Games to Rely on Wide Array of Hardware, Software, Consulting Services from Sun
Sun Microsystems of Canada will be responsible for managing the IT infrastructure supporting the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) in Vancouver, Canada. The assignment entails connecting 15 networked venues and three datacenters, running multiple business applications and an integration test lab, and keeping 10,000 media outlets up to date with over 100 TB of data. This technology infrastructure will handle daily operations as well as share real-time data with billions worldwide.
Sun Fire Servers, Intel SSDs Help Music Streaming Architecture Scale
Last.fm is a popular Internet radio site for music. Founded in 2002, it now claims over 30 million active users based in more than 200 countries. In its early stages of development, Last.fm turned to Sun and the Sun Startup Essentials program to help it get up and running. Over the past two or so years, Sun has saved the organization money, reduced its output, and helped Last.fm scale beyond boundaries it never thought feasible, writes Sun’s Stewart Townsend, who shares a blog from Last.fm engineering team member Mike Brodbelt on its Xbox LIVE launch.
If You Are Looking for More Bang for Your Storage Buck, Look Here
ZFS and hybrid storage pools (HSP) is the subject of a recent posting by Sun blogger “Thin Slice,” who writes about the collaboration between Sun and Intel that has delivered the combination of ZFS and high performance, flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) to offer enterprises cutting-edge HSP innovation that can reduce the risk, cost, complexity, and deployment time of multi-tiered storage environments.
Latest Release Adds Support for Intel 5500 and Six-core AMD Processors
Oracle VM is server virtualization software that fully supports both Oracle and non-Oracle applications. The latest release is version 2.2, which features the latest Xen-based, industry-standard hypervisor, Xen 3.4, and provides performance enhancements for customers running Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, as well as six-core AMD Opteron processors.
Adds ZFS User and Group Quotas, L2ARC Support, Faster Patching, and More
Sun released Solaris 10 10/09 with new and enhanced features, such as up to two Tbytes disk support for installing and booting the OS, ZFS and Flash installation support, updates to setting ZFS user and group quotas, support of L2ARC, power management capabilities to leverage the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, a “P2V” (Physical to Virtual) method, faster patching and parallel zone patching, etc. There are many more system administration, installation, system resources, device management, system performance, driver, and freeware enhancements included.
Sun Servers Improve Performance, Ability, Stability With Less Space
The University of Washington’s Department of Mathematics needed a hardware upgrade in order to successfully expand the computational capabilities and overall performance of Sage, an open-source computational software program. A new Sun solution was chosen with Sun Fire X4450 and Sun Fire X4540 servers, providing a powerful, compact server technology for the department’s growing open-source mathematics software engine.
Learn how to configure and optimize Intel Xeon Processor 5500 and 3500 series systems in a Sun blog by John Nerl. He discusses the processors’ memory subsystem and population guidelines and explains how to optimize the processors for capacity, performance and power. This detailed technical entry demonstrates that users will need to determine what aspects of these processors’ offerings are best for their specific environment and configure accordingly.
Know Your Needs, Blogger Recommends, Then Choose the Processor
The IT atmosphere is clouding up and, as it does, administrators are going to have to address certain issues, among them, which is the most suitable processor for a particular use of cloud computing. Mr. Benchmark provides a few suggestions in this direction in his blog, “What processor will fuel your first private cloud: Intel Nehalem or AMD Istanbul?”
This quick reference guide is intended for developers interested in a briefing on what specific capabilities of Intel Xeon processor 5500 series systems can be optimized with the Solaris Operating System. The authors provide a short overview of the Sun and Intel collaboration, and briefly highlight technical descriptions of specific features and capabilities in the two companies’ technologies. It specifically covers intelligent performance, automated energy efficiency, reliability & availability and developer tools. Numerous record-setting benchmarks complete the 39-page PDF.
The blog Pure See takes a look at out-of-box performance of Intel Xeon 5500 processor series (Nehalem) on Sun servers running OpenSolaris 2009.06, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 and Solaris 10 Update 7 using a micro-benchmark tool uperf, which is an open source, network performance tool that supports modelling and replay of various networking patterns. The main purpose of this test is to see if a system can achieve X Gbit/s or send/receive y packets/sec after the workload is characterized.
