Softpanorama
(slightly skeptical)
Open Source Software Educational Society
May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)
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Softpanorama |
May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)
Softpanorama Search
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Recent changes:
Solaris 10 is the first Unix that deserves to be called "XXI century Unix" due to implementation of light-weight virtualization scheme called zones, extension of RBAC and process right management, DTrace, ZFS and predictive self-healing. Those distinctive features mean that Unix as the whole (including but not limited to multiple BSD and linux flavors) will continue to move forward with other Unixes coping and moving further the best Solaris 10 features.
| Solaris 10 zones implementation (which includes Solaris-specific seamless integration with RBAC and process right management), is one of the most important innovation in Unix for the whole history of existence of this OS |
Another nice thing is Sun partnership with AMD and getting Solaris 10 on Opteron on equal footing with Solaris 10 on Sparc. Sun enjoyed a vert good timing on Sun's part to capitalize on Opteron architecture, which eventually (and not without Microsoft help :-) became standard for Intel too and which includes important innovation such as 64-bit and virtualization suppport.
While Sun marketing slogan about Solaris 10 "ten steps ahead " of competition is probably somewhat of a stretch I would say that the following four features really distinguish it from competition:
It looks like Sun heard my prayers. Predictive Self-Healing
is a newly designed hardware architecture that has capability to be
reconfigured dynamically by software if diagnostic software determines
that a component started to go south. Currently it can switch off faulty
CPU, banks of memory and power supplies (of course if there are redundant
power supplies on a particular server; but if you got them they are
hot-swappable). Disks were not a problem for a long time. Power
supplies diagnostics is still buggy in some v210 probably due to faulty
temperature sensor, but generally works OK. May it Solaris can
switch off something else too :-) but just CPU and memory are
probably enough to provide 95% of a typical "high availability solution"
benefits without typical "high availability" overhead and complexity.
That means that a slight premium that you have to pay for UltraSparc
servers is now more then justified, especially for large corporate environment
were cost of the server is always more then offset by overhead inherent
in running any huge organization...
Meanwhile I would like a simple addition of BSD style attributes to classic UFS which remains tried and true filesystem for conservative users :-). Actually Sun made UFS logging default in Solaris 10 (it was available in Solaris 9 too, but not as a default -- you need explicitly put keyword logging into dfstab for each partition where you want it -- and that means that it largely ignored by system administration masses).
Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov
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| 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 |
Nov 10, 2009 | FT Alphaville
Oracle on Monday mounted a strident attack on Europe’s competition authorities as it confirmed it had received an official objection from Brussels to its proposed $7.4bn acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The US software company also said it would “vigorously oppose” the European Commission’s position.
The official statement of objections, which has been sent to Oracle and not made public, comes two months after EU regulators first revealed they might have concerns. A formal objection is the first step towards possible action to block a deal.
This entry was posted by Gwen Robinson on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 4:41 and is filed under M&A, Capital markets. Tagged with oracle, sun microsystems.
NYTimes.com
If Oracle decides to walk away from its $7.4 billion bid to buy Sun Microsystems, it may be no big deal for Oracle, but it could end up being a big problem for Sun, Forbes notes.
October 22, 2009 | NYTimes.com
The European Union’s competition commission is busy reviewing Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems and has said it may not rule until Jan. 19, 2010. Sun is not doing well in the meantime, and this week it announced it would lay off up to 3,000 workers. Sun’s stock price is also rapidly imploding in light of the failure of progress in the Oracle acquisition and from Sun’s own difficulties.
This is a time when the regulatory covenants section of an acquisition agreement matter. These spell out what a buyer must do to obtain regulatory clearance for an acquisition. Sun’s lawyers are no doubt rereading the section carefully to see how they can force Oracle to obtain an earlier clearance from the European Union, if at all. Unfortunately, Sun and its lawyers should have pushed the negotiation much, much harder.
Here are four weak points in the agreement on this matter that are likely now haunting Sun:
... ... ...
Nov 05 | FT Alphaville
At the end of October, FT Alphaville came across some strange goings on in Oracle’s pending $7bn acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
Oracle had withdrawn its Russian antitrust filing, an unexplained move prompting speculation the deal was about to unravel.
With proceedings snagged in Brussels after EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes voiced monopoly concerns, there was understandable investor unease at the withdrawal of the filing to the Russian anti-monopoly regulator.
Oracle, however, declined to offer a formal explanation to its shareholders or to the media. Days later, the FT reported that Oracle was braced for a formal objection from the European Commission.
And when that objection comes, shareholders of both companies, but especially those of Sun, would do well to examine the various caveats attached to the deal.
The Sun-Oracle acquisition agreement makes it clear that Oracle is not required to complete the deal unless it has specific approval from the EC, along with a string of other competition authorities.
And while both companies are left sweating over what, for example, the Turkish antitrust regulators are thinking, the agreement leaves Oracle under no obligation to dispose of any assets in order for the deal to be passed. Sun is effectively left blowing in the wind.
Both companies have a lot to lose if the situation drags on. Oracle has said it is losing $100m a month during the hold up as rivals such as HP and IBM exploit the uncertainty to poach its customers. Sun meanwhile has its own problems, recently laying off 3000 people.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Sun’s lawyers should have pressed Oracle for far tighter conditions on the competition clearance front. Sun shareholders would be feeling rather more comfortable now if the risk of forced disposals rested with Oracle - rather than Oracle retaining the option of simply walking away.
Computerworld - A number of influential members of the open-source community are raising their voices about Oracle Corp.'s pending takeover of the open source MySQL database. Surprisingly, many are not opposing the shift in MySQL ownership that would come with the close of Oracle's $7.4 billion deal to acquire current owner Sun Microsystems Inc., contending that it would not wound the open source database.
Those supporters say that MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius, free software advocate Richard Stallman, and others are whipping up unfounded fears about the future of MySQL in order to get the European Commission to either quash the entire deal or at least force Oracle to sell off MySQL. The EC launched an in-depth investigation into the planned merger this fall, citing "serious concerns" about how the deal would affect database competition.
"I may be a contrarian on this, but I don't think Oracle will have any dramatically-enhanced market power," said Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical Ltd., maker of the Ubuntu distribution of Linux. The latest Ubuntu Server 9.10 version includes a copy of MySQL. "The EU's sophistication on open-source matters may make them inclined to overreact. In fact, they have little to worry about."
Opponents like Widenius and Stallman argue that whatever Oracle and it's CEO Larry Ellison may claim, the acquirer would either weaken or bury the widely-used MySQL in order to protect its proprietary database, which generates more than $8.5 billion in revenue a year for the company.
They also contend that what supporters of the deal call MySQL's salvation -- its open-source status, which allows anyone to download, modify and even sell their own versions of MySQL -- is just a mirage.
However, open-source veterans such as Carlo Piana, a lawyer for the Free Software Foundation Europe who successfully sued Microsoft to open its Windows networking protocols, maintain that Oracle's ownership wouldn't hurt the future of MySQL.
"If Oracle were hypothetically to bend the project away from competition in the high end or simply make it a stale project, it is clear to me that the declining fortunes of the original work would leave (disgruntled developers) room to further the success of the fork(s)," -- new software created from open source code, wrote Piana.
Matthew Aslett, an analyst at research firm The 451 Group, argue that opponents are "spreading what can only be described as fear, uncertainty and doubt. The only possible argument in favor of the EC blocking Oracle's acquisition of MySQL is that it is damaging to competition, not that it is damaging to MySQL itself," which is the primary arguments of opponents like Widenius and Stallman, Aslett wrote in a 451 Group blog post earlier this month.
Sun Microsystems
Jonathan I. Schwartz
- 2008 11.1
- 2007 7.7
The European Commission now has until Jan. 19 before it makes a final decision to clear the deal or block it. In some cases, such as with Intel Corp., the EU has been a stricter antitrust regulator than the U.S., and often presses companies to make changes that eliminate antitrust worries, such as selling off parts of their business.
Oracle is the database leader with 37 percent of the overall market, followed by IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp., according to the IDC research firm.
MySQL, a Swedish company that Sun bought for $1 billion last year, is a tiny player, with just 0.2 percent market share, but is the reason European regulators are worried.
The EU officials claim that MySQL, already popular among Web-based companies, will increasingly threaten Oracle's database software as it adds features and attracts more customers. The regulators questioned "Oracle's incentive to further develop MySQL as an open source database."
"In the current economic context, all companies are looking for cost-effective (information-technology) solutions, and systems based on open-source software are increasingly emerging as viable alternatives to proprietary solutions," Kroes said. "The commission has to ensure that such alternatives would continue to be available."
Helps to understand the capabilities of ZFS snapshots, a read-only copy of a Solaris ZFS file system. ZFS snapshots can be created almost instantly and are a valuable tool for system administrators needing to perform backups.
You will learn:
- How to set up a ZFS file system
- How to use and create ZFS snapshots
- How to use ZFS snapshots for backup and restore purposes
- How to migrate ZFS snapshots between systems
After reading this guide, you will have a basic understanding of how snapshots can be integrated into your system administration procedures.
See also
Learn how Immutable Service Containers provide a way to safeguard virtualized environments.
August 15, 2009 | SD Times Software Development News
Much has been written about the mishaps and missteps that led to the decline and fall of Sun Microsystems. At its height, it was a Silicon Valley powerhouse whose servers “put the dot in dot-com” nearly a decade ago. Today, the company is being acquired for a relatively paltry sum by Oracle.
