Here is a little press review around Oracle technologies, and Solaris in particular:
The 37th edition of the closely watched list was released Monday, June 20, at the 2011 International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg. The ranking of all systems is based on how fast they run Linpack, a benchmark application developed to solve a dense system of linear equations.
For the first time, all of the top 10 systems achieved petaflop/s performance – and those are also the only petaflop/s systems on the list. The U.S. is tops in petaflop/s with five systems performing at that level; Japan and China have two each, and France has one.
The K Computer, built by Fujitsu, currently combines 68544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs, each with eight cores, for a total of 548,352 cores—almost twice as many as any other system in the TOP500. The K Computer is also more powerful than the next five systems on the list combined.
Oracle announces Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3 5/11, delivering unrivaled High Availability (HA) on the Oracle Solaris OS for the largest selection of enterprise applications and databases. Oracle Solaris Cluster unique HA solution for Oracle Solaris' virtual environments lowers the inherent risk of consolidated infrastructures by leveraging redundancy to protect from outages. Oracle Solaris Cluster Disaster Recovery (DR) option extends these benefits to multi-site, multi-cluster architectures to protect against planned and unplanned downtime, in physical and virtual environments.
This page offers a variety of links to Oracle Solaris Virtual Machine Templates. These Oracle VM Templates speed the creation of Proof of Concept environments and other evaluation/development tasks by dramatically simplifying the installation process. Oracle Solaris VM Templates are available for both SPARC and x86-based systems.
Learning your way around a new software stack is challenging enough without having to spend multiple cycles on the install process. Instead, we have packaged such stacks into pre-built Oracle VM VirtualBox appliances that you can download, install, and experience as a single unit. Just assemble the downloaded files (if needed), import into VirtualBox (available for free), import, and go!
A collaborative effort between the Software Patch Services, Enterprise Installation Standards (EIS), Sun Risk Analysis System (SRAS) - now renamed Oracle Risk Analysis Services (ORAS) - and the Explominer team in the Oracle Solaris Technical Center (TSC), has achieved this goal with the creation of the Recommended Patchset for Solaris.
Up until now, while the Solaris OS Recommended Patch Cluster was the core basis for Solaris patch recommendations, various teams tended to recommend their own favorite patches on top of this core set. This wasn't just by whim. Each team was looking at patching from a slightly different angle - for example various angles of proactive patching (issue prevention) versus reactive patching (issue correction).
The Recommended Patchset for Solaris is the result of the combined wisdom of the various teams. It is designed for proactive patching (issue prevention). The contents are generic and should be suitable for most customer configurations.
I'm not sure how well known it is that Solaris 11 contains a load balancer. The official documentation, starting with the Integrated Load Balancer Overview, does a great job of explaining this feature. In this blog entry my goal is to provide an implementation example.
For starters, I will be using the HALF-NAT operation mode. Basically, HALF-NAT means that the client's IP address is not mapped so that the servers know the real client address. This is usually preferred for server logging (see ILB Operation Modes for more).
Oracle Solaris Resource Manager provides specific software components and utilities that are used to manage hardware resources. It is integrated into the operating system, and it is available on SPARC and x86/x64 platforms running Solaris 9 or later.
Oracle Solaris Resource Manager is a key enabler for server and workload consolidation and increased resource utilization. It provides the ability to allocate and control major system resources, such as CPU, virtual memory, physical memory, I/O bandwidth, and number of processes. It also implements administrative policies that govern which resources different users can access and, more specifically, how much of a particular resource each user is permitted to use. Based on the implemented policies, all users can receive resources commensurate with their service levels and the relative importance of their work.
