Links of the week
More and more rumours regarding Niagara II find their way to to the register. I will not comment the rumours but given the rumors are true either it´s quite a good marketing or someone talks too much. Niagara I is a real killer device, so there is much to report about boxes already available. In the end this means something really good: We are back! Better than ever.
Best sign for this revival is our stock: 4.45 a few minutes ago. From 3.80$ two weeks ago. I hope this trend is sustainable. I want to New Zealand next year after losing my fear of flight and some options are vestable ;).
Serverwatch has a nice summary of the developments at Sun. An interesting quote:
Several years ago, Sun decided to redesign the RISC core from scratch. It now includes four dedicated memory controllers for its eight cores, and each core has dedicated memory access. Other chip vendors, however, have largely remained with a unified memory controller and stuck to their established core architectures. Thus, although Intel is now in the midst of a revamp, it might be two years before a different core design hits the market.
In an IT Jungle IBM make some bold claims regarding virtualization with AIX. Okay … only one comment from my side: In my remembrance there was several fast AIX systems (in the time before Ultrasparc-IV+), there was several virtualized AIX systems, but no virtualized, fast AIX systems. Think a about it and take the story on IT-jungle (or when the IBM-sales-blue-suit steps trough your door next time) with a big amount of salt.
David Dagastine points out, that the new BEA benchmarketing world record was done with the Sun Hotspot JVM. And Lasse posted an article with the answers to the top questions of the eternal solaris newbie problems list. Enigmas weblog contains a really excellent article about Niagara and cryptography. And he reports in the article about an upcoming feature of solaris: kssl, an in-kernel ssl proxy. Really awesome stuff and already part of opensolaris.
Okay, now you have some customers, dozens of old webservers, you have a fuckingpowerfullkickass Sun Fire T2000. How to consolidate? You should read this Blueprint. And at the and of this article: BrandZ was unleashed to the wild. For the uniformed: BrandZ is the foundation for “Solaris Containers for Linux Application”. It´s the follow-on to the project known as Janus. Nils Nieuwejaar explains in his blog what´s occured to Janus, he describes BrandZ and much more. Interesting lecture.