2009/06/02
TheRegister: Sun rolls out OpenSolaris 2009.06 release
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
The OpenSolaris development release of Sun Microsystems' Unix operating system has only been available officially on x64 PCs, workstations, and servers. The OpenSolaris distribution has not been packaged up for Sparc workstations or servers. Starting today, with the OpenSolaris 2009.06 release, both x64 and Sparc iron are now supported in the distro.
According to the release notes, OpenSolaris 2009.06 can run on all Sun4v-based platforms (that is UltraSparc T1 and T2 machines) and Sun4u-based platforms (that's UltraSparc-II, UltraSparc-III, and UltraSparc-IV machines). These latter machines have to have an OBP level of 4.17 or greater, and across all Sparc machinery, the distro is only available as an Automated Install image. (Fujitsu's Sparc64 platforms were not mentioned as being supported.)
The initial "Project Indiana" OpenSolaris 2008.05 release, which came out a little more than a year ago, was targeted mainly at 32-bit x86 and 64-bit x64 desktops and laptops for students and workstations, and with the OpenSolaris 2008.11 update Sun started pushing the distro as suitable for production workloads on x64 servers.
The OpenSolaris 2009.06 release is notable for a few reasons. Unlike other development operating systems, such as Red Hat's Fedora and Novell's openSUSE, OpenSolaris is available with the full suite of support services from Sun. The support was a bit different than that available on standard Solaris 10 platforms, and with bigger x64 boxes - the kinds that customers use to run production Solaris workloads - Sun was charging higher prices for OpenSolaris than it was charging for Solaris 10. It did so presumably because it was more expensive to deliver 24x7 support on OpenSolaris because the code was a little more raw, as a development release always is.
But starting today, according to Charlie Boyle, director of Solaris product marketing, OpenSolaris 2009.06 and Solaris 10 (in its many updates) have exactly the same Sun Spectrum support prices for silver, gold, and platinum support, and they are the Solaris, rather than the higher OpenSolaris, prices. Solaris and OpenSolaris have the same support contracts, even if they use different mechanisms to deliver support. This is something that Sun's field sales and support people have been asking for because customers wanted it.
The updated OpenSolaris is also the first release of any Sun Unix variant to sport the Project Crossbow networking virtualisation and management stack to market. Crossbow has a reimplemented networking stack with revised architecture that virtualises Ethernet network interfaces and InfiniBand host adapters.
Up until now, Solaris and OpenSolaris tied an Ethernet NIC or InfiniBand adapter to a specific CPU inside of a machine or, in a virtualised environment, to a virtual machine. But with the Crossbow stack, Ethernet NICs and InfiniBand adapters are themselves now virtualised, and system administrators can carve up slices of high-bandwidth networking adapters to provide each VM or processor core with a suitable amount of bandwidth. Before, a fast 10 Gigabit Ethernet or 20 Gigabit InfiniBand adapter card would be tied to a CPU or VM, which it could easily flood.
Boyle says that the Crossbow stack can be managed using standard SNMP tools (for both physical and virtual network links), which means HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, and other system management tools can reach into the OpenSolaris servers and monitor and manage them. This is not the case, Boyle says, with the "California" Unified Computing System built by Cisco Systems with the help of VMware. "Cisco and VMware do proprietary stuff, and you have to use their tools to manage networking."
OpenSolaris 2009.06 also has fine-grained control for networking, which means you can do traffic shaping and provide quality-of-service guarantees (such as a minimum bandwidth or latency) for the networking for physical and virtual machines. This kind of fine-grain control, and monitoring through dynamic tracing (DTrace) has been available in Solaris for processors and memory capacity for years, but networking has been set up as a shared resource that the operating system can just hog at will. "We now give you the tools to set network limits and the tools to observe the effect of the limits that you set," says Boyle.
In addition to the Crossbow features, OpenSolaris 2009.06 includes a bunch of other tweaks and tucks. The Zettabyte File System (ZFS) is now tweaked to automatically turn any flash-based memory or drives in a system into read and write accelerators for disk subsystems. The native OpenSolaris CIFS Windows file server has been added as a full peer to NFS in OpenSolaris, and faster iSCSI and Fibre Channel block protocols have been added into the OpenSolaris kernel as well.
OpenSolaris 2009.06 already has support for the "Istanbul" six-core Opteron processor whose launch is imminent, and supports most of the features in the "Nehalem EP" Xeon 3500 and Xeon 5500 processors from Intel, which were launched in March. Support for Sun's future "Rock" UltraSparc-RK processors is also in the release, and this software could, in theory, run on Intel's eight-core "Nehalem EX" Xeon 7500 processors, even though they won't be here until next year. Boyle says that more tweaks for the Nehalem and Istanbul processors will come out with the next OpenSolaris release in about six months.
Because Sun is competing against Linux for a lot of accounts, it is always comparing OpenSolaris to Linux. On its Project libMicro performance benchmark suite, OpenSolaris 2009.06 has 35 per cent better memory management, 22 per cent better integer math performance, and 18 per cent better multithread scheduler management compared to the latest Linux releases on the same iron.
