| Sun
Launches New Telco Grade SPARC Servers......................................... |
SANTA CLARA, CA - September 29,
2008 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. today launched the Sun Netra T5440
server, a 4U NEBS Level 3 server powered by 2 UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors.
Main
memory is expandable upto 128 GB. Expansion is via 6x PCIe slots and 2x PCI-X
slots. Internal mass storage includes upto 12x
SAS drives.
Pricing starts at $19,635.
Sun, Lazarus and Solaris
Editor:-
September 25, 2008 - InfoWorld has published a new article called - "is
Sun Solaris on its deathbed?"
Speaking as a publisher
- I have to admire the cleverness of the title which is bound to attract readers
both for and against the argument.
I myself have published articles
which at various times in the past decade have been cited by marketers in HP,
Sun or IBM to illustrate whatever point they were trying to make at the time.
But I have always believed that the most important asset for a publisher is the
confidence of its readers. Advertisers may come and go - but as I tell
potential advertisers - if your market is stupid readers - then advertise
somewhere else - and not here.
Going back to the InfoWorld article..is
there any merit in the proposition?
If you read it you can draw
your own conclusions. It's cleverly written and draws together a bunch of quotes
and assertions which are intended to lead you to a particular conclusion. And it
would not have seemed out of place if it had been published in the darker days
of the Sun market - anytime between 2002 and 2005.
But the conclusion
that Solaris is doomed - just because the Solaris server market hasn't been
growing recently - and just because the customer base is made up of die-hard
SPARCaholics who (by insinuation) are too old to learn about any other OS
ignores an important clear and present danger which is facing all server
operating systems and all server chipmakers.
That's the impact of
solid state disks - which
will have as big an impact on sweeping away old ways of designing servers - as
the 8086 and 68000 had on the minicomputer market in the 1980s.
It
seems to me that Sun has said more sensible things on this subject (SSDs) in
recent months than any other server oem. And although Sun could still screw up
(as it has done many times
before in the storage market) Sun is uniquely placed to marry OS and
processor acceleration technologies. As I said in my
2004 article -
which predicted that Sun would be the first of the server brat pack to make
this revolutionary step.
If you're wondering where the "Lazarus"
part comes from in my headline, it's not that I think Solaris has been on its
deathbed and will rise up and walk (or run). But I couldn't think of a title
that's better than the one InfoWorld already used.
OpenSolaris Award Winners
SANTA
CLARA, CALIF - September 18, 2008 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. today
announced the winners of the OpenSolaris Community Innovation Awards Program.
Winning
contest entries range from new distributions to tools that make using and
administering OpenSolaris easier.
Sun Fires New Salvo in Server Virtualization Wars
SANTA
CLARA, CA - September 10, 2008 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. today
announced the availability of Sun xVM Server software and Sun xVM Ops Center
2.0, key components in its comprehensive virtualization strategy.
Sun
says its new virtualization portfolio delivers datacenter-grade server
virtualization for managing heterogeneous workloads, including Windows, Red Hat
and SUSE Linux, Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems, on Sun x86 platforms
and SPARC-based servers.
Sun xVM Server software is designed to
interoperate with VMware and uses the same virtual hard disk and virtual
appliance formats, enabling customers to easily move workloads between VMware
ESX and Sun xVM Server software.
see also:-
virtualization
predictions roundup on virtualization.info | |
| . | |
Sun Launches New Telco Grade
SPARC Servers
Sun on Deathbed Article
OpenSolaris Award
Winners
Sun Fires New Salvo in Server Virtualization Wars
earlier news - archive |
 |
| rackmount SSDs |
If he had his way... Sir
Squeaks-a-Bit
would stretch all 15K RPM disk pretenders
on the
rack and then remove their wobbly heads. | |
| . |
| Can You Trust Your Flash
SSD's Specs and Benchmarks? |
Editor:- I've noticed is that
the published specs of
flash SSDs change
a lot -from the time a product they are first announced, then when they're
being sampled, and later again when they are in volume production.
Sometimes
the headline numbers get better, sometimes they get worse. There are many good
reasons for this.
The product which you carefully qualified may
not be identical to the one that's going into your production line for a
variety of reasons...
And here's another thing to worry about...
The
enterprise flash SSDs which you benchmarked yourself - may surprise you by
running much slower when deployed in your own applications due to
common "halo" errors which are implicit in the set ups of many
performance test suites which were originally designed for HDDs. ...read the article | |
| . |
| Are MLC SSDs Safe
in Enterprise Apps? |
This is a follow up
article to the popular
SSD Myths and
Legends which, a year earlier demolished the myth that flash memory
wear-out (a comfort blanket beloved by many
RAM SSD makers)
precluded the use of flash in heavy duty datacenters.
This new
article looks at the risks posed by MLC Nand Flash SSDs which have recently
hatched from their breeeding ground as chip modules in cellphones and morphed
into
hard disk form
factors. |
 |
It starts down a familiar
lane but an unexpected technology twist takes you to a startling new world
of possibilities.
...read the
article | | | |
