Sun's hardware at Oracle: a new announcement

Oracle announced the following statement on their website:

But why did they announce this now?
Here some answers out of the web:

The advertisement is a sign of how seriously Oracle views the Sun customer base as part of the value of Sun. At JavaOne, Ellison said Oracle has sold many database systems to run on Sun servers. Linux servers make up its fastest growing business, but Sparc/Solaris platforms remain its largest installed base, he said.
www.informationwee.com

or

Analysts see Oracle's ad as a defensive move ... Among the top hardware makers, Sun registered the biggest decline in server revenue in the second quarter, offering evidence that this protracted merger may be eroding Sun's value.
www.computerworld.com

or

Still, this may all be a little propaganda to ease the worries of the EU's Competition Commission, which has extended its investigation of the deal.
news.softpedia.com

or

This is very good news for us geeks; Oracle is promising to invest in not only Solaris, some decent competition for Linux, but also in the SPARC architecture. We're getting two alternative products for one here.
www.osnews.com

Many opinions and if you ask yourself, you will get even more ;-)

SUN: Solaris Cluster (SUN Cluster) is now Opensource

SUN released the source code of the Sun Cluster on www.opensolaris.org under the name High Availability Clusters.
The project page can be found here.

If you are really interested try the wiki or the related blog.
The Open HA Cluster source code is available under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). For more information follow this link to wikipedia.

Here some statements from sun about Solaris Cluster:

Previously known as Sun Cluster, the Solaris Cluster framework extends high availability features of Solaris - it includes Solaris Cluster, Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition, developer tools and support for commercial and open-source applications through Solaris Cluster agents. The integrated software provides high availability and disaster recovery for local, campus, metropolitan and worldwide clusters.

By tightly coupling Sun's servers, storage and networking solutions, Solaris Cluster provides the maximum level of service availability and performance for a cluster system.
The servers (nodes) in a cluster communicate through private interconnects. These interconnects carry important cluster information (data as well as a cluster "heartbeat"). This heartbeat lets the servers in the cluster monitor the health of the other servers within the cluster, ensuring that each server is "alive". If one of the servers goes offline and its heartbeat disappears, the rest of the devices in the cluster isolate the server and "fail-over" any application or data from the failing node to another node. This fail-over process is quick and transparent to users of the application. By exploiting the redundancy in the cluster, Solaris Cluster ensures the highest levels of availability.

Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition software enables a multi-site disaster recovery solution that manages the availability of application services and data across geographically dispersed Solaris Clusters. In the event that a primary cluster goes down, Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition enables sysadmins to start up automatically business applications with replicated data on the secondary Solaris Cluster.

I think Solaris Cluster is an alternative solution to Oracle Clusterware to achieve high availability for your software stack. But keep in mind, that the configuration of these cluster software stacks has to be planned and maintained carefully...

SPARC IIIi: End of Life for SUN Fire V125, V215, V245 and V445

SUN Microsystems announced end of life (EOL) for V125, V215, V245 and V445. For SUN Fire servers powered by UltraSPARC IIIi last shipment is July 11, 2008. After this date only SUN Netra servers with UltraSPARC IIIi processors will be available.
If you are interested in the SPARC family follow this link to wikipedia.
SUN provides several upgrade paths:

Move to UltraSPARC T1 or T2 if single thread performance is not critical (e.g.:Sun Fire T1000 Server, Sun Fire T2000 Server)

Move to SPARC IV+/IV single thread performance is critical and you have to stay on SPARC architecture (e.g.: Sun Fire V490 Server, Sun Fire E2900 Server)

Move to AMD Opterion if single thread performance is critical and you only have to stay on Solaris (e.g.: Sun Fire X4200 Server, Sun Fire X4200 Server)

Sun Virtualization

Hmmm.. now i am getting confused:
At the Oracle Open World has Jonathan Schwartz (SUN CEO) announced SUNs Virtualization solution.
So this week Oracle launched its OVM as well as SUN launches its SUN xVM.

Here are some statements from SUN:

Host Windows, Linux and Solaris guest operating systems
Built using technology from the Xen open source project as well as Sun's Logical Domains
High availability and scalability
Advanced CPU and memory handling capabilities

At this link you can read further details about the SUN solution.
There is a community site at http://openxvm.org/.

So let's start with xVM? or OVM? or stay at VMWare or M$.....
(I am waiting for IBM eVM or iVM?)

IBM supports Solaris

What a strange world...
Have you read this press release?

IBM promotes Solaris on its xSeries server. Wow...
First SCO looses its battle against Linux and now IBM sells Solaris on its servers. What will happen tomorrow?
AIX on SPARC? MacOS on Itanium? MS Office on PalmOS?

Everything is possible ;-)