It’s easy to take shots at where Sun fell short. Purchasing companies and failing to commercialize them, such as its acquisition of Cobalt Networks. Spending a fortune on an open-source software without explaining the return on investment, like its US$1 billion buy of MySQL AB in early 2008. Stumbling in attempts to take leadership in Java application servers, a market that it invented—then lost.
It’s also easy to pin the blame on Jonathan Schwartz, who took over the reins as Sun’s president in 2004, and became CEO in 2006. While SD Times has been critical of Schwartz, we also note that the company had been trending downward before his ascension—and he apparently had the company’s cofounder and chairman, Scott McNealy, backing him up.
Rather than take those shots, we’ll pause for a moment and think about the genuine innovation that characterized this truly unique company. Sun had a profound impact on Silicon Valley and the entire computer industry. Its SPARC processor came to dominate the world of RISC-based servers and led the industry toward 64-bit computing. Sun’s version of Unix, called Solaris, earned a reputation for stability and reliability, and introduced cutting-edge features like DTrace and ZFS. On the small side, the Sun SPOT wireless devices continue to fire the imagination.
The Java language, invented at Sun, and the Java Virtual Machine gave the software development world its first commercially successful managed runtime environment. “Write Once, Run Anywhere,” while never perfectly implemented by competing Java EE vendors, remains a compelling vision that isn’t equaled anywhere in the mainstream computing world. The Java Community Process brought together many of those competitors and provided a successful forum for evolving the Java platform.
Beyond Java, Sun impacted development with its purchase of NetBeans and its decision to release the platform as open source, then base its entire family of software-development tools on it, phasing out its older Forte tools. While lacking the market power of rival Eclipse, NetBeans is technologically second to nothing.
While Sun’s business mistakes caused many sighs, its spirit of creativity was the envy of the entire computer industry. As Sun’s intellectual property, as well as its assets and human capital, pass over to Oracle, we hope that the spirit of innovation will live on.
SD Times Software Development News
Sun Microsystems passed away on July 16, 2009. On that day, the company's shareholders voted to accept the merger agreement, proposed by Oracle, to purchase the company for US$5.6 billion, or $9.50 per share. Sun's CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, and its chairman of the board and cofounder, Scott McNealy, were not present for the shareholder vote.
July 16, 2009 | sdtimes.com
The proxy, filed in June by Sun, contained an extensive blow-by-blow account of the merger and its preceding negotiations.
On Nov. 6, 2008, IBM initially approached Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and an unnamed Sun board member to discuss a possible merger. As the board began to discuss the offer, it also instructed management to approach a second company, called Party B.
Multiple sources have fingered Hewlett-Packard as Party B, but no one at Sun or HP would confirm it.
Jun 2, 2009 | ComputerWeekly.com
The changes to network and storage performance make the operating system much faster than Linux, according to Sun.
Project Crossbow is Sun's network architecture for virtualisation. The company claims that Crossbow can be used to network multicore, multi-threaded processors together using an extremely fast network interface.
With Project Crossbow, OpenSolaris 2009.06 gets a virtual network interface, which Sun says can be used to simplify administration of complex deployments of multi-tiered applications on a single machine or an entire datacentre
OpenSolaris 2009.06 also includes a revamped version of Sun's ZFS file system, which now supports flash storage devices. Sun said flash-based storage support in ZFS can be used to accelerate read and write access to build high-performance storage systems.
Sun said OpenSolaris 2009.06 delivers 35% better memory management, 22% better integer arithmetics and 18% better multi-thread scheduler management when compared with the latest Linux releases.
Abstract: This article compares the performance characteristics of Asterisk PBX operating on Solaris 10 verses Linux. The author shows how to achieve even greater performance from Asterisk on Solaris 10 by using a native feature available to Solaris. In addition, Solaris 10 SMF (Service Management Facility) scripts are made available to ensure the continuous operation of Asterisk PBX on the Solaris 10 operating system.
Apr 21, 2009 | IT Business Edge
Oracle, at least for most of this decade, has performed nearly flawlessly. A company to be reckoned with, it has mowed down or rolled over most of its competitors. IBM and Microsoft are the two exceptions, but even these giants had difficulty competing with Oracle. However, when Oracle created Unbreakable Linux and ran against much smaller Red Hat and Novell, it got handed its hat and became kind of a running joke here in Silicon Valley.
With Sun, that joke gets a lot less funny. Sun still has a substantial installed base of customers who have not been able to move off Solaris to Linux and weren't particularly motivated to move. Granted, they also weren't particularly motivated to buy more, which is why Sun was in the financial trouble that forced it to look for a buyer. In addition, Oracle knows how to do mergers like this. Even the hostile PeopleSoft acquisition had it keeping more PeopleSoft customers than most thought was possible. Given that there is a substantial amount of client overlap between Oracle and Sun, keeping the Sun clients happy should be an easier task.
... ... ...
Finally, it is believed that a substantial amount of code in Linux actually may belong to Sun and, with this acquisition, could belong to Oracle. While I don't expect a SCO moment, I would expect Oracle to use it as a bargaining chip to drive Linux in a direction it felt benefitted the firm. It may be the only company on the planet that might know how to do this without it blowing up in their face. This might make Oracle a leader among equals, and if it played with HP (see below), a real risk to the other enterprise distribution owners and IBM. Coupled with Java, which is both a valid platform in its own right and vastly more strategic to Oracle than it was to Sun, Oracle becomes a real platform company and better able to match both IBM and Microsoft going forward.
... ... ...
Oracle deal is vastly more disruptive. Coupled with Oracle's demonstrated expertise in mergers and in making deals, it could actually change the power dynamics in the Linux, high-end server and workstation markets. It will be harder to do right because several players are needed to optimize the result and the timing isn't great for any of the hardware vendors that would need to buy into this effort. It is interesting to note that, with regard to assets, Sun is probably worth more to Oracle than to IBM because it gives the company a position on development platforms. However, for IBM, part of the value would be to deny competitors access to the Sun assets and that cost to IBM may turn out to exceed the asset value, suggesting that IBM may have substantially under bid. That, of course assumes this works out, but given Oracle's success with ventures like this, it wouldn't seem prudent to bet against it.
...Oracle is a tough place. It routinely evaluates the performance of staff and chops around 10 per cent. Acquired staff and products must also justify their place in this Dawnian environment or they'll get chopped or boxed
... ... ...
Java is strategically critical to Oracle's middleware, development tools, application server, and database support. Oracle has been a life-long believer in Java, which - running on Linux - provides the perfect answer to Windows and .NET from Microsoft. Java also means licensing from all those enterprise ISVs and device manufacturers.
Solaris is important to Oracle, too. More copies of Oracle's database run on Solaris than on any another operating system - a fact chief executive Larry Ellison helpfully pointed out on Monday. Ellison talked of tuning its database to Solaris, which will help keep Oracle in major accounts such as telcos, service providers, and banks and financial services that might otherwise have been flirting with Linux and its database or - worse - Linux and MySQL and Postgres.
... ... ...
Optimists inside Sun will likely argue GlassFish, OpenSolaris, and Java CAPs can serve their new master in the same OEM market using MySQL.
... ... ...
The biggest determining factor, though, will be cash generation.
Many at the flagging server-and-software company were just glad it appears to be over. A deal with Oracle may be a better fit than IBM for the troops at Sun, which -- despite its roller-coaster history -- still inspires fierce loyalty among its own ranks and customers.
"We're sort of relieved," said a 39-year-old hardware manager and 12-year veteran of the company. "There was a lot of bad press with Sun being up for sale, desperately looking for a buyer. It hurt business and it hurt earnings."
Where IBM conjured up images of a mass of navy-blue suits, Sun employees see Oracle as a compatriot.
"The employees run in the same social circles as Sun employees," the manager said.
Few companies embody the rise and fall of dot-com as much as Sun, whose name stands for Stanford University Network and whose campus resembles that of the college, with a palmtree-lined drive leading up to a grassy courtyard and clocktower.
March 19, 2009 | Forbes.com
So deftly did Sun take advantage of technology that during the '90s, it was impossible to beat it; companies like IBM feared Sun the way companies now fear Microsoft
( MSFT - news - people ) and Google ( GOOG - news - people ). Anyone who wanted to do serious technical computing bought Sun because its machines were essentially the only option. The problem for Sun is that the forces that launched it didn't stop once Sun was a success. Creating complex operating systems--something that had once been such cutting-edge engineering you needed the old Bell Labs to do it--became a more straightforward engineering undertaking. With NT, Microsoft took its first big step toward a mature OS; later versions of Windows closed the gap with Unix, as far as much of the marketplace was concerned.
And Moore's Law was not repealed. Low-end Intel
( INTC - news - people ) chips had been a joke during Sun's early years; by the end of the 1990s, they had caught up with the proprietary chips that Sun had by then incorporated into its machines. The economics of increasing returns, which holds that successful companies tend to grab an ever-larger share of the marketplace, gave another boost to Intel. Sun's slogan during the late 1990s was, "We're the dot in dot-com." It was true; anyone with a serious Web site chose Sun, though the fact that everyone was awash in VC money made buying the expensive machines an easier call than it might have been otherwise. But if the dot-com bubble had happened just a few years later, Sun would never have had its thermonuclear moment--the stock was near $250 in 2000--because the competition, especially Intel and Microsoft, would have by then caught up. With the rise of Linux--software that arguably was the inevitable result of the Internet--Sun didn't have many plays left.
