Ever wanted to build your own custom configuration for Sun servers?  Find that the Sun store provides a limited set of preconfigured systems?  Try the Sun Desktop system Configurator. It allows you to build supported configurations of Sun servers, disk, tape, desktop systems and racks.  With a completed configuration you can export to a CSV file that opens in OpenOffice or Excel with standard list pricing.

The Sun-powered Ranger supercomputer, one of the most powerful systems in the world for open science research, has run about 1.1 million jobs in under two years. When it entered full production on Feb.

The Government of Prince Edward Island (PEI), Canada offers services ranging from education and environmental protection, to public health, social services, and transportation to the province's 140,000 residents. In a move to improve these services while reducing IT costs, PEI consolidated all 12 individual department IT divisions into a single Information Technology Shared Services group in 2007.

I have finally found how to find the no. of cores in a Solaris Box on newer T class servers. The clue was given on Steve Sistare's blog post CPU to Core Mapping. He mentioned that:

It has been the responsibility of the DBA to implement a security strategy, at least on the database level. All DBAs should take action, if not already, by taking a proactive approach to this crucial part of database administration. For this post I have compiled a list of general best practices below.

Oracle Server Consolidation Oracle notes that their Oracle Instance Caging utility is used in consolidated shops where many instances share the same server CPU resources.  Due to falling prices on large servers with 32 and 64 CPU's shops all across America are undertaking , moving dozens and hundreds of instances into a sing

(Network World Middle East Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Oracle Corp.'s pending acquisition has put Sun Microsystems Inc. into a limbo that appears to be devouring its server business.

The overall worldwide server revenue in the second quarter fell by a housing market-like decline of 30% from the same period a year ago, or from just over $14 billion to $9.8 billion, according to a report released today by market research firm IDC. This second quarter decline -- the largest ever year-over-year quarter decline -- follow a 26.5% decline in the first quarter.

This week, Sun continues to highlight the record-breaking performance of its latest update to the chip multi-threaded (CMT) Sun SPARC Enterprise server family running Solaris.  Some of these benchmarks leverage the use of a variety of Sun's unique technologies including ZFS, SSD, various Storage Products and many more. These benchmarks were blogged about by various members or our team and the URLs are shown below.

Benchmark Results Recently Blogged

This distribution only offers the latest firmware supporting Sun Fire X4140/X4240/X4440 servers. This release includes the following:

We couldn't run shell script directly on XSCF to schedule dynamic reconfiguration automatically on fixed time or according to the cpu usage. That's because XSCF is the management S/W, not OS.

Automatic resource management is the one of the most important requirements for datacenter, and it can be configured by ssh remote login and the expect for not requiring password prompt. Also SunMC would be used together when we need more visual configuration.

ZDNet's Craig Simms evaluated Sun's newest 2RU Nehalem-based Sun Fire X4275 server, focusing his evaluation on the design, architecture and performance aspects of the unit he tested.

The reviewer began with a rundown of hardware design features and system specifications. Specifically, he called out the two Xeon E5540 "Gainestown" CPUs with four physical cores each.

The Register takes a look at the recent enhancements to the Sun Constellation System:

If you look at a how the (community version) of memcached works, all servers are completely isolated from each other. They don't know (or care) about the existence of other servers, and all advanced logic is implemented by the clients. This removes a lot of complexity from the server, resulting in a small clean source base with few bugs. You will also find this simple design in the client-server protocol, reducing what you can try to implement in the server.

With the pending buyout of Sun by Oracle still fresh in our minds, a recent email thread emerged wanting to put together a time-line of technologies created to help Sun servers run Oracle better. This seemed like a great way to start off the Oracle Performance portion of the Performance Technologies group new wiki.

There’s been a dramatic fall in server revenues across European, Middle East and African (EMEA) markets, with IDC recording its fastest year-on-year decline in revenues since it started recording them 13 years.

According to IDC, EMEA server revenues dropped by 34.3 percent in the first quarter this year with the value of the market now at $2.9 billion.  This was the fastest year-on-year decline in revenues since 1996, with IDC also reporting server shipments declining 29.6 percent to below the half-million mark.

In this tech tip, a Sun engineer describes how to enable host watchdog monitoring on Sun SPARC Enterprise Mx000 servers. This feature is also called Alive Check/Monitoring, and it allows the eXtended System Control Facility (XSCF) software on the system controller to detect problems and recover when a domain hangs in the Solaris OS.

Sun SPARC Enterprise Mx000 servers have a domain watchdog monitoring feature that is disabled by default. This feature is also called Alive Check/Monitoring and allows the eXtended System Control Facility (XSCF) software on the system controller to detect problems and recover when a domain hangs in the Solaris OS. (Note: This information applies to the Solaris 10 OS, which supports these servers).

The following is from Table 2-27 of the SPARC Enterprise M3000/M4000/M5000/M8000/M9000 XSCF User's Guide:

Learn how Sun servers equipped with Flash-enabled solid state drives (SSDs) improve HPC, Web 2.0, and data center application performance in the March 2009 white paper "Unleashing Application Performance with Solid-State Drives and Sun Servers". Sun servers equipped with SSDs can be configured to use fewer HDDs and still deliver the same storage I/O performance, Sun reports, resulting in lower capital and operating expenses.

When compared to traditional hard disk drives, Sun Enterprise Solid-State Drive (SSD) delivers 70 times faster response time, 38% less power/GB, 98% less power/IO, and more shock resistance.

Nine Sun server systems now offering 2.5-inch 32GB SATA SSD include:

Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 and M9000 Data Center Servers now offer double the maximum memory capacity with a new 8GB DIMM memory option. Using the new higher density memory CPU/Memory Boards (CMUs) enables customers to double the maximum system memory in the SPARC Enterprise M8000 and M9000 Servers and up to 4 Terabytes of system memory in the largest M9000-64 configuration. New Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000/M9000 CMU boards with the new 8GB DIMM memory options are available now for both new factory configured systems and can be ordered separately and added to existing systems.

There is now a new 32GB (4X8GB) memory Pick-to-Order (PTO) configuration and a new 4x8GB DIMM memory X-option for the SPARC Enterprise M3000 single processor server available from Sun and Fujitsu. This new factory PTO configuration increases the M3000 DIMM density to 32GB (4x8GB) with the ability to add a memory X-option of 32GB (4x8GB) to achieve total system memory of 64GB.

According to Sun and Fujitsu, this configuration also allows customers greater memory choice and flexibility to match the memory intensive needs of their applications at different price points.

Logica, a leading IT and business services company employing more than 40,000 people, has run a benchmarking test of its Logica All Payments Solution (LAPS), the company's new payments hub, with the Sun T-series and Sun SPARC Enterprise M-series servers. A report appearing in BusinessWire relates the success of this benchmarking exercise, which provided capability in excess of 50 million payments per hour.

Oracle's PeopleSoft HRMS 8.9 Self-service Benchmark Puts Iron to the Test