Find out about Sun's new 4-chip UltraSPARC T2 Plus system direct from the source: Sun's engineers.

Sun today announced the 4-chip variant of its UltraSPARC T2 Plus system, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440. This new system is the big brother of the 2-chip Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 systems released in April 2008. Each UltraSPARC T2 Plus chip offers 8 hardware strands in each of 8 cores. With up to four UltraSPARC T2 Plus chips delivering a total of 32 cores and 256 hardware threads and up to 512Gbytes of memory in a compact 4U package, the T5440 raises the bar for server performance, price-performance, energy efficiency, and compactness. And with Logical Domains (LDoms) and Solaris Containers, the potential for server consolidation is compelling.

Standard configurations of the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 include 2- and 4-chip systems at 1.2 GHz, and a 4-chip system at 1.4 GHz. All of these configurations come with 8 cores per …

Find out about Sun's new 4-chip UltraSPARC T2 Plus system direct from the source: Sun's engineers.

Sun today announced the 4-chip variant of its UltraSPARC T2 Plus system, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440. This new system is the big brother of the 2-chip Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 systems released in April 2008. Each UltraSPARC T2 Plus chip offers 8 hardware strands in each of 8 cores. With up to four UltraSPARC T2 Plus chips delivering a total of 32 cores and 256 hardware threads and up to 512Gbytes of memory in a compact 4U package, the T5440 raises the bar for server performance, price-performance, energy efficiency, and compactness. And with Logical Domains (LDoms) and Solaris Containers, the potential for server consolidation is compelling.

Standard configurations of the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 include 2- and 4-chip systems at 1.2 GHz, and a 4-chip system at 1.4 GHz. All of these configurations come with 8 cores per …

Find out about Sun's new 4-chip UltraSPARC T2 Plus system direct from the source: Sun's engineers.

Sun today announced the 4-chip variant of its UltraSPARC T2 Plus system, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440. This new system is the big brother of the 2-chip Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 systems released in April 2008. Each UltraSPARC T2 Plus chip offers 8 hardware strands in each of 8 cores. With up to four UltraSPARC T2 Plus chips delivering a total of 32 cores and 256 hardware threads and up to 512Gbytes of memory in a compact 4U package, the T5440 raises the bar for server performance, price-performance, energy efficiency, and compactness. And with Logical Domains (LDoms) and Solaris Containers, the potential for server consolidation is compelling.

Standard configurations of the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 include 2- and 4-chip systems at 1.2 GHz, and a 4-chip system at 1.4 GHz. All of these configurations come with 8 cores per …

Pimp My Drive by Richard and Barb

There’s remarkably little information online about using MySQL on ZFS, successfully or not, so I did what any enterprising geek would do: Built a box, threw some data on it, and tossed it into production to see if it would sink or swim.

I’m a Linux geek, have been since 1993 (Slackware!). All of SmugMug’s datacenters (and our EC2 images) are built on Linux. But the current state of filesystems on Linux is awful, and …

We released Cool Stack 1.3.1 recently. This was the last release that was built to work on releases as old as Solaris 10 01/06 (Update 1). Going forward, future versions of the stack will only be supported on newer Solaris 10 updates. So I'd like to urge everyone who is running older releases to please schedule their systems for upgrade. We highly recommend that you upgrade to at least Solaris 10 01/08 (Update 5) as it has many performance, security and other fixes.

For some time now, we've had two different stacks for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris - Cool Stack for Solaris 10 and Web Stack for OpenSolaris. We cannot continue to sustain this model  where we have two different source bases with slightly different …

Reminders work. At least on me. I try to Get Things Done (TM) efficiently, but slips do happen. And when they do, reminding me has a good chance to influence my priorities. I hope I’m not alone in this fallibility.

And therefore I want to remind you that you’ve still got two weeks to reply to our Call for Participation in the MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, California on 20-23 April 2009.

A few items to remember:

• We have plenty already, but we’re looking for more proposals. It does make our selection process harder (that’s when the Program Committee sits down and asks itself “what’s right for the conference and its participants”), but that’s a task that we are happy to work on.
• The theme of the conference is “Innovation …

We released Cool Stack 1.3.1 recently. This was the last release that was built to work on releases as old as Solaris 10 01/06 (Update 1). Going forward, future versions of the stack will only be supported on newer Solaris 10 updates. So I'd like to urge everyone who is running older releases to please schedule their systems for upgrade. We highly recommend that you upgrade to at least Solaris 10 01/08 (Update 5) as it has many performance, security and other fixes.

For some time now, we've had two different stacks for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris - Cool Stack for Solaris 10 and Web Stack for OpenSolaris. We cannot continue to sustain this model  where we have two different source bases with slightly different …

We released Cool Stack 1.3.1 recently. This was the last release that was built to work on releases as old as Solaris 10 01/06 (Update 1). Going forward, future versions of the stack will only be supported on newer Solaris 10 updates. So I'd like to urge everyone who is running older releases to please schedule their systems for upgrade. We highly recommend that you upgrade to at least Solaris 10 01/08 (Update 5) as it has many performance, security and other fixes.

For some time now, we've had two different stacks for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris - Cool Stack for Solaris 10 and Web Stack for OpenSolaris. We cannot continue to sustain this model  where we have two different source bases with slightly different …

At the end of the Orlando meeting in January this year when the Sun acquisition was announced, I remember sitting next to MySQL’s co-founder David Axmark in the bus going to some evening event. “What do you want to do now, with so many opportunities opening up?” was my question to him, partly as his friend, partly as his colleague and partly as his line manager. David seemed very confident in the future of MySQL within Sun, but less sure about his own future role.

With that as a background, and knowing David since well over 20 years, I was not all that surprised to read his resignation letter, and in particular his reasoning for resigning:

I have thought about my role at Sun and decided that I am better off in smaller organisations. I HATE all the rules that I need to follow, and I also HATE breaking them. It would be far better for me to “retire” from employment and work with MySQL and Sun on a less formal …

I’m just back home from Brazil, where I went last Sunday in order to launch MySQL’s presence in Brazil and meet with MySQL users, developers, Sun customers, the press as well as with numerou Sun colleagues. “Is this your first time in Brazil?” was a frequent question (as one could expect), and I was happy to respond that it wasn’t. In fact, I have particularly fond memories of my first visit to Brazil in 2001, as that was the trip when I decided to join MySQL AB.

They say Rio de Janeiro is one of the most beautiful cities on the planet. Whoever “they” are, they’re right. The cone in the middle is Pão de Açúcar (Sugarloaf