All of which may be a long way of saying that it's more important to pay attention to how the winds are blowing than to whatever a sailboat's captain is doing with the tiller. It definitely takes skill to take proper advantage of your environment. But heaven help when the fates turn against you.
David Magda Jan 28 2003, 7:52 pmNewsgroups: comp.sys.sun.miscFrom: David Magda <dmagda+use...@ee.ryerson.ca>Date: 28 Jan 2003 18:48:32 -0500Local: Tues, Jan 28 2003 7:48 pmSubject: Re: The Rise And Fall Of Sun Microsystems> Now it seems that Sun is past its peak, lost its vision of openness and has turned into just another closed systems shop:
While I think it's unfortunate that Sun doesn't give US-III, you do
have to remember that they gave it to Linux for the UltraLinux
port. The Linux porter (David Miller?) had to sign an NDA. Theo de
Raadt is not agreeing to sign an NDA because of philosophical
reasons. Something I don't see anything wrong with.The question you have to also ask is: how is Sun becoming more
"closed"? By:
* giving away the source to StarOffice
* opening up GridEngine (now on SourceForge?)
* helping to develop GNOME
* helping U. of Michigan with NFSv4 (to Solaris, Linux, OpenBSD)Anything else?
The link is to a Slashdot story regarding OpenBSD trying to get documentation for the US-III.I have no idea what Sun is thinking on this one. They're a hardware company: you want more systems running on that hardware.
> How long before HP purchases what's left of Sun?Personally I think HP will sink before Sun, just because of stupidity. There's an interesting thread in comp.arch on HP's treatment of the Alpha processor.
Time will tell, he always does.
--
David Magda <dmagda at ee.ryerson.ca>
Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under
the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well
under the new. -- Niccolo Machiavelli, _The Prince_, Chapter VI
JerkBoB (7130) on Monday April 20, @08:29AM (#27644011) For anyone with morbid curiosity:From: Jonathan I. Schwartz
To: allsun@sun.com
Subject: Today's Sun/Oracle Announcement
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:34:16 -0700 (07:34 EDT)Today's Sun/Oracle Announcement
This is one of the toughest emails I've ever had to write.
It's also one of the most hopeful about Sun's future in the industry.
For 27 years, Sun has stood for courage, innovation, a willingness to blaze trails, to envision and engineer the future. No matter our ups and downs, we've remained committed to those ideals, and to the R&D that's allowed us to differentiate. We've committed to decade long pursuits, from the evolution of one of the world's most powerful datacenter operating systems, to one of the world's most advanced multi-core microelectronics. We've never walked away from the wholesale reinvention of business models, the redefinition of technology boundaries or the pursuit of new routes to market.
Because of the unparalleled talent at Sun, we've also fueled entire industries with our people and technologies, and fostered extraordinary companies and market successes. Our products and services have driven the discovery of new drugs, transformed social media, and created a better understanding of the world and marketplace around us. All, while we've undergone a near constant transformation in the face of a rapidly changing marketplace and global economy. We've never walked away from a challenge - or an opportunity.
So today we take another step forward in our journey, but along a different path - by announcing that this weekend, our board of directors and I approved the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by the Oracle Corporation for $9.50/share in cash. All members of the board present at the meeting to review the transaction voted for it with enthusiasm, and the transaction stands to utterly transform the marketplace - bringing together two companies with a long history of working together to create a newly unified vision of the future.
Oracle's interest in Sun is very clear - they aspire to help customers simplify the development, deployment and operation of high value business systems, from applications all the way to datacenters. By acquiring Sun, Oracle will be well positioned to help customers solve the most complex technology problems related to running a business.
To me, this proposed acquisition totally redefines the industry, resetting the competitive landscape by creating a company with great reach, expertise and innovation. A combined Oracle/Sun will be capable of cultivating one of the world's most vibrant and far reaching developer communities, accelerating the convergence of storage, networking and computing, and delivering one of the world's most powerful and complete portfolios of business and technical software.
I do not consider the announcement to be the end of the road, not by any stretch of the imagination. I believe this is the first step down a different path, one that takes us and our innovations to an even broader market, one that ensures the ubiquitous role we play in the world around us. The deal was announced today, and, after regulatory review and shareholder approval, will take some months to close - until that close occurs, however, we are a separate company, operating independently. No matter how long it takes, the world changed starting today.
But it's important to note it's not the acquisition that's changing the world - it's the people that fuel both companies. Having spent a considerable amount of time talking to Oracle, let me assure you they are single minded in their focus on the one asset that doesn't appear in our financial statements: our people. That's their highest priority - creating an inviting and compelling environment in which our brightest minds can continue to invent and deliver the future.
Thank you for everything you've done over the years, and for everything you will do in the future to carry the business forward. I'm incredibly proud of this company and what we've accomplished together.
Details will be forthcoming as we work together on the integration planning process.
Jonathan
Slashdot
by rackserverdeals (1503561) on Monday April 20, @11:24AM (#27646517) Homepage
I'm listening to the conference call now.
One of the first thing Larry Ellison said was two of the main reasons they were buying sun were for Solaris and Java.
Solaris/Sparc is the largest base where Oracle is deployed. Linux is number 2. He also said "Solaris is the best unix techonology available in the market."
Solaris isn't going anywhere.
by Jon Peterson (1443) <jon@@@snowdrift...org> on Monday April 20, @10:21AM (#27645443) Homepage
"On paper, Rock and the T2 look like they'd be a very good match for Oracle's workloads, but since Oracle's license prevents publishing benchmarks and I don't have the hardware and software to hand to test them, I can't tell how they do in the real world."I do have the hardware and software
to hand
The key thing is licensing. We run Oracle 10g standard, and it works
out very well. Oracle have insane licensing with fine distinctions about
when a core counts as a CPU blah blah blah. Right now, with T2 we get
64 parallel execution threads for 1 Oracle CPU license, which works
for me
I'll be interested to see what Rock offers, but with the virtualization capabilities in Solaris, the T2 gives us a lot of room to be flexible and split stuff up. If you've been paying attention for the last 20 years and have designed your software on the principles of atomicity, asynchronicity, and statelessness, it does let you scale very very nicely.
--- http://www.jbrowse.com/ [jbrowse.com] - best hex editor in the worldI concur with this assessment. We recently moved from a $300,000 SunFire 6900 (a system the size of a standard full-size 42U rack) with 12 dual core CPU's and 48 GB of RAM that drew massive amounts of power and cooling, to a $30,000 T2 blade with 64GB of RAM that runs cool and sips power. Our DBA's were amazed at the improvement. We need to upgrade the front end systems now to keep up with the increase in performance of the backend! We were able to trade in the 6900, and the savings on *support* for the 6900 offset the purchase price of 2 blade chassis, 10 blades and a SAN!
For our workload, the massive parallel architecture of the T2 really suits Oracle. For any type of multithreaded or multiprocessed throughput-based app (web serving, front-end app servers, LDAP server, database server), the T1 and T2 design is perfect.
--
-- There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand
binary, and those who don't.
by rackserverdeals (1503561) on Monday April 20, @08:27AM (#27644001) Homepage
There was a time when Oracle was considering Netbeans [zdnet.com], but Oracle joined the Eclipse Foundation.
I don't think JDeveloper is based on Eclipse though.
Might be interesting to see what happens. I think Netbeans will live on. Too many of sun's products rely on it.
What I'm more concerned with is the amount of contributions to PostgreSQL.
I still feel had they put more money/time into postgresql instead
of buying MySQL, they wouldn't need to be bought.
by rackserverdeals (1503561) on Monday April 20, @10:58AM (#27646071) Homepage
Most of Sun's revenue comes from their Sparc hardware, even though sales have been declining.They need Solaris for their Sparc servers and since the x86 and Sparc versions come from the same codebase, and the x86 server sales are increasing, it doesn't make sense to ditch Solaris.
One of the reasons Sun's became such a dominant player in the unix market (especially considering their relatively small size) is that, in addition to buying Sun's hardware on the merits of the hardware, a lot of people would buy sun hardware to be able to run Solaris. The same is not true for HPUX and AIX. While there are some fans of those OSs, they dwarf in comparison to Solaris.
Oracle wants sun's hardware business, including SPARC. That means Solaris isn't going anywhere.
--by egghat (73643) on Monday April 20, @08:20AM (#27643955) Homepage
Oracle+Sun has the power to seriously harm IBM. IBMs big plus was the combination of good hardware + OS + DB + consultants.
Oracle + Sun can now deliver exactly the same.
bye egghat
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Why? From what I've seen, the recent UltraSPARCs (T2, and possibly the Rock too) have the best performance-per-watt when running parallel workloads with few floating point ops and lots of I/O. Oracle workloads are parallel, with few floating point ops and lots of I/O. Shipping Oracle appliances on T2 chips means that they aren't having to pay another company a share of their profits for their CPU, and continuing to sell them to other people helps them offset more of the R&D costs.
Oh, and Sun aren't the only company making SPARC chips. Some of the ones Sun has been selling for the past few years have been rebranded Fujitsu SPARC64s and there are a few companies selling SPARC32 (v8) systems for the embedded market, although they are less common than ARM and PowerPC.
