Volume 122, Issue 4 - A disruptive force in IT: Sun; Sun on blogtalkradio.com; OpenSolaris 2008.05 ; Storage/Archive for HPC; xVM Ops Center UI - System News
Check out the new "Sun News Radio" on blogtalkradio.com. Sun is considered a disruptive force within the IT industry [19769]. See how its strategy toward open source is leading it to profitability [19806]. OpenSolaris 2008.05 is nearing release [19807]. A recent Gartner analysis sees the open source OS as a serious competitor for Linux [19768]. Get a brief look at the new package system in a webcast featuring Ian Murdock[19723]. Details on the Solaris 10 5/08 OS's features and new enhancements are now available [19815].
New releases:
Sun Storage and Archive Solution for HPC [19832]; Java Card Platform Specification 3.0 [19843]; Solaris On Demand - SaaS Program for ISVs [19852]; Sun Shared Visualization Software Version 1.1 [19745]; Sun Scalable Visualization Software Version 1.1 [19739]; OpenOffice.org 2.4 [19748]
Take a look at the new UI in Sun xVM Server and Sun xVM Ops Center [19783].
Smart card chip manufacturers, smart card vendors and Java Card platform implementation providers will welcome the news that Java Card platform specification version 3.0 has been released. There are two separate editions of the new Java Card 3.0 platform specification: Java Card Platform v.3.0, Classic Edition and Java Card Platform v.3.0, Connected Edition.
Russ Castronovo, (Director, Social and New Media, Sun Microsystems), has started a series of on-demand "radio" interviews on
blogtalkradio.com. Interviews that Russ has produced in April:
Juan Carlos Soto about Sun's Solaris On Demand Program
Ram Banerjee, talks about the JavaCard 3.0 specification
Baseline, in consultation with market analysts and business leaders, recently released the companies it assesses to be disruptive, meaning that they dare to innovate and displace outmoded business models. Sun Microsystems made the list with its eco-strategy.
Attendees at the 2008 Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit held at the University of Texas at Austin earlier this month wanted to know whether Sun's preference for the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) over Linux would affect MySQL with its new ownership to Sun. According to speaker Marten Mickos, former MySQL CEO and current Sun senior VP of Databases, the answer was a resounding no.
System News posts items of interest for Sun users on a regular basis on the System News For Sun Users blog. Some of those items will become detailed articles in this newsletter. A quick recap of posts for the last week includes Solaris On Demand - SaaS Program for ISVs, Sun x64 Server Platforms to be Supported by Upcoming Ubuntu Release and Free Solaris 10 5/08 OS Download Now Available.
The Solaris On Demand program has been launched, offering the independent software vendor (ISV) community the technology, hosted infrastructure and services needed to offer their software as a service (SaaS).
Wind River Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition - a Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) and Workbench development suite - will be the first CGL to be ported to Sun's UltraSPARC T2 chip multithreading (CMT) processor with the Netra Carrier Grade rack servers and ATCA blades as the first CMT systems to run the Wind River solution.
According to the recent Gartner report, "Open-Source Software in the Server OS Market 2008: The State of Linux," OpenSolaris is gaining traction and will be a serious competitor to Linux distributions in the next 12 months.
Exciting happenings for the OpenSolaris community are coming next month with the anticipated release of OpenSolaris 2008.05 and the second OpenSolaris Developer Summit set for May 3-4 at the University of California in Santa Cruz, Calif.
With OpenSolaris 2008.05 nearing its release, it may be of interest to some to take a few minutes and watch a Sun Developer Network Channel Webcast of Sun's Chief OS Strategist Ian Murdock showing off the new package system in OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2.
The new OpenSolaris community has elected its Governance Board, seating John Beck, Alan Coopersmith, Glynn Foster, Jim Grisanzio, Simon Phipps, John Plocher and Stephen Lau to the seven-member board. The community also amended its Constitution and outlined the top five community priorities during recent elections.
The official download release of the Solaris 10 5/08 Operating System (Solaris OS) was announced in mid-April, and the physical media kit's general availability set for release April 28. Now, more details on the version's new features and enhancements are available.
Steve Wilson gives a brief update on the xVM Server and its user interface (UI) architecture in a recent blog entry. He notes that many think of the xVM Server only as it relates to the Xen hypervisor at OpenSolaris, and points out that it is much more than an open source project.
Sun Shared Visualization v1.1 is a unique visualization middleware that "virtualizes" visualization by treating the graphics hardware resources as a resource pool and dynamically assigning them to either sharing or scaling, or both. Users on a variety of platforms can transparently view and interact with 3D-accelerated applications, which can run on a central resource with very large shared memory, lots of CPUs, many high-performance graphics cards and/or high-performance, high-capacity storage.
The Sun Storage and Archive Solution for HPC is a comprehensive solution that consists of disk, software and tape to provide a complete storage solution for all HPC requirements. This solution provides high-performance storage for current use, bulk disk storage for low-performance needs, and long-term storage on power-efficient tape for data requiring only occasional access.
Sun has helped place UAE University in the Top 500 list of high performance computing (HPC) grids worldwide with the deployment of one of the most advanced super grid computers in the world.
Sun's EVP of Systems John Fowler says high performance computing is more pervasive than most people think and many businesses already have "pockets" of HPC technology throughout their organizations and are not taking full advantage of its offerings.
During the last quarter (Jan 08, Feb 08. Mar 08), the web site for this newsletter had 140k unique visitors who viewed 312k pages. (For the past 12 months: 416k visitors and 1.0 million page views.)
Each week, we determine which articles have been most frequently referenced by logged-in subscribers to provide you with a list of the most popular articles for the last 4 issues. The top 10 articles for last week, Vol 122 Issue 3, were:
Features in the Just Released Solaris 10 5/08 [19789]
Eric Lundquist of eWeek characterizes Sun Microsystems as "a company that develops open-source software, uses it as an entrée into enterprises, and then sells hardware and services into those enterprises," calling the company the "largest open-source-based IT infrastructure company in the world." His interview with Jonathan Schwartz and EVP for Software Rich Green examined Sun's approach to leveraging open source to develop enterprise market share.
Version 2.4 of OpenOffice.org, which is now available for immediate download, fixed a number of security vulnerabilities. Users are advised to upgrade to afford themselves of this additional protection.
The free, open source project management solution OpenProj is now being included in StarOffice boxes available in Europe. OpenProj is a complete replacement of Microsoft Project, offering equivalent functionality, and available on Linux, Unix, Mac or Windows.
Joerg Moellenkamp has created several tutorials on understanding access control and auditing features in the Solaris 10 OS that were recently highlighted in an SDN article. These tutorials deal specifically with Solaris Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and Privileges; Solaris Auditing; and the Solaris Basic Audit Reporting Tool.
Wajih Ahmed and Babak Kenkre have written a BigAdmin feature on "Using Kerberos to Authenticate a Solaris 10 OS LDAP Client With Microsoft Active Directory," which describes how to configure a Solaris OS client to use Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition (Active Directory) for authentication and naming services. In this treatment, the Solaris client uses per-user authentication (also called self-credentials) for naming service lookups instead of a proxy account, a new functionality available starting with the Solaris 10 08/07 OS.
If you have questions about the nature of virtualization on Solaris Containers and Solaris Zones, then you just might find the answer you are looking for in the 29 FAQ that others have asked and are handily answered in one place.
The Sun white paper "Information Management: Discovering the Business Value of Archived Information" examines the potential business value of information in the more than 30 exabytes of data currently stored in archives. The white paper promotes "intelligent archiving," which means archiving optimized for its business value.
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