System News for Sun Users - The Blog

Gartner has issued a new vendor rating for Sun Microsystems: “The overall vendor rating is positive”.

The Gartner  definition for “positive” is

Demonstrates strength in specific areas, but execution in one or more areas may still be developing or inconsistent with other areas of performance:

• Customers: Continue planned investments.
• Potential customers: Consider this vendor a viable choice for strategic or tactical investments, while planning for known limitations

Table 1. Detailed Rating

Source: Gartner

The Gartner Report breaks down each of the categories in the table. The report has forma definitiions for all the ratings:

• Strong Positive
• Positive
• Promising
• Caution
• Strong Negative

Quotes:

“Sun Microsystems customers should feel more comfortable with their infrastructures than they have since 2001, because of the company’s improved market and financial position. The past year represents an important turning point in Sun’s ambition to be known as an open-source company.”

“Sun continues to reinvigorate its image and move to sustained revenue and profitability. Since 2006, gross margins have risen from 42% to as high as 48.5%, with more consistent profitability (47.3% for nine months ending March 2008).

“There are indications that Sun is using its alliance partners more to spearhead a professional service-led entry into key vertical markets.”

“Sun continues to strengthen its organization. Its executive management team is stable, strong and comfortable working together.”

SPARC64 Servers: “a technically strong family of RISC Unix servers, well-positioned to compete for conventional Unix workloads in terms of performance and functionality with comparable designs from IBM and HP”

“Sun’s commitment to x64 technology innovation is unquestioned, and sales of these servers have increased at a brisk rate. “

 ”Sun has pioneered the market for dense, multicore processor designs … Sun receives a strong positive rating in this category due to the product’s forward-looking design and philosophy, strong throughput, and reduced space and power consumption”

“Sun is conscious of the threat that Linux poses to Unix, and the Sun approach is to enable ever-better Linux coexistence, so that Solaris effectively will become a better Linux than Linux is itself.”

 ”Sun Java System Identity Manager and Access Manager products are considered leaders in the IAM [ identity and access management ] market.”

 ”Sun’s identification of and investment in key technology trends, such as multithreading, multicore and power conservation (well before they became mainstream), is impressive.”

“Sun is a premier contributor of key technologies to the open-source movement. From OpenSolaris to middleware (GlassFish), DBMS (MySQL acquisition) and Java, Sun has delivered innovative code into various communities. “

 ”Sun’s presales system engineers continue to be a major asset, especially in conjunction with the company’s solutions centers.”

“Hardware support: Sun has quietly built an impressive direct-service capability for its equipment”

NetBeans has evolved considerably since it was acquired by Sun in 1999 and open-sourced in 2000. The NetBeans IDE is an open-source integrated development environment written entirely in Java using the NetBeans Platform.  The NetBeans IDE runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris. NetBeans IDE is open-source and free. NetBeans supports many languages, including C, C++, Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl and JavaScript.

Sun Blogger Kunal, in a recent post lists some of the NetBeans featurs that qualify it to be the “Ultimate Linux IDE“:

Diagrams support:

NetBeans supports UML (Unified Modelling Language) and BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) diagrams.

GUI designer:

NetBeans comes with one of the worlds best interface GUI designers (for Swing), thanks to Project Matisse.

Coding:

NetBeans supports almost all stable SDKs, including Java SE SDK 6 and the new OpenJDK

Testing and tuning:

NetBeans includes a complete quality framework called SQE (Software Quality Environment). It also comes with a performance and memory profiling tool

Enterprise Java and database support:

NetBeans has the industrys most complete support for JavaEE5. It supports various J2EE servers, including Glassfish, SUN J2EE, Web Logic and IBM Web Sphere

Multiple configuration support:

NetBeans supports various project configuration properties

Debugger support:

NetBeans tightly integrates with GDB to provide standard debugging facilities

Editor:

The C/C++ editor supports syntax highlighting, automatic code completion, automatic indentation and formatting (including a choice of formatting styles), bracket matching, code folding and templates. NetBeans IDE can find classes, variables, functions, include directives, derived classes, and more.

NetBeans vs Eclipse:

Kumal provides a table of features to compare NetBeans and Eclipse

See Also

NetBeans wikipedia enrtry

http://www.netbeans.org

NetBeans 6.1 Press Release from Sun

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a “storage for the Internet”.  A web services interface can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. The S3 feature set includes:

• Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.
• Each object is stored in a bucket and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.
• A bucket can be located in the United States or in Europe. All objects within the bucket will be stored in the bucket’s location, but the objects can be accessed from anywhere.
• Authentication mechanisms are provided to ensure that data is kept secure from unauthorized access. Objects can be made private or public, and rights can be granted to specific users.
• Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.
• Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added.  Default download protocol is HTTP.  A BitTorrent(TM) protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution.  Additional interfaces will be added in the future.
• Reliability backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement.

There is a fee for storage (15c per GB=month in the US) and a fee for data transferred  in (10c per GB) and out (starting at  17c per GB and going down with volume). There is also a small fee for PUT, POST, GET and LIST requests.

Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. To use Amazon EC2:

• Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications, libraries, data and associated configuration settings. Or use pre-configured, templated images to get up and running immediately.
• Upload the AMI into Amazon S3. Amazon EC2 provides tools that make storing the AMI simple. Amazon S3 provides a safe, reliable and fast repository to store your images.
• Use Amazon EC2 web service to configure security and network access.
• Start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed, using the web service APIs.
• Pay only for the resources that you actually consume, like instance-hours or data transfer.

OpenSolaris on ECS

Sun  and Amazon are collaborating to offer OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2. The two supported releases are OpenSolaris OS 2008.05 and Solaris Express Community Edition.

Saving and Restoring ZFS Snapshots to and from Amazon S3

Sean O’Dell has posted a blog entry that shows how to use ZFS snapshots to “save and restore filesystems from one Solaris EC2 instance to another.”

A new  “McNealy Minute” audio podcast features Scott McNealy talking with Mike Zafirovski, President & CEO of Nortel, on

“… the future of education, and how Sun, Nortel and others are working together to eliminate the digital divide by providing better access to knowledge through network technology, open systems and sharing.”

Sun has a long history in providing service to the education space and Scott is involved with Curricki, which was spun out of Sun.

Nortel is a leading innovator in the communications space. They invest their philanthropic activities in a program called LearniT:

Nortel LearniT is an initiative of Nortel Community Relations to prepare teachers, students, and learners of all ages to develop 21st century skills that will provide a basis for their ongoing engagement in learning and personal achievement

Scott calls this NASA approved program,  “Rock science - Online”. Mike says he would like LearniT to reach as many teachers and students as possible and he is excited about working with Scott and Curricki to put those assest together and drive adoption.

Scott and Mike go on to discuss how  LearniT and Curricki will work together and why it makes sense for corporations like Sun and Nortel to invest in such initiavites.

Scott McNealy. in top form, delivered a 45-talk this month to a group of entrepreneurs in the UK.

He shared some his personal experiences in staring Sun Microsystems and some insights into his management philosophy.

Spend 60 minutes listening to  Russ Castronovo, (Director, Social and New Media, Sun Microsystems), interviewing Michael Cornwell, Sun manager of flash memory technology. Learn how Sun will leverage this new, disruptive technology to create a new storage architecture.

Michael joined Sun from Apple where he was involved with disk subsystems and innovatve flash based products such as the iPods.

This was a live event and Russ asks questions  submitted from the audience. 

If you’re interested in learning more about COMSTAR, the OpenSolaris Project COmmon Multiprotocol SCSI TARget, then take 10 minutes of your time to watch a screencast demonstration conducted by Sun expert Sumit Gupta who walks viewers through the basic steps of setting up a Solaris host as a fibre channel storage array using COMSTAR and ZFS.

The OpenSolaris Web site also has a video of Gupta presenting COMSTAR at SNIA SDC and Sun engineers presenting COMSTAR at SNW.

Visit the COMSTAR Videos page for all three.

In a Sun BigAdmin community-submitted tech tip by Victor Feng, readers are treated to some helpful hints they may need when setting up resource control for Zones in the Solaris 10 08/07, which was the first version that offered this control directly to users.

Tips passed along by Feng:

- Use cpu-shares to control zone computing resources.

- The swap property of capped-memory is virtual swap space, not physical swap space.

- A zone sometimes consumes more physical memory than the maximum limit.

For each of the above mentioned hints, Feng provides information and coding to make these aspects of zones work more effectively.

The International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) 2008 is currently underway in Dresden, Germany. Numerous announcements from Sun have been made including:

• the new Sun Blade X6450 Server Module powered by four high-performance dual-or-quad core Intel Xeon processor 7300 series. When integrated into the Sun Constellation System, this new Sun Blade x64 system delivers more than seven TFlops of peak performance per fully populated Sun Blade 6048 chassis, up to 71% more compute cores and 50% more memory capacity than competing blade servers.

• additions to the Sun Constellation System, such as the Sun Datacenter Switch 3×24 (a smaller version of the Sun Datacenter Switch 3456), which features 72 DDR 4X Infiniband ports

Video presentations from the conference and other broadcast media on Sun’s newest HPC solutions are posted on the Sun HPC Community Portal so readers can find out about the latest information as its announced.

Also, visit the ISC 2008 Media Kit Web page hosted on Sun’s site for more detailed information on the company’s newest HPC products and solutions.

Sun now holds the number four spot on the Top 500 Supercomputers list with its Sun Constellation System-powered supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), which boasts a compute capacity of 326 TFlops and a peak performance of 504 TFlops.

The Ranger supercomputer at TACC is based on the Sun Constellation System which combines the Sun Blade 6048 Modular System and the Sun Datacenter Switch 3456.

“Working with TACC, we’ve delivered the highest ranking system built on an open architecture and open platforms and made it possible for customers the world over to take advantage of the power of superscale technologies in their own departments,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Sun Systems. “With Sun’s Constellation System, customers don’t have to dream about a supercomputing Ferrari, they can drive their own.”

Sun HPC software and storage also made the list with Sun’s Lustre file system managing data on six of the list’s top 10 sites as well as nearly half of the top 50 supercomputers. Additionally, half of the list’s top 10 sites and nearly half of the top 50 systems archive their data on Sun storage.