Yahoo! FinanceOracle Corp. snapped up computer server and software maker Sun Microsystems Inc. for $7.4 billion Monday, trumping rival IBM Corp.'s attempt to buy one of Silicon Valley's best known -- and most troubled -- companies.
... ... ...
Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, predicted the combination will create a "systems and software powerhouse" that "redefines the industry, redrawing the boundaries that have frustrated the industry's ability to solve." Among other things, he predicted Oracle will be able to offer its customers simpler computing solutions at less expensive prices by drawing upon Sun's technology.
... ... ...
Yet Oracle says it can run Sun more efficiently. It expects the purchase to add at least 15 cents per share to its adjusted earnings in the first year after the deal closes. The company estimated Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun will contribute more than $1.5 billion to Oracle's adjusted profit in the first year and more than $2 billion in the second year.If Oracle can hit those targets, Sun would yield more profit than the combined contributions of three other major acquisitions -- PeopleSoft Inc., Siebel Systems Inc. and BEA Systems -- that cost Oracle a total of more than $25 billion.
A deal with Oracle might not be plagued by the same antitrust issues that could have loomed over IBM and Sun, since there is significantly less overlap between the two companies. Still, Oracle could be able to use Sun's products to enhance its own software.
Oracle's main business is database software. Sun's Solaris operating system is a leading platform for that software. The company also makes "middleware," which allows business computing applications to work together. Oracle's middleware is built on Sun's Java language and software.
Calling Java the "single most important software asset we have ever acquired," Ellison predicted it would eventually help make Oracle's middleware products generate as much revenue as its database line does.
Sun's takeover is a reminder that a few missteps and bad timing can cause a star to come crashing down.
Sun was founded in 1982 by men who would become legendary Silicon Valley figures: Andy Bechtolsheim, a graduate student whose computer "workstation" for the Stanford University Network (SUN) led to the company's first product; Bill Joy, whose work formed the basis for Sun's computer operating system; and Stanford MBAs Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy.
Sun was a pioneer in the concept of networked computing, the idea that computers could do more when lots of them were linked together. Sun's computers took off at universities and in the government, and became part of the backbone of the early Internet. Then the 1990s boom made Sun a star. It claimed to put "the dot in dot-com," considered buying a struggling Apple Computer Inc. and saw its market value peak around $200 billion.
Adobe Reader 9.1 for Linux and Solaris x86 has been released today. Solaris x86 support was one of the most requested feature by users. As per the Reader team's announcement, this release includes the following major features:- Support for Tabbed Viewing (prevbr> - Super fast launch, and better performance than previous releases
- Integration with Acrobat.com
- IPv6 support
- Enhanced support for PDF portfolios (preview)The complete list is available here.
Adobe Reader 9.1 is now available for download and works on OpenSolaris, Solaris 10 and most modern Linux distributions such as Ubuntu 8.04, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva 2009, SLED 10, Mint Linux 6 and Fedora 10.
See also Sneak Preview of the Tabbed Viewing interface in Adobe Reader 9.x (on Ubuntu)
Solaris Filesystem Choicesposted by John Finigan on Mon 21st Apr 2008 19:00 UTC
When it comes to dealing with storage, Solaris 10 provides admins with more choices than any other operating system. Right out of the box, it offers two filesystems, two volume managers, an iscsi target and initiator, and, naturally, an NFS server. Add a couple of Sun packages and you have volume replication, a cluster filesystem, and a hierarchical storage manager. Trust your data to the still-in-development features found in OpenSolaris, and you can have a fibre channel target and an in-kernel CIFS server, among other things. True, some of these features can be found in any enterprise-ready UNIX OS. But Solaris 10 integrates all of them into one well-tested package. Editor's note: This is the first of our published submissions for the 2008 Article Contest.
The details of the whole Solaris storage stack could fill a book, so in this article I will focus only on filesystems. There are four common on-disk filesystems for Solaris, and my goal is to familiarize the reader with each of them, and to mention a few deployment scenarios where each is appropriate.
UFS
UFS in its various forms has been with us since the days of BSD on VAXen the size of refrigerators. The basic UFS concepts thus date back to the early 1980s and represent the second pass at a workable UNIX filesystem, after the very slow and simple filesystem that shipped with the truly ancient Version 7 UNIX. Almost all commercial UNIX OSs have had a UFS, and ext3 in Linux is similar to UFS in design. Solaris inherited UFS through SunOS, and SunOS in turn got it from BSD.
Until recently, UFS was the only filesystem that shipped with Solaris. Unlike HP, IBM, SGI, and DEC, Sun did not develop a next-generation filesystem during the 1990s. There are probably at least two reasons for this: most competitors developed their new filesystems using third party code which required per-system royalties, and the availability of VxFS from Veritas. Considering that a lot of the other vendors' filesystem IP was licensed from Veritas anyway, this seems like a reasonable decision.
Solaris 10 can only boot from a UFS root filesystem. In the future, ZFS boot will be available, as it already is in OpenSolaris. But for now, every Solaris system must have at least one UFS filesystem.
UFS is old technology but it is a stable and fast filesystem. Sun has continuously tuned and improved the code over the last decade and has probably squeezed as much performance out of this type of FS as is possible. Journaling support was added in Solaris 7 at the turn of the century and has been enabled by default since Solaris 9. Before that, volume level journaling was available. In this older scheme, changes to the raw device are journaled, and the filesystem is not journaling-aware. This is a simple but inefficient scheme, and it worked with a small performance penalty. Volume level journaling is now end-of-lifed, but interestingly, the same sort of system seems to have been added to FreeBSD recently. What is old is new again.
UFS is accompanied by the Solaris Volume Manager, which provides perfectly servicible software RAID.
Where does UFS fit in in 2008? Besides booting, it provides a filesystem which is stable and predictable and better integrated into the OS than anything else. ZFS will probably replace it eventually, but for now, it is a good choice for databases, which have usually been tuned for a traditional filesystem's access characteristics. It is also a good choice for the pathologically conservative administrator, who may not have an exciting job, but who rarely has his nap time interrupted.
ZFS
ZFS has gotten a lot of hype. It has also gotten some derision from Linux folks who are accustomed to getting that hype themselves. ZFS is not a magic bullet, but it is very cool. I like to think that if UFS and ext3 were first generation UNIX filesystems, and VxFS and XFS were second generation, then ZFS is the first third generation UNIX FS.
ZFS is not just a filesystem. It is actually a hybrid filesystem and volume manager. The integration of these two functionalities is a main source of the flexibility of ZFS. It is also, in part, the source of the famous "rampant layering violation" quote which has been repeated so many times. Remember, though, that this is just one developer's aesthetic opinion. I have never seen a layering violation that actually stopped me from opening a file.
Being a hybrid means that ZFS manages storage differently than traditional solutions. Traditionally, you have a one to one mapping of filesystems to disk partitions, or alternately, you have a one to one mapping of filesystems to logical volumes, each of which is made up of one or more disks. In ZFS, all disks participate in one storage pool. Each ZFS filesystem has the use of all disk drives in the pool, and since filesystems are not mapped to volumes, all space is shared. Space may be reserved, so that one filesystem can't fill up the whole pool, and reservations may be changed at will. However, if you don't want to decide ahead of time how big each filesystem needs to be, there is no need to, and logical volumes never need to be resized. Growing or shrinking a filesystem isn't just painless, it is irrelevant.
ZFS provides the most robust error checking of any filesystem available. All data and metadata is checksummed (SHA256 is available for the paranoid), and the checksum is validated on every read and write. If it fails and a second copy is available (metadata blocks are replicated even on single disk pools, and data is typically replicated by RAID), the second block is fetched and the corrupted block is replaced. This protects against not just bad disks, but bad controllers and fibre paths. On-disk changes are committed transactionally, so although traditional journaling is not used, on-disk state is always valid. There is no ZFS fsck program. ZFS pools may be scrubbed for errors (logical and checksum) without unmounting them.
The copy-on-write nature of ZFS provides for nearly free snapshot and clone functionality. Snapshotting a filesystem creates a point in time image of that filesystem, mounted on a dot directory in the filesystem's root. Any number of different snapshots may be mounted, and no separate logical volume is needed, as would be for LVM style snapshots. Unless disk space becomes tight, there is no reason not to keep your snapshots forever. A clone is essentially a writable snapshot and may be mounted anywhere. Thus, multiple filesystems may be created based on the same dataset and may then diverge from the base. This is useful for creating a dozen virtual machines in a second or two from an image. Each new VM will take up no space at all until it is changed.
These are just a few interesting features of ZFS. ZFS is not a perfect replacement for traditional filesystems yet - it lacks per-user quota support and performs differently than the usual UFS profile. But for typical applications, I think it is now the best option. Its administrative features and self-healing capability (especially when its built in RAID is used) are hard to beat.
SAM and QFS
SAM and QFS are different things but are closely coupled. QFS is Sun's cluster filesystem, meaning that the same filesystem may be simultaneously mounted by multiple systems. SAM is a hierarchical storage manager; it allows a set of disks to be used as a cache for a tape library. SAM and QFS are designed to work together, but each may be used separately.
QFS has some interesting features. A QFS filesystem may span multiple disks with no extra LVM needed to do striping or concatenation. When multiple disks are used, data may be striped or round-robined. Round-robin allocation means that each file is written to one or two disks in the set. This is useful since, unlike striping, participation by all disks is not needed to fetch a file - each disk may seek totally independently. QFS also allows metadata to be separated from data. In this way, a few disks may serve the random metadata workload while the rest serve a sequential data workload. Finally, as mentioned before, QFS is an asymmetric cluster filesystem.
