In no uncertain terms, the Director of Solaris product management at Oracle Dan Roberts says OpenSolaris will continue as an open source entity and Oracle will actively support and participate in the community. There are some questions regarding which direction Oracle will take in open sourcing some of OpenSolaris’ technologies and the level of support that will be offered, but generally speaking, all is well, affirms Roberts.
Concise Reference on Setting Up and Administering ZFS
As the title reads, this book is an essentials guide to Solaris 10 ZFS. Numbering only 144 pages, the slim paperback is designed to show its readers how to deploy and manage ZFS file systems. It is particularly useful for those users who are new to Solaris or are using ZFS for the first time. It is easy to get ZFS up and running on a home system or business IT infrastructure by following the simple instructions in this book.
Sun’s OpenOffice.org, Solaris 10 Considered Significant
A special eWEEK report names the products, applications, and technologies of the last decade that have changed the way people work, play, and live. Limiting the list to 25 of the most significant technologies and products, eWeek found OpenOffice.org and the Solaris 10 Operating System to be two important solutions making a mark in the last 10 years.
Seeking to address some misconceptions on the subject of deduplication, Joerg Moellenkamp’s blog “To dedup or not to dedup - that results in a lot of questions” provides a primer on the process. There are two major ways to deduplicate, he writes: synchronous and asynchronous. The synchronous variant does the deduplication while writing to the disks, so duplicates aren’t written to disk; the asynchronous variant writes every block to the disk and later on it deletes duplicated blocks by searching possible candidates.
A few tips on how to install Solaris 10 OS as a virtual machine under an Oracle VM 2.2 environment has been posted by Honglin Su on Oracle’s Virtualization blog. All of the steps are accompanied by screen snippets so readers can compare their results with his. He also includes links to downloads and documentation throughout the blog, helping ease the process.
Oracle Solaris Becomes the Company’s Strategic Enterprise Platform
Rebranding has begun for Sun products. One of note is the Solaris Operating System, which now reads as Oracle Solaris. This name change filters down to associated products such as Sun Studio, which now is officially called the Oracle Solaris Studio. In regards to Oracle Solaris, Barbara Darrow with SearchEnterpriseLinux.com, identifies it as Oracle’s new high-end data center appliances running the Oracle software stack, while Vijay Tatkar discusses the newly named Oracle Solaris Studio.
Yet another entry in the Linux vs. Solaris scalability debate. This time it comes in Garrett D’Amore’s blog “Scalability FUD”, where he argues that, at least in the HPC arena, most operations involve “user” rather than “sys” time and, therefore, the calls to inter-thread synchronization are relatively few.
The task of installing a multi-node RAC cluster of Oracle 11g R2 on Solaris 10 with an EMC PowerPath has acquired the reputation of being a troublesome assignment. In the interests of sparing readers some of the tribulations, Dossy Shiobara has written a guide to the installation that gathers heretofore difficult to find suggestions in a single, how-to source.
