c0t0d0s0.org - Sun

The Sell Rating from Goldman Sucks

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 13:21:30 +0100

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.

WTF - JAVA above $5 ...

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 09:37:44 +0100

Comment about Fishworks

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:50:39 +0100

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 about Sun 2009

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 18:44:47 +0100

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.

Latency impact of sonic waves directed to hard disk casings

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 14:59:26 +0100

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.

Bullshit in regard of Openoffice

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:39:46 +0100

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.

Logical Domains 1.1

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 13:18:11 +0100

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.

Recession friendly software

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 20:08:00 +0100

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!

Neue Events

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 20:52:01 +0100

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.

Virtualbox 2.1 released

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:55:32 +0100

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.

UltraSPARC T2 Reference Design Kit

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:21:22 +0100

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 ...

NAND-Flashs from Sun and Micron

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:39:22 +0100

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.

Sun X4600M2 vs HP ProLiant DL785 G5 revisited

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 15:50:50 +0100

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.

Continue reading "Sun X4600M2 vs HP ProLiant DL785 G5 revisited"

Sun servers shanghaied ...

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 18:11:00 +0100

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

A more sane comment about Suns future

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:50:05 +0100

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.

Hamburg (Open)solaris User Group

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 18:42:45 +0100

Ich fange ja so langsam an, meine Vorsaetze fuers nächste Jahr zusammenzustellen. Einfach mal die Dinge zu sammeln, die ich nächstes Jahr vor habe. Ein ganz wesentliches Ding rotiert da schon etwas laenger in meinem Kopf. Ich überlege momentan, ein Projekt für den Hamburger Raum zu starten, aber bevor ich da weitere Gedanken reinstecke, würde ich gerne eure Meinung hören.

Ich möchte in 2009 eine Hamburger (Open)solaris User Group ins Leben rufen. Es geht hier hierbei um eine Möglichkeit die Solarisnutzer in der Metropolregion Hamburg untereinander zu vernetzen. Was haltet Ihr davon? Würde euch so eine Gruppe zum Erfahrungsaustausch interessieren? Wer nicht via Kommentar antworten moechte, kann seinen Kommentar via Mail schicken. Mailaddresse steht rechts.

Storage market in the third quarter of 2008

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:15:27 +0100

The IDC Worldwide Disk Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker report for the third quarter of 2008 showed an positive development for Sun. The Register reports:

Although Sun is listed by IDC in the 'Others' category, it grew disk storage system sales 25 per cent in its second consecutive quarter of revenue growth, with 16.1 per cent growth in external disk systems. The company sold more disk storage for Unix servers than any other supplier has done, it claimed, for the past 20 consecutive quarters. If the new Open Storage products take off then it could start approaching Hitachi and NetApp. That would be a noteworthy feat.

Deutschsprachiger Anwenderbericht zu Opensolaris 2008.11

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:51:40 +0100

Ein sehr wohlwollender, deutschsprachiger Bericht über Solaris 2008.11 ist bei computerseite-spezial zu finden:

Mir als Heimanwender macht der Umgang mit dem Unix OpenSolaris viel Freude. [...] Die aktuellen Einschränkungen des Systems betrachte ich optimistisch als einen vorübergehen Zustand. Für mich persönlich ist mit OpenSolaris tatsächlich eine ?neue Sonne? am Himmel der Betriebssysteme aufgegangen.

Adam Leventhal about the storage business in the light of the HSP

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:52:16 +0100

Adam Leventhal wrote an really insightful piece about the potential effect of the Hybrid Storage Pool to the storage business in "Casting the shadow of the Hybrid Storage Pool":

What we have today though integrates flash in a way that changes the landscape of storage economics and delivers cost efficiencies that haven't been seen before. If the drives manufacturers don't already, it can't be long until they hear the death knell for 15K RPM drives loud and clear

When the performance of a storage architecture is ensured by SSD there isn´t really a need for low capacity 15k discs ... 7200 rpm (or even lower) drives with high capacity are more than enough.

IBM benchmarketing - now with 100% more nonsense

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:12:25 +0100

There must be a standard course at the IBM marketing school. The tricks of the benchmarkting are the same again and again. At least it doesn´t get boring to read at the IBM website. Now i found another benchmarketing stunt at their website. It´s called "Move Up to IBM Power Systems".

It was really fun to read it. IBM Benchmarketing - now with 100% more nonsense. One important disclaimer: The following article just contains the stuff that was obvious at my first read. I have a daytime job that isn´t dissecting IBM marketing stunts

Continue reading "IBM benchmarketing - now with 100% more nonsense"

This made my day

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:56:40 +0100

From a discussion about NAT in IPv6:

the only good NAT is a dead NAT

NAS at home

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:40:39 +0100

While preparing the next part for the configuration walkthrough of the Sun 7000 my mind was playing with an desire: I want this interface on an soho device. I played around with many NAS boxes but there wasn´t a single interface in the class of the Fishworks interface. Intel Atoms are cheap enough to build real soho NAS devices from it ...