QFS cannot manage its own RAID, besides striping. For this, you need a hardware controller, a traditional volume manager, or a raw ZFS volume.
SAM makes a much larger backing store (typically a tape library) look like a regular UNIX filesystem. This is accomplished by storing metadata and often-referenced data on disk, and migrating infrequently used data in and out of the disk cache as needed. SAM can be configured so that all data is staged out to tape, so that if the disk cache fails, the tapes may be used like a backup. Files staged off of the disk cache are stored in tar-like archives, so that potentially random access of small files can become sequential. This can make further backups much faster.
QFS may be used as a local or cluster filesystem for large-file intensive workloads like Oracle. SAM and QFS are often used for huge data sets such as those encountered in supercomputing. SAM and QFS are optional products and are not cheap, but they have recently been released into OpenSolaris.
VxFS
The Veritas filesystem and volume manager have their roots in a fault-tolerant proprietary minicomputer built by Veritas in the 1980s. They have been available for Solaris since at least 1993 and have been ported to AIX and Linux. They are integrated into HP-UX and SCO UNIX, and Veritas Volume Manager code has been used (and extensively modified) in Tru64 UNIX and even in Windows. Over the years, Veritas has made a lot of money licensing their tech, and not because it is cheap, but because it works.
VxFS has never been part of Solaris but, when UFS was the only option, it was a popular addition. VxVM and VxFS are tightly integrated. Through vxassist, one may shrink and grow filesystems and their underlying volumes with minimal trouble. VxVM provides online RAID relayout. If you have a RAID5 and want to turn it into a RAID10, no problem, no downtime. If you need more space, just convert it back to a RAID5. VxVM has a reputation for being cryptic, and to some extent it is, but it's not so bad and the flexibility is impressive.
VxFS is a fast, extent based, journaled, clusterable filesystem. In fact, it essentially introduced these features to the world, along with direct IO. Newer versions of VxFS and VxVM have the ability to do cross-platform disk sharing. If you ever wanted to unmount a volume from your AIX box and mount it on Linux or Solaris, now you can.
VxFS and VxVM are still closed source. A version is available from Symantec that is free on small servers, with limitations, but I imagine that most users still pay. Pricing starts around $2500 and can be shocking for larger machines. VxFS and VxVM are solid choices for critical infrastructure workloads, including databases.
Conclusion
These are the four major choices in the Solaris on-disk filesystem world. Other filesystems, such as ext2, have some degree of support in OpenSolaris, and FUSE is also being worked on. But if you are deploying a Solaris server, you are going to be using one or more of these four. I hope that you enjoyed this overview, and if you have any corrections or tales of UNIX filesystem history, please let me know.
About the Author
John Finigan is a Computer Science graduate student and IT professional specializing in backup and recovery technology. He is especially interested in the history of enterprise computing and in Cold War technology.
AP
IBM Corp. withdrew its offer to buy Sun Microsystems Inc. for about $7 billion this weekend, clouding the prospects for a deal that would have shaken up the computing industry, The Associated Press has learned.Talks were in their final stages in recent days, but IBM took its offer off the table after Sun terminated IBM's status as its exclusive negotiating partner, according to two people familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the negotiations.
One of these people said the two sides were still meeting Sunday.
Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM was believed to be offering about $9.50 per share for Sun. That was about double the price the Santa Clara, Calif.-based server and software maker was trading for when the discussions leaked last month. Sun shares closed Friday at $8.49.
Sun was one of the darlings of the dot-com era but spent most of this decade struggling to find its place, wrestling with huge losses and thousands of layoffs. As a result many analysts were not surprised Sun and IBM were in talks.
Sun still owns key server and business-software technologies that might fit in IBM's product and services lineup. But a deal likely would face antitrust questions, and in addition to haggling over price, Sun has been pushing IBM to make certain commitments to seeing the deal through such scrutiny.
___
Jordan Robertson reported from San Francisco.
Re-The next headline is...by RancidPickle (160946) on Friday April 03, @09:49AM (#27444103) Homepage
IBM today announced the outsourcing of 90% of Sun employees. "This will save us a good chunk of the $7B we paid for them," said an IBM representative.
Meanwhile, in Washington, IBM was approved to receive $3B in taxpayer money from the Keep America Working fund.
--
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor WhoRe:The next headline is... (Score:5, Informative)
by Anonymous Meoward (665631) on Friday April 03, @11:01AM (#27445191)The GPL prevents Linux from "winning" (Score:2, Interesting)If only this wasn't true.
I know folks in IBM (used to work there long ago myself), and who have just been pushed out. Those who left think they're the lucky ones. The remaining American workforce is stressed out over heavy workloads and fear of the impending (inevitable?) axe. Morale is slightly better there today than it was inside Dachau in 1943.
And yes, CEO Sam Palmisano has been lobbying Barack Obama personally to get some of the stimulus package. So your U.S. tax dollars will go to accelerate offshore outsourcing.
I pity Sun employees. I really do. They are about to become part of a company that is, undeniably, bad for America. (And they won't be staying long either.)
--
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03, @10:58AM (#27445165)
Even an open source version is made available.OpenSolaris is a last-ditch effort to remain relevant in the face of Linux [zdnet.com].
Solaris is doomed to fail because Sun made it unnecessarily baroque. Speaking as someone who cut their Sun teeth on SunOS 4.1.1 on sun3 (now is your cue, crusty Unix overlords, to come and tell me you started with sun2) I can conclusively say that while SunOS has come a long way it has also become continually more of a PITA. If it's so fucking great, why is Linux eating its lunch? Maybe ZFS and dtrace just aren't enough?
"Eating its lunch"?
Really? Get thee to a real customer that demands five 9s or better uptimes. Yeah, there are probably some - running IBM mostly. We'll see how IBM likes handing support revenue over to RedHat now that it looks like they'll have their own open-sourced OS that's not burdened by GPL restrictions.
Until Linux guarantees backwards binary compatibility, Solaris is going to stay put. Nothing sucks more than applying a patch and having your customer's app fail to run. And as long as backwards compatibility can be broken by some long-haired wackademic on his vision of free-software jihad deciding unilaterally "THIS IS THE RIGHT WAY TO DO IT!", Linux has a problem.
Ever try to back out an upgrade on Linux? Hint: enterprise customers do NOT upgrade their boxes by running yum or some
Sparc was dead anyway (Score:2)
by mikeee (137160) on Friday April 03, @12:14PM (#27446517)No. Sad, but no:
Sun doesn't have the volume to do chips anymore. HP and Apple gave up a few years ago, and frankly I'm not so sure about IBM and AMD. Have you actually looked at real benchmarks for the Intel 5500 series (or Power, or Sparc)?The SMT Sun machines were actually halfway competitive with x86 on throughput/performance, but not better, and single-threaded performance sucks. The Ultrasparc-VI/VII had improved but still weren't really competitive unless you needed a $500k box that was twice as fast as a $50k top-of-the-line x86. Power6 was better, but still not really competitive.
And now Nehalem is out - Intel's first real bottom-up redesign since they realized AMD was kicking their butts because nobody wanted to move onto a new Itanium architecture (which, by the way, was slow) - and it's all over but the screaming. Once the 4-socket 32-core Intel x86 is shipping by Q1 next year I'm not sure anybody else can really hang in in the processor market.
Sun has some real innovation in software, though (Java, Dtrace, ZFS, some of their new storage stuff). It'll be a real loss if IBM kills that.
Re:Sparc was dead anyway (Score:2)
by davecb (6526) * on Friday April 03, @04:44PM (#27451075) Homepage Journal
I'll mildly disagree re the CMT machines.
I was just doing capacity planning involving T5240s, and as a side task compared them to other machines, which included a 32-core Opteron box. The T5 handled more users and degraded less under (over-)load. Absolute performance was entirely consistent with 1.2 GHz x 128 threads versus 3.2 gHz x 32 threads, which is to say the Opteron was faster initially but slower under load.
Specifically, light-load Opteron performance was about 1.5:1 of the T5, heavy-load the other way around. Conclusion? it's a tradeoff: you take the horse that does best on your course (;-))
--dave
-- davecb@spamcop.net
March 19, 2009 | ZDNet Asia
However, the challenge Sun, and other open source vendors face is converting non-paying users to become paying users, noted Chee. "There are many open source software users out there, but they're not necessarily people who are paying for software services," he said.
Global technology giant IBM is in talks to buy Sun in a deal that would expand its server market share, the Wall Street Journal reported WednesdayI
BM may pay as much as $6.5 billion in cash for Sun, the newspaper reported on its Web site, without naming its sources. That amount of money would be nearly double Sun's closing share price on Tuesday of $4.97 per share.
Sun had revenue of $3.2 billion last quarter, around $1.2 billion of it from server sales. That put Sun in fourth place in the server market, behind IBM ($4.9 billion, or 36% of the market), HP ($3.9 billion or 29%) and Dell ($1.4 billion).
Sun also has a software business, although that brings in little revenue. It made just $42 million last quarter from sales of its Solaris operating system and associated management and virtualization software. In February it struck a deal with HP to expand distribution of Solaris, complementing deals struck in 2007 with IBM and Dell.
It has a lot of open-source software, including the MySQL database, which it hasn't been able to monetize. It reported just $81 million in sales of MySQL licenses and related infrastructure last quarter, after paying $1 billion for the company in January last year.
