Posts tagged with: hardware

Yesterday Oracle announced that Dell and HP will certify and resell Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM on their respective x86 platforms. What wasn't clear from this was how this affects other vendors. Well, I can confirm this offering covers ALL Solaris certified non-Sun hardware that is listed on the HCL too, regardless of the manufacturer. A quick glance of the HCL shows it covers a broad selection of HP, Dell, IBM, and Fujitsu systems among others. If you have a system that isn't on the list, and you need support for it, contact the vendor of the ... Continue reading ►

The expression "actions speak louder than words" came to mind the yesterday when I heard Oracle were releasing a whole stack of new x86 hardware. A lot of people were concerned that Oracle were going to completely ditch x86 in favour of SPARC, but it looks like Oracle will be staying in the x86 business, albeit without AMD, for at least a whilst longer. Yesterday's announcement saw a refresh of pretty much the entire current x86 rackmount server and blade range with the the existing 2 socket x86 servers getting an 'M2' version with access to the latest Intel ... Continue reading ►

First off, let me make it clear that I don't know much more about this topic than you do and will only be commenting on what is public knowledge pulling in my experiences as a support engineer. As you'll no doubt be hearing more of, Oracle seems to be taking an "All or nothing" approach to it's support offerings for Solaris and Sun hardware and with some pretty stringent penalties to try and keep customers going back to Oracle for support (details can be found in this PDF). My understanding is this isn't much different from they way they operate... Continue reading ►

I'm really starting to look forward to Sun being taken over by Oracle, especially if their current advertising battle is an indication of things to come. In the on-going battle between Oracle and IBM, comes the latest TPC-C benchmark results which pit a 9 rack Sun/Oracle T5440/F5100 configuration (TPC-C results) against IBM's monster 76 rack POWER 595 (TPC-C results). Historically Sun has ignored the TPC-C benchmark as it's not really a good indicator of real world use, however IBM hasn't, and they continue to use it. Not for much longer though. Oracle has taken them to task and given them a jolly good hiding. Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 2 Sep 2009 - 24 Sep 2009: IBM Throws Out Microsoft Office - Welcome to the party IBM. Sun did this years ago. 99% of people don't use half the functionality in MS Office anyway. Linus calls Linux 'bloated and huge' - ... and it's suffered on average a 2% decrease in performance per release over the last 10 releases making a cumulative drop of 12%. How are the Linux advocates in the corporate world substantiating this drop in performance? Solaris customers certainly wouldn't accept it. Ellison: Sunacle is an IBM killer - `Ellison was adamant:... Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 28 Aug 2009 - 1 Sep 2009: Apache.org Compromised via stolen SSH keys - Best bit: "... we restored from a ZFS snapshot to a version of all our websites before any accounts were compromised." Now how's that for an advertisement for Solaris and ZFS? Oracle is likely to sell sun's hardware business to hp - The Inquirer - [Updated: My initial comments here have been removed as I may give people the idea that I actually have insider info on this. I DON'T.] New attack cracks common Wi-Fi encryption in a minute - ... Continue reading ►

Links of interest for 20 Jul 2009 - 15 Aug 2009: HTML5 Canvas and Audio Experiment - This is a brilliant display of some of the cool things you can do in HTML5 (Requires a browser that supports HTML5 like Firefox 3.5) How To Hijack 'Every iPhone In The World' - Oooops. Just as well I don't have an iPhone. Why does 1.6 beat 4.7? - BestPerf - People always forget the details, and it's often these details that competitors deliberately leave out too. Triple-Parity RAID-Z : Adam Leventhal's Weblog - ZFS has just got triple-parity RAID-Z support. Why? Alan... Continue reading ►

In an interview (PDF) just posted on the Oracle site, Larry Ellison confirms his commitment to SPARC... Once we own Sun we’re going to increase the investment in SPARC. We think designing our own chips is very, very important. Even Apple is designing its own chips these days. Right now, SPARC chips do some things better than Intel chips and vice-versa. For example, SPARC is much more energy efficient than Intel while delivering the same performance on a per socket basis. This is not just a green issue, it’s an economic issue. Today, database centers are paying as much for... Continue reading ►

The Sun Storage 7000 simulator has just been updated to reflect the changes introduced in the 2009.Q2.0.0 release of the "firmware" and at the same time a Virtualbox image of the simulator has been released (get it here) I've been waiting for this for a while as I don't have VMWare and didn't really want to go that route considering Virtualbox is just as good, if not better (I have to say that ;-) ). Anyway, thanks to Virtualbox's new ability to support OVF and host-only networking (as of 2.2.2), a simulator image for Virtualbox is possible. I've not ... Continue reading ►

Updating the firmware on an Ultra 20 is a really simple matter: download the "Tools and Drivers" ISO image, burn it to DVD (as it's about 1.3GB), boot from the DVD and select option 2 to perform the update. However, it very quickly becomes way more complicated if you don't have a DVD burner or spare DVD-R, or even a DVD drive. So what other option do you have? Boot CD? Yes, but its way too complicated for the time and effort. Boot Network? Ditto. Boot USB? Bingo!!! Continue reading ►