System News for Sun Users - The Blog

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.

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Includes New Debuggers, Visualization Technology and Support for Parallelism

Sun Studio 12 Update 1 is the latest version of Sun’s compilers and performance tools designed for the C, C++ and Fortran developer communities. As we mentioned when it was released in June, this major update delivers new optimizations and features for OpenSolaris, Solaris and the latest Linux operating systems such as optimized compilers with auto-parallelization, multi-thread aware code-level and memory debuggers, a thread analysis tool that identifies race and deadlock conditions in multithreaded code, a performance analyzer, DLight for unified application and system profiling using Solaris DTrace technology, support for OpenMP 3.0 and a next-generation IDE based on the NetBeans project.

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Java vs C: A Brief Performance Comparison

Alejandro Murillo shows off test results that demonstrate that the “JDK score beats the gcc overall or composite score, even without any tuning.”

Zeus ZXTM ADC and Sun’s CMT lead in perf & price-perf

ZXTM (Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager) “manages your application traffic, inspecting, transforming and routing requests as it load-balances them across the application infrastructure,”

Zeus shows performance data from their testing on QC Xeons, older DC Opterons, f5’s Big-IP, Citrix, and Sun’s CMT on HTTP throughput tests. What the data shows is the Sun Fire T5140 (1.2GHz, 2-socket) is the fastest 2-socket system. Estimating from the graph the Sun Fire T5140 looks to have almost 3x better price peformance than f5’s BIG-IP VIPRION and 2.5x better Citrix.

Citrix ICA Clients

A new version (v8.59) of the Citrix ICA Client for SPARC/Solaris was released (by Citrix) on 18 Nov 2008.

Download new Solaris/SPARC Citrix ICA Client (V8.59) here

Corresponding Admin Guide is available here

No recent changes, but listed here for completeness, the Solaris/x86 Citrix ICA Client (Version 8.50) released on 25 Sep 2007 is available here

NetBeans IDE 6.5 Screencasts

Updated tutorials and screencasts for NetBeans 6.5 are available:

• Guided Video Tour of NetBeans IDE to learn what’s new in the latest release, NetBeans IDE 6.5.
• Introduction to NetBeans IDE 6.5
• Demo of the PHP support in NetBeans 6.5 - Part I
• PHP distribution of NetBeans 6.5 - Part II
• Web Services Pet Catalog

Trusted Extensions in OpenSolaris 2008.11

Trusted Extensions is a feature of OpenSolaris 2008.11 It can be installed and configured after you have completed the default installation of OpenSolaris 2008.11 from the LiveCD, either running directly on the hardware or as a VirtualBox guest. These instructions assume that you have created a user account during the initial installation, and that root is a role that you can assume.