According to the release notes, Sun is not planning on putting another OpenSolaris release into the field until 2010, and it is a fair guess that this release will be timed to the eight-core Nehalem EX processor from Intel and the six-core "Lisbon" and twelve-core "Magny-Cours" Opterons. That future OpenSolaris will have full interactive installation on Sparc platforms (including installing a custom spin based on the OpenSolaris repository), and will also presumably support Fujitsu Sparc64 machines. That future OpenSolaris will sport a new Gnome interface, ZFS deduplication and user quotas for storage and "cloud integration." ®
TheRegister: Microsoft to talk Sun-cloud interoperability
by Gavin Clarke
CommunityOne Microsoft is making its debut at Sun Microsystems' annual Java jamboree in what's looking like a mission of mutual support.
The company will use its first ever JavaOne keynote speech Thursday to talk about the ability to use open-source infrastructure components built by Sun with Microsoft's nascent Azure cloud. Microsoft's come a long way in the last 10 years, having been at one time the subject of a Sun legal action for breaking compatibility on Java with its implementation.
Microsoft will discuss interoperability between Azure and an open-source, high-performance web service stack called Metro for Sun's GlassFish application server to talk to .NET systems, Sun distinguished engineer Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart said during a presentation. Microsoft's executives are due to take the stage on Thursday morning.
It's not clear whether the discussion will focus only on Metro or whether the keynote will address other ways to run GlassFish on Azure and program and deploy Java applications to Azure.
Azure is due later this year, and Microsoft wants to encourage non-.NET developers to build applications on the platform - particularly developers using open source. It recently unveiled the PHPAzure software development kit (SDK) to build apps for Azure and the cloud's underlying SQL-like Windows Azure Storage service's blobs, tables, and queues.
Microsoft and Sun already have a technology interoperability agreement dating from April 2006, which has seen work on servers, security, directories, and web services.
Meanwhile, Sun is expected to use the coming few days at JavaOne to evangelize its own cloud strategy.
Sun's "on track" for "more broader public access this month" of its cloud, senior vice president of cloud computing and chief sustainability officer Dave Douglas told Sun's CommunityOne on Monday. He added: "Of course we love more partners."
Sun had promised to release further details of its cloud offerings this summer when it unveiled its cloud APIs and formally announced its cloud service in March.
A "secure and hardened" virtual machine for use on OpenSolaris in the cloud was also announced with the availability of OpenSolaris 2009.06. The VM is designed to ease concerns people might have that a cloud opens their systems to being hacked through back doors in the VM and the date center.
Sun's cloud computing chief technology officer, Lew Tucker, said the company had: "Turned off underused ports and got rid of services that are not really need, so if you are a developer, not a security expert, you can get on with what you do." Tucker, also pointed to tools under its Project Kenai hosting site to encrypt ZFS snap shots and lock down and secure your data.
But the future of Sun's whole cloud strategy is in question. Several years late, Sun's set of computing and storage options mirror Amazon's existing service. Furthermore, the chief executive officer of the company buying Sun has poured doubt on cloud services. CEO Larry Ellison appears to believe in providing component parts such as virtualization, but not in providing his own cloud service.
Douglas claimed that 3,000 of Sun's staff are currently using its internal cloud.
InfoWorld: Sun connects developers, users via Java Store
by Robert McMillan
Sun Microsystems has opened up a test version of its Java Store, which it bills as a Web site where developers can connect with millions of computer users who run Java on their desktop.
Similar to Apple's successful App Store, the site is designed to give consumers an easy way to download Java programs. A beta version of the store launched Tuesday with just a couple of applications – a Java version of the RuneScape online role-playing game and a Java-based Twitter client called Twitter FX – but developers will have until the Java Store's public launch at the end of this year to add programs to it.
The company is also testing a new developer portal, called the Java Warehouse, which Sun says is "the central repository for Java and JavaFX applications." Developers who pay a $50 fee to register with Java Warehouse will then be able to distribute their programs via the Java Store.
At first, Java Warehouse applications will be targeted at Mac and Windows users in the U.S. who use the Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer browsers, Sun said.
Sun has had a lot of success promoting Java as a platform for popular back-end servers applications, but has not enjoyed the same kind of popularity with desktop software. Java Store and Java Warehouse, known internally at Sun as Project Vector, are an effort to breathe new life into client-side applications.
Sun estimates that 800 million desktop users worldwide have Java installed, and it hopes Java Store will give developers an easy way to reach this vast audience.
In a May 18 blog posting announcing Project Vector, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said he hopes the portal will be used by "banks looking to sign up new accounts, sports franchises looking for new viewers, media companies and news organizations looking for new subscribers – basically, any Java developer looking to escape the browser to reach a billion or so consumers."
The Java Store and Java Warehouse sites went live Tuesday morning in advance of the company's annual Java One conference, which runs through the week in San Francisco.
