Executives Review Oracle-Sun Product Strategies
Oracle is hiring 2,000 salespeople and engineers to sell not just software but hardware, now that Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, which was completed on Jan. 27, transforms it from a software company to a systems company. In a five-hour event, Oracle executives assured the IT industry it will accelerate the investment in Sun’s SPARC/Solaris server and storage hardware.
eWeek Presents 10 Reasons Sun Still Has Strong Market Influence
Darryl Taft with eWeek has assembled a slide presentation entitled “10 Reasons Why Sun is Still Relevant (an One Reason Why Not)”. He states the questioning of Sun’s relevance began when acquisition of the company started back in April with Oracle’s proposed buyout. “But there are still a lot of factors that demonstrate how Sun’s products and technology remain relevant and in demand in the IT industry,” he writes. “This eWeek slide show illustrates why Sun still has a strong market influence.”
New Monitoring Tool Developed Purely in Java, Uses JMX 
Inspect is a new monitoring tool included in Sun Grid Engine (SGE) Update 3. It is a flexible interface for viewing current and historical data about SGE cluster(s) and the Service Domain Manager. The new GUI-based monitoring tool is developed purely in Java and uses JMX. This means an SGE installation has to enable JMX. Users interested in using Inspect must have version 6+ of the following software: Sun JDK, OpenJDK, IcedTea, and Apple JDK.
Support for Sun’s JavaFX 1.0 video has been integrated into On2 Technologies, Inc. Flix line of encoder products. On2 Flix video encoders range from desktop applications for consumers and professionals to server side encoding platforms for the enterprise.
Existing Flix licensees with current support and maintenance agreements will receive a free of charge upgrade enabling them to immediately output video content for JavaFX rich internet applications.
“The ability to quickly publish high-quality video across multiple devices is a touchstone of the JavaFX experience, and we are pleased to work with On2 to enable this experience for professional and consumer publishers alike,” said Param Singh, senior director of Java marketing at Sun Microsystems. “The combination of JavaFX and the On2 Flix encoding engine leverages the latest innovations of the Java platform and On2’s world-class encoding technologies to deliver an enhanced rich media experience for users across the landscape of Java-powered devices.”
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:
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.
