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Press Review #8

Feb 01, 2012 | 6 minutes read
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Here is a little press review around Oracle technologies, and Solaris in particular:

Having worked with resource controls in Oracle Solaris, I was anxious to learn how to do the same thing in Oracle Linux 6 with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK). Resource management using control groups (cgroups) is just one of many new features in Oracle Linux 6. Cgroups give administrators fine-grained control over resource allocations, helping to make sure that applications get what they need to deliver consistent response times and adequate performance.

With the creation of ZFS, Apple MacOSX has finally made it into the realm of being a very viable platform for server applications. No longer will people need to use MacOSX as a client and buy a SPARC or Intel Solaris platform as a server to gain the benefits of ZFS. Common designers, video publishers, and media collectors can now just add the occasional multi-terabyte hard drive and just keep on building their data collection with limited concern for failure - it will all be protected with parity and old deletions can be easily rolled back.

Suite à une migration d'une base de données Oracle d'une architecture Solaris Sparc à une architecture Solaris x86, l'équipe DBA a décidé d'utiliser pleinement la mémoire disponible sur cette nouvelle infrastructure. Disposant d'un serveur avec 512 Go de mémoire, la SGA de la base Oracle a été positionnée à 290 Go (afin de diminuer les lectures physiques et d'éviter les locks R/W). L'augmentation de cette SGA a eu un bénéfice important sur les opérations de lectures (plus d'activité sur les disques SAN concernant les lectures) par contre le système Solaris saturait...

The manifest-import service manages importing of manifests that are delivered as part of a package for an application. This instantiates the service and its instances on the system. The manifest-import service will then manage re-importing those manifests if they are modified/upgraded in some way.

The behavior of svccfg import and svccfg delete fmri has changed in S11 if the manifests are in SMF's standard locations.

SPARC T4 Servers Adopted By Customers Across All Industries, Regions

Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliances Earn Highest Ratings for Enterprise and Midrange NAS Systems

Virtualization is not a new concept; however, there have been numerous advances in recent years that are helping businesses to be more effective at managing their virtualized environments. The easier it is to manage assets reliably, with reduced risk of downtime, the better the ability to focus on optimizing asset utilization in balance with required Service Level Objectives.

China Mobile (Fujian) (Fujian Mobile) is a rapidly expanding subsidiary of China Mobile (HK) Group. Fujian Mobile’s customer base has expanded rapidly with subscribers growing from 2 million to more than 22 million in the past few years. To meet this increasing demand, Fujian Mobile is replacing its current Teradata system with a full-rack Oracle Exadata system for its next-generation high performance BASS.

The SPARC Road Map has been experiencing updates at a tremendous pace over the past few years, with new SPARC releases either happening early, with higher performance, or with a combination of the two. It is quite exciting to see SPARC back in the processor game again!

In the ZFS Storage Appliance we have little nice feature enabling you to do migrations of data in the background. It's called Shadow Migration. It's a really useful feature. Imagine you have a RAIDZ. After a time you recognize that RAIDZ wasn't a good decision for your workload and RAID10 would be much better choice. But how to transform it into a RAID10 and how to do it with minimal interruption? You can do this with the Shadow Migration feature. With the Shadow Migration feature, you can migrate the data from one local or remote filesystem to another, while you are already accessing the new one to get the data on the old ZFS filesystem. This feature is available in Solaris 11 as well.

As most of my long term readers know I am a huge Solaris fan. How can’t you love an Operating System that comes with ZFS, DTrace, Zones, FMA and Network Virtualization amongst other things? I use Linux during my day job, and I’ve been hoping for quite some time that Oracle would port one or more of these technologies to Linux. Well the first salvo has been fired, though it wasn’t from Oracle. It comes by way of the ZFS on Linux project, which is an in-kernel implementation of ZFS (this project is different from the FUSE ZFS port).

One of the most significant business challenges is to create and preserve value in a highly competitive environment, while keeping business applications available and reducing costs. It is important to maximize the business application availability during planned or unplanned outages. This document provides information about increasing application availability by using the Oracle VM Server for SPARC software (previously called Sun Logical Domains).

By using an example and presenting various scenarios, this paper describes how to take advantage of the Live Migration capability in the Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.1 software to increase the availability of an Oracle Database 11g Release 2 single-instance database.

Oracle Security Evaluations are an integral part of the Oracle Software Security Assurance program. Go to Security Evaluations for more information on the evaluations and validations that Oracle undertake.

Things have changed since Solaris 10 (and Solaris 11 Express too!) on how to properly set up a CIFS server on your Solaris 11 machine so that Windows clients can access files. There's some documentation on the changes here, but let me share the full instructions from beginning to end.

Recently, I attended a customer workshop where the customer declared that they standardized on x86, VMware and Linux.

That got me and my colleague thinking about what standardization really means and whether that actually makes sense.

The workshop was actually about defining a PaaS platform for the customer, and early in the process they just said: Fine, but it's gonna be x86, VMware and Linux, because that's our standard. WTF?

One of the first things TOGAF recommends architects do when establishing an Enterprise Architecture practice within a company is to formulate Architecture Principles that guide the development of solutions. During the last few workshops and during some discussions with other architects, three principles in particular struck me as being key to successfully developing a Cloud solution.

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