System News for Sun Users - The Blog

Just the Ticket for Rapidly Growing Company

StubHub, an eBay affiliate, and the world’s largest ticket marketplace, upgraded a mission-critical, online transaction processing (OLTP) database from Oracle 9i Real Application Clusters (RAC) to Oracle 10g RAC. To take advantage of high scalability and mainframe-class performance, StubHub also moved the database from a 32-bit platform to a 64-bit platform with Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System.

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Sun Virtualization Technologies Streamline Management for City of San Antonio

The City of San Antonio (CoSA) allows its residents to pay a traffic ticket, apply for a job, or find information about the dozens of activities online. As its server infrastructure had sprawled to keep pace with its service delivery, CoSA decided to upgrade its IT infrastructure to reduce space, maintenance costs, and enhance service. The solution: Sun’s SPARC servers as a platform for Solaris 10 and Solaris Zones, which provided the best roadmap for return on investment (ROI) with its virtualization technologies and energy-efficient, mainframe-class servers.

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Options for Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 and M5000 Servers

Get a new higher performance 2.53GHz quad-core SPARC64 VII processors for Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 and M5000 servers and with out any increase in cost. The new quad-core 8 thread SPARC64 VII processor option operating at 2.53GHz includes 5.5MB L2 cache. The SPARC64 VII quad-core options can be mixed and matched in the SPARC Enterprise M4000 and M5000 servers with the current SPARC64 VI (2.15GHz) and SPARC64 VII (2.4GHz and the new 2.53GHz) options.

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IT Director’s Guide Provides Specific Examples

A Sun-sponsored IT director’s guide asserts consolidating systems onto the latest server technology and utilizing virtualization techniques will give enterprises increased efficiency, performance and flexibility while lowering costs. In twelve pages, this guide entitled “Reducing Costs by Improving Server Performance” offers what it states is proof that consolidation works. and focuses on Sun servers with CoolThreads technology and Sun SPARC Enterprise M-Series servers as solutions that can bring these claims to reality.

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Short Items of Interest on Sun Servers

• Tape Library on Logical Domains on a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240
• Sun Fire X2270 Cluster Fluent Benchmark Results
• Sun SSD Server Platform Bandwidth and IOPS (Speeds & Feeds)
• The Future for SSD, Flash Technology
• Comparison of Sun Volume Servers Product Line
• Sun x86 SNMP Hardware Monitoring Agent
• Sun Installation Assistant (SIA) 2.2.16.0
• 300GB SAS Disk Drives Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000/M5000 Servers
• Memcached on Sun X2270

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Applies to UltraSPARC T2, T2 Plus & Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000, M5000, M8000, M9000 Servers

Sun is retiring two different products: the 73 GB, 10,000 RPM, 2.5 inch SAS disk drives for UltraSPARC T2 and T2 Plus Chip Multithreading (CMT) servers and the 73GB disk drive options on Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000, M5000, M8000, and M9000 servers.

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The latest version of the XCP firmware , XCP 1071 contains fixes for the following Change Requests:

• 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

Detailed product notes are available for the M4000/M5000 and M8000/M9000.
This firmware update is recommended for all customers with M series servers.

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.