Short Items of Interest on Sun Open Storage
New HPC Solutions, Benchmarks, Customers and Positioning on Top500 List 
The latest Top500 list published in November shows three of the top five supercomputers based on Intel Nehalem CPUs were Sun Constellation Systems. Sun also doubled its number of entries since the June 2009 list with a total of 11 deployments providing nearly 2 PetaFLOPS (PFLOPS). Additionally, Sun announced new products and technologies for high performance computing (HPC), an upgrade to the Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System, new HPC benchmarks and new HPC customers.
Sun BluePrints Describes Architecture, Provides Performance Information
A Sun BluePrints Online article discusses the Sun Systems for Enterprise 2.0 with Oracle solution, describing the architecture and performance characteristics for determining proper sizing of systems. According to the authors, the Sun Systems for Enterprise 2.0 with Oracle solution provides an integrated platform to deploy a highly reliable Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure that delivers simplicity, speed, and savings. Read the BluePrints piece to learn more.
Increases Maximum RAM Support to 256GB Per Node
New configurations for the Sun Storage 7410 offer six-core AMD Opteron processors for up to 256GB RAM per node. The Assemble-to-order (ATO) option provides a choice of three base configurations consisting of a fixed number of processors and RAM. With this announcement, Sun plans an end of life for the existing configurations using the four-core AMD processors.
Using Virtualization Features in Solaris OS
“Deploying the AMP Stack in Virtualized Environments - Taking a Step Towards Cloud Computing” is a Sun BluePrints paper by Thierry Manfe of Sun ISV Engineering that explains how to deploy the AMP (Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack in a virtualized environment, describing the virtualization features built into the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS).
Sun Fire X2200 M2 Servers, StorageTek Solution a Good Match for SAS Grid Computing Workload
Sun has demonstrated the first large scale grid validation for the SAS Grid Computing 9.2 benchmark using large data sizes with the Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System and complex data processing that models the real world, according to blogger Marcus Heckel.
