Volume 123, Issue 2 - Quad-core AMD servers; Gartner on Sun/Open Source; OpenSolaris/VirtualBox; Schwartz on JavaOne accouncements; Wilson on xVM - System News
A new Gartner report examines the company's role in the open source market. OpenSolaris 2008.05 is reviewed and tips on running the new OS with VirtualBox and Mac OS X are included.
Sun Distinguished Engineer Josh Simon defines HPC needs during the HPC User Forum: Operating System Panel. Catch a video replay of Sun's Lustre Group Director Peter Bojanic's presentation during the recent LUG conference.
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Tune in to an interview with Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz conducted during the JavaOne Conference by CNET News.com Editor-in-Chief Dan Farber, who quizzes the executive about Sun's plan for JavaFX in the developer arena as well as a corporate money-maker; his philosophy on Sun as an infrastructure provider and "arms dealer"; Project Hydrazine, Sun's new cloud computing service in development, and much more.
Sun quietly purchased the microprocessor start-up Montalvo Systems on April 21st and plans on integrating its assets into Sun's Microelectronics business unit. Montalvo Systems was an early stage startup company focused on developing processors for the mobile, low-power computer segment markets.
Sun's move to an open source model is unprecedented in the industry, reports a new Gartner report that examines the company's role in the open source community and speculates about what the future may hold for the organization, its customers and the industry as a whole.
Sun received three SSPA STAR Awards and the SSPA's Hall of Fame Lifetime Achievement Award from the Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA), which recently honored the company along with others at the SSPA Best Practices Conference in Santa Clara, Calif.
The "Good News" from Sun for May 2008 includes a new distribution model for OpenSolaris OS and its availability on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2); JavaFX software as one part of many enhancements to the Java runtime; technology preview of the open source GlassFish Enterprise Server and Communications Server; MySQL 5.1, the latest
version of the database; the release of two new energy efficient UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor-based servers; and much more.
System News posts items of interest for Sun users on a regular basis on the System News For Sun Users blog. A quick recap of posts for the last week includes: Download OpenSPARC T1 and T2 Final Releases; First Release of PowerTop for OpenSolaris; Sun Joins Sybase, BMMsoft in Breaking World Record for Largest Data Warehouse; Hints on Using OpenSolaris 2008.05 and Amazon EC2; Sun Expands its x64 Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processors Server Line; Moellenkamp’s Solaris Tutorial on Crashes and Cores; Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000, StorageTek 2540 Arrays Achieve World Record TPC-H Results; and OpenOffice.org 3.0 Public Beta Release.
Intel's open source Threading Building Blocks (TBB) technology is now available for the Solaris 10 5/08 Operating System (Solaris OS) and the Sun Studio software toolchain, the latter of which can be used with the Solaris OS and Linux on x86/x64 platforms, as well as with the Solaris OS on SPARC processors.
An overview of the Sun Startup Essentials program discusses the nature of the program, designed to provide assistance to companies new to their respective businesses. The global program, which has already seen over 2,300 applications since the initial launch in the U.S. in November of 2006, has also launched in Canada, China, India, the UK, France, Germany and Israel. Sun now has launched a Startup Essentials program in Sweden, one of the largest venture capital investment bases in EMEA and one of the most connected countries worldwide.
Some of the latest partner activity at Sun over the last few weeks includes: Sun Expands its x64 Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processors Server Line; Developers Offered Free Hosting on OpenSocial Platform; Sun Third Party System Management Integrations; Webcast: Sun Virtualization Technologies; Solaris On Demand - SaaS Program for ISVs; Sun x64 Server Platforms to be Supported by Upcoming Ubuntu Release; Kickfire Database Appliance Based on MySQL Breaks Data Warehousing Price-Performance; Sun Expands Sun Streaming System Product Portfolio; and more.
Steve Wilson, VP of Sun's desktop and data center virtualization initiative, identified three distinguishing factors of the company's virtualization strategy in an interview with eWeek's Peter Galli. "Data-center-grade solutions, openness and interoperability," said Wilson, are what make Sun different in the virtualization field.
NaviSite now offers software as a service (SaaS) to ISVs through Sun's Solaris On Demand program. The program enables ISVs to quickly develop and deliver their software applications in an on-demand environment hosted and supported by NaviSite in the US and the UK, using Sun products and technologies. Using the technology and infrastructure provided by NaviSite, ISVs can now develop software applications that meet the availability, security and scalability needs of their own customers while cutting down their overall costs.