About all this "What Sun should do?" articles

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 17:05:10 +0100

I´ve thought about linking to all this people writing articles about "What Sun should do now?". But at the end most of this articles are written with no background knowledge or with an hidden agenda. So i simply decided not to link to this articles at all.

But there is an article i want to comment. Rich Sharples writes in What Sun Should Do:

#3 Solaris
See above. Linux has won. Whatever technical merit Solaris has today will be commoditized next year. The innovation around Linux is relentless.

Next year ... really? ZFS is available for years now. I don´t see it´s commoditization by any technology in Linux at the moment. Same thing for DTrace. No SSD support besides of simply using it as a faster disk.

And i know, all those Linux people will cry "Foul" but i do not really see innovation in the Linux kernel. Having many hardware drivers in the kernel isn´t an innovation. Commoditization and innovation are diametral concepts. Linux is good in commoditization, it´s the master in the field of good enough. But it fails in the field of innovating. And to get interesting technologies (besides of drivers) Linux need strong competitors. We don´t stand still. There are other interesting technologies in their creation that will gives us a good technological lead.

By the way. To understand Mr. Sharples standpoint you should know, that he is "Director, Product Management at Red Hat". What a strange luck that he suggests to drop products that could hurt his employer. I tend to say this is a kind of hidden agenda.

From my perspective, Sun has just to learn one thing: Learning to kick the butts of our competitors with their good enough products and learning to make more money from our innovations. But: You don´t make money by dropping them.

Virtualbox 2.0.6 available

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:44:59 +0100

A new version of Virtualbox is available at the usual location. Version 2.0.6 fixes some bugs as described in the changelog. Thanks to Constantin for the hint.

SPARC Enterprise T3120 - you´ve read it at c0t0d0s0.org first ;)

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 18:39:48 +0100

TPM adds many speculations to the bits of truth in an article at the Register (fueled by this Flag Day announcement). No confirmations or declines about the stuff in the article.

Wikipedia uses Sun equipment

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:42:06 +0100

We announced in the press release "Wikimedia Selects Sun Microsystems to Enhance Multimedia Experience for Expanding User-Base Worldwide and Accommodate Explosive Growth of Rich Content"(who uses such fscking long headlines ?!? ), that the Wikipedia will use Sun hardware and software for it´s service:

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia and other free-content projects, announced today that it has selected Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) [...] to help it build a secure and scalable open source web infrastructure using Sun Fire(TM) x4500 and x4150 servers and Sun StorageTek(TM) storage arrays.
[...]
By implementing Sun's open source MySQL(TM) database and Sun Open Storage infrastructure, we are in a position to create a better and faster user experience.

Hardware teaser: SPARC Enterprise T3120

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:31:32 +0100

Just a teaser. There is an interesting putback in Opensolaris Build 104:

PSARC 2008/665 Tenaya Platform Software Support
6766865 Solaris support needed for SPARC-Enterprise-T3120

adds support for Tenaya platform to Nevada

No, i will not tell you more And this putback doesn´t disclose so much stuff like the M3000 support putback

My thoughts about the future of Sun ...

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:08:15 +0100

I´ve stopped to think about all the articles from analysts or newspaper articles about Sun. Reading them leads to the instant urge to ask your doc for Prozac or Effexor. Mostly they are underinformed, heavily biased to other computer companies or just outright sensational. I don´t want to tell you that all is well in the sunny kingdom. But my outlook for the next 2 years looks really positive.

Continue reading "My thoughts about the future of Sun ..."

Immutable Service Containers

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:32:49 +0100

Glen Brunette describes at the Sun Wiki the concept of the Immutable Service Containers (ISC):

Immutable Service Containers (ISC) are an architectural pattern used to describe a platform for highly secure service delivery. While the actual instantiation of an ISC can differ based upon customer and application requirements, an ISC embodies at its core the key principles inherent in the Sun Systemic Security framework including: self-preservation, defense in depth, least privilege, compartmentalization and proportionality.

A really interesting concept! By delivering the service by a zone in conjunction of denying write access to the binaries or configurations and vastly locking down the privileges you can build a really secure environment.

Sun slashes 6000 employees

nospam@example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:17:26 +0100

Not a good way to start the day as i´ve found a mail from Jonathan and some Google Alerts mails not much later. Sun will cut costs in the verge of a recession of the worldwide economy. eWeeks write for example in "Sun Flames 6,000 Workers in Cost-Cutting Bid":

The company says that falling demand for high-end hardware is behind its losses and forcing budget and staffing cuts. The layoffs, which will eliminate as much as 18 percent of Sun's workforce, will save the company $700 million to $800 million. The company will incur a charge of as much as $500 million as a result of the layoffs and restructuring its software division.