Gains Accelerated Performance, Better CPU Utilization, Lower Operating Costs
Mind Candy made its Moshi Monsters upgrade happen with Sun Technology: Sun Startup Essentials, Sun Fire X4170 and X4270 servers, Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System and Java SE6. Mind Candy achieved the upgrade with CPU utilization rates cut from 70 to 15 percent; Tomcat Web application server speed doubled; and the implementation of a cost-effective, eco-responsible infrastructure.
In 2009, multitudes of IT departments had to reassess their datacenters, and many are making enlightening discoveries, like air cooling can be sufficient in keeping systems in optimum condition or 15-30 percent of what is consuming power in their datacenters can be turned off with no harmful effect. So what does this type of complete and thorough datacenter inventorying translate to for the IT industry in 2010? ServerWatch’s Andy Patrizio offers his opinion.
Anyone interested in the Oracle VM may want to read Roddy Rodstein’s underground manual on Oracle’s server virtualization software. Broken down into seven topics, Rodstein, who is a member of the Virtualization and Linux team at Oracle, offers an introduction and architectural review, along with information on hard and soft partitioning, upgrading, OVS repository configurations, guest disk storage options, and manager command line interface.
Former Sun channel executive Tom Wagner, who once served as vice president of the company’s North America partner sales, has been hired by Oracle to handle the company’s new hardware division, reported Joseph F. Kovar for ChannelWeb. As part of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, this new hardware division is expected to continue the production and future development of much of Sun’s server, storage, operating system and software business as Oracle has promised to do.
Also Improved Data Integrity, Strengthened Regulatory Compliance
Geisinger Health Systems upgraded its IT environment with a Sun StorageTek tape solution that strengthened the organization’s regulatory compliance while improving performance and data integrity at its primary and remote datacenter sites. The new back up and recovery solution stores and encrypts healthcare records from its mainframe system for more than two million patients.
How valid are HP’s claims of pre-eminence in SAP SD benchmarks? In a Sun Performance and Best Practices blog, Guido Ficco comments on significant SAP SD 2 Tier results and HP claims. According to Ficco, HP’s claims rely on data skewed to establish their result. In defense of his position, Ficco cites the results for the latest version of SAP Enhancement Package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode).
Using DTrace to secure a more comprehensive view of IO sizes and alignments than is possible with iostat, for example, is the subject of Lisa Noordergraaf’s blog “IO Sizes and Alignments with DTrace.” The problem with iostat, she writes, is that while that utility does show the total number of reads and writes, it does not provide the necessary detail about individual sizes and alignments (start addresses) of the IOs as DTrace can.
Get support for the latest version of selected Veritas Storage Foundation software components with Solaris Cluster. Veritas Volume Manager and File System, part of Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1, are now supported on SPARC and X64 platforms with Solaris Cluster 3.2 11/09 and 3.2 1/09. Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) 5.1 Cluster Functionality (CVM) is supported on SPARC only.
Links to a Variety Resources on the Current Roadmap
The Jan. 27 Oracle presentation on its product strategy for integrating Sun hardware and software produced a lot of information on a variety of solutions and technologies. In this article, readers will find links and references from many different sources to help find material on their valued interests.
An Overview Along with Insight into New Developments
Joerg Moellenkamp has published an “IPMP - Tutorial Sneak Preview” for those interested in learning more about IP Multipathing (IPMP). He discusses the IPMP implementation in both Solaris 10/older versions of OpenSolaris as well as the current releases of OpenSolaris (Build 107 and up). Beginning with definitions and basic concepts, which are then followed through with more specific details, Moellenkamp offers insight into using IPMP, ending with tips and tricks even seasoned users may not know.
