 |
| . |
ASAPs Webinar
Editor:-
November 18, 2009 - Dataram
is running a webinar today -
Navigating
the Maze of Solid State Storage Solutions.
The company says
viewers will discover - "How to better gauge your storage traffic to
identify bottlenecks and areas where solid state storage can provide a day 1
positive ROI."
EU Says "Non!" to Oracle's Sun Romance
Editor:-
November 10, 2009 - this is an update on the
EU
antitrust case (M.5529) concerning
Oracle's
proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
According to a
Sun
SEC filing the EU has objected saying "the combination of Sun's open
source MySQL database product with Oracle's enterprise database products and its
potential negative effects on competition in the market for database products".
Oracle
effectively said - it's
sad and feels misunderstood.
The case is not yet over, however. One
interesting factor has been the publicly aired difference of views expressed by
EU and US regulators -
as
reported in this story by Reuters.
There is a lot of history on
the EU site regarding Oracle, Open Source and Sun. The EU does understand
Sun and Oracle a lot better than you might think and doesn't want to be
stung by retrospective tabs for migrating or end of lifing thousands of Open
Source database projects. But surely the parties involved could agree to ring
fence MySQL or spin
it off as part of the takeover settlement. I'm not sure how relevant this is
to the value Oracle sees in Sun - unless they want to choke it off.
I
was surprised how frustrating it was trying to find anything useful on the EU
site - probaby because Google has also been a target of their earlier
investigations (re Doubelclick) - and the EU web designers don't appear to use
it.
Unigen Signals 2.5" SAS SSD Intent
Editor:-
November 2, 2009 -
Unigen announced
it will manufacture a new range of
flash SSDs using
SSD processors from SandForce.
The 2.5"
SSDs will be available with
SATA or
SAS interfaces.
That
brings the number of native SAS SSD oems up to 9. Still a small fraction
of those making SATA SSDs.
The small form factor SAS SSD market has been squeezed into a corner by high
speed SATA eating design slots from below and
PCIe SSDs gobbling up
from above.
Another SPC-1 Record for TMS SSD
Editor:- October
27, 2009 - Texas
Memory Systems today
announced
that its RamSan-620 - (2U
5TB SLC flash SSD, price $220,000 approx) - has achieved a
record
setting SPC-1 result.
It produced 254,994.21 SPC-1 IOPS with
average response time of 0.72mS and at a cost of only $1.13 per SPC-1 IOPS -
which is better than any competing RAID or Flash solution.
Sun Launches New SSDs
Editor:- October 12, 2009 -
Sun Microsystems
launched
2 new SSD product lines.
- The F5100
Flash Array ($45,995 upwards) is a new 1U
rackmount SSD -
which has 16 SAS ports
and provides upto 1.92TB capacity. R/W IOPS are upto 1.6M and 1.2M respectively
(for a system populated with 80 SSD modules).
- The FlashFire
F20 is a 96GB SLC flash
PCIe SSD with 100k
read and 84k write IOPS. R/W rates are upto 1092MB/s and 501MB/s respectively.
The card also includes a
SAS controller.
Editor's
comments:- I added the F5100 Flash Array to the directory of
the Fastest
SSDs. It rates that on throughput and IOPS. However, its latency is 20x
worse than typical RAM
SSDs and its performance per channel is low.
In some ways it
looks like a product which has been engineered to
look good in a
benchmark - rather than to perform well in a range of real applications. So
- as I advise everyone looking at their 1st SSDs - try before you buy.
The
FlashFire F20, however, is totally unimpressive. It looks like a low capacity
version of products which Fusion-io
was shipping a year ago.
More Musings Over Sun's (Still Moving) Entrails
Editor:-
September 16, 2009 -
Sun
Microsystems Autopsy: Death by Reverse Darwinism is an interesting
commentary on the history of Sun's corporate culture and the current state of
the company.
It's written by Daniel Nenni who once upon a time
worked for the 1st multi-processor SPARC server company, Solbourne. ...read
the article
Will Oracle Dissect Sun?