On reviewing the excellent security benchmarks available over at CI Security, I wanted to automate the security checks of my Solaris 10 servers and produce a highly detailed report listing all security warnings, together with recommendations for their resolution. The solution was seccheck - a modular host-security scanning utility. Easily expandable and feature rich, although at the moment only available for Solaris 10.
This doesn't cover 100% of the checks recommended by CI Security, but has 99% of them - the ones that I consider important. For example, I don't check X configuration because I always ensure my servers don't run X.
Installation
The source distribution should be unpacked to a suitable location. I suggest doing something like the following:
# mkdir /usr/local/seccheck # chown root:root /usr/local/seccheck # chmod 700 /usr/local/seccheck # cd /usr/local/seccheck # mkdir bin output # cd /wherever/you/downloaded/seccheck # gzip -dc ./seccheck-0.7.6.tar.gz | tar xf - # cd seccheck-0.7.6 # mv modules.d seccheck.sh /usr/local/seccheck/binEverything is implemented as bash shell scripts, so there are no really strict installation guidelines, place the files wherever you wish. You can specify an alternate location for the modules directory with the -m option anyway.
Using seccheck
By default, seccheck.sh will search for a modules.d directory in the same directory in which the seccheck.sh script is located. If your modules are not located there, you can use the -m option to specify an alternate module location, for example:
# ./seccheck.sh -m /security/seccheck/mymodulesseccheck will then scan through the modules.d for valid seccheck modules (determined by filename). A seccheck module filename should be of the following format:
seccheck_nn_somename.sh
Where nn is a two digit integer that determines the order in which modules should be executed. For example, included with the current seccheck distribution you'll find the following files in modules.d:
# ls -1 modules.d seccheck_00_services.sh seccheck_01_users.sh seccheck_03_kernelcheck.sh seccheck_05_logging.sh seccheck_10_accessauth.sh seccheck_99_perms.sh seccheck_NN_template.sh.NOTYou can see that seccheck_00_services.sh will be processed before seccheck_01_users.sh, and so on. You can disable a module by renaming it something other than the convention, for example, by appending a .NOT suffix to the module filename.
A template is provided so that you can write your own seccheck modules.
By default, seccheck will write everything out to STDOUT and STDERR. If you want to redirect to an output file, just use the -o option and specify an output directory. After running the script, you'll be left with a file such as:
${OUTPUT_DIR}/seccheck-<hostname>-YYYYMMDD-hhmm.log
containing the output of your modules.
Download
You can download the latest seccheck distribution, including all current modules, below:
User Contributed Modules
Please feel free to submit your own seccheck modules - send them through to kevin@zazzybob.com. Bear in mind that any scripts submitted will be distributed freely under the terms of the GPL. Also please note that these are user contributed modules, and as such are unsupported by me!
Module Name Author Date Added View Download Description seccheck_80_audits.sh Scott Everard 26/05/07 View D/L Check Solaris Audit Daemon configuration seccheck_89_zones.sh Scott Everard 26/05/07 View D/L Check Solaris Zones configuration
ZDNet Asia
The laptops will be available in the United States from early 2009 and will come with the latest version of OpenSolaris: 2008.11."Toshiba and Sun are announcing that we're going to preconfigure and optimize OpenSolaris for certain Toshiba models," said Jim McHugh, Sun's vice president of data center software, in a promotional video.
The firms have yet to release details on availability elsewhere, pricing or which laptop models would feature the operating system.
OpenSolaris is Sun's flagship operating system, designed for desktop, server and high-performance computing environments. Features in OpenSolaris 2008.11 include Time Slider, a graphical interface slide bar that allows users to access previous versions of files.
"Time Slider lets us integrate ZFS [file system] snapshots taken automatically by the system with a standard window environment file browser," said Stephen Hahn, OpenSolaris project lead. "It lets you access previous versions of your source code, of your word-processing document or any other thing that you're saving on your system."
Developers will have greater access to repositories, said Sun, and will be able to deliver code to OpenSolaris users through the updated package manager.
Sun also extended its OpenSolaris subscription options. There will be two subscription plans: 'production' and 'essentials'.
Sun and I concluded in the end that I have much higher chances of achieving my goals outside of Sun, so it's just better to swallow the bitter apple, go out and get things going. We parted in good terms and we both expect to continue to do business and work together.
But for more complex and/or business-critical applications, for example Oracle or Tivoli installations Solaris X86 might have an edge: There are problems with Linux that are pretty annoying for business critical applications. For example NFS fails to mount from the first time on boot, spontaneous reboots, patching dependency mechanism sometimes screw your custom compiled applications, etc.
Re:I really like Solaris but... (Score:4, Interesting)by David Gerard (12369) <slashdot&davidgerard,co,uk> on Friday December 19, @11:22AM (#26173629) Homepage
Depends. We use a lot of Sun boxes and a lot of Dell boxes. Solaris 10 on a Sun box (even an x86) is way easier to administer than Linux - particularly when things go wrong. The OS indicates problems very nicely in messages and syslog, better than RHEL does.The downside is that modern open source software is too often written by coders who think "cross-platform" means "works on Fedora and Ubuntu."
So we end up doing things like running Solaris 10 on Dell boxes and RHEL on Sun servers
;-) Sun's hardware is competitively priced and their service is really good (I'm in London), so we're very happy to stay with Sun boxes even running Linux.
Actually, I can see why they're doing this (Score:5, Informative)by Lord Crowface (1315695) on Friday December 19, @10:28AM (#26172983)
I'm typing this from OpenSolaris 2008.11 and I'm actually surprised how "desktop-friendly" Solaris has actually become. The default GNOME-based desktop is gorgeous and works well. Hardware support may not be all that broad, but when hardware is supported it's REALLY supported: even booting off the live CD, my Atheros wireless card, NVidia 3D card and crappy on-mobo sound were "auto-magically" detected and set up. Performance is also quite snappy, even on my aging Athlon XP 3000+ with a measly 1 GB of RAM. In short, OpenSolaris is more than up to the task of working on Toshiba's new laptops.
A lazy sysadmin is a good sysadmin. Time spent in finding more-efficient shortcuts is time saved later on for that ongoing project of "reading the whole of the internet", so try Juliet Kemp's 10 handy tips to make your admin life easier...
- Cache your password with ssh-agent
- Speed up logins using Kerberos
- screen: detach to avoid repeat logins
- screen: connect multiple users
- Expand Bash's tab completion
- Automate your installations
- Roll out changes to multiple systems
- Automate Debian updates
- Sanely reboot a locked-up box
- Send commands to several PCs
With the new Sun xVM Server software, Sun delivers an easy-to-use, open source, datacenter-grade server virtualization solution to virtualize and manage heterogeneous workloads, including Windows, Red Hat and SUSE Linux, Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems, on Sun x86 platforms and SPARC-based servers. With a state-of-the-art web GUI, Sun xVM Server software provides built-in management through a browser, enterprise-class scalability, reliability and security. Sun xVM Server software is designed to interoperate with VMware and uses the same virtual hard disk and virtual appliance formats, enabling customers to easily move workloads between VMware ESX and Sun xVM Server software.
With the release of Sun xVM Ops Center 2.0, Sun provides integrated, simplified management of virtual and physical environments. The new release adds virtual guest management to its existing ability to manage physical infrastructures, making it easier for users to manage thousands of geographically distributed systems simultaneously. Sun xVM Ops Center's best-of-class software lifecycle management simplifies and accelerates the discovery, provisioning, updating, monitoring and reporting of physical and virtual assets, as well as compliance reporting via one unified browser-based interface.
... ... ...Sun offers standalone subscriptions for Sun xVM Server software and Sun xVM Ops Center, as well as additional options that offer the combined benefits of the two products, allowing customers to virtualize and manage at Internet scale. Commercial subscriptions are priced annually in four-socket increments and provide premium 24X7 support, access to the latest, up-to-the-minute patches and updates, as well as installation and training. Available pricing options include:
- Sun xVM Server software: Priced at $500/year per physical server.
- Sun xVM Infrastructure Enterprise Subscription: Priced at $2000 per physical server per year, the enterprise subscription is designed to simplify the management of large scale virtualized environments and includes advanced features, such as management of live migration and of multiple network storage libraries.
- Sun xVM Infrastructure Datacenter Subscription: Priced at $3000 per server per year, this option includes all the features in the Sun xVM Infrastructure Enterprise Subscription in addition to physical server monitoring, management and advanced software lifecycle management capabilities.
- Sun xVM Ops Center: Available from $100 per managed server up to $350 a year, depending on customer selected features, along with a required $10,000 Satellite Server annual subscription for Sun xVM Ops Center.
Description: This site provides information supporting the Solaris Internals books published by Jim Mauro, Richard McDougall and Brendan Gregg. Our aim is to provide links to pertinent reference material and tools discussed in the book, plus any new and relevant information about the Solaris operating system since publication.
Updated for the addition of the 2nd Edition as well as the 'Solaris Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris' companion book.
We are developing a community to provide a go-to reference for the key information related to Solaris Performance. Here we aim to provide a top level index to the essential performance information, by either linking to existing references (blogs etc...) and providing original documentation where necessary.
Today is a significant day in the history of VirtualBox. The brand new version 2.0 comes with major enhancements such as 64-bit VMs, stronger networking capabilities and a native Mac OS X interface. See the change log and check out the press release for the full story.
