Scott McNeally and Terry Matthews of Mitel answer questions put to them by Andy Canham of Sun on the subject of their companies' most recent collaboration, the world's first converged voice and data desktop for the thin client.
Sun announced Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0, a high performance, free and open source desktop virtualization software, and
Sun xVM VirtualBox Software Enterprise Subscription, a new offering for 24/7 premium support for enterprise users. Enterprises will be able to fully reap the benefits of the xVM VirtualBox platform and deploy it across their organizations with guaranteed technical support from Sun. xVM VirtualBox software is the first major open source hypervisor to support the most popular host operating systems (OS), including Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, Solaris and OpenSolaris.
Sun's xVM VirtualBox software has received awards and positive reviews from top industry experts. Most recently, the software won InfoWorld's 2008 Bossies (Best of Open Source Software) Awards in the "Best of open source platforms and middleware: Desktop virtualization" category. xVM VirtualBox software was chosen for its OS support and seamless Windows support.
In the IDC Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker for Q2CY08, Sun showed strong results for disk storage systems sales.
Sun outpaced all major storage vendors to see a 29.2% year-over-year increase in factory revenue for the second quarter of 2008, outperforming the market by nearly three times.
The second quarter's worldwide disk systems results shows continued strength, with the total market increasing to $6.9B in revenues, up from a 10.9% increase from Q2 CY07.
Sun disk storage systems outgrew the market in many major revenue categories for Q2 CY2008.
The Benton Public Utility District in Kennewick Washington practices a strong public service ethic and, as part of its continuing dedication to providing its 45,000 customers the best possible service, the utility has migrated its Oracle PeopleSoft applications to browser-based versions. The result was a disappointing degradation in the performance of certain key applications. Benton Public Utility turned to the Sun Try and Buy Program for a solution.
Virtualization has really paid off for Dow Corning Corporation, where a three-member IT UNIX team using the Solaris 10 Operating System manages to deliver all the IT services this $4.4 billion multinational company requires at a substantial savings. Dow has been able to virtualize and manage servers quickly and efficiently by exploiting the Containers and ZFS features in the Solaris 10 OS as a key part of its adaptive computing model.
Rainer Walter's case study entitled "Phone Call Surveillance With CopperEye Greenwich on Sun Fire X4540 Server" describes the results of using the CopperEye Greenwich Server software, v2.1.0.6 designed for the fast retrieval of records from flat data files, on a high-density storage Sun Fire X4540 server with 2x AMD Opteron quad-core CPU, 2.3 GHz, 32 GB RAM and 48 X 500 GB SATA disks running the Solaris 10 Operating System. This case study describes the results of a usage test for phone call surveillance under storage and analysis requirements defined by a directive of the European Parliament and Council.
"Setting Up MySQL Cluster Software Using Solaris Zones Partitioning Technology" is a Sun BigAdmin paper by Hashamkha Pathan that describes how to set up MySQL Cluster software in a Solaris Zones environment, as if it were running on independent physical servers. This setup is useful for replicating an environment in-house without using multiple physical systems. Pathan shows that it is also possible to extend the setup to use Solaris Zones on different physical systems.
Check out Sun's new approach to virtualization of the datacenter — Easy, Open, and at Internet Scale.
Revolutionizing the Enterprise Software Market — Again
On September 10, 2008, Sun will be introducing the new Sun xVM Virtualization Portfolio — the only open solution spanning virtualization and management from desktop to datacenter
Live Webcast and Chat
What: Sun xVM Virtualization Portfolio Launch Web Event
When: September 10, 2008
Time: 9:00 a.m. PDT
Who: Rich Green, Software EVP and Steve Wilson, xVM VP
In their position paper "Virtualization Solutions for Data Center and Storage Efficiency" CIO2CIO identifies the two problems that concern contemporary CIOs more than any other. They are the difficulty of managing an increasing volume of data and the relative inefficiencies of the storage systems they use to manage their complex and fragmented storage infrastructure.
Sun xVM Ops Center offers dynamic work flow automation for discovery, lights-out management, monitoring, patch management, change management, configuration management, provisioning and application deployment. It allows system administrators to manage thousands of Solaris, Red Hat, and Suse systems from a web browser. Its intelligent knowledge services and smart patching processes are scalable and automated and provides a cost effective solution for handling complex system administration tasks in the datacenter.
