Sun

Goldman Sachs put Sun on the sell list. The reasoning behind this move is interesting. Regarding to this article on a german financial news portal we are to focussed on telecom, banks and manufacturing. Thus the analyst (Mr. David Bailey) assumes we have more problems with the recession than other competiors with a wider customership. Let´s assume he is correct with his assumption. Can somebody explain me, why a wider positioned competitor has any advantages about a focused company when the complete economy is on it´s way downhill to recession?

PS: Goldman Sachs was an investment banking not long ago ... no normal customers ... focused when you want to think so ... they got an different status, not by choice, they were forced to do so. When you sit in a glas house, you should choose the restroom in the basement.

Storagebod wrote an article about the various available virtual storage appliances. In Appliance of science he wrote about Fishworks the S7000 Storage Simulator (it´s just that, andi it´s not optimised as a virtual storage appliance):

Just recently, I've decided to give a few more a play; I've just built a Fishworks environment. Easy-to-use, easy-to-configure, a tad resource heavy but a really nice GUI. I think I could grow to really like this environment. I think I could get a decent amount of disk for me to use for my home environment, I need to reconfigure the virtual environment but definitely useable. [...] Actually Fishworks could give both EMC and NetApp a run for their money if it was shipped as a fully supported VSA. It could be very disruptive at the low-end to start with.

Storagebod is the blog of a storage manager working for a large media company in UK, so he has some experience with storage stuff.

Paul Murphy writes in his article "Predictions for 2009":

Sun is an odd case: by any reasonable standard the company should be a big winner next year: in particular with respect to storage markets, web services markets, and HPC markets. In practice the company is often its own worst enemy: unable to cope with people manipulating its stock, unwilling to tell the mid market about its products, and collectively baffled by the tsunami of ignorance characteristic of the IT press writing for the Wintel industry.

I hope the this year will be a better year than the last one for Sun. But i´m confident about that.

When you really thing about harddisks, you could get the feeling, that this subsystem is a really delicate one. You read data from disk spinning at up to 15.000 rpm, trying to catch tracks as narrow as 50 nm, and you don´t read the data from the hard disk, you read a waveform and compute the most probable data pattern out of it. All together it´s a little bit of an suffciently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic.But at the end the system "harddisk" is really susceptible for perturbations from outside.

Brendan Gregg was able to measure the latency impact of sonic waves hitting the casing of hard disks - with a low-tech approach as he wrote in Unusual disk latency.



I don´t want to know how he found out about this effect ... perhaps a debugging session or a harddisk falling on his feet. Nevertheless it´s an impressive usecase for the Analytics feature of our new 7000 series storage. Try to find such effects with the tools from our beloved competitors. Their products are susceptible for "Brendans war scream" as well (as they use hard disks, too) ... but you can´t measure it.

Hmm ... long time ago i´ve subscribed a Google news alert about "Sun Microsystems". Sometimes it gathers really excellent articles at locations i wasn´t aware of before. But most of the time it gathers pure bullshit. On of this "pure bullshit" articles is this one: "OpenOffice bound for orphanage?" written by Mr. Barlow.

At first: Openoffice wasn´t developed by volunteers the last 20 years. The earliest versions were written at by Star Division in Hamburg. In 1999 Sun acquired Star Division. We opened up the code in October 2000 and since this time there is OpenOffice and StarOffice (an enriched version of OpenOffice). Many Staroffice developers paid and pay their bills by working for Star Division or Sun.

About the orphanage thing: I have a good insight into that topic ... i´m working in the Sun Office in Hamburg. Staroffice Development and the Sun Office are in the same building. At a part even in the same floor of a multi-floor building. And i don´t see any sign of orphanage ...

I won´t comment on the other bullshit in the text. So, dear Mr. Barlow, please just don´t comment on things without doing any basic research (a short search on wikipedia would be sufficient). But i don´t think that was his intend ... i smell a pro-Microsoft agenda in this text.

BTW: The article "Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org" referenced by Mr. Barlow is written by a Novell guy working on a code-fork of Openoffice and he is promoting it in his text. Hmm ... i´m not that deep into the openoffice development structures, so i will leave it to a fellow blogger from the Staroffice Development to comment that article. But some parts reads as a Novell vs. Sun thing at some parts. Obviously it´s a pain in the a... for Novell that the sole usable Office suite for their flagship product SuSE Linux is a product of a development community lead by Sun. But that is just my impression.

The developers of LDOMs gave the users of the T1 and T2(+) based system a nice christmas present: The 1.1 version of the LDOMs. This update provides some interesting new features:

• a new XML based interface to manage Logical Domains
• "Guest Domain Migration provides the capability to migrate a guest logical domain from one server to another compatible server. If active, the domain on the source server is suspended, and its configuration and run-time state are transferred to another server, where the domain is recreated and resumed."
• Virtual Input/Output (I/O) Dynamic Reconfiguration (DR) provides the ability to add and remove virtual I/O services and devices without rebooting
• Enhanced Networking subsystem
• "Network Interface Unit (NIU) Hybrid I/O provides support for a virtualized I/O path, a hybrid I/O path, and better performance and scalability. "
• "VLAN Support provides the capability to configure and use virtual local area networks (VLANs) in logical domains"
• Enhanced Storage subsystem
• Virtual Disk Failover adds support for disk multipathing
• Single-Slice Disk Enhancement allows installing the Solaris OS on a single-slice disk.
• New and Changed CLI ldm Subcommands

You can download the new version of LDoms at at the Sun website.

