System News for Sun Users - The Blog

Updated Sun Configuration Diagram Templates are available. Recent changes include:

2008-06-12 Added T5240.
2007-12-10 Added T5120 & T5220
2008-05-20 Added X4450
2008-01-11 Added X8420 Blade. Added SB8000P
2008-01-23 Added M8000 Slice Config.
2007-09-12 M8000 & M9000 added.
2007-08-12 M4000 & M5000 added.
2008-05-30 Added J4500, Updated SL500
2008-05-21 Added SL3000 Tape Library

More Information
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Testing The Technology that allows ZFS to exploit Flash
A new blog posting by Brendan Gregg, co-author of “Solaris Performance and Tools”, explains an exciting new ZFS feature called L2ARC - the second level ARC.
ARC - Adaptive Replacement Cache - is the algorithm that ZFS uses to keep pages in memory to improve performance. Think of […]

According to a blog posting by Sun,
The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server running 2.52GHz SPARC64 VII processors delivered 2.023 TFLOPS on the Linpack HPC benchmark.
For single servers, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server outperforms the best IBM Power 595 5GHz POWER6 published result by two times on the Linpack HPC benchmark. This system is the […]

The SPEC OMPbenchmark  is used to rate certain types of system for HPC applications …
SPEC OMP (OpenMP Benchmark Suite) is SPEC’s first benchmark suite for evaluating performance based on OpenMP (http://www.openmp.org) applications. SPEC OMP continues the SPEC tradition […]

Sun announced preliminary results for its fourth quarter of fiscal 2008, which ended June 30, 2008:

$3.725 to $3.800 billion, as compared with $3.835 billion for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007
Total gross margin as a percent of revenues expected to be in the range of 44 to 45 percent.
GAAP net income per diluted share for […]

Sun is announcing new quad-core SPARC64 VII for its Enterprise servers — M4000, M5000, M8000 M4000 and M9000 - today. These CPUs extend the server family from 16 cores  to 256 cores with 32 to 512 DIMM slots:

M4000 - 4 CPUs, 16 cores, 32 DIMMS
M5000 - 8 CPUs, 32 cores, 64 DIMMS
M8000 - 16 […]

20253: Automatic Data Migration (ADM) with ZFS

OpenSolaris HSM for Solaris file systems, including ZFS
ADM, Automatic Data Migration, is an OpenSolaris HSM (hierarchical Storage Management) system for Solaris file systems. With ADM, files can be moved to archive storage (disk […]

Sun has made a Podcast available that talks about Sun Identity Manager 8.0:
Introducing Identity Manager 8.0 — 6/23/08
Brandon, Squire Earle, Craig McDonald and Mat Hamlin discuss the features and benefits of the new Identity Manager 8.0. Plus you’ll hear about roles and their evolution in identity management.

In a July 2008 article by Dominic Kay, “Configuring J4000 and ZFS in Ten Minutes”, you can see how powerful the combination of low cost JBODs and ZFS can be.
Dominic shows how easy it is have ZFS handle the manage two arrays each contain 12 x 136.72 GB disks - approximately 3.2 TB - in these […]

Release Notes
This release of Sun Clusters add support for  Oracle 11g in HA-Oracle and Oracle RAC configurations on SPARC based platforms.
It also adds support for Logical Domains in a Cluster. The Release note describes  topologies, requirements and restrictions, and installation and configuration procedures for guest domains as cluster nodes:

SPARC: LDom Guest Domains: Cluster in a […]