The next live web event will be held on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 9 AM PT.
Sun Secure Global Desktop Software provides secure access to centralized Windows, UNIX, Mainframe and Midrange applications from a wide range of popular client devices, including Microsoft Windows PCs, Solaris OS Workstations, thin clients and mobile devices.
Sun Secure Global Desktop Software 4.41 is available for download with such features as new
new command for securing an SGD server; pull-down header for kiosk mode applications: service tag support; active directory authentication log filter; and active directory SSL security without client certificates.
Sun staff writer Marina Sum interviewed Jamie Nelson, director of engineering for access and federation management at Sun, to learn his views on security as it pertains to application development on the web. This interview is part 1 of six, each with a different individual and all part of the From the Trenches at Sun Identity series.
Sun has posted a new 6-page data sheet that describes the Sun Java System Identity Management software, including role manager.
One of the big challenges facing IT managers is how to provide access to their employees, their customers and partners in a secure fashion. Sun’s™ identity management portfolio includes everything an organization needs to manage, protect, store, verify, and share identity information throughout the enterprise and across extranets.
A directory is a directory is a directory...well, er, sorry Gertrude Stein, but not any longer. Sun has posted a new 4-page data sheet that describes Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition, 6.3. Identity-enabled applications need more than a directory that is only a repository for identity data. Instead, the new directory must provide secure access to numerous repositories while maintaining the highest possible levels of availability and demonstrating the ability to scale to keep pace with ever changing groups of internal and external users.
"The Solaris Operating System and the New Intel Core Microarchitecture" is the title of a white paper that offers a high-level overview of key features of the new Intel Core Microarchitecture (formerly code-named Nehalem), and the advantages of running the Solaris Operating System (OS) in this environment. The intended audience includes business decision makers, developers and IT professionals.
Sun, long a proponent of open source technology, has joined the MTConnect Technical Adviosory Group (MTAG), expanding its advocacy of open communication to the area of manufacturing technology, as reported in Market Watch. MTConnect, is an open manufacturing technology standard using royalty free Internet communications technologies as its basis to encourage and enable manufacturing technology vendors and customers to safely and easily communicate.
The Sun 10 Gigabit Ethernet Networking Cards which incorporate the Intel 82598EB 10 Gigabit Ethernet controller, are designed to meet the throughput and latency requirements of bandwidth-hungry applications such as High Performance Computing, database clusters and video-on demand. In addition, these Sun 10 GbE cards offer advanced features for higher throughput, lower CPU utilization and virtualization. Ideal for slot-constrained environments, the Sun 10 Gigabit Ethernet Cards provide a simplified alternative to multiple 1 GbE cards for Sun's portfolio of x64 servers and Blade Servers.
The new ExpressModule, X1108A-z, is a dual 10GbE port ExpressModule supporting SFP+ Transceivers. customer can change available SFP+ transceivers to create any combination as needed.
Sun has made a wiki available for the all blade information and needs. Here you will find the Modular Solutions Community, How-To Interactive Videos, and other useful content to learn more about the Sun Blade Systems. On this wiki, you can:
The Sun Bade 6000 Multi-Fabric Network Express Module (NEM) is designed for enterprise-level connectivity environments. The Muti-Fabric NEM connects to some of the popular switches from Cisco, Force 10, Foundry, Extreme, Fujitsu, and HP.
It comes with 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports and 10 unpopulated SFP+ (10G) ports. It also includes four mini SAS ports.
Up to two of the NEMS can be added to a Sun Blade 6000 chasis.
FileBench has kindled the enthusiasm of Ben Rockwood, who writes on how to "Explore Your Storage with FileBench," which he calls one of the most powerful and flexible benchmarking tools around.
Unlike such micro-benchmarking tools as Bonnie++ or IOzone, he writes, FileBench [19937] is an application simulator or workload generator that results in benchmarking results that more nearly approximate the results in an actual production setting.
For all of that, FileBench, which is still in development, is somewhat non-intuitive, Rockwood maintains. His aim is to make using the solution easier through example.
