FLUENT Sun Blades Running NAMD Molecular Dynamics Benchmark Beat IBM Sun and Oracle Demonstrate World's Fastest Database Performance Sun Ultra 27 With nVidia Graphics Card on SPECviewperf 10 Benchmark Sun Storage 6780 Array 51% Better Price/Performance than IBM DS5300 http://blogs.systemnews.com/ http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/storage/22677 A Brief Look at Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array A Sun blog considers the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array with an overview of the business and technology environment leading up to the development and release of the database accelerator, and highlights its benefits, design, use, and architecture. "This blazing fast storage is a trail blazer in its category and way ahead of traditional storage that would need over 3000 disk drives to put up an equivalent performance," the writer notes. "With the full array consuming only 300W, it is a big saving on space and power - a hundred times over." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/sw/22697 Sun Java Web Server 7.0 Update 7 Released Released in Dec., Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 Update 7 is a full multi-language product installation. It comes with performance and stability improvements, plus support for Kerberos via Simple Protected GSS-API Negotiation (SPNEGO) authentication and more. The Sun Java System Web Server delivers a single, secure infrastructure for all web technologies and applications. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/Healthcare/22718 Java CAPS Selected to Develop Integrated Healthcare Services Medical device company TechniScan, Inc. is developing an automated breast ultrasound imaging system called SVARA to improve diagnosing and treating breast cancer. To bring its SVARA ultrasound technology to market faster, TechniScan has selected a Sun Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) solution architecture based on Sun's Java Composite Application Platform Suite (CAPS) and is engaged with Sun to provide expert implementation services. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/MySQL/22665 Securing MySQL in a Chrooted Environment: A How-to Chrooting, a technique commonly used with MySQL at the file system level, is typically achieved by creating a separated and minimal operating system disk-image to improve system and application security by providing them with a higher degree of isolation. Thierry Manfe has written a how-to that goes a step farther, utilizing the zone and Crossbow virtualization technologies that come with OpenSolaris to get to the next level in terms of isolation. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/NetBeans/22695 A Guide to Using NetBeans IDE with Kenai Projects Developers in search of an integrated development environment that offers an opportunity for working as part of a team should have a look at "A Guide to Using NetBeans IDE with Kenai Projects." This tutorial demonstrates how the collaborative tools in the IDE enable users to take advantage of the services offered by the Kenai.com infrastructure and facilitate communication and sharing among developers who are working on a project hosted on Kenai.com. The combination of Kenai services and the integrated support in NetBeans IDE provides a complete development environment. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/server/22650 Sun Fire X4140, X4240, and X4440 Server Architecture White Paper Get details on the systems architecture of the Sun Fire X4140, X4240, and X4440 servers, and learn more about their key software components in a 52-page PDF. Sun Fire X4140, X4240, and X4440 servers provide a range of dense and scalable systems based on the latest quad- and six-core AMD Opteron processors. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/news/22712 Survey Reveals Strong Growth in UNIX Market What are the implications of the numerous migrations by UNIX users to Linux and to Windows, the folks at Gabriel Consulting Group asked their survey audience. Turns out the answer may not be the imminent demise of UNIX, since, among its other virtues, the platform's availability and security and its virtualization capabilities enable consolidation and cost reductions that appeal to more than just a few users. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/opt-sysadmin/22531 Sun Labs Technical Report on Hardware Transactional Memory Experimentation Sun architects are making groundbreaking progress towards sophisticated synchronization support for multicore systems, find Dave Dice, Yossi Lev, Mark Moir, Dan Nussbaum, and Marek Olszewski. In their research for a Sun Labs technical report on commercial hardware transactional memory (H), the men report on a number of promising results using H to improve performance in a variety of contexts, in addition to lessons learned on more effectively using the feature. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/ja/22687 Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3 Virtual Conference - Replay Available A replay of the Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3 Virtual Conference, which took place on Dec. 15, is available. There are 16 individual sessions, all of which can be accessed separately so viewers can pick and choose the topic(s) of interest to watch. Also, anyone interested in learning even more about Java EE 6 may want to sign-up for a one-week online codecamp, which begins Jan. 12. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/feature/22451 Sun/Oracle Solution Ups Transaction Capacity by 52x for StubHub StubHub, an eBay affiliate, and the world's largest ticket marketplace, upgraded a mission-critical, online transaction processing (OLTP) database from Oracle 9i Real Application Clusters (RAC) to Oracle 10g RAC. To take advantage of high scalability and mainframe-class performance, StubHub also moved the database from a 32-bit platform to a 64-bit platform with Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/Solaris/22521 "Creating a Solaris 10 x86 OS Bootable DVD or CD" Having a bootable DVD for system recovery and bare-metal rebuilds is essential to many system administrators. Ross Moffatt has shared his approach for a full install onto a 16G virtual disk using a zfs root file system. Moffatt's work begins with a system that runs the Solaris 10 OS for x86 platforms within a Sun VirtualBox. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/Oracle/22703 "Deploy Oracle 10g or 11gR1 ASM Using iSCSI on Sun Unified Storage Systems" The Internet SCSI (iSCSI) protocol allows a client system (initiator) to send SCSI commands to targets on a remote server over an existing IP network infrastructure, thus providing a low cost alternative to a Storage Area Network (SAN) infrastructure. Learn how to configure the volumes in the Sun Open Storage system so they can be exported as iSCSI targets, and then configure those iSCSI LUNs at the database server to be used for Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM). http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/opt-sysadmin/22510 Aligning Flash Modules for Optimal Performance Methods for aligning flash modules for optimal performance are the subject of a tech tip in the System and Application Performance, Monitoring, and Tuning wiki that outlines how to take advantage of the solid state flash devices (SSDs) for Solaris as well as Linux. Both Solaris and Linux methods are explored with this wiki tech tip offering up examples for each. The Solaris example works with SMI and EFI Labels, while the Linux lesson shows the use of fdisk and parted. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/ja/22585 Deep Dive Video: Java Warehouse and Java Store A three-part video deep dives into the Java Store and the Java Warehouse. The Java Store is a JavaFX-powered storefront that provides an easy and secure way to discover and acquire compelling Java and JavaFX applications. The Java Warehouse is the repository for applications submitted for distribution through the Java Store. Bernard Traversat, director of Engineering for the Java Store at Sun, discusses and demonstrates how to use the two with Sun Senior Information Engineer Ed Ort. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/CloudComputing/22675 "Building Customer Trust in Cloud Computing With Transparent Security" A 25-page Sun white paper introduces the concept of transparent security and makes the case that the intelligent disclosure of security design, practices, and procedures can help improve customer confidence while protecting critical security features and data, thereby improving overall governance. Written for prospective cloud computing customers, the paper presents a model leveraging the ISO 27000 series standards as a commonly understood framework for disclosure. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/Government/22508 Efficiencies in Cost, Performance, Production Improve Government Services The City of San Antonio (CoSA) allows its residents to pay a traffic ticket, apply for a job, or find information about the dozens of activities online. As its server infrastructure had sprawled to keep pace with its service delivery, CoSA decided to upgrade its IT infrastructure to reduce space, maintenance costs, and enhance service. The solution: Sun’s SPARC servers as a platform for Solaris 10 and Solaris Zones, which provided the best roadmap for return on investment (ROI) with its virtualization technologies and energy-efficient, mainframe-class servers. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/143/1/NetBeans/22690 Details on NetBeans 6.8 To help developers get the most out of Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3, the NetBeans IDE 6.8 is the first IDE to provide complete support for the Java EE 6 specification, including support for JSF 2.0 (Facelets), EJB 3.1, and GlassFish v3. This latest version of the integrated development environment also upgrades its support of dynamic languages with PHP 5.3 support and support for the Symfony framework, along with new improvements and features in several other areas. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/5/feature/22505 Sun Delivers a Silver Lining to SoundCloud The more than 250,000 artists and other music professionals who rely on the web-based platform provided by Germany's SoundCloud to send, receive and distribute their music find the experience enhanced by the company's use of Sun servers, Open Storage and the Startup Essentials Program, which have enabled SoundCloud to achieve a monthly growth rate of 25%. SoundCloud availed itself of the services of Sun Startup Essentials to migrate its Web server stack to a solution that includes virtual servers and a hybrid storage pool built with Sun technologies. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/5/storage/22682 The Clock Is Running for RAID-6 "How much longer will current RAID techniques persevere?" asks Adam Leventhal of Sun Fishworks in his paper for the Association for Computing Machinery entitled "Triple Parity RAID and Beyond." In the course of answering his question, the author examines RAID and its history, its rate of capacity growth in the hard-drive industry, and the need for triple-parity RAID as a response to diminishing reliability. