Ok, I'm way waay late on commenting on the two most recent IT company takeovers .
Sun buys MySQL
Tricky one, I have to honestly say I have a hard time seeing where MySQL fits in to Sun's portfolio.
Sun is one of Oracle biggest partners (the biggest after Dell?) and they are one of the biggest backers of PostgreSQL, then even employee a few of head lead Postgres developers.
Sun has got two options with MySQL, they can either invest a lot of RnD in MySQL and actually turn it in to a really good product. MySQL is without a doubt a product with incredible potential, but is today pretty much a over-sized way to store CSV index files (bit harsh perhaps but hey).
Or they can ride out the profits by selling LAMP-stack boxes and let MySQL sustain itself, I doubt they can make up for the billion dollars they payed for it though.
Oh, and what will Sun make of the (rather evil) closed source MySQL Enterprise Monitor administration product from MySQL. Sun having new closed source software? Errr!
Some advice for sun,
1) Add real constraint support. This is a show stopper for many, and the InnoDB approach isn't good enough. MySQL needs native solid from the ground up constraint support, independent of storage engine, version bla bla. If people don't want the "performance loss" of constraints, don't add the constraints!
2) Sort out proper I/O management, tablespaces, clean partitioning all that stuff. MySQL has improved a lot on this point over the last 12 months. But more work is needed, especially if they are planning on selling MySQL powered Thumpers.
3) 100% solid transactional support. MVCC would be fun. I've seen a few to many transactional problems in MySQL. Some sort of logging/undo/redo system is needed.
On top of that I wouldn't mind a clean hot-backup tool, requires proper transactional support (with something like SCN's etc), 3rd party scripting language support (PgPerl anyone?).
That's about 250.000 RnD hours, go get busy!
Oracle buys BEA
This is most likely very good news. I'm a big fan of the Oracle database (duh) and a fan of Weblogic Application Server.
What I'm not a big fan of is Oracle Application Server (oc4j).
I hope Oracle realize that Weblogic is the superior product and works with Weblogic as the front runner and port oc4j features to Weblogic and not the other way around. I doubt that will be the case though. If not, I hope they don't kill off Weblogic any time soon.
Hmm, that's all for now.
Showing posts with label sun. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sun. Show all posts
Sunday, February 3
Thursday, December 20
Solaris 10 on Dell PowerEdge 1950 and 2950
I probably get an email every couple a weeks about this one, not sure why.
E-mails regarding something in Solaris not working on Dell PowerEdge 9th gen servers.
For any device driver related issues with Solaris on x86, the first resource to check if you run in to trouble is the Sun HCL, the 'hardware compatability list'.
Solaris 10 works fine on most Dell boxes, but some need NIC or HBA drivers.
For a Dell 2950 that tells us that Solaris works, from release 11/06 upwards, it also tells us to download the ethernet driver here and the MegaRAID SAS driver here.
NB, the Sun HCL does not mention the new 'III' series 9-gen server yet. I would guess they are working on as Sun and Dell recently partenered to provide better Solaris support. The PERC6 card may need some new drivers.
E-mails regarding something in Solaris not working on Dell PowerEdge 9th gen servers.
For any device driver related issues with Solaris on x86, the first resource to check if you run in to trouble is the Sun HCL, the 'hardware compatability list'.
Solaris 10 works fine on most Dell boxes, but some need NIC or HBA drivers.
For a Dell 2950 that tells us that Solaris works, from release 11/06 upwards, it also tells us to download the ethernet driver here and the MegaRAID SAS driver here.
NB, the Sun HCL does not mention the new 'III' series 9-gen server yet. I would guess they are working on as Sun and Dell recently partenered to provide better Solaris support. The PERC6 card may need some new drivers.
Sunday, July 1
The new top 500 supercomputer list is out!
Finally had some time to look at the latest Top500 supercomputer list released last week at ISC '07 last week.
Lots of changes compared to the old list; two quite interesting new things. First of all is Intel multi-core chips, secondly we have Blades, loads and loads of blades.
A significant number of entries on the list are using Intel Xeon 5160 3.0GHz dual-core CPU's and there is also a number of quad-core systems.
Another interesting point is that the crown in terms of number of systems on the list has been passed from IBM (with 192 systems) to HP (with 201 systems).
The HP Cluster Platform BL460c holds quite a few spots on the list. Can't say I've heard much about HP's HPC offering so far, they're not exactly beating the drum on that one (compared to the IBM guy who's calling me every 2 months).
SGI holds a few new slots on the list as well, which is extra fun to see considering the hard last year SGI have had. One Altix system even made it to number 10 on the list (with Columbia on number 13).
Lots of changes compared to the old list; two quite interesting new things. First of all is Intel multi-core chips, secondly we have Blades, loads and loads of blades.
A significant number of entries on the list are using Intel Xeon 5160 3.0GHz dual-core CPU's and there is also a number of quad-core systems.