Developers creating applications on the OpenSocial platform can receive up to a year of free hosting on Sun servers through Joyent. Sun and Joyent have partnered to make this offer available through Joyent's Free Accelerator program.
InfoVista has joined the Sun Partner Advantage Program for Independent Software Vendors as a Principal Partner. InfoVista, which provides proven solutions for proactive service assurance, qualified for this level of membership by meeting the stringent criteria for excellence as a supplier of Solaris Operating System (OS) solutions, and by committing to tight strategic and technical alignment with Sun.
OpenSolaris 2008.05, released on May 5, 2008, has some new features that Michael Larabel of Phoronix considers worth reporting on. Reviewed just prior to the official release, Larabel discusses the test release based upon Solaris Express Community Edition (a.k.a. "Solaris Nevada") Build 86.
A Sun Weblog reports on the experience of running OpenSolaris 2008.05 under VirtualBox on OS X Leopard. There were a few snags that developed on the blogger's MacBook Pro, though experiences with VirtualBox on both OpenSolaris 2008.05 and Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) Update 5 were satisfactory.
Data Migration Manager (DMM) is a tool which facilitates the movement of file systems from one platform to another over the NFS and/or CIFS protocols. It is designed to be used when moving large amounts of data. Recently, Mark Cruciani introduced this OpenSolaris project in an informal "Birds of a Feather" session at Usenix FAST, in San Jose, Calif., held earlier this year, and his presentation is available as a video or iPod replay.
The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers can now be ordered with an X-Option or ATO option specifying a SAS 73 GB hard disk drive for an additional 15K speed for users.
The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers, powered by the Sun UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor, are now supported by multiple PLX PEX 8548 PCIe switches for high-performance PCIe fanout and slot expansion.
If you are interested in learning more about Sun's Open Storage platform and the OpenSolaris storage community, then take a few minutes to watch a couple of videos that highlight Sun's latest move into the open source world.
Do you have questions you'd like answered regarding JRuby and its support in the NetBeans IDE 6? Well beginning May 19th, you may pose those queries to a knowledgeable panel at "Ask The Experts" where just that topic will be addressed.
Following up on his earlier blog entry on interconnect issues, Josh Simon now writes on the proceedings of the Operating System Panel from the recent HPC User Forum.
The opening welcome by Peter Bojanic, director of the Lustre Group at Sun, during the Sixth Annual Lustre User Group conference held April 28 in Sonoma, Calif. is available in video replay at the HPC Community Portal.
Sun is expanding its line in the x64 server space with the introduction of the Sun Fire X4140, Sun Fire X4240 and Sun Fire X4440 servers, all of which are powered by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors and offer a choice of operating systems, including the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS), OpenSolaris operating system, Linux, Windows and VMware.
AMD has expanded its collaboration with Sun by including optimization and tuning advancements for the OpenSolaris operating system and Sun xVM Virtualization family of products at its Operating System Research Center (OSRC), which ensures that OS and virtualization software layers are optimized to leverage AMD processor-based platforms' features.
Lawrence Spracklen was impressed by the SPECweb05 performance of the UltraSPARC T2 processor, as he reports in his blog, especially its performance on the 100 percent HTTPS banking workload. What he discovered was that a single-socket UltraSPARC T2 processor provides equivalent performance to 4-socket x64 systems containing Quad-core processors, which means that, on a per socket basis, the UltraSPARC T2 outperforms the competition by over 2.7X.
Sun's first response to the IT dilemma of needing to do more with fewer resources was to introduce the UltraSPARC T1 processor with four cores and 32 threads. Next came the UltraSPARC T2 with eight cores and 64 threads, to which Sun recently added symmetric multiprocessing (SMT), enabling multiple CMT processors to be used within a single system. The impact on energy costs and throughput has been enormous, Chip Brookshaw reports, freeing the processor from the limits formerly imposed by clock speed.
The OpenOffice.org community is looking for regular users of OpenOffice.org to test and evaluate the just released OpenOffice.org 3.0 public beta release, which is immediately available in US English for MS-Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and OpenSolaris platforms.
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