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/5/Solaris/22462 Sun ZFS Plus Intel SSDs Equal Hybrid Storage Pools ZFS and hybrid storage pools (HSP) is the subject of a recent posting by Sun blogger "Thin Slice," who writes about the collaboration between Sun and Intel that has delivered the combination of ZFS and high performance, flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) to offer enterprises cutting-edge HSP innovation that can reduce the risk, cost, complexity, and deployment time of multi-tiered storage environments. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/5/ev/22645 Lustre User Group 2010 The Lustre User Group 2010 conference is set for April 14-16, in Aptos, Calif. on Monterey Bay. Registration for the event, which is ongoing, will be limited to 150 people to ensure the conference remains conversational and interactive. The first day of the conference will consist of a Lustre User Advanced Seminar and the following two days will cover a variety of topics, lead by both Sun experts and Lustre users. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/5/trademarks/22692 Copyrights and Trademarks (c) 2009 System News, Inc. All rights reserved. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/5/BigAdmin/22710 What's New on BigAdmin Community Article: Plex Mirroring for Business Continuity With Veritas Volume Manager and the Solaris 10 OS This community-submitted article shows how to configure a business continuity setup for a small IT environment using Veritas Storage Foundation version 4.1 (VxVM) from Symantec and the Solaris OS. The author used vxmake to create the individual elements such as subdisks and plexes. This article can provide an idea of how to handle the virtual entities of Veritas Volume Manager. Community Tech Tip: How to Leave Scripts Running When You Log Off A BigAdmin user posted this on our community wiki. The tech tip highlights the usefulness of the trap command for trapping the SIGTERM, 1, signal to enable scripts to keep running after the user who started the process logs off. It also shows the usefulness of trapping the SIGTERM, 15, signal and running commands just before a script exits. http://sun.com/bigadmin http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/5/OpenStorage/22649 Deploying Oracle Databases Using NFS on Sun Open Storage Systems A quick start guide shows how to deploy the Oracle Database using the NFS protocol with the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System release 2009.Q3. Authored by Sridhar Ranganathan and Jeffrey Wright, this 25-page BigAdmin feature provides the procedures and configuration details on this deployment scenario along with figures and screenshots to ease understanding. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/5/news/22668 The Relevancy of Sun in the IT Industry Darryl Taft with eWeek has assembled a slide presentation entitled "10 Reasons Why Sun is Still Relevant (an One Reason Why Not)". He states the questioning of Sun's relevance began when acquisition of the company started back in April with Oracle's proposed buyout. "But there are still a lot of factors that demonstrate how Sun's products and technology remain relevant and in demand in the IT industry," he writes. "This eWeek slide show illustrates why Sun still has a strong market influence." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/5/Service/22676 Introduction to Sun Shared Shell A three and a half minute Sun-sponsored video introduces Sun Shared Shell - a collaborative service tool that allows Sun Services engineers to remotely view and diagnose customers' computing issues. As part of the Sun Spectrum Support Service, Shared Shell is a Java application providing secure, shared, remote access. To demonstrate how it works, the video brief walks through the steps of how to access the tool and invite participants. It also presents the various communication tools available during these sessions that make collaboration easy and help overcome noise or language barriers. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/5/SunJavaSystem/22686 Sun Java Enterprise System 7 The Sun Java Enterprise System (JES) is a comprehensive set of subscription-based services that combines software, support, professional services, and educational services in a single package, for a single price. Sun JES consists of fully integrated enterprise services components that deliver: Web and Application services, Identity and Directory services, Communication and Collaboration services, Availability services, and Security services. Version 7 adds some of the latest updates made to various solutions within the Sun JES set of Suites. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/5/MySQL/22596 MySQL Performance in Virtualization Environment on xVM Hypervisor Orgad Kimchi reports on a performance study of MySQL's behavior within a Xen virtualized environment based on the xVM hypervisor and how the database software makes use of the UFS and the ZFS file system. The system performance benchmark SysBench was applied to test base performance for the configurations used in this experiment. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/5/sec/22533 Protecting the Enterprise from Attacks President and COO of Sun Microsystems Federal Bill Vass writes about developments at Sun in the area of enforcing Mandatory Access Control (MAC) with virtualization to confine Internet services with simple security configurations using the Solaris OS. Featured in the blog are the remarks of senior Sun researchers John Weeks and John Totah that explain how, in addition to enforcing MAC provisions, they also layered the MAC protection with what users ordinarily expect from employing all of the other Solaris security features combined with virtualization, eg. zones, and Internet community sponsored configuration guidelines such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/5/HPC/22643 Sun Constellation System at the Heart of CLUMEQ HPC Implementation CLUMEQ is a supercomputing consortium of universities in the province of Quebec, Canada. It includes McGill University, Universite Laval, and all nine components of the Universite du Quebec network. CLUMEQ supports scientific research in disciplines such as climate and ecosystems modeling, high energy particle physics, cosmology, nanomaterials, supramolecular modeling, bioinformatics, biophotonics, fluid dynamics, data mining and intelligent systems. Sun is providing the technology for this HPC implementation. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/5/bk/22648 "Solaris 10 Security Essentials" "Solaris 10 Security Essentials" describes the various security technologies contained in the Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems. The book describes how to make installations secure and how to configure the OS to the particular needs of your environment. The authors present the material in a straightforward way that makes it accessible to system administrators at all levels. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/5/opt-sysadmin/22503 White Paper: "Practicing Solaris Cluster Using VirtualBox" Learn how to set up a single x86-based system with OpenSolaris, configuring a training and development environment for Solaris 10/Solaris Cluster 3.2 and using VirtualBox to set up a two node cluster. These instructions can be found in the white paper "Practicing Solaris Cluster using VirtualBox" by Thorsten Frueauf. The presented configuration can be used to practice using various technologies such as Crossbow, COMSTAR, ZFS, IPsec, software quorum, and zone clusters. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/5/Virtualization/22479 Sun Ops Center: Changing the Economics of Datacenter Operations A Sun white paper discusses typical datacenter inefficiencies, commonly used strategies to resolve them, and how available technologies, like the Sun Ops Center, can lower costs over the lifecycle of a solution. "Sun Ops Center: Changing the Economics of Datacenter Operations" examines how the Sun Ops Center addresses monitoring frameworks, point-in-time provisioning - specifically OS provisioning tasks, software lifecycle management, and virtualization management, and how its approach is quite cost-efficient. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/5/SunJavaSystem/22608 Sun Java Communications Suite 7 on a Single Host The Sun Wiki "Deployment Example: Sun Java Communications Suite 7 on a Single Host" describes how to install Sun Java Communications Suite 7 software on one computer for a functioning deployment. This document is intended for any evaluator, system administrator, or installation technician who wants to install and evaluate the services delivered by these components. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/5/OpenSolaris/22606 Toshiba OpenSolaris Laptops Three of Toshiba's new laptops come with OpenSolaris installed: the Tecra M10, Portégé R600 and mini Notebook NB200. Toshiba's announcement credits the partnership between Sun and the Digital Products Division of Toshiba America Information Systems for providing an easy option for people who want to use Toshiba laptops with Sun's open source platform, which features Suspend/Resume, Timeslider, ZFS, among other. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/4/sw/22683 Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 5 Feature Release Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 5 is a feature update release with significant additions including data-aware scheduling, improved public cloud adapter technology and new commands for invoking power-saving software. Additionally, Update 5 includes improvements to the Sun Grid Engine Service Domain Manager and Sun Grid Engine Inspect modules. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/4/trademarks/22670 Copyrights and Trademarks (c) 2009 System News, Inc. All rights reserved. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/4/Performance/22609 Vdbench Test Results for Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe Card The Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCle Card is designed to accelerate IO-intensive applications, such as databases, at a fraction of the power, space, and cost of traditional hard disk drives. It is based on enterprise-class SLC flash technology, with advanced wear-leveling, integrated backup protection, solid state robustness, and 3M hours MTBF reliability. A recent BestPerf blog reported on Vdbench 5.0 testing that measured 100% Random Read, 100% Random Write, 100% Sequential Read, 100% Sequential Write, and 50-50 read/write, and that demonstrated the maximum performance and throughput of the storage system. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/4/BigAdmin/22709 What's New on BigAdmin Patching Best Practices for the Solaris 10 OS (With Sam the Solaris Sysadmin) This Solaris 10 Patching Best Practices Course Reference Guide is a supplement to the web-based training course WS-2700-S10: Solaris 10 Patching Best Practices. The guide presents the key concepts of the course but it does not contain all the content presented in the course itself. The guide is for use as a reference and refresher after completion of the online course. BigAdmin Blog Responds to Feedback From LISA "Feedback from LISA 09 in Baltimore" introduces some of the input from the BigAdmin BoF session at this year's Large Installation System Administration (LISA) Conference. See also the entries "The BigAdmin Blog on LISA Feedback: The Tower of Babel" (showing how you can send us more feedback) and "BigAdmin Navigation: Sections and Categories" (explanation of the BigAdmin site's structure). http://sun.com/bigadmin http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/4/Solaris/22681 Solaris 10 10/09 Appliance Image for VirtualBox There is now a VirtualBox Appliance Image available for Solaris 10 10/09, or so Bruce Hill, Sr. Manager, SPARC Platform Software Release Engineering, reports in his blog "Solaris 10 10/09 VirtualBox Appliance Image." Hill writes that the latest version of the Solaris 10 operating system (10/09, also referred to as Update 8) can be downloaded as an importable VirtualBox OVF appliance image, which will enable users to get started working with Solaris 10 in the VirtualBox 3.x environment on x86/X64 machines. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/4/Oracle/22497 "Sun Systems for Oracle Coherence" The Sun BluePrints article "Sun Systems for Oracle Coherence" discusses a drop-in implementation of Oracle Coherence running on Sun servers utilizing Oracle Fusion Middleware components. Each major architectural component is described, providing information about the network interconnects, and detailing the functions of each tier in the solution. The paper also covers Oracle Coherence benchmark testing with a detailed review and analysis of the results. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/4/HPC/22583 "Sun Business Ready HPC for Altair RADIOSS" In his Sun BluePrints paper, "Sun Business Ready HPC for Altair RADIOSS: Best Practices for Altair RADIOSS Deployments," Dr. Gunter Roeth, of Sun ISV Engineering provides insight into constructing an optimal configuration for Altair RADIOSS car crash simulations using a high-performance cluster of Sun systems equipped with x86/x64 processors. The paper points out how HPC solutions often consist of servers equipped with Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron processors that are clustered together using high-speed, low-latency interconnects. In many cases, Roeth writes, these high-performance clusters can match and even surpass the throughput capabilities of vertically-scalable proprietary solutions. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/4/hw/22674 Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe Card The Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe Card is a Flash PCIe card with an integrated disk controller that increases server storage I/O and application performance. Targeted at I/O intensive applications, such as databases with 4K block aligned workloads, the Sun Flash Accelerator delivers I/O performance equaling that of up to 300 disk drives, Sun reports. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/4/ja/22658 Java Application Platform SDK: Overview Sun developed the Java Application Platform SDK to streamline enterprise application development and improve developer productivity. The SDK also supports Java Platform, Standard Edition 6 and the latest technologies of the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5 (Java EE 5) Specification. The SDK Team describes SDK Update 8, which includes updated versions of Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server and Portlet Container. This free release is based on the source code developed by Sun engineers and the open-source community. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/4/sec/22680 OpenDS 2.2 Released With the announced release of Sun OpenDS Standard Edition 2.2 also comes the OpenDS 2.2.0. The open source directory server is LDAPv3 compliant and written entirely in Java. The new release brings several new features and enhancements including scalable import and indexing, external changelog, fractional replication, and more. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/4/ja/22514 GlassFish White Papers The Sun GlassFish Portfolio provides the foundation to develop and deploy Web and enterprise applications and is a cost-effective way to acquire, manage, and maintain critical aspects of a Web platform. Some recently published white papers on GlassFish may be of interest with titles such as "The GlassFish Advantage for Small Businesses," "Comparing GlassFish and JBoss: Which Application Server is right for you?," "A Guide to Cost Savings with GlassFish Portfolio," among others. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/4/Solaris/22464 Deep Dive into ZFS If you didn't attend or haven't viewed the CommunityOne presentation by Ben Rockwood on ZFS, then take some time to tune into a replay of his talk. The nearly two-hour webcast is a thorough examination of the ZFS file system. The talk covers the basics, but Rockwood delves into the subject matter more than many other presentations on the topic. It is directed at beginners as well as individuals who are familiar with ZFS but don't consider themselves quite experts. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/4/HPC/22586 Configuring Sun Ops Center for the Sun HPC Software Framework Anyone interested in an integrated open-source software solution for Linux-based high-performance computing (HPC) clusters running on Sun hardware may want to read the Sun BluePrints article "Using Sun Ops Center with Sun HPC Software, Linux 2.0." Authors Mike Berg and Zhiqi Tao describe how to set up a Sun Ops Center server, provision the HPC cluster nodes (head node, Luster file system servers, and compute nodes), and configure system services. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/4/Retail/22429 Toy Retailer Chooses Sun Servers, Storage, Software, Service for a One-stop Solution Berlin-based myToys.de is a retail company that sells merchandise for children and their families. Distributing its goods online, in stores, and through a mail-order catalog, the company initially relied on Linux for most of its computing systems. In time, the IT environment at myToys.de became heterogeneous and support became an issue. To increase system security and receive technical support, myToys.de replaced its Web site and order-processing system from multiple manufacturers with a new infrastructure based on Sun SPARC Enterprise servers, StorageTek storage systems, software, and technical support services. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/4/Government/22407 Spain's New Electronic Post Box Service Supported by Sun Correos is the operator of the public postal service in Spain. Recently, it decided to build a secure email service for up to 140,000 mailboxes for citizens and businesses to send emails and attachments to government offices. With the support of Sun Professional Services, Correos designed and implemented a fully redundant data storage and backup platform for its new email service based on Sun Fire servers and Sun StorageTek technology. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/4/MySQL/22536 Sun Systems for Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 with MySQL Reference Architecture Sun Systems for Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 with MySQL is a new reference architecture featuring Sun servers, Flash storage products, MySQL Enterprise Server, the Sun GlassFish Portfolio, the ZFS file system, and a choice of OpenSolaris, Solaris or Linux operating systems. A Sun BluePrints paper describes the hardware and software components of the reference architecture, studies the scalability of the architecture and includes step-by-step directions for setup and configuration. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/4/opt-edu/22667 Sun Academic Advantage Offers Online Course Materials The Sun Academic Advantage is a joint initiative between Sun and online educational service provider Pearson, enabling instructors to add Sun-endorsed courseware into their curriculum and give students an enhanced classroom experience using the latest Sun technologies. Course materials and online courses cover topics on Java technology, JavaFX, OpenSolaris and open source technologies for students of all levels. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/4/CloudComputing/22666 Sun's Open Source Cloud Security Tools Leveraging the built-in security capabilities of the Solaris Operating System, including Solaris ZFS and Solaris Containers, Sun reports some of its open source security tools can help in securing data in transit, data at rest, and data in use in the cloud. Sun also has announced its support for the latest security guidance from the Cloud Security Alliance. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/3/news/22672 Oracle Reports Quarter Profits Up, Sun Deal to Close Oracle's results for its fiscal second quarter showed profits jumped 13 percent. New software licenses rose 2 percent in the three months ending Nov. 30, which is better than the company's earlier prediction and comes after four straight quarters of declines, reported AP. Speaking during a conference call held Dec. 17 on the earnings report, Oracle executives also declared victory in their quest to acquire Sun. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/3/server/22673 Mobility, Flexibility, Small Form Factor Set Tadpole Rack Mount Servers Apart Ensuring that critical, decision-quality information flows seamlessly, securely and expediently in the most demanding field conditions, TadpoleR Rack Mount Servers offer rapidly deployable, mobile-rugged computing systems to meet current systems needs as well as those planned for the future. The expense and complexity of supporting existing infrastructure investments through a standard program life cycle has become increasingly challenging as rapidly evolving requirements are demanding support for multiple IT environments. Tadpole systems support SPARC and x64 environments as well as multiple OS options, providing a universal building block to extend the life of existing infrastructure while laying the groundwork to deploy next generation requirements. Flexibility in the Tadpole Rack Mount Servers provides users with the capability to meet new demands and engage emerging trends like virtualization and cloud computing, along with a choice in operating systems and long-term support. Learn about Tadpole's year end promotion. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/3/sw/22552 More on Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7.0 Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition (DSEE) 7.0 improves performance by more than three times when compared to its predecessor, Sun reports, and improves authentication and modification performance by 60 percent, allowing customers to accelerate their applications without changing one line of code. See a comprehensive list of DSEE 7.0's features and benefits for more information on this release. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/3/trademarks/22656 Copyrights and Trademarks (c) 2009 System News, Inc. All rights reserved. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/3/ja/22657 Article Series Introduces Java EE 6 Platform Sun Developer Network (SDN) staff writer Ed Ort has written a three-part article series introducing the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 6 platform. Released this December, Java EE 6 adds significant new technologies and extends the usability improvements made in previous Java EE releases. Ort's review of the platform highlights some of these enhancements. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/3/BigAdmin/22679 What's New on BigAdmin Community Tech Tip: Converting MilaX Live CD for SPARC to a WANBOOT Image MilaX, a small distribution that runs completely off a CD, can be a good tool for troubleshooting. In this BigAdmin community tech tip, Bernd Schemmer describes how to convert the MilaX Live CD for SPARC platforms to a WANBOOT image, so it can be used on a WANBOOT server to troubleshoot non-booting SPARC machines that run the Solaris OS. Updated: Analyzing a patchadd or patchrm Failure in the Solaris OS Sun engineer Enda O'Connor has updated the script for this BigAdmin article on patching. The updated script runs a pkgchk on both global zone and non-global zone binaries, and it searches for left-over lock files. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/3/MySQL/22499 "Guide to MySQL Embedded Server for Microsoft Windows" Seventy-two percent of MySQL ISV / OEM customers responding to a 2009 survey use Windows for development and 59% use Windows as their application's deployment platform. With these statistics in mind, a guide has been written pointing out the reasons MySQL on Windows is more popular than Microsoft databases along with tips and links to various resources on how to develop and optimize MySQL applications on Windows. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/3/news/22663 Sun Wins Cases Against Two Intellectual Property Violators Sun has won intellectual property cases in both the United States and Britain, reflecting strong efforts by Sun to protect its IP rights and market integrity, the company said. In the U.S. case, Sun obtained a federal court judgment against Sun Valley Technical Repair, describing it as a major counterfeiter of its products. The U.K. High Court of Justice also ruled in Sun's favor stating that British firm M-Tech Data infringed upon Sun's registered trademarks by importing Sun product into Europe without authorization. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/3/news/22664 Oracle Publicly Pledges 10 MySQL Commitments Oracle has listed 10 promises on its Website in regards to maintaining MySQL when it acquires Sun. Oracle states that it has engaged in constructive discussions with the European Commission regarding the Oracle/Sun transaction, and in particular the maintenance of MySQL as a competitive force in the database market. It published this list of commitments in order to further reassure the Commission, customers, developers and users of its plans for MySQL. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/3/FOSS/22662 New Fine-Grained Entitlement Enforcement Engine and Directory Proxy Server Sun announced the availability of a new, fine-grained entitlement enforcement engine as part of OpenSSO Express 9, and a next-generation directory proxy server as part of Sun OpenDS Standard Edition 2.2. The entitlement enforcement engine supports enterprise deployments and provides mass-scale extranet deployments with a complete off-the-shelf, standards-based solution that can externalize authorization for more than 100 million users. The new directory proxy server proactively maintains up-time as activity increases with a "global index" to help easily distribute and balance loads - based on factors such as any identity attribute or based on a traffic distribution algorithms. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/3/Oracle/22516 Hardening the Oracle Database with Solaris Security Features Christoph Schuba in Solaris Security hosts a brief presentation on protecting Oracle applications with built-in Solaris Security features. Recorded during the Oracle Open World 2009 event, Schuba states that he along with Glenn Faden created a system that takes advantage of the security features available in Solaris. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/3/server/22621 2.88GHz Quad-core SPARC64 VII Processor/Memory Boards A new quad-core 8 thread SPARC64 VII processor operating at 2.88GHz are now available on all M8000/M9000 servers and offered as field-install X-options and upgrades. It includes 6MB L2 cache. The 2.88GHz SPARC64 VII quad-core options can be mixed and matched in the SPARC Enterprise M8000 and M9000 servers with the current SPARC64 VI (2.28 or 2.4GHz) and SPARC64 VII (2.52GHz) options. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/3/ja/22661 New Beta Release of Sun's Java Store Launched A new beta release of Sun's Java Store is available with some new features including account creation in the client, the ability for developers outside of the US to preview applications using the Java Store view, improved integration with PayPal and more. Java Warehouse also is now available to six new countries: Israel, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Taiwan and South Korea. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/3/Virtualization/22456 Zones and Ops Center 2.5 Sun Ops Center 2.5 offers enhanced support for virtualization solutions such as Solaris Zones. Owen Allen briefly highlights what users can do with Zones in the latest release of this comprehensive management software for physical and virtual systems. This includes managing, monitoring and working with both global and local Zones. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/3/OpenStorage/22524 A Look at the Advantages and Risks of Open Storage The advantages and risks of open storage, especially from the CIO's perspective, is the subject of Sun CIO Bob Worrall's discussion with Distinguished Engineer Art Licht of Sun Global Sales and Services. The talk begins with a definition of open storage, which is, "... a new way to build a storage product by using open, industry-standard components ... that offers a simpler, less-expensive way to manage data," in Licht's words. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/3/storage/22480 Database Study Observes Performance Gains of Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array A database study comparing the performance of storage architectures using Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array and storage architecture based only on traditional hard disks was recently conducted, and its results presented by Chang Shu. Both atomic queries such as sorts / joins, and advanced queries containing complex business logic were tested in order to observe the performance gains in using F5100 Flash Array. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/3/opt-sysadmin/22465 Study Finds Higher DIMM Error Rates than Commonly Supposed The authors of "DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study", Bianca Schroeder of the University of Toronto and Eduardo Pinheiro and Wolf-Dietrich Weber, both of Google, report on their analysis of measurements of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) errors in a large fleet of commodity servers over a period of 2.5 years. The collected data covers multiple vendors, DRAM capacities and technologies, and comprises many millions of DIMM days. The goal of the research was to answer questions such as the following: How common are memory errors in practice? What are their statistical properties? How are they affected by external factors, such as temperature and utilization, and by chip-specific factors, such as chip density, memory technology and DIMM age? http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/server/22602 Mobility, Flexibility, Small Form Factor Set Tadpole Rack Mount Servers Apart Ensuring that critical, decision-quality information flows seamlessly, securely and expediently in the most demanding field conditions, TadpoleR Rack Mount Servers offer rapidly deployable, mobile-rugged computing systems to meet current systems needs as well as those planned for the future. The expense and complexity of supporting existing infrastructure investments through a standard program life cycle has become increasingly challenging as rapidly evolving requirements are demanding support for multiple IT environments. Tadpole systems support SPARC and x64 environments as well as multiple OS options, providing a universal building block to extend the life of existing infrastructure while laying the groundwork to deploy next generation requirements. Flexibility in the Tadpole Rack Mount Servers provides users with the capability to meet new demands and engage emerging trends like virtualization and cloud computing, along with a choice in operating systems and long-term support. Learn about Tadpole's year end promotion. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/NetBeans/22651 NetBeans IDE 6.8 Full Support to Latest Java Technologies NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) 6.8 just released not only expands PHP support, tightens integration with Project Kenai, improves C/C++ profiling and interoperates better with JavaFX, it also provides complete support for the newly released Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6) and Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/OpenSolaris/22534 Developers Integrate Solaris 10 Branded Zones into OpenSolaris The first phase of Solaris 10 Branded Zones (otherwise known as Solaris 10 Containers) was successfully integrated into OpenSolaris build 127 in late October of this year, reports Jordan Vaughan in his blog. These Zones, he explains, enable users to host environments from Solaris 10 10/09 and later inside OpenSolaris Zones. These Zones are being developed so that users can consolidate their Solaris 10 production environments onto machines running OpenSolaris and take advantage of many innovative OpenSolaris technologies (such as Crossbow) within such environments. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/ja/22652 Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6 Now Available The much anticipated Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6) has been released. New additions include Java Context and Dependency Injections (CDI), Java EE Profiles, the new Web Services and Interoperability (WSIT) features that came from the Microsoft collaboration, and many new APIs for REST-based services, and REST-based administration of enterprise applications. Additional updates to the platform include Servlets 3.0, JSF 2.0, EJB 3.1, Java Persistence 2.0, Java EE Connector API updates, among others. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/news/22653 Oracle Confident in Case Presented to EU In a two-day closed-door hearing that began Dec. 10, Oracle defended its planned acquisition of Sun before the European Commission, and a company lawyer said he's "confident" about the company's defense of its planned $7.4 billion purchase. The European Commission has threatened to block the acquisition because of concerns that Oracle, the world's second-largest software maker, might be able to eliminate Sun's MySQL database product as a competitor. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/ja/22654 Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 is the latest release of Sun's commercial Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application server. Its open source counterpart is GlassFish v3. The Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 provides features to help improve start-up time and reduce resource utilization, and introduces new features to its management and monitoring capabilities including fine grained and low overhead monitoring. It fully supports the new Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6). http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/HPC/22335 South African Government Implements 2nd-Gen Sun Constellation System When the South African government launched its largest (both in South Africa and the continent as a whole) supercomputer at CHPC in Cape Town, Marc Hamilton, Sun VP of Americas Systems Practice was there to interview Naledi Pandor, South African Minister of Science and Technology, on the system and the Sun technology at its core - the second generation Sun Constellation System. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/BigAdmin/22660 What's New on BigAdmin Get 30% Discount off Price of Sys Admin Essentials Book Take our survey and receive 30% off the price of "Solaris 10 System Administration Essentials." The survey is short and should take less than 10 minutes to complete. Community-Submitted Article: Upgrading From the Solaris 8 to 9 OS With Sun StorEdge SAN Foundation Software This scenario uses Solaris Live Upgrade to move from the Solaris 8 to 9 release, on a server with Sun StorEdge SAN Foundation Software or SFS (known informally as Leadville). A member of the BigAdmin community explains that SFS uses different packages and patches for the Solaris 8 and 9 releases. How to Set Keyboard Layouts Explicitly in the OpenSolaris OS Need to control which keyboard layout is selected for a machine that runs the OpenSolaris OS? This tech tip from Sun engineer Tim Cheng describes how to manually configure the keyboard layout for systems with OpenSolaris. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/trademarks/22627 Copyrights and Trademarks (c) 2009 System News, Inc. All rights reserved. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/MySQL/22498 Visual Guide to Importing/Exporting Data Between Excel and MySQL The Sun/MySQL white paper "A Visual Guide to Importing and Exporting Data Between Microsoft Excel and MySQL" discusses the process using MySQL’s ODBC Connector in conjunction with Excel 2007 and Access 2007’s native import/export capabilities. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/ja/22496 Modular Version of Java ME in the Works A modular version of Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME) could be on the horizon, at least that's what Jeet Kaul, vice president of Sun's client software group, told The Register. The goal is to make this version available sometime in 2010, allowing netbooks running Java to offer more of the kinds of features used in cell phones and bring functionality found on laptops to some smart phones. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/Solaris/22416 Tutorial: DTrace by Example Senior Engineer Rickey C. Weisner has written a tutorial on DTrace to illustrate how the diagnostic tool can be used to help analyze real-world applications. With an emphasis on practical use, Weisner employs DTrace to analyze several applications and uses mpstat and prstat information to show which questions one should ask and how one can use DTrace to answer these questions. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/Performance/22646 Sun's New x64 Server Sets New World Records The new Sun Fire X4640 server delivered outstanding performance on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark, which represents the critical tasks performed in real-world ERP business environments, and the SPECompL2001, which represents workloads consisting of medium and large problem sets that stress the computer's processor, memory, compilers and OpenMP implementation. The Sun Fire X4640 is an 8-socket modular x64 server in a single 4U chassis that supports up to 48 cores. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/ev/22647 Sun Tech Days Conference World Tour The Sun Tech Days worldwide developer conference for 2009-10 is a multi-city world tour designed to showcase how the developer community can leverage Sun technologies, services and products to drive the next generation of industry innovation. Each Tech Days event for 2009-10 has four tracks: Enterprise Computing, Client Technologies, OpenSolaris and Hands-on Labs. There also is a demo showcase of open source technologies and Sun partners' solutions as well as lighting talks. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/pr-partner/22638 Sun Identity Management Suite Partner Integrations According to Daniel P. Raskin in Sun Identity Marketing Division, the company works hard on ensuring its Sun Identity Management solutions can be integrated with all kinds of popular third party solutions. Recently, Sun published five new solutions briefs on this type of integration. These PDFs provide information on Sun Identity Management Suite partner integrations with Sun ISV partners ARCOT, BrinQa, Cyber-Ark, Intellitactics and Passlogix. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/feature/22376 Improved Management, User Experience, Power Consumption Woos Online Map Provider to Sun The Japanese online map search service Mapion recently standardized its systems environment on Sun, running Solaris 10 and deploying Sun servers, Sun StorageTek 9985V system for storage, and Solaris Containers to improve performance in its data center. Mapion Mobile leveraged MySQL Cluster Database to create a database with 99.999% availability; while Mapion BB for its broadband users deployed open source technology using the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server to reduce application management time. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/Oracle/22461 White Paper Details Sun's 50,000 User Benchmark Results on Oracle BI EE An Oracle white paper explains how the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (Oracle BI EE) Release 10.1.3.4 performs under high user-loads, and how well it scales vertically and horizontally on two Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 servers running Solaris 10. The two identical T5440 servers, each with 4 x 8-Core 1.6 GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors delivered the best performance of 50,000 concurrent BI EE users at around 63% CPU utilization. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/sw/22500 Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 4 Sun Grid Engine is a distributed resources management (DRM) system that maximizes resource utilization and workload throughput while adhering to resource allocation policies and business rules. Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 4 release is the latest available version. It is a bug fix update release and delivers no new features. Anyone interested in the DRM system may want to read a blog entry authored by Dan Templeton that provides the basics on the Sun Grid Engine to help new users get started. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/Solaris/22457 10 Reasons ZFS is Insanely Great Paul Rubens with Enterprise Networking Planet lists what he believes are the top 10 features of Sun's open source ZFS file system. These include checksums in metadata for data integrity, copy on write, data snapshots with Time Slider, pooled data storage, RAIDZ and RAIDZ2, among others. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/storage/22489 Details on Sun Storage 6180 Array The power to achieve better performance with fewer drives - lowering acquisition, support and operational costs - is what Sun proposes the Sun Storage 6180 Array offers customers. It also scales and integrates seamlessly all the way up to the flagship Sun Storage 6780 Array. Offering redundant components, the Sun Storage 6180 Array provides automated I/O path failover, and extensive online configuration, reconfiguration and maintenance capabilities. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/opt-sysadmin/22442 Case Study: Web Application Tuning on Chip Multithreading Platforms A Sun case study focuses on its CMT series, including the UltraSPARC T1, T2 and T2 Plus processors. Author Wynne Wang looks at how a slip in the performance of a non-CMT platform might become a bottleneck in the CMT environment and the possible solutions that could alleviate these type of data center issues. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/2/ja/22443 Sun White Paper Describes Sun GlassFish Web Space Server 10.0 Curious about the Sun GlassFish Web Space Server? A Sun white paper provides a brief technical overview of this next-generation portal server platform, as well as the steps to install and configure it. The 44-page PDF details the features and benefits of the GlassFish Web Space Server, highlights its architecture, and then describes the installation and configuration process. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/1/trademarks/22625 Copyrights and Trademarks (c) 2009 System News, Inc. All rights reserved. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/1/CloudComputing/22600 DMTF White Paper: "Interoperable Clouds" "Interoperable Clouds," a white paper by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), describes snapshot of the work being done in the DMTF Open Cloud Standards Incubator, including use cases and reference architecture as they relate to the interfaces between a cloud service provider and a cloud service consumer. The paper summarizes the core use cases, reference architecture, and service lifecycle. These building blocks are used to specify the cloud provider interfaces, data artifacts, and profiles to achieve interoperable management. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/1/MySQL/22472 Some Best Practices for Secure Use of MySQL on the Web In Part 1 of a two-part piece on securing MySQL Thierry Manfe addresses the concern that should occur to every web project developer before opening the flood gates to on-line users. The article presents four steps that take the project development from the default configuration available on the developer's laptop to the level of security exposure on the web calls for. A second part recommends practices called for with MySQL in a production environment. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/1/opt-sysadmin/22415 "Joomla! Deployment Guide for Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems" The Sun BigAdmin paper "Joomla! Deployment Guide for Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems" by Sun ISV Engineering staffer Eric Reid was written to provide guidance for readers looking to install and configure the open source Joomla! content management system with the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System product family. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/1/BigAdmin/22641 What's New on BigAdmin Using the Solaris 10 Applications Library The Solaris 10 Applications Library has thousands of apps for SPARC and x86/x64 platforms (currently, it shows over 11,000 applications). This tip describes how to find applications that run on the Solaris 10 OS, with examples of how to search for an application and how to submit an application to the library. Community Submission: Bare-Metal Restore of x86 Server Running the Solaris 10 OS With a ZFS Root File System This BigAdmin community-submitted article describes how to restore the Solaris 10 Operating System on x86 platforms in a bare-metal scenario, using Veritas NetBackup by Symantec. In this setup, a ZFS root file system was used on the original system disk. http://sun.com/bigadmin http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/1/NetBeans/22605 Helping NASA Get to Lift Off with NetBeans IDE An article in Javalobby reports on the adoption by NASA of the NetBeans Platform. Geertijan Wielenga writes about the experiences of Sun Senior Staff Engineer Tim Boudreau in training NASA staffers on the use of the NetBeans platform. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/1/sec/22617 Using SSO to Succeed in the Web 2.0 Era "Risk, Reach, and Return: Everything Today's CISO Needs to Know About Using SSO to Succeed in the Web 2.0 Era" is a Sun white paper that provides the CISO with the information necessary to make informed choices in extending the enterprise’s reach with minimal risk and maximum return on the technology employed in the effort. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/1/Solaris/22386 IBM WebSphere Portal V6.1 on Solaris The authors of the IBM tech article "Capitalizing on Large Numbers of Processors with IBMWebSphere Portal on Solaris," Martin Presler-Marshall, Laura Yen, and Daniel Edwin, share their experience in evaluating IBM WebSphere Portal V6.1 running on a Sun T5240 server with 16 processor cores, supporting 128 simultaneous computing threads. The authors tested a variety of approaches, configurations and tuning techniques in an effort to determine how best to get the optimal results from software in a system with hundreds of simultaneous computing threads. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/1/OpenStorage/22636 Sun's OpenStorage Product Plans for 2010 New Sun OpenStorage products planned for 2010 have been revealed and reported to SearchStorage. These include a new high-end 7000 series storage product, two new JBODs (Just a Bunch Of Disks) and an entry-level device that can hold up to 60 SAS2 drives. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/1/server/22637 Server Market Shows Signs of Stabilizing, IDC and Gartner Report Server sales are beginning to stabilize, reports IDC and Gartner in analyses on the July-September period. The IT research and advisory firms both found revenue down in the worldwide server market during the third quarter of 2009, however the decrease was less than anticipated and demonstrated an increase over the first and second quarters of this year. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/1/Solaris/22623 Solaris Cluster 3.2 11/09 Solaris Cluster is a multi-system, multi-site disaster recovery solution that manages the availability of application services and data across local, regional and vastly dispersed datacenters. Solaris Cluster 3.2 11/09 is the third update for this version and brings extended support for virtualization with more options for Solaris Container Cluster, failover Solaris Containers and LDoms, new file system and volume management choices, improved Scalable Services support and new replication solutions for Campus Cluster and Geo Cluster deployments. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/1/news/22635 Oracle to Meet with EU on Dec. 10th Dec. 10 is the day Oracle will be presenting its case to European Union regulators on why it should be allowed to acquire Sun. The European Commission has objected to the $7 billion deal, saying the combination of Sun's MySQL database product and Oracle's products could hinder competition in the database market. This ruling has met with opposition from a variety of sources and galvanized letter writing campaigns urging the EU to reconsider its stance. Recently, Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen told EU antitrust regulators in a Nov. 19 letter their analysis of the deal is partly flawed. Moglen is considered a legal expert on open-source software. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/1/OpenStorage/22408 Sun Storage 7000 for Oracle Database Consolidation A four-page brochure from Sun makes a case for using the Sun Storage 7000 family for consolidating oracle databases in these sections: The Challenge Breakthrough Simplicity, Performance, and Savings The Ideal Platform for Database Consolidation Breakthrough Data Placement: Hybrid Storage Pools (HSP) Breakthrough System Monitoring: Analytics Breakthrough Data Protection: Self Healing Storage A Paradigm Shift in Scalability: Scale Any Aspect of the System Services and Support This article also list the key feature of the Sun Storage 7000 for databases. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/1/Performance/22607 SPECmail2009: New World record on T5240 1.6GHz Sun 7310 and ZFS According to SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation), "The SPECmail2009 benchmark measures the ability of corporate e-mail systems to meet today's demanding e-mail users over fast corporate local area networks (LAN). The SPECmail2009 benchmark simulates corporate mail server workloads that range from 250 to 10,000 or more users, using industry standard SMTP and IMAP4 protocols." Sun has published SPECmail2009 results for the Sun Java Messaging server 7.2, which achieved a world record. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/1/Virtualization/22622 Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Software 3.1 Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Software 3.1 is available both as a perpetual license and as a subscription. The Key New Features for this release are: Microsoft Hyper-V is now supported as an additional virtualization platform. Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (formerly Microsoft Terminal Services) Sun Desktop Access Client Adobe Flash Enhancements USB Redirection to Windows Support for additional virtual desktop operating systems The software is available for download now. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/1/feature/22619 Business Value of Deploying Flash Systems In a recent Sun Inner Circle article, Sun's Flash Technologist, Michael Cornwell, shares how Sun's customers are already reaping the business value of deploying Flash systems in their datacenters and how you can get the best from your Flash investment. To the question, "What is the business case for broader use of Flash technology?" Mark said, "Enterprise Flash products offer increased performance with a significantly smaller footprint in the datacenter. In many cases, Flash provides higher value than any other alternative to boost throughput and application response times for business-critical IT." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/1/Virtualization/22427 "Datacenter Lifecycle Management with Sun Ops Center" A new white paper from Sun states that Sun Ops Center as "is designed as a single platform that can manage heterogeneity and complexity through a single pane of glass." and "Sun Ops Center manages across the entire hardware/software stack and throughout the entire system lifecycle -- from the moment that power is applied to servers to the point at which they are retired. Sun Ops Center derives from Sun’s unique experience as a server vendor and as a developer of virtualization solutions." The paper goes on to provides chapters on Background Architecture Overview Deployment architecture Functional architecture A Comprehensive, Integrated Feature Set Putting Sun Ops Center to Work (PDF, 20 pages, 648 KB) http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/142/1/Virtualization/22633 Sun VirtualBox 3.1 With 20 million total downloads and some 40,000 downloads per day, Sun VirtualBox has become a major, general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software. A significant new release, VirtualBox 3.1, improves performance and adds significant new features, including 'teleportation' which is the live migration of a VM session from one host to another (e.g. from an Intel-based Mac Desktop to an AMD server then to an Intel-based laptop running Windows 7). http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/4/BigAdmin/22632 What's New on BigAdmin Using Oracle Databases With NFS on Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems This quick start guide shows how to deploy Oracle Database using the NFS protocol with Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems (release 2009.Q3). Here are configuration tips for the Solaris 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Oracle Enterprise Linux operating systems. Updated: Firmware Flash Utility for SAS Expanders This unbundled product requires Solaris 10 10/08 OS or later (using SPARC and x64 platforms). The utility allows you to upgrade the SAS expander firmware on Sun Fire T5140/T5240 servers, Sun Storage arrays, and some storage blades. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/4/trademarks/22612 Copyrights and Trademarks (c) 2009 System News, Inc. All rights reserved. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/4/ja/22591 "Performance Tuning the Sun GlassFish Web Stack (Apache, MySQL, and PHP)" The Sun white paper "Performance Tuning the Sun GlassFish Web Stack (Apache, MySQL, and PHP" is an introduction to tuning different components of the Sun GlassFish Web Stack, with a focus on Apache, MySQL, and PHP. The guide also explains how the features of Web Stack Enterprise Manager can identify which areas of the system to tune for a user's workload. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/4/Oracle/22576 Zend Server Now Available Via Oracle Unbreakable Linux Network Oracle and Zend Technologies are working together to make PHP/Zend Server more integrated with Oracle Enterprise Linux by offering the server to customers from the Oracle Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN). This server is a complete, Oracle-enabled, enterprise-ready Web application server for running and managing PHP applications and includes out-of-the-box enterprise-grade connectivity to Oracle Database. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/4/feature/22568 Sun Solutions Cut Annual Power Consumption for SAP Environment by 59% Anyone looking to boost energy efficiency for SAP environments, while increasing hardware performance and environment expansion should take a look at a case study on BSH Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH. The Germany-based domestic appliance supplier migrated its SAP software onto a platform consisting of Sun SPARC Enterprise servers, Solaris 10, Sun Blade servers and Sun StorageTek systems. This move reduced its annual power consumption by 59% and increased server efficiency by 108%. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/4/Solaris/22592 "Patching the Solaris OS Using Sun Ops Center 2.5" A recent Sun Docs BigAdmin paper by Shanthi Srinivasan and Laura Hartman describes "Patching the Solaris OS Using Sun Ops Center 2.5." The paper explains that Sun Ops Center offers comprehensive data center management software for the physical and virtual systems in the data center. This software enables users to provision, patch, virtualize, manage, and monitor the assets in your data center from a single browser user interface (BUI). http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/4/Virtualization/22539 Virtualizing Enterprise Application Infrastructure with Sun CMT Technology "Virtualizing Enterprise Application Infrastructure with Sun Chip Multithreading (CMT) Technology Using Sun's Built-in, No-cost Virtualization Technologies to Dramatically Increase ROI" is the long title of a relatively brief (16 pages) Sun white paper. The authors write that IT managers, drive to lower both capital and operating expenditures while increasing capacity for more application services and growing markets must determine ways to reduce both the number and complexity of the systems in the corporate infrastructure. These managers must simultaneously deliver increasing performance, capacity, and security. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/4/Performance/22476 WRF Benchmark Puts X6275 Cluster to the Test The blog posting on Sun BestPerf by Paul Kinney reports on the results of Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) code running on twelve Sun Blade X6275 server modules housed in the Sun Blade 6048 chassis, using the 2.5 km CONUS benchmark dataset. According to Kinney, the Sun Blade X6275 cluster was able to achieve 373 GFLOP/s on the CONUS 2.5-KM Dataset. Further, the results demonstrate an 91% speedup efficiency, or 11x speedup, from 1 to 12 blades. The current results were run with turbo on, he adds. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/4/feature/22400 What is the Role for Social Networking Sites in the Enterprise Writing for the Sun Inner Circle, CIO Bob Worrall discusses the possibilities for the enterprise of social networking. Worrall is joined by Mary Smaragdis, Director of Sun News Network and New and Social Media, and Linda Skrocki, Senior Engineering Program Manager for Sun's high-volume external-facing community web properties, both social community experts. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/4/opt-dev/22584 Enabling IP, Resource, Environment-Based Authentication With OpenSSO Learn how to configure the OpenSSO server and its Policy Agents to use IP/Resource/Environment-based authentication for a flexible mechanism that can define customized policies and improve user experience for access control. The three-part article series hosted on the Sun Developer Network comes from the minds of Qingwen Cheng, Mrudul Uchil and Rick Palkovic. The series explain the resource authentication architecture and information flow of OpenSSO components, and presents five use cases for enterprise/corporate SSO and federated SSO deployments. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/4/news/22620 U.S. Senators Urge EU to Expedite Probe A group of 59 U.S. senators sent a letter to the European Commission (EC) on Nov. 24 urging the European antitrust regulators to hurry their investigation into Oracle's acquisition of Sun, citing the latter's "precarious" financial condition and fears about more layoffs at the struggling computing company, reported AP Technology Writer Jordan Robertson. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/4/Performance/22588 World-record TPC-C Benchmark With Sun SPARC and Oracle 11g Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 Server Cluster is number one in the Top Ten TPC-C List by Performance as of Nov. 24, 2009. Using 12 Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 servers, 60 Sun Storage F5100 Flash arrays and Oracle 11g Enterprise Edition with Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Partitioning, Sun delivered a world record TPC-C benchmark result of 7,646,486.7 tpmC and $2.36 $/tpmC (USD). TPC-C is an online transaction processing (OLTP) benchmark. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/4/SunJavaSystem/22447 How Sun Java Communications Suite Answers Service Providers' Needs Learn more about the Sun Java Communications Suite in a Sun white paper focused on relaying to service providers how the communications and collaboration solution can help them build their business. Its capabilities, such as enhanced email indexing and search; interoperability with Mac's iCal and Mozilla's Thunderbird/Lightning calendars, Microsoft Outlook, etc.; and native calendar synchronization with mobile devices that support CalDAV, such as Apple's iPhone, are a few reasons why the Communication Suite is worth investigating. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/4/opt-edu/22616 New Cloud-based Desktop as a Service for Educational Institutions A new cloud-based Desktop as a Service is being offered for educational institutions by Sun and Ashbourne Technology Group. The multi-platform service provides a virtual desktop experience for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris to most client devices, including Sun Ray thin clients and other platforms with Java-based browsers. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/4/Oracle/22567 Configuration Guide on Oracle Database 10G with RAC and RDS Oracle Database 10g with Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) using Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS) on Solaris 10 is the subject of a Sun BluePrints article that describes the software and hardware configurations, along with the steps necessary to install and configure the components. Authors Uday Shetty and Peter Sciarra also explain the testing used to validate the example configurations defined in the article. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/4/ja/22618 Java CAPS 6.2 Released Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS) 6.2 comes with some significant features, including clustering via GlassFish Enterprise Server to distribute processing across multiple servers. It also adds support for RESTful Web services, SWIFTReady 2009 certification and a number of platform-level enhancements. Java CAPS provides a standards-based, open, extensible platform for developing software infrastructures using a service-oriented architecture approach. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/4/Government/22604 NSA Offers Security Guidelines for Sun, Apple and Red Hat The National Security Agency (NSA) is working with Sun, Apple and Red Hat "to develop secure baselines for their products," commented Richard Schaeffer, the NSA's information assurance director, on Nov. 17 at a hearing before the U.S. Senate's Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/4/opt-dev/22595 "Web Site Performance Tips and Tools" Java Technology Evangelist Carol McDonald has posted a list of web site performance tips and tools with simple suggestions on how to improve web site performance along with links to a variety of tools to help resolve common issues faced by many users. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/4/news/22603 New Deadline Set for EU to Rule on Sun-Oracle Merger European Union (EU) regulators extended the deadline for their final decision on Oracle's plans to buy Sun by eight days. Announced on November 20, this extension was set in place to satisfy a request made by Oracle, which is building its rebuttal to the European Commission's Statement of Objections issued on November 9th opposing Sun's acquisition by Oracle. The Commission said it has pushed back its deadline to January 27, 2010, from the original January 19 deadline set back in September. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/BigAdmin/22614 What's New on BigAdmin Deploying Oracle RAC 10g or 11g Release 1 on Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems This quick start guide shows how to configure Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems (release 2009.Q3) for Oracle Real Application Clusters infrastructure deployment. Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems support protocols such as NFS v3, NFS v4, iSCSI, and CIFS, and offer data service features that provide snapshots, clones, and remote replication. Booting From SATA DVDs for Solaris 10 8/07 or 5/08 OS on SPARC Platforms A Sun engineer describes how to add support for booting from SATA DVDs on SPARC systems. The article explains how to install Kernel Update (KU) patch 137137-09 to the SPARC miniroot image for the Solaris 10 5/08 or 8/07 release on SPARC platforms. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/Solaris/22419 Things Are Getting Easier with ZFS, Live Upgrade and now, Flash Archive The blog "ZFS, Live Upgrade and Flash Archive - happy together at last" extols the virtues of ZFS, claiming, "you can use a mirrored ZFS boot environment to protect against media failures, enable compression to save disk space, take snapshots to preserve the point-in-time image of your system as a safeguard against 'Ooops!', and other benefits." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/Performance/22582 World Record Performance on PeopleSoft Payroll (North America) 9.0 Benchmark "Benchmarking PeopleSoft Enterprise Payroll 9.0 Using Oracle for Solaris on a Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000" reports the results of an exercise measuring the batch performance of the Paysheet Creation, Payroll Calculation and Payroll Confirmation processes in PeopleSoft Enterprise Payroll 9.0 using Oracle 11g on a 4-way Quad-Core Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 database server running Solaris OS 10 5/09. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/sec/22556 Federating to Salesforce CRM with OpenSSO "Federating to Salesforce CRM with OpenSSO" explains how to simultaneously control access to in-house applications and those hosted by the software as a service (SaaS) provider Salesforce by using OpenSSO. SaaS, a way of delivering applications over the Internet, employs a delivery model in which a commercial vendor develops the software, hosts its operations, provides Internet-based access, and supports applications for its end users and customers. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/SunJavaSystem/22599 Download Sun Directory Enterprise Edition 7.0 Version 7.0 of the Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition (DSEE) improves performance by more than three times when compared to its predecessor, and improves authentication and modification performance by 60 percent, allowing customers to accelerate their applications without changing one line of code, Sun reports. It is now available for download along with supporting documentation. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/trademarks/22581 Copyrights and Trademarks (c) 2009 System News, Inc. All rights reserved. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/CloudComputing/22572 Oracle and the Cloud According to Richard Sarwal, SVP Product Development for Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle will support cloud computing as an enterprise grade offering, whether private or public. He shared this information with Cloud Computing Expo Conference Chairman Jeremy Geelan in an interview published in Cloud Computing Journal. Sarwal describes the role of middleware in cloud computing, detailing how application grid’s automation and dynamic capacity adjustment are primary enablers of cloud architectures. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/feature/22559 Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs Generated at New Sun Server Farm Facing a looming deadline and a legacy IT infrastructure that just wasn't delivering the goods, Blue Sky Studios, a wholly owned subsidiary of Fox Filmed Entertainment, turned to Sun for the solutions that made it possible to deliver "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" on time and with the promised quality. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/MySQL/22393 A Guide for Migrating From Microsoft Access to MySQL The MySQL/Sun Technical White Paper "A Guide for Migrating from Microsoft Access to MySQL" provides insight into what is needed for considering a move from Access to MySQL and presents a number of options that help make for an easy transition. Both the business and technical sides of migrating to MySQL are covered. Both managers and seasoned technical developers, business analysts, and DBAs, will find the needed answers to questions that revolve around migrating to the world’s most popular open source database: MySQL. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/CloudComputing/22594 AT&T's New Cloud Computing System Relies on Sun Technologies The newly announced AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service is using Sun's Open Cloud Platform, Sun Cloud APIs and cloud reference architecture as the underlying infrastructure for its cloud offerings. This global cloud-based service is geared at creating an environment to make it easy for developers to build and deploy value-added services, as well as provide companies of all sizes simple on-demand access to scalable computing capacity. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/Virtualization/22579 Virtualization News Bites Smart DisplayCard Token with Sun VDI Import Existing VDI File into VirtualBox VirtualBox 3.1 Beta 1 Download Sun VirtualBox 3.0.10 Tips and Resources on VirtualBox Sun Unified Storage Simulator 2009.Q2.0.0 http://blogs.systemnews.com/ http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/HPC/22597 Sun HPC Recent Developments The latest Top500 list published in November shows three of the top five supercomputers based on Intel Nehalem CPUs were Sun Constellation Systems. Sun also doubled its number of entries since the June 2009 list with a total of 11 deployments providing nearly 2 PetaFLOPS (PFLOPS). Additionally, Sun announced new products and technologies for high performance computing (HPC), an upgrade to the Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System, new HPC benchmarks and new HPC customers. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/OpenStorage/22553 New Configurations for Sun Storage 7310 and 7110 Sun Storage 7310 and 7110 now come with new configurations containing six-core AMD Opteron processors as part of the assemble to order (ATO) model. With ATO, customers will get a system fully assembled and tested with the additional components ordered. Existing configurations using four-core AMD processors now have a last order date of January 29, 2010, and last ship date of April 30, 2010. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/workstation/22566 Hardware Retailer Improves Business With Sun Thin Clients With a customer relationship management (CRM) system running on desktop PCs connected to a datacenter, burgeoning U.K. building supplier Screwfix needed an upgrade in speed and efficiency to deal with its expanding customer base. Following a proof of concept, Sun Ray 270 Virtual Display Client terminals were deployed, resulting in a reduction in call help-desk time by 90% and power consumption by 75%. Workplace performance and environment also improved. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/Government/22548 US Choosing Open Source To Open Government The Office of the Secretary of Defense CIO recently released policy guidance promoting the use of open source software throughout the U.S. Department of Defense. The DoD is not the only area where the federal government is embracing open source, so is the White House, whose Web site now runs on open source technologies. "By choosing open source software as the defining technology of Whitehouse.gov, it is clear that the President means business," said Bill Vass, president and COO of Sun Microsystems Federal. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/opt-sysadmin/22343 Why VeriScale Architecture Is Ideal for Cloud Computing Mikael Lofstrand, chief technologist of Networking Technologies for Sun’s Global Sales and Services organization, has written a 27-page Sun BluePrints article on Sun’s VeriScale architecture, stating it provides an excellent foundation for cloud computing and can be implemented as an overlay to create a virtual infrastructure on a public cloud, or it can be used to implement a private cloud. He details VeriScale’s defining principles, underlying components, interactions and advantages. Applicable real-world scenarios are also described. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/Oracle/22575 Encryption Wizard for Oracle The Encryption Wizard for Oracle provides transparent data-at-rest encryption for the Oracle RDBMS at a fraction of the cost of other solutions. With robust AES-256 cryptography and schema, table or column encryption and auditing, the Encryption Wizard is the smart choice for Sun/Oracle users to help combat data theft. Built around an intuitive Java interface, the Encryption Wizard has been protecting Oracle/Sun servers since 2002. A free trial is available for download. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/ja/22578 New Features in Sun GlassFish Communication Server 2.0 Sun GlassFish Communications Server is a Java EE technology-based converged application server combining enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services capabilities with Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) servlets. Version 2.0 is the latest version, offering SIP session replication, diameter support, rolling upgrade, 64-bit JVM support, multihome support and overload protection. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/Oracle/22560 "Deploying Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition" An enterprise deployment architecture for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition using Sun servers running Solaris and Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage systems is described in a Sun BluePrints article. The architecture brings fault tolerance, security, resiliency and performance to enterprise deployments, and can be used to consolidate multiple tiers onto a single system through the use of key virtualization technologies. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/SPARC/22488 New 2.53GHz Quad-core SPARC64 VII Processors Get a new higher performance 2.53GHz quad-core SPARC64 VII processor for Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 and M5000 servers and without any increase in cost. The new quad-core 8 thread SPARC64 VII processor option operating at 2.53GHz includes 5.5MB L2 cache. The SPARC64 VII quad-core options can be mixed and matched in the SPARC Enterprise M4000 and M5000 servers with the current SPARC64 VI (2.15GHz) and SPARC64 VII (2.4GHz and the new 2.53GHz) options. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/3/OpenSolaris/22460 Getting Started With the OpenSolaris OS If you've been interested in trying out OpenSolaris but aren't sure where to begin, take some time to read a Sun Developer Network article that shows you how to give it a try via a Live CD, and move on to actually installing the open source OS if long-term use is preferred. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/2/BigAdmin/22590 What's New on BigAdmin Sun Java Communications Suite Resources for System Administrators This resource center links to documentation, videos, blogs, white papers, and other information on Sun Java Communications Suite 7, which offers secure, scalable communication and collaboration products for email, message management, calendar management, time and resource management, and real-time collaboration. C and Fortran Development and Deployment Tools for the Solaris 8, 9, and 10 OS Find out how you can develop, maintain, and support a software product on Solaris 8, 9, and 10 releases simultaneously, on one machine. This scenario uses Sun Studio compilers and tools for C, C++, or Fortran applications; for Message Passing Interface (MPI) applications, you can use Sun HPC ClusterTools software. (This tech tip was reprinted from the BigAdmin newsletter of November 5, 2009.) http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/2/Performance/22446 Results from Sun Directory Server 5.2 Patch 6 Benchmark Terry Gardner reports that a Sun Netra x4250, dual-CPU, 8-core (2.13 Ghz), 64 GB RAM running Solaris 10 update 7 using internal disk drives and a Gigabit Ethernet accommodated 13,800,000 entries loaded into the Directory Server database in 2 hours; sustained 17,000 searches per second over 8 hours with an average latency of less than 2 milliseconds with no update (replication) traffic; and sustained 11,000 searches per second sustained over 8 hours with average latency of than 2 milliseconds in the presence of update (replication) traffic. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/2/Virtualization/22381 Sun Virtualization Solutions Saves Travel Operator Over $10K Yearly Sun's VirtualBox and Sun Ray thin clients helped solve Germany travel operator Gebeco's IT environment challenge of maintaining its own OS/2-based reservation software while introducing new software simultaneously, and at a cost savings of nearly US$11,000 per year in electricity. Other benefits Gebeco has experienced with the Sun solution includes simpler and remote maintenance, time savings for administrators, improved failover and overall stability, increased employee flexibility, accelerated client login and reduced heat build up in its offices. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/141/2/OpenStorage/22397 Sun Storage 7000 Software Update Supports Infiniband HCAs Infiniband IPoIB datalink partition and IP interface configuration is easy and painless using the same network BUI page or CLI contexts as ethernet, says Fishworks blogger Cindi in her up