System News for Sun Users - The Blog

Single Console Management Has Reduced Database Incidents by 50 Percent 

Cerner, a global health care company with over 9,000 facilities worldwide, has implemented Oracle Enterprise Manager in its aim to eliminate error, variance and waste for its affiliated health care providers and customers while also generating additional revenue. The new cloud-based services supported by Oracle Enterprise Manager have enabled Cerner to reduce capital investments by $9.5 million. The simplified management environment of Oracle Enterprise Manager allows Cerner staffers to operate from a single management console, enabling preventive actions that have reduced database incidents by 50 percent and allowed 17 percent of problems to be identified without DBA intervention.

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Darryl Gove’s Book Back in Circulation Once Again

“The System Developer’s Edge: Selected Blog Posts and Articles” is available now as a pdf, reports Darryl Gove. The pdf differs from the earlier book in only two significant ways, Gove writes, the first being an absence of cover art and the second being a change in the title to include the word “system,” indicating a focus on the hardware end of the stack. Some of the links in the pdf are no longer current, Gove cautions, just as a number of the products discussed may have been rebranded or come to end of life under Oracle.

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Oracle Solaris Optimization for Intel Processors Pays Off in Many Ways

“Beefing Up Xeon RAS with Solaris,” a presentation by Ashok Raj originally given at Oracle OpenWorld 2011, is available as a slide set that covers the following aspects of the talk:

• Intel Processor Advances
• Platform RAS Components (Oracle Solaris FMA)
• Xeon Machine Check Architecture Improvements
• Future Enhancements

Raj contends that Oracle Solaris has been optimized for Intel Xeon-based systems in terms of scalability, enhanced power management, and mission critical reliability.
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Case Study 

By way of their slide presentation from Oracle OpenWorld 2011, now available as a download, Cheri Williams, Craig Yappert, and Gowthaman Ranganathan provide an update on Oracle IT Upgrades to Sun Storage Products. The presentation is in three parts:

• Overview: Oracle IT and Storage Strategy (reasons for migrating to ZFS Storage Appliance and outline of storage strategy)
• Storage Configurations and Performance (specifics of Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance)
• Oracle IT Use Cases (includes an overview of ZFS Storage in Product Development)

The presentation then summarizes lessons learned from the migration to ZFS Storage Appliance.
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His Current Assignment: Enhancing Core JDK Libraries 

Stuart W. Marks, Principal Member of Technical Staff in Oracle’s Java Platform Group, is the guest on Episode 54 of the Java Spotlight Podcast, where the discussion involves the coinification of JDK 7. Marks is currently working on enhancing the core libraries of the JDK and has previously worked on JavaFX and Java ME at Sun. Host Roger Brinkley notes that Marks has over 20 years of software platform product development experience in the areas of window systems, interactive graphics, and mobile and embedded systems. Once again, Dalibor Topic, Java Free and Open Source Software Ambassador, sits on the Java All Star Developer Panel.

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The extinction of UNIX is not going to happen in our lifetimes - Forrester 

How does one describe UNIX, that Grande Dame of OSes: faded, perhaps, but vital nonetheless? Those are not Richard Fichera’s words but they appear to be his sentiments in his article for Forrester, “UNIX — Dead or Alive? and framing the title in terms of a wanted poster suggests his very thesis, that UNIX is still much in demand and likely to remain so. He contends that UNIX on proprietary RISC architectures is in for the long haul and predicts vendors, including Oracle, IBM and HP, will offer continued improvements in hardware and software.

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A How-to that Avoids the DBA (in most cases)

How to set up a one-click HA setting in PostgreSQL’s vFabric Data Director is illustrated in Jignesh Shah’s blogspot.com post. In some cases the PostgreSQL monitor can correctly diagnose the situation and restart the database. In others the virtual machine itself will need to be shut down, enabling the vCenter Server to start the database on another server. In this instance, DHCP addresses may well be affected, which Shah solves by relying on the virtual hosts format to allow users to find their intended database without regard for which server it is running on.

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OASIS Approval Is Expected
The Document Foundation (TDF) announces the adoption by LibreOffice of ODF 1.2 as an OASIS standard. A formal announcement of this development by OASIS is anticipated. Standard document formats, the blog continues, are key for liberating the user from the lock in of proprietary formats. ODF has been developed by OASIS based on OOo document format, and is now supported by most personal productivity software and many other computer programs. TDF is committed to supporting ODF and contribute to its development. ODF will be one of four main topics at the upcoming LibreOffice Conference in Paris.
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Attend in Person or Sign Up for the Webcast
27 Oct 2011 The long-awaited launch of Solaris 11 takes place on November 9, 2011, in New York City. Interested parties in the New York area are invited to register to attend; those outside the area can sign up for the webcast.
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2014: 6Tb-12Tb Disks; 1.2Tb-2Tb SSDs; 6Tb-15Tb Tapes
“Tape Based Magnetic Recording: Technology Landscape Comparisons with Hard Disk Drive and Flash Roadmaps,” a paper by IBM’s Robert E. Fontana, Jr., Steven R. Hetzler, and Gary Decad, describes the areal density (bits per unit area) roadmap goals for tape-based magnetic recording to show that current volumetric densities (bits per unit volume) for tape, HDD and NAND are similar and that lithographic requirements for tape are less challenging than those for NAND and HDD. As a result the potential for sustained annual areal density increase rates for tape is greater by far than that for both NAND and HDD.
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