http://sun.systemnews.com System News for Sun Users http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/BigAdmin/20943 Articles which have been posted to BigAdmin in the last week include: Resources for the Solaris OS on IBM and Dell Servers Identities in a Service-Oriented World: Identity as a Service German-Language Version: Identitaten in einer Service orientierten Welt Solaris 8 Vintage Support and Solaris 8 Vintage Patch Service Solaris Tip of the Week: Managing Self-Signed Certificates http://www.sun.com/bigadmin http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/HPC/20904 At SC08, Sun showed its latest HPC technologies and services that are reinventing the HPC cluster. Highlights include the next-generation Sun Constellation System -- with double the storage capacity, double the cores and double the compute nodes of the original Sun Constellation System, the "Genesis" storage array, new "Magnum" switch solutions, the "Glacier" cooling door and storage flash arrays. Sun also announced HPC hardware and software solutions that are designed for easy entry into HPC. This article has links the announcements and products discussed at SC08. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/HPC/20923 Writing in The Register, Timothy Prickett Morgan reviews the Sun products on view at SC08 and ponders the effect of the just announced layoffs on production at Sun. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/MySQL/20920 Jeff Freund, CTO of Clickability, has a success story that he shares with readers in his blog entitled "Details of our MySQL Query Analyzer Use Case." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/MySQL/20928 Increased high availability is attainable, writes Ritu Kamboj, in his Sun BluePrints Online paper entitled "Deploying MySQL Database in Solaris Cluster Environments for Increased High Availability." Kamboj assumes that readers will have a basic understanding of Solaris Cluster and MySQL database installation and administration. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/OpenSolaris/20848 Charlie Schluting wrote an article on the Enterprise Networking Planet, how he can take his favorite server operating system and merging it with his favorite desktop OS using OpenSolaris, an the open source version of the Solaris operating system from Sun Microsystems (and the OpenSolaris community). Since 2005, both Sun engineers and community coders have hacked on OpenSolaris. What has resulted is a drastically improved Sun OS. This article is an overview of OpenSolaris article is the start of a three-part series. Next will be a technical review of the latest OpenSolaris, and finally Schluting will offer an IT manager's strategy guide. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/OpenSolaris/20914 Watch the Tim Cramer, Director of Core OpenSolaris Engineering, RedMonk Previews interview about OpenSolaris to learn more about what this November 2008 release brings. Sun is working on rapidly innovating OpenSolaris. Listen for a sneak peek into the “Crossbow Project” and other projects that are on the dashboard for the upcoming release in April/May 2009. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/OpenStorage/20861 The Sun solution brief "Enterprise Flash Technology: Revolutionizing Enterprise Storage Infrastructure" explains how users can reduce the CPU-to-storage bottleneck by incorporating Flash technology in a new fast, low cost and rugged storage tier that can be combined with hard disk drives into an integrated, hybrid storage pool managed with Solaris ZFS that delivers massive capacity and enhanced performance. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/Performance/20910 In a recent blog BM Seer reports the world record breaking results of the Sun Blade X6440 server module (2.7 GHz Opteron 8384 "Shanghai") running OpenSolaris 2008.05 and using Sun Studio Express 11/08 compilers. The Sun Blade X6440 delivered a SPECompM2001 x86 16-thread result of 35896. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/Performance/20924 One Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server with four UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors at 1.4GHz, delivered a single system World Record result of 6334.86 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard. The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 consumed an average of 1578 Watts of power to obtain this result for a power-performance rating of 0.25 Watts/JOP. This benchmark result proves that the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server using the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor performs as an outstanding J2EE application server as well as an Oracle 11g OLTP database server. This result used a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server (four 1.4 GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus chips) in the database tier to obtain this World Record result. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/Solaris/20935 Isaac, the UnixMan, Rozenfeld has posted the slides from an, "action-packed day of events held on 2 consecutive days in NYC and in lovely Edison, NJ." Storage Product Update (25 slides) Software Performance and Solaris Observability (11 slides) Solaris 10 10/08 [Update 6] Highlights (60 slides) xVM Server/OpsCenter Update (62 slides) x64 Product Update (33 slides)" xVM Desktop Virtualization (33 slides) Zones & OpenSolaris Update (20 slides) Cloud Computing Initiative (22 slides) 8 Presentations, 266 slides in total. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/Solaris/20886 The Sun Netra T5440 is Sun's high-efficiency rack server platform based on the second generation of Chip Multi-threaded Technology (CMT) UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor. The Netra T5440 offers extreme reliability and high throughput, at the same time offering processor core, memory and I/O densities to enable expansion and flexibility. This makes is a great platform for mission-critical applications enabled by Solaris Cluster. The Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000 server is the latest addition to the M-series portfolio and brings extreme RAS, and extreme performance, in an ultra dense footprint at an entry-level price point. The mainframe-class reliability features of the M3000 and Solaris Cluster makes the combination a perfect solution for mission critical datacenter deployments. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/Top10/20944 We track how frequently each article is viewed on the web site to determine which the readers consider the most important. For last week, Vol 129 Issue 3, the top 10 articles were: Jonathan Schwartz Video: Sun Aligns Business to Amplify Growth Opportunities (5:40) [20909] Sun Analyst Series (SAS) 2008 - Videos and Slides Available [20898] Success with OpenSolaris + ZFS + MySQL in Production [20874] Jonathan Blogs on The Inside Story (Java, Microsoft and MySQL) [20890] OpenSolaris 2008.11 pre-release [20864] Sun Storage 7000 Management Software [20866] White Paper: Rethink Storage with Sun Storage 7000 Systems [20868] High Availability In The Datacenter [20808] Three Wins for Sun Consellation System and Lustre File System [20906] StarOffice 9 Software Release Includes Major Updates, Native Support for Mac OS X [20905] http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/bk/20921 O'Reilly has published "Nagios: System and Network Monitoring, Second Edition" by Wolfgang Barth, which deals with the host and service monitoring tool, Nagios, that is designed to inform systems administrators of network problems before clients or managers notice. It's robust but also complex, and Barth's book, updated to address Nagios 3.0, will help you take full advantage of this program. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/bk/20922 "JRuby Cookbook" by Justin Edelson and Henry Liu is a new O'Reilly title that offers practical solutions for using the Java implementation of the Ruby language, with targeted recipes for deploying Rails web applications on Java servers, integrating JRuby code with Java technologies, developing JRuby desktop applications with Java toolkits, and more. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/feature/20925 Sun donated a Sun Modular Data Center (Sun MD/Blackbox) to the China National Disaster Reduction Center (CNDRC) to help “Chinese officials develop an early warning system for earthquakes, hoping to minimize the impact of temblors like the one that devastated Sinchuan province earlier this year.” http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/feature/20929 An article appearing in Computerworld.com said: "Migrating from high-end Unix-based systems to commodity x86/Linux platforms has been a popular idea for the past few years, at least in theory. But it turns out that not everyone thinks going full-on with Linux is the best solution -- at least not yet." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/news/20947 Peter Ryan, Executive Vice President, Global Sales & Services, delivered a talked called "Execution On Innovation" at Sun's recent "Sun Analyst Series (SAS) 2008" event. Peter opened his talk by saying that his goal was to give the audience of analysts a perspective of what Sun is seeing in the field, with partners and with customers and why, "frankly we are optimistic and positive about the future." He continued, "I'll try to give you proof points about why we're confident and what we are seeing out there. The one thing that's missing in lots of the discussion that takes place in the chat rooms and blogs is factual details. I'll try to give you some context there." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/news/20933 In his new blog, Jonathan talks about Sun's recent success at Wikipedia which he calls a great example of a "redshift" application ("a segment of the market that's growing faster than the technology industry's capacity to innovate"). Jonathan also states that. "most of the planet's largest web sites (just look at the top 100) are built atop Sun's MySQL database. Which is why we've just introduced a line of systems platform designed specifically to run MySQL - at up to 3x the performance of whitebox alternatives." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/news/20941 Sun announced the Sun Data Protection Services, Data Erasure, a new on-site service to help enable customers to remain compliant with internal corporate data erasure policies during the removal, redeployment or relocation of equipment containing sensitive data. The service also empowers customers' to become compliant with the ever increasing policies of regulatory agencies for the removal or destruction of data, by providing a global, audit-ready solution that erases data at the platter level. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/sec/20930 Released in October 2008, the COMPLETE BUYER’S GUIDE for IDENTITY MANAGEMENT provides the information and tools to help you make the right decision when evaluating identity management solutions. Section one of the guide provides a business primer which examines the role of identity management. Section two provides decision-making tools for business needs and the technology environment. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/sec/20934 Sun has posted a new Blueprint by by Joel Weise. The intro says, "Security threats can reduce the functionality, performance, availability, and integrity of IT systems. These systemic qualities are critical — so much so that they are typically instantiated formally into Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In IT environments, the desire is to reduce potential security threats at least to the degree by which SLAs can be satisfied. This article discusses the principles and characteristics of a new architectural approach -- adaptive security -- which is based in part on the concepts and principles of complex adaptive systems." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/server/20828 Sun has announced product enhancements to the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 Server platforms based on the Chip Multi-threaded Technology (CMT) UltraSPARC T2 processor. The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 CoolThreads servers based on the UltraSPARC T2 processor continue to enable IT groups to securely, reliably and eco-efficiently serve millions of new customers and communities while saving millions, through a virtualized, environmentally responsible data center infrastructure. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/server/20926 Patrick McGehearty has written a Sun BluePrints Online paper on "Performance Considerations for Developers Utilizing Sun SPARC Enterprise M-Series Servers." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/storage/20902 In a recent blog Ben Rockwood speaks to practitioners of bulk data archiving about the virtues of the compression capabilities built in to ZFS. His first point is that compression has a contribution to make in the area of I/O, as well as disk space. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/129/4/sw/20900 Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v2 includes advanced high availability features that enable enterprises to deploy GlassFish in business-critical environments. This white paper provides valuable insights into possible reference topologies that meet a variety of deployment needs from a high availability perspective in a virtualized environment. IT departments are asked to deliver a continuous stream of new business services into a constrained, if not shrinking, IT budget. GlassFish, together with Solaris 10 Containers and Sun Fire T2000 servers, can enable IT departments to deliver these services under budget. GlassFish offers the cost-efficiency and productivity of open source products, while Solaris 10 Containers on Sun Fire T2000 servers minimize the number of manage nodes.