System News for Sun Users - The Blog

Angus MacDonald, chief technologist for Sun Microsystems, Australasia, has put together a slide presentation that he calls “The Future of the Eco-Datacenter,” which investigates the increasingly pressing conjunction of ecology and economy as it affects the datacenter. He talks about the tension between demand and capacity and ways around these conflicts, such as increasing utilization, […]

Demo Project Tests Datacenter Cooling Technology of 7 Vendors
Dean Nelson blogs about the results of a demonstration project on comparing cooling products for datacenters, the results of which were presented in May 2008 at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.
Nelson identifies the participants in the demo, who were:

Liebert
XD
APC
InRow
Rittal LCP+
IBM/Vette Cool […]

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 […]

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 […]

A BigAdmin System Administration Portal is now available for the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 Servers.
Features on the portal include:

an overview of CoolThreads technology (with 360-degree tour)
link to the T5140 detailed product page
link to the T5240 detailed product page
discussion of Management Facilities
[…]

ZDnet columnist Paul Murphy looks at the cost of acquiring 1000 desk top systems in a recent blog post, “Costing Sun Ray vs Wintel“. He compares the Sun Ray thin client to a popular low-cost Dell desk top and concludes that the hardware costs are lower for the Sun Ray solution.
However, the big savings are […]

Sun has approved Active Power, Inc.’s PowerHouse system as a complimentary solution to the Sun Modular Datacenter S20. Active Power provides efficient, reliable and green critical power solutions and uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems to enable business continuity in the event of power disturbances.
Its Powerhouse system is based upon the company’s flywheel-based UPS system and […]

Energy efficiency is becoming more and more relevant to IT decision-makers as its impact on the customer’s bottom-line is realized. Sun has been cognizant of this aspect of its solutions, and has been detailing measured watts on its UltraSPARC products for a few years (2008: UltraSPARC T2+; 2007: UltraSPARC T2; 2005: UltraSPARC T1 and T2000 […]

A free download of Rod Snevely’s 220-page book, “Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology” is now available.
Contents:

Data Center Design Philosophy
Data Center Design Criteria
Designing a Data Center
Determining Data Center Capacities
Site Selection
Implementing a Raised Floor
7. Power Distribution
HVAC and Other Environmental Controls
Network Cabling Infrastructure
Shipping, Receiving, and Staging
Avoiding Hazards
Environmental Contaminants
Codes and Construction

A. Managing System Configurations
B. Bibliography and References