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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.
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SPARC Product Directory - since 1992
see the SPARC Directory home page as it looked
in the Golden Age of the market in years gone by
1996 / 1998 / 1999 / 2000 / 2001
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click for datasheet SPARC T2BC Blade Server
SPARC T2 Server
for IBM BladeCenters
from Themis Computer
Flashbacks from SPARC History from archived SPARC news



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

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banner ad from sparc product directory - nov 2000
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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").

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read the article about SSD integrity written by SandForce
Data Integrity Challenges in flash SSD Design
Editor:- October 16, 2009 - StorageSearch.com recently published a new article called - Data Integrity Challenges in flash SSD Design - written by Kent Smith Senior Director, Product Marketing, SandForce.

Since bursting onto the SSD scene in April 2009, SandForce has achieved remarkably high reader popularity. How did a company whose business is designing SSD controllers achieve this? - especially when the direct market for its products today numbers less than 1,000 oems.

The answer is - that if you want to know what the future of 2.5" enterprise SATA SSDs might look like -you have to look at the leading technology cores that will affect this market. Even if you're not planning to use SandForce based products yourself - you can't afford to ignore them - because they are setting the agenda.

Reliability is the next new thing for SSD designers and users to start worrying about.
read the article about SSD integrity A common theme you will hear from all fast SSD companies is that the faster you make an SSD go - the more effort you have to put into understanding and engineering data integrity to eliminate the risk of "silent errors." ...read the article
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