Sun blogger Anatol Studler makes that case in a recent blog
that you should avoid placing SSDs in traditional arrays.
A traditional array has a controller with a certain fixed amount of compute power and I/O capability.
Placing fast SSDs into an array designed for traditional disks is,
"is quite surprising to me, as it is comparable to place a 8-cylinder bi-turbo engine with 450HP into an entry level car."
Anatol continues, "Traditional midrange arrays are developed to handle hundreds of traditional (15k RPM) harddisk drives. A traditional harddisk is capable of running about 250 IO/s. Now if we compare this with the actual enterprise class Solid State Disks available on the market, a single solid state disk can do about 50k IO/s read or 12k IO/s write. So in fact it is about 100x faster than a 15k RPM harddisk."
A fast array controller capable of delivering 500k I/Os would hard pressed to keep up with just 10 SSDs.
Fujifilm's NANOCUBIC Technology has enabled the company to produce media for the Sun StorageTek T10000 Tape Drive that is capable of storing up to three TB of data using industry standard 3:1 compression, reports CNNMoney.com. This product can provide superior levels of enterprise tape storage performance with 120 MB/sec native transfer rate, the report continues.
We track how frequently each article is viewed on the web site to determine which the readers consider the most important.
The top 10 articles for last week, Vol 126 Issue 4, were:
TWiki version 4.2, from TWIKI.NET, includes a new WYSIWYG editor that is easy to use and can significantly reduce the learning curve for first time users. It also offers support for a SQL like query language to aide the end-user in building wiki applications.
This software release coincides with the open source project migration to a new Sun Fire T5220 server, a Sun Fire X4450 server and a Sun StorageTek 5320 NAS Gateway System contributed by Sun Microsystems.
"The development community and TWiki users everywhere are benefiting from Sun's support and participation of the project. The improved performance we are delivering is very helpful to the open source developers and TWiki users around the world who are working on this Web 2.0 project," said Peter Thoeny, Community Leader, Founder and CTO of TWIKI.NET.
The BigAdmin XPert sessions all BigAdmin community members to interact with experts who
will answers questions for the whole community to see.
In a recent session, Jeff Victor was the expert and the topic was, "Running Solaris 8 and 9 Applications on Solaris 10 with Solaris Containers".
Jeff Victor authored the Sun BluePrints document "Solaris Containers Technology Architecture Guide", "How to Move a Container" guide, and he maintains the "Solaris Zones and Containers" FAQ at opensolaris.org.
Some of the questions asked by the community were, "Are Solaris 8 Containers and Solaris 9 Containers the same thing?",
"Do Solaris 8 Containers run on x86 systems?".
Perfbar is a visual tool that is very valuable when determining bottle necks on SMP servers. It serves as an indicator for single threaded applications. Such tools as mpstat are much more precise but far from less intuitive. Removing this bottle neck of a single thread which is CPU bound in an application is very important to exploit all CPU resources of a SMP server.
Ralph Bogendörfer, Solaris Performance Engineer, is currently working to extend the perfbar. Version 1.2 allows the monitoring of massive parallel CMT servers through an improved layout. The traditional look showed bars for all CPUs in a row like the one for a 16 way server below.
CacheFS is a hidden feature deep inside of Solaris. It is considered similar to a caching proxy, but it doesn't cache web pages, it caches files from another filesystem. Joerg Moellenkamp has a series of tutorials on hidden features of Solaris, and his latest edition is an 8 part walk through of CacheFS and how it works.
Sun Installation Assistant (SIA) helps install supported Linux (Red Hat and SUSE) and Microsoft Windows operating systems on Sun x64 servers. SIA also makes firmware updates automatic on some servers. SIA makes OS installation easy. With SIA, all that is needed to begin is a licensed copy of Linux or Windows OS distribution media supported for a particular server. All Sun software and required server-specific drivers are supplied by SIA. With a graphical wizard interface and flexible installation options, SIA brings simplicity, speed and reliability to server deployments.
Managing growth cost effectively was something of a issue for C.A. Mobile of Tokyo, which offers media services for mobile phones, including e-commerce solutions, ringtones and games, and advertising creation and placement. The large number of Intel-based servers running Linux in the company's datacenter just were not the answer.
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