System News for Sun Users - The Blog

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.”

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 in the lower costs of administration and the lower power consumption (8 watts + screen for Sun Ray vs 180 watts + screen for Dell Optiflex 755).

In May, 2008, VMware unveiled a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform for remote users who want to use VDI with Sun Ray Software and virtual display clients. The new integrated desktop solution is ideal for wide area networks (WANs) and uses Sun’s Appliance Link Protocol (ALP), which VMware and Sun report outperforms other display protocols in delivering virtual desktops in a WAN deployment with high latency and in delivering consistently better performance than competing display protocols

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. 

Network.com, Sun’s collection of grid-enabled online applications available on a pay-per-use basis, along with the free open source 3D content creation suite Blender were selected by BBC World News as one of the best cloud applications available:

“Sun’s data centres are available for hire by the hour to power on-demand cloud services. Used mainly for processing scientific data, the servers can also be used for rendering animations via the open source Blender 3D software on the desktop.”

Network.com and Blender 3D recently made headlines as the technologies teamed up for the 3D animated movie “Big Buck Bunny.” Network.com acted as a web hosting location for the online comedy created using Blender 3D.

Blogtalkradio.com will be hosting another edition of Sun’s Innovation Insider, this time featuring Michael Cornwell, Sun manager of flash memory technology business development, who will discuss flash memory and storage technologies, and answer questions from listeners.

The show will air Thursday, June 26, from 12 noon - 1 p.m. PST

Visit http://www.blogtalkradio.com/stations/sunradio/innovationinsider. The dial-in number for questions during the live broadcast is: (646) 478-3261.

If you would like to submit a question for consideration in advance of the program, please send to innovationinsider@sun.com by Wednesday, June 25.

Podcasts will be posted at the following link after every show: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/stations/sunradio/featured.aspx.

New Sun Internet Talk Show: “Shift Radio”

Gamers may be interested in tuning in to a new Sun radio show called “Shift Radio” that will feature discussions with leaders in the gaming and rich media industries as well as the latest in tech gadgets. Sun Chief Gaming Officer Chris Melissinos will host the weekly show which will be debuting this Friday, June 27, at 9 a.m. PST with guest Hal Halpin, President of the Entertainment Consumers Association.

Visit http://www.blogtalkradio.com/shiftradio. The dial-in number for questions during the live broadcast: (347) 539-5008

Questions can be submitted in advance by sending an email to shiftradio@sun.com no later than Thursday, June 26.

Podcasts will be posted after every show at the same Sun radio station link listed above.

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.

Sun recommends Sun server customers using third party tools check the company’s Web page dedicated to third party integration regularly for updates and new information.

Sun’s System Management team notes that there are about a dozen integrations and best practices on the page with more to come through the summer:

• Altiris Deployment Server 6.8
• BMC Patrol
• CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (NSM)
• HP OpenView Operations for Unix
• HP OpenView Operations for Windows
• HP Systems Insight Manager
• IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console
• IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM)
• IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus
• IBM Director
• Microsoft Operations Manager 2005

Owners of Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000/M5000/M8000/M9000 servers whose systems need to be updated with the latest XCP Firmware or possibly just need a reinstall of the firmware, should visit the Sun Download Center, which recently released XCP 1071.

Fixes incorporated within this release as described by Bruce Hill, Sr. Manager, SPARC Platform Software Release Engineering:

• 6685379 XSCF changed from XCP1050 so that console logs out from Solaris
• 6661840 Description of setdscp/showdscp is unclear
• 6667626 adduser man page should change the maximum user name length to 31 characters
• 6654373 Man page should designate when sendbreak won’t work
• 6668614 Undocumented platform power cycle is required before SPARC64-VII can be added.
• 6685374 Power-on failed after XCP was updated to XCP1070 and Jupiter CPU was installed
• 6681287 DBS got an error(QA-DC-0973)
• 6655686 XCP updates needed to support new FF I2C fan controller chip
• 6706348 show_scf_trace should report information about begin and end date/time of each region and trace file
• 6660264 There needs to be two types of XSCFU serial I/F ereport.
• 6571840 panel_dongle status needs to be logged
• 6664046 snapshot should collect ‘getflashimage -l’
• 6666291 Snapshot needs to collect the SunMC logs for trouble shooting.
• 6677063 RFE: Add “fmstat -a -m emailprv” to snapshot
• 6545482 XSCF archiving generates a huge amount of data
• 6667088 check xscf#0-if’s IP and xscf#1-if ’s ip are on same subnet.
• 6683763 missing DB files results in SCF unbootable.
• 6615720 Customers are requesting ability to restore a system to factory default state
• 6566540 Executing shownvram w/ /MBU_B/FPGA” on FF system shows OBP instead of FPGA.
• 6630959 BUI changes for user name restricted to less than 32 characters
• 6677958 FMA-’showlogs error’ discrepancy reg degraded component
• 6645828 “Could not write FRU-ID status” is detected
• 6546593 WANboot should not reflect packets
• 6561957 OBP bge ethernet driver needs performance improvement when loading a big file (wanboot 108 MB)
• 6634974 Incorrect Error reported on nvramrc CRC Error
• 6634980 Possible Data corruption when using NVRAMRC kill or yank
• 6675519 Problem with LSB Degradation
• 6684123 On OPL OBP can cause OBP to Display incorrect information

Sun Docs offers more information on the M4000/M5000 and M8000/M9000.