Editor:- September 1, 2009
- a recent blog in Fortune.CNN.com
speculates that Oracle may sell
Sun's hardware business to
HP.
Sun's Venerable SPARC® Trademark Site Infected!
Editor:-
July 31, 2009 - I became aware today that the web site for SPARC International
(the original SPARC member ORG founded by Sun in 1989) may have have become
infected by malware.
Although we have not heard anything from SPARC
International for many years - this is often the case with
industry standards
organizations when the market windows for their services have ended.
I
was concerned that curious readers may want to visit their site for the purposes
of historic research etc. That was the reason for my visit today - which set off
malware warnings in my machine. The sparc.com domain is also tagged with a
warning
from Google.
I contacted Sun Microsystems today to alert them to
this possibility - as there are nearly 60,000 pages on Sun's own web site which
reference the SPARC trademark site.
Sun should be able to reclaim the
site from the domain
registration body if it has been inadvertantly lost - due to the SPARC
trademark issue. Or Sun should be able to clean it up - if Sun can still exert
authority over it. I'll let you know when I hear what they've done.
...Later:-
I contacted Finjan (a company with
expertise on preventing web site contamination) - and within minutes their
CTO Yuval
Ben-Itzhak confirmed there is indeed a malicious script present.
"I worked enthusiastically in the SPARC market - as an editor
- for over a decade - so I find this security lapse sad and embarrassing
- even though I don't have any connection with the site" said Zsolt
Kerekes, editor of StorageSearch.com
who discovered the problem today. "I hope that Sun can do something to
fix the problem soon."
More on this will follow later.
Sun Unplugged? - Rivals Race to Reap the Harvest
Editor:-
July 30, 2009 - an article in
Infoworld
says Sun Microsystems' customers are being targeted by IBM and
HP who are preying on customers' doubts about Sun's long term
hardware strategies under Oracle's ownership.
Author
Jon Brodkin writes
- "Sun customers were already showing a willingness to switch" - even
before these targeted Sun-away campaigns. ...read
the article
Novell Automates Hardware Migration for Solaris 10
Waltham,
MA - July 14, 2009 - Novell today announced the addition of
physical-to-virtual migration support for Sun's Solaris 10 OS in the
latest version of PlateSpin Migrate.
"We expect PlateSpin
Migrate 8.1 to make it even easier for customers to take advantage of the power
and versatility of Solaris Containers," said Jim McHugh, VP of Data Center
Software Marketing at Sun. "Using PlateSpin Migrate 8.1 to perform
physical-to-virtual migration will also help minimize the risk of introducing
errors into new configurations and speed the completion of virtualization
projects."
PlateSpin Migrate 8.1 is available later this month priced at $1,495
for a one-time
Unix
license.
Last SPARC Standing - TOP500 Supercomputers
Editor:-
June 24, 2009 - the 33rd edition of the TOP500 list of the
world's most powerful supercomputers was updated recently.
Only 1
single machine in the list today uses SPARC processors.
That's a
steep decline from 10
years ago - when the TOP500 included 95 SPARC systems. |
| |
|
| Sun's
Future Lies in Oracle................................... |
Editor:- April 20, 2009 - Oracle today
announced
an agreement to acquire Sun
Microsystems for approximately $7.4 billion.
Editor's
comments:- this ends nearly a decade of speculation about the future of Sun
Microsystems, a company which created a unique server business peaking at
over $20 billion annual revenue at the turn of the Millenium.
You
can read how Sun created that market, then lost it piece by piece and then
finally lost itself in the storage market in the article which tracks the
22 History of SPARC
systems market.
It's fitting that Oracle writes the end of this
story.
In the earliest days of the Sun market, portable relational
databases were a great selling tool for Sun VARs a to open the doors for the
unknown Sun.
