Here is a little press review mostly around Oracle technologies and Solaris in particular, and a little lot more:
Agility can also be added to their IT operations through more rapid application rollout and an easy means to move services around in a highly available, secure, and scalable environment. A new generation of SPARC servers, based on SPARC T-Series processors, provides a wider portfolio of hardware and software features that can be leveraged to dramatically improve efficiency and agility.
Keeping up with changing market conditions can be a challenge. Enterprises are looking for ways to cut costs and streamline their business operations. So when it's time to migrate off your aging servers, consider how Oracle's SPARC systems, software, and solutions can protect your legacy application investment, improve IT efficiency and services.
I have never really understood why I get peaks and troughs in nmon questions and urgent situations but July seems to be a peak and fortunately I was not at work for a large part of it. Performance and nmon Questions trend to come in three flavours: really dumb, genuine and mega-urgent critical lets blame the hardware. Let me give you a flavour of each type of question from the last month. Perhaps, reading these will let you avoid the same problem or at least let you learn "you are not alone".
Giri Mandalika wrote an article how to use the 2 gigabyte page size offered by T4 systems on Solaris 10: "Enabling 2 GB Large Pages on Solaris 10". This can be really useful if you have an application allocating really large amounts of memory. The more memory a single page covers, the smaller the the translation tables from virtual to physical memory gets, the higher the hit rate of the translation lookaside buffer. However check out your application if it behaves well with such large pages.
This document is intended to address the recommended security settings for the Solaris 11 operating system (Solaris 11 OS) running on x86 or SPARC platforms.
With Oracle Solaris 11 development, one of the primary goals was to greatly modernize the operating system and make it easier to use, remove some of the uneccessary differences between the two operating systems, and remove some of the frustrations that people have had. I believe we've done exactly that with the introduction of Oracle Solaris ZFS as the default root file system, the Image Packaging System (IPS) and much more familiar installation experiences with the LiveCD and interactive text installer. It's now even easier to approach Oracle Solaris, install it into a virtual machine and give it a spin!
Oracle's SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 is a high performance, multipurpose engineered system designed, tested, and integrated to run a wide array of enterprise applications. It is well suited to many different tasks including database and application consolidation, running multitier enterprise applications, and multitenant application delivery. To realize secure architectures such as these, the SPARC SuperCluster platform offers a level of security synergy not often found in today's IT architectures. Its engineering innovation and high degree of integration provide a security potential that is truly greater than the sum of its individual components.
Who should attend? Application developers and administrators who want to learn how they can deploy Oracle Solaris 11 in their application environment.
The Service Management Facility (SMF), first introduced in Oracle Solaris 10, is a feature of the operating system for managing system and application services, replacing the legacy init scripting start-up mechanism common to prior releases of Oracle Solaris and other UNIX operating systems. SMF improves the availability of a system by ensuring that essential system and application services run continuously even in the event of hardware or software failures. SMF is one of the components of the wider Oracle Solaris Predictive Self Healing capability.
This article covers some more-advanced administrative tasks with SMF, including an introduction to service manifests, understanding layering within the SMF configuration repository, and how best to apply configuration to a system. To learn more about SMF, check out a variety of content at the SMF technology page on Oracle Technology Network.
There are a lot of organisations out there that are still running AIX 5.3. As you must know, AIX 5.3 is out of support. That doesn't stop you updating to the latest Technology Level (TL 12). But you may not be entitled to the latest Service Pack (SP 6). If you're staying with AIX 5.3, then you have a choice of being supported; unsupported (but legal), or unsupported and illegal!
This article continues an exploration of Btrfs, looking into the more interesting—and sometimes less obvious—features of Btrfs, such as redundant configurations, data integrity options, compression, snapshots, and performance enhancements.
Stephen Atkins (the Guru behind the nmon Analyser) has released a new version - two days ago. This includes loads of improvements and some new features. Best of all - less problems running on newer Excel releases (it works around inconsistencies with the Microsoft API).
Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c manages Oracle hardware, virtualization technologies, and operating systems that are deployed in traditional, virtualized, and cloud environments. This article describes how you can use it to create and configure Oracle Solaris 11 zones.
The upcoming Hot Chips symposiums "Big iron" session will feature two future SPARC processors...
Overview of hardware and software virtualization basics, and the role that Oracle VM Server for SPARC plays in a virtualization strategy.