Julian Exenberger has an interesting point of view in regard of Sun software. He wrote about it in "It's recession time and Sun has the best recession kool aid.":

Well I don't know if anyone has noticed but one of the coolest recession friendly enterprise software stacks around is being offered by that company we all love to hate: Sun Microsystems.

That´s exactly the stuff i´m telling to my customers in many presentations (of course without the hate stuff). An everoccuring answer is: "But my ultraimportant application needs BEA and Oracle. It runs that way for a while now and i don´t want to change that". Okay ... i´m fine with that. Keep it this way. But: There are tons of small services in a corporation that doesn´t need BEA or Oracle. If you take this kind of applications from BEA and Oracle to Glassfish and Mysql or Postgres, you get something really precious: Licenses for cores for your Oracle/BEA/Websphere/younameit-dependant application because your licenses are perpetual and you can reuse them as you like to do (at least when you didn´t made some strange agreements). Just look at the per-core price of an Oracle license to see the possible savings. So you don´t have to spend for more licenses when you opt for a larger server, just use the spare ones. And as there is commercial-grade support available for Glassfish, Mysql and Postgres you don´t base your operations. on newsgroup reading.

I don´t want to be misunderstood: Glassfish V3 is at least (!) on par with any other commercial appserver. As Julian writes it:

Sun has a really cool application server which is fully buzzword compliant in the form of Glassfish. Besides the fact that its pretty scalable with old Grizzly, it comes with a rock solid ESB and messaging system, A decent compatible web service stack, and on top of that it is dead simple to administer. And then of course lets not forget the awesomeness that is Glassfish 3.0.

It´s not about getting cheaper, but less capable software what i´m proposing here. It´s just about breaking some habits.

Now what is really cool about this whole stack is that everthing I've mentioned here is either open source or free, with support contracts available. If you wanted you could download all individual components and not cost to you, that's right no cost. How recession friendly is that.

Update: Okay, i won´t write articles (the time in the article is the start time, not the submit time) that late again after being awake since half past four in the morning ... this article was full of typos and grammar errors (hopefully i have corrected most of them now). It´s difficult enough for me to write a decent english when i´m fully awake ... it seems to be impossible when i´m already on my way to the land of dreams. Sorry for that!

In der linken Seitenleiste stehen wieder eine Reihe von Terminen von Events, die entweder von Sun ausgerichtet werden oder bei denen Sun beteiligt ist. Ich bitte um freundliche Beachtung. Sollte bei einem interessanten Event kein Link zu Anmeldung sein, wendet eucht bitte an den Sun oder Partner VB Eures Vertrauens.

We have announced a new version of Virtualbox. 2.1 contains some new features and bugfixes. You will find the following add-ons in it:

• Support for hardware virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V) on Mac OS X hosts
• Support for 64-bit guests on 32-bit host operating systems (experimental)
• Added support for Intel Nehalem virtualization enhancements
• Experimental 3D acceleration via OpenGL
• Experimental LsiLogic and BusLogic SCSI controllers
• Full VMDK/VHD support including snapshots
• New NAT engine with significantly better performance, reliability and ICMP echo (ping) support
• New Host Interface Networking implementations for Windows and Linux hosts with easier setup (replaces TUN/TAP on Linux and manual bridging on Windows)

You will find the changelog at here. The binaries are available at the usual location.

Sun announced an Reference Design Kit for CMT: It´s an UltraSPARC T2 at 1.17 GHz on an ATX board. You will find more information at the datasheet and the Sun website. As this is board is intended for hardware developers planing their own UltraSPARC T2 system, the kit contains such things like board schematics, gerber files, board layout design and the bill of materials for the board.

I don´t have an idea what this board will cost at the moment, but this looks as a way to custom-build a CMT workstation

Update: Too expensive for a workstation at home ...

News from the SLC flash front - Micron, Sun take NAND endurance to one million cycles:

Micron Technology Inc. (Boise, Idaho) has said it has worked with Sun Microsystems Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) to develop a single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory technology that extends the lifespan of flash-based storage for enterprise applications and reaches a million write cycles.

I further digged down into the topic of the seemingly vastly slower HP Proliant 785 G5 when compared with a Sun X4600M2. In some discussions colleagues told me: You have to compare two systems with the same os and same database. This discussion even found it´s way to the german heise.de forum. Okay, that´s correct for a final proof but i don´t expect a HP running the SAP SD benchmark on Solaris and MaxDB, so we will never know it ....

So i´ve studied the SD 2-tier benchmark list out of curiosity to find some hints to explain the performance difference between the both benchmark results.

Our servers are now available with the new AMD chips (codenamed Shanghai): Sun x64 Servers with New Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processors Boost Performance Up to 35 Percent for Enterprise, HPC and Web Applications

Interesting comment about Suns future at the Enterprise Storage Form - Sun May Surprise Its Critics:

The truth is that Sun has much more time than the urgent tone of much of the coverage would have you believe, and has no need for a white knight or a federal bailout. The company's dramatic September-quarter loss was largely a non-cash write-down — the company's actual cash levels dropped $242 million in the quarter. Not pretty, but with about $2 billion more in cash and liquid investments than debt, the company could survive for a couple of years at its current cash burn rate. There are blue chip companies that would kill to be in that position right now.