Typically they'd get the customer to run a dbase
benchmark on their VAX and then run the same thing on a Sun. In the late 1980s
Sun hardware came in at less than 1/2 the price and more than 2x the
performance. And that was before the SPARC market heated up with a series of
ever faster, and then unbeatable, products in the early to mid 1990s.
...Later:-
April 22, 2009 - Although I've read a lot of "analyst" blogs - I
haven't seen any analysis about this significant deal that's worthy of a
link. So here's what I think.
The 2 most important emerging trends
in the computer market which I've been discussing for many years
elsewhere are:-
The new content enabled industries
of the future mean that vast data sets, which were once the preserve of telcos
or governments - will become much more commonplace than in the past.
Although
Google manages huge amounts of data using Linux, and internally developed
applications, most enterprises can't do that. Because unlike Google they don't
have a monopolist's business advantages, and unlike Google, they can't easily
recruit PhDs to write most of their software.
Instead enterprises will
turn to platforms which already have a reputation for managing large data sets
reliably - as the starting point for their new projects.
SSD
accelerated, Solaris hosted Oracle makes good sense for that kind of business
plan.
If readers have views on this Oracle / Sun thing that they'd
like to share. Drop me a line,
saying who you are and what you think. | |
| . |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
. |
|
|
|
|
3 years ago - November 2006 -
Transitive
Demos SPARC Apps on Intel Boxes
November 7, 2006 - Transitive
announced the availability of a virtual appliance that provides an evaluation
release of QuickTransit for Solaris/SPARC-to-Linux/x86-64 pre-installed within a
VMware Virtual Machine.
The virtual appliance provides data center
managers with a quick and easy evaluation of Transitive's innovative hardware
virtualization solution by allowing them to execute their Solaris/SPARC
applications inside a VM on a 64-bit x86-based system, running either the free
VMware Server or the high-end VMware Infrastructure 3 platform. No software
installation or configuration is required.
The Transitive virtual appliance with QuickTransit for
Solaris/SPARC-to-Linux/x86-64 pre-installed within a VMware VM is a limited
offering available at no cost to qualified enterprise data center managers.
...Later:- although long anticipated, this showed that the rising tide
of the new
Solaris Migration (away from Sun's SPARC) had passed a pivotal point. All
previous offerings had been engineer intensive, costly and error prone, suiting
only very large customers who could offset the migration costs against lower
cost server hardware.
With the promise of automated tools - users who
had hung onto their SPARC setups (but who were still dissatisfied with Sun)
found it easier and less risky to take that first step. |
|
6 years ago - November 2003 -
Tadpole
Launches UltraSPARC-IIIi Notebook
November 18, 2003 - Tadpole Computer
announced VIPER, an UltraSPARC-IIIi powered notebook with integrated wireless
capabilities.
VIPER provides more than 2x the performance of other
SPARC notebooks. It supports up to 2GB memory, up to 80GB disk storage,
DVD/CD-RW drives, 10/100 Ethernet, a PCCard slot, 3x USB 2.0 ports, external
video, printer port, PS/2 ports and audio in/out connections.
It comes pre-installed with Solaris 9, GNOME 2.0, StarOffice 7.0,
Evolution 1.4 and Mozilla 1.4. Starting price is $5,995.
Editor's comments:- the SPARC notebook market, started by
Tadpole in 1992, outlived workstations and servers as a
multi-vendor SPARC
IHV market. You can
read its history
here. |
|
9 years ago - November 2000
This,
below, was a banner ad we were running for a California based Sun VAR called
Cymerc.
Like
many others following the dotcom crash they were closed down soon after opening
their doors - in February
2001
|
| . |
 |
| . |
SPARC news stories in
November 2000
included:-
- a high availability Sun SPARC cluster system from I-Bus/Phoenix
- 41% server shipment growth for Dell servers (for many years Sun
lived in denial and refuted suggestions that Dell was a competitor in Sun's
enterprise market)
- the launch of System News, from John J. McLaughlin
(Publisher of the original Sun market ezines - "SunFlash" and "FlashBack").
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| . |
| |