Jan 16, 2008 | www.networkworld.com
The real loser in the deal? Oracle. MySQL has now just been thrust into the mainstream with the market and corporate muscle of Sun. As much as Oracle would like to claim dominance in Linux land, everyone knows that MySQL and Postgres are favorites for anyone without a must-have Oracle on Linux requirement.
About:
Patch Check Advanced (pca) generates lists of installed and missing patches for Sun Solaris systems and optionally downloads patches. It resolves dependencies between patches and installs them in the correct order. It works on all versions of Solaris and on both SPARC and x86.Release focus: Minor feature enhancements
Changes:
Checks for patches 137112, 119252, and 119253 have been added. Ignorable errors message from showrev are no longer shown. The list of contributors has been updated.
Computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc. said it will introduce a line of servers and data storage products that use a combination of hard drives and flash memory drives to speed up performance. Sun's move comes nearly six months after EMC Corp. of Hopkinton became the first major storage vendor to add flash memory to its high-end storage arrays.Jonathan Schwartz's Blog: Anything But a Flash in the Pan
"This is the most exciting thing to happen in storage in 20 years," said John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president of systems, during a meeting with journalists in Boston yesterday. Although Sun is based in Santa Clara, Calif., the company unveiled its plans in Boston because Massachusetts is a major center for data storage technology, according to Graham Lovell, senior director of open storage and networking.
Flash memory drives use chips rather than mechanical hard drives to store information. Their use is popular in consumer devices like MP3 music players and digital cameras. The chips cost far more than the equivalent amount of hard drive storage, but flash memories are smaller, lighter, and require less electricity.
Sun and EMC say flash drives are ideal for business users who need to swap huge amounts of data in and out of computer systems. Flash chips read and write information thousands of times faster than hard drives, enabling enormous increases in processing speeds, resulting in improved efficiency and savings. In addition, Fowler said Sun's flash memory drives use only about two watts of power, compared to roughly 12 watts for a typical hard drive.
While EMC only makes storage gear, Sun is a major vendor of server and storage equipment. Sun plans to introduce servers that replace some of the standard hard drives with faster flash drives. Fowler said in addition to conserving electricity, the servers will deliver three times the data throughput of servers using only standard hard drives.
Sun is scheduled to introduce its new products in the second half of this year.
There are only two kinds of storage devices - those that have failed, and those that are about to fail. That's the view most datacenters have about the traditionally mechanical devices pejoratively referred to as "spinning rust." All disk drives fail, cheap drives fail faster.
If the average time to fail is five years, you and your laptop can make do with the occasional backup. But when an average enterprise has 100, or 1,000, or increasingly 10,000 or 100,000 individual disk drives, failure is a daily, if not hourly occurrence. Mechanical devices fail.
And with failure comes the potential for losing data - using commodity disks to save your boss $500,000 does her no good if she's fined $50,000,000 for violating data retention regulations. Stock transactions, medical images or feature length movies - take your pick, some data has to be perfect. Not a decimal point or pixel out of place.
That's exactly why, years ago, Sun invented a storage platform called ZFS. ZFS makes a powerful assumption - that a reliable system must be built from unreliable parts. By using surplus computing cycles, ZFS constantly runs powerful integrity checks, giving data corruption no place to hide. With ZFS, customers can use the cheapest disks and simplest systems, and get exceptional data integrity, along with massive reductions in cost and complexity.
But there's a new option on the table, known to many by the memory cards they use in their phones, iPods or digital cameras - called Flash memory. Flash is very fast at reading and writing data, like DRAM (the memory chips in your computer). Its price sits squarely between DRAM and traditional disk drives. But unlike either alternative, Flash requires no power to remember data. And with the price of electricity escalating across the world, keeping 10,000 disks spinning at thousands of rpm can cost you in power what you pay for your storage. Power has become the dominant factor in high scale hardware decisions - and Flash is set to disrupt the industry.
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But simply introducing Flash as yet another tier of storage in a datacenter isn't the real opportunity - that adds new costs and a set of new management hassles. To truly change the industry, adding Flash would have to be completely transparent to users and operators, alike, with no switching or operational cost. And that's exactly what we're doing with ZFS. ZFS will transparently incorporate Flash into the storage hierarchy of a running system, using the microprocessor cache for the most performance sensitive tasks, DRAM for the next, then Flash, then disk (then ultimately tape). ZFS will allow Flash to join DRAM and commodity disks to form a hybrid pool automatically used by ZFS to achieve the best price, performance and energy efficiency conceivable. Simply put, our storage and server systems will get enormously faster - without any upgrade to the microprocessor. Adding Flash will be like adding DRAM - once it's in, there's no new administration, just new capability.
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The second problem is trickier - simply put, although Flash memory can be read an infinite number of times, writing to Flash more than a few hundred thousand times can wear it out. Now, most normal humans will never hit 500,000 writes in a digital camera. But you might in your enterprise. What to do?
Sun will release a 32GB flash storage drive this year and make flash storage an option for nearly every server the vendor produces, Sun officials are announcing Wednesday. (Compare storage products)Like EMC, Sun is predicting big things for flash. While flash storage is far more expensive than disk on a per-gigabyte basis, Sun argues that flash is cheaper for high-performance applications that rely on fast IOPS (I/O Operations Per Second) speeds.
“It consumes one-fifth the power and is a hundred times faster [than rotating disk drives],” John Fowler, the head of Sun’s servers and storage division, said at a press conference in Boston Tuesday. “The fact that it’s not the same dollars per gigabyte is perfectly okay.”
Sun held back some details on the products. It’s not clear when in 2008 they will be released, and while Fowler passed around an engineering prototype of the 32GB drive he would not say which chip manufacturer Sun is working with to build it. EMC relies on chip maker STEC for its flash drives. Fowler did say that one of Sun’s partners is Intel, which announced a solid state flash drive last year.
Customers will be able to get flash storage embedded in nearly any server they buy from Sun by the end of the calendar year, Fowler says. (Compare server products) “That’s the easiest place to put it, because you have a high-performance I/O subsystem that’s very close,” he says.
Even the most optimistic industry players say flash isn’t about to replace most disk storage. Fowler said a server containing small amounts of flash might be connected to large disk arrays. Essentially, the data needed most quickly would reside in flash.
“You could have one of our servers with a collection of solid state drives in it connected to traditional arrays,” he says. Sun’s ZFS file system lets customers aggregate multiple types of storage devices into one centrally managed pool. “ZFS allows you to manage this as a hybrid storage pool where the local [flash drives] in the front of the server are used for these logs and caching and the big [disk] arrays are used for these petabytes of storage.”
The majority of enterprises building I/O-intensive applications will use some amount of flash within a year, Fowler predicted. Databases like Oracle, MySQL and IBM DB2 are ideal candidates, he says.
Sun and Amazon Web Services are opening a private beta program starting on May 5, 2008. Approved beta users get access to OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2. Per hour prices:
$0.10 - Small Instance (Default). 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform
$0.40 - Large Instance. 7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform
$0.80 - Extra Large Instance. 15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform
Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance type. Partial instance-hours consumed are billed as full hours.
Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a Web service that provides flexible compute capacity in a cloud. Amazon EC2 provides on-demand computing, pay-as-you-go pricing, and integrated storage.
The OpenSolaris OS is available free of charge. With OpenSolaris OS on Amazon EC2, you pay for only the compute capacity you use, starting at 10 cents per hour (bandwidth and storage are charged separately by Amazon). You can start with as little as one small instance (currently 1.7 GB RAM, 1 virtual core, 160 GB storage, 32-bit platform) and scale up and down as your workloads and business demands change. Various types of instances of Amazon EC2 are described here.
- Elastic
Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs
12/05/2008 | Computerworld
Ian Murdock is vice president of developer and community marketing at Sun Microsystems.... ... ...
What do you do at Sun? I see the OpenSolaris project seems to fall onto your plate.
Initially I was working on OpenSolaris and started Project Indiana, which culminated this week [with] the first version of the OpenSolaris binary distribution. These days I am running the developer and community marketing organization, so I am responsible for marketing Sun's developer tools, the developer programs like Sun Developer Network and Tech Days Events, our open-source projects and communities. [Also, I do marketing for] StarOffice, OpenOffice, Network.com. So basically anything that relates to the developer community in some way, I run the marketing piece of that.
Is Sun completely open source with its software right now?
Well, not entirely, but that's again mostly a function of how complex it is to take a piece of intellectual property that has not been open source and then moving it into open source. We are in the process of open sourcing all of our software, as [Sun President/CEO Jonathan Schwartz] has said many times. But, for example, with Solaris there, are still a few bits and pieces that have been licensed from other companies. We are working out the arrangements with those companies to be able to open source them.
What pieces are those?
Well, for example, some device drivers [and] certain bits of functionality that were licensed.
I heard a former Sun official last year who basically said that he thought Sun was kind of moving too fast with open source, maybe over-emphasizing it a bit. You're probably going to disagree with that, but how would you respond to that?
I think the big question around open source is how do you make money from it? And it's because the software industry has traditionally been built on an intellectual property licensing model. But the reality of the situation is with the rise of open-source software, developers don't buy things anymore. [It is] a world where you can go to the Web and download just about anything you could possibly need to put an application into production. So you don't monetize at the point of acquisition of software any longer, you have to monetize at a different place. So it's not to say that there is not money to be made in software, it's just made at a different place, and the different place is with all of the developers adopting technology, putting it into production, some of those applications that are deployed are going to be successful. They're going to run into the traditional challenges of having to grow and scale that application. They're going to need to have a relationship with the vendor behind the technology. So there are ample opportunities to make money because even though open source is free in the monetary sense, it still requires a lot of expertise and knowhow to make it operate efficiently. So there's plenty of opportunity there to add value.