Another interesting point is that the crown in terms of number of systems on the list has been passed from IBM (with 192 systems) to HP (with 201 systems).
The HP Cluster Platform BL460c holds quite a few spots on the list. Can't say I've heard much about HP's HPC offering so far, they're not exactly beating the drum on that one (compared to the IBM guy who's calling me every 2 months).
SGI holds a few new slots on the list as well, which is extra fun to see considering the hard last year SGI have had. One Altix system even made it to number 10 on the list (with Columbia on number 13).
Sunday, June 24
Sun 2002 flashback
We've been doing some shuffling around of hardware at work and I've recommissioned some old Sun hardware for a new QA environment.
Oh the memories I have of old Sun kit :)
The most exciting thing I've installed is a Sun v480 connected to a T3 brick. That combo was pretty much the industry standard Oracle solution when I had my first job in "real" systems administration and it was probably one of the first the real mid-range installs I did (not counting ageing 420r/450's).
To be honest, it's a match made in heaven. A quad cpu v480 with a t3 brick (or two) kicked out some real performance numbers in it's day. The v480 is probably one of the nicest boxes to work with (considering age and all), the boards are easy to fit, the RSC is awesome, it's simply rock solid. Running Solaris 8 of course (we still have *lots* of clients on Solaris 8 (with Solaris 10 gaining ground)).
The T3 array is pretty cool, but it brings back the frustrations everyone had with early low-end SANs. The limitation to two disk RAID volumes with very limited zoning and slicing. But hey, it's pretty old and is still pretty fast.
Now if I only could figure out how to get rid of that darn Sun E250 we still have running Sybase 12.5.4, it just works to well so far.
Oh the memories I have of old Sun kit :)
The most exciting thing I've installed is a Sun v480 connected to a T3 brick. That combo was pretty much the industry standard Oracle solution when I had my first job in "real" systems administration and it was probably one of the first the real mid-range installs I did (not counting ageing 420r/450's).
To be honest, it's a match made in heaven. A quad cpu v480 with a t3 brick (or two) kicked out some real performance numbers in it's day. The v480 is probably one of the nicest boxes to work with (considering age and all), the boards are easy to fit, the RSC is awesome, it's simply rock solid. Running Solaris 8 of course (we still have *lots* of clients on Solaris 8 (with Solaris 10 gaining ground)).
The T3 array is pretty cool, but it brings back the frustrations everyone had with early low-end SANs. The limitation to two disk RAID volumes with very limited zoning and slicing. But hey, it's pretty old and is still pretty fast.
Now if I only could figure out how to get rid of that darn Sun E250 we still have running Sybase 12.5.4, it just works to well so far.
Wednesday, September 20
Update of updates
Another quickie update, nothing fun to report anyway. Been busy fighting WebSphere lately, trying to get decent performance on a Sun T2000 server. Out of the box performance was horrible. Websphere 5.1 is still far from satisfactory, I'm putting my hope on Websphere 6.0 now.
Updated Sun boxes:
Sun finally decided to update the classic vXX0 range. Just a simple face lift to be honest, they still run the same range processors. The v440 has been replaced by the new v445, the v240 with the v245 and the 1U v210 is replaced by the v215.
The main two updates are the use of SAS drives and the addition of PCIe. Same basic features as the Galaxy and Niagra servers. They updated the chassi to Andys design.
My favorite new feature is the fact that you can have twice as many drives in the v445. 8 SAS drives instead of the old 4 SCSI. Might even be usable as a Oracle server without external storage. Oh, one last thing. No Solaris 8 support, bad bad. Who uses Solaris 9 anyway?!
Oracle patch release:
Patch release 9.2.0.8 is out, not much new. Bug fixes and a patch for the dreaded select-view-permission-hack security hole. I have tried applying it to both 9.2.0.4 and 9.2.0.6 machines without any hickups. 4547809 in Metalink (now if Oracle would just make these patches available for anyone to download *sigh*).
Btw, I've switched to KDE at work as well.
Updated Sun boxes:
Sun finally decided to update the classic vXX0 range. Just a simple face lift to be honest, they still run the same range processors. The v440 has been replaced by the new v445, the v240 with the v245 and the 1U v210 is replaced by the v215.
The main two updates are the use of SAS drives and the addition of PCIe. Same basic features as the Galaxy and Niagra servers. They updated the chassi to Andys design.
My favorite new feature is the fact that you can have twice as many drives in the v445. 8 SAS drives instead of the old 4 SCSI. Might even be usable as a Oracle server without external storage. Oh, one last thing. No Solaris 8 support, bad bad. Who uses Solaris 9 anyway?!
Oracle patch release:
Patch release 9.2.0.8 is out, not much new. Bug fixes and a patch for the dreaded select-view-permission-hack security hole. I have tried applying it to both 9.2.0.4 and 9.2.0.6 machines without any hickups. 4547809 in Metalink (now if Oracle would just make these patches available for anyone to download *sigh*).
Btw, I've switched to KDE at work as well.
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