I heard two different computer industry executives make the following comments. One is, how do you have a software industry if there's open source? And the other is, open source lowers revenues for everybody. How would you respond to those?
Well again, open source is only free or free software is only free if your time is free. And I don't know about you, but my time is definitely not free. And in terms of lowering revenues, I don't think that's necessarily true. I think the money changes to a different place. The revenue opportunity changes to a different place. So it's a disruptive event in the software industry. But disruptive events create opportunities for those who are agile enough or have the foresight to see the changes that are coming and can adapt. And so Sun's embrace of open source is just a part of adapting and changing with the changing of landscape. There's still plenty of money to be made, it's just shifting to a different place. Again, pay at the point of deriving some value from having a relationship with your vendor versus pay to get access to the technology.
With OpenSolaris, Sun changed the packaging to make it more like Linux. Is it too late for OpenSolaris to compete against Linux?
No, I don't think it's too late at all. In fact, I think there's a huge amount of interest in the Linux community for the technologies that we have in Solaris. So whether it's ZFS (Zettabyte File System) or DTrace [providing a dynamic tracing framework] or containers or any of those things. And the problem has always been barriers to adoption, right? The changes that we have put into OpenSolaris are primarily designed to lower barriers to adoption to that technology that the market has been wanting, but it has been too difficult to this point for to get at it. It'll be interesting to see how OpenSolaris is received in the Linux community. I would look at it as it's not so much an OpenSolaris versus Linux thing. We're putting another alternative out into the marketplace just like Ubuntu is an alternative and Red Hat is an alternative and SuSE is an alternative.
As somebody who has developed Debian and now is an advocate for OpenSolaris, which do you see as superior?
I think they're both good for different reasons. One of the advantages of Debian is it has a huge ecosystem of packages around it, so just about anything you could possibly want is just an app to get installed away. OpenSolaris has some of this functionality, like ZFS and D-Trace, that Debian -- or no Linux distribution for that matter -- has. So it all depends on the application environment.
Won't those capabilities you mentioned be added to Debian in other Linux distributions?
Well no, because those are part of the Solaris platform, and Debian is based on Linux. Now certainly we're going to see a lot of the reverse happening, so now that we have the package system in place around OpenSolaris, we have the same kind of infrastructure around it to enable bringing in this open-source software that is available for Debian.
No one is permitted to take ZFS and port it to Linux?
Well, today the licenses are not compatible with each other, so that can't be done.
What are the differences in the licensing?
Linux is governed by the GNU Public License, or GPL, and open source is governed by the CDDL, the Common Development and Distribution License.
Why CDDL and not GPL like you did for Java?
Well, OpenSolaris was open sourced, what, a year and a half before Java? There's a desire in some of our customer base to have a license that allows you to build value-added products on top of OpenSolaris. And so the ability to easily drive commercial versions based on Solaris technology was one of the drivers behind the CDDL. And basically, the CDDL is just a slightly modified version of the Mozilla Public License, so it is an OSI-approved open-source license. It's no more or less open source than a GPL is. But it turns out that the GPL is very restrictive, and so you can't combine some of the things that the CDDL says with some of the things that the GPL says.
What are you expecting developers to do with Open Solaris?
I think first of all, there's going to be a lot of experimentation now that the barriers are gone for a Linux developer, a Linux user to take a look at what OpenSolaris has to offer. We are spending a lot of time understanding what those developers are doing; namely, how they are moving up the stack and working in environments like PHP and Ruby on Rails. So how do we describe the capabilities of Solaris, such as DTrace, in a way that's relevant to them? For example, OpenSolaris is going to be an ideal environment for Web-facing applications because we've moved the DTrace functionality up into somebody's Web application frameworks. And if you think about it, the basic problem behind a Web application is, particularly if you are successful, how do you scale? If you build an application, you put it out there, you gain a large user base, people start hitting your servers, you have to figure out where in your code you need to optimize so that you can scale along with it. DTrace offers those kinds of developer's capabilities that are not available on any other operating system.
What do you see happening with the Amazon-based hosted version of OpenSolaris?
That represents yet another barrier to entry being removed. Now you can take advantage of these same capabilities without necessarily having to provision your own infrastructure. And it's all a part of the same trends that you've seen coming out of Sun over the last several years. The embrace of AMD and Intel, Linux, Windows. I mean, it's all about how do we get Sun technology as broadly adopted as possible, no matter what the vehicle?
Do you see a role for OpenSolaris in the Web 2.0 world?
Absolutely. If you are building a Web application and you become popular, your servers are getting hammered by all of these users who are coming, how do you scale with the increasing demand? And we've actually done this in several Web 2.0 shops where they've run into scaling problems, we've been able to come in, point DTrace at it, and extract some very amazing performance improvements in a very short amount of time. So we feel that now that the barriers to adoption have been removed, we're going to be able to play a much bigger role in this space than we have with Solaris 10 and previous.
Is there anything else you wanted to bring up?
One of the things to watch here in the coming months is what we are doing around Network.com [which is Sun's grid-based cloud computing platform]. At Sun we are fully committed to open source. To your earlier question about open source and business, we have a very clearly defined business model where the core offerings that are for developers are free and open source, no barriers to adoption. The one interesting question is what role does open source play in a world where software is no longer delivered as a product but rather delivered as a service? Web 2.0, for example, wouldn't be possible without open source. But why are people going to open source? They're going to open source for the same reason that they went to open standards and open systems. [There is] the desire to not be locked into a single vendor. Are we going back to the 30-year-old model in the pursuit of simplicity and moving everything into the cloud? I think you're going to see, coming out of Sun and around Network.com in particular, some pretty interesting answers to these questions.
About: Patch Check Advanced (pca) generates lists of installed and missing patches for Sun Solaris systems and optionally downloads patches. It resolves dependencies between patches and installs them in the correct order. It works on all versions of Solaris and on both SPARC and x86.
Changes: HTML tags in patchdiag.xref are ignored. This change from Sun to patchdiag.xref breaks compatibility with all previous versions of PCA and makes updating mandatory. An option for concurrent patch downloads was added. A new option to set sunsolve access protocol to HTTPS was added. wgetproxy options for non-SunSolve URLs are honored as well. The file ../etc/pca-proxy.conf is read in proxy mode. Checks for several patches were added.
Cloud Computing with Joyent Accelerators
Software previously installed on personal computers is being shifted or extended to be accessible via the Internet. The term for this is “cloud computing”. In the cloud, you run your application on one (or many) virtual computers. The advantages to this approach include reduced up front hardware costs, reduced maintenance and administrative costs, the ability to match hardware and software capabilities and, most importantly, the flexibility to scale your site up and down depending on demand.
Joyent’s Cloud
Our Accelerator™ powered compute cloud provides a highly scalable on-demand infrastructure for running web sites, including rich web applications written in Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python and Java. Joyent Accelerators are next-generation virtual computers that can grow and multiply (or shrink and consolidate) depending on the real world demands faced by your Web application.
Accelerators are built on OpenSolaris, multi-core (8+), RAM-rich servers (32GB+ each) and vast amounts of NAS storage. Accelerators are deployed in the best routing and switching fabric (Force 10) and the best load-balancers (F5 Networks) available (and always will be).
Proven Track Record
- We have the largest OpenSolaris installation in the world
- Joyent manages hundreds of TBs of storage in each datacenter
- We serve billions of web pages each month for our customers
- Joyent delivers and receives hundreds of millions of emails every month
Joyent’s Storage is Real, Not Virtual
OpenSolaris’ ZFS filesystem provides seamless access to as much NAS powered storage as you need. This means that if the system goes down, you do not need to suffer through a long boot as you re-instantiate an entire virtual machine, with data, from a remote data store. Instead, your data is still there on your disks and the Open Solaris means you can be up and running within 10 seconds.
Rails Applications Rock On Joyent
Joyent has a long successful history of scaling Ruby on Rails Web applications to thousands and tens of thousands of requests/second, including our own Joyent Connector collaboration suite. If you build in Rails, Joyent’s experience can prove invaluable.
Open and Standards Based Means No Lock-In
We are going to try and get you hooked on our great support, first class infrastructure and flexibility; but we are never going to lock you in. If you become the next billion dollar Web wonder, this means your set-up is entirely portable. Of course, you then have to invest a huge amount in off the shelf hardware.
Buy what you need, when you need it
Sun Microsystems on Monday said it has released OpenSolaris, an open source version of its Solaris operating system, and announced a deal with Amazon.com.The OpenSolaris project has been under development for more than three years. Sun hopes to popularize the operating system with developers, students and other traditional Linux users.
In addition, Sun said it has partnered with Amazon.com to release OpenSolaris as an on-demand service as part of Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). OpenSolaris will be available for operating system and storage services as part of the overall EC2 service, which starts at 10 cents per CPU-hour, the company said. Sun touts OpenSolaris as the most robust Unix-flavored operating system.OpenSolaris will offer some interesting features intended to appeal to the curious, such as the ability to run the operating system from CD and a system for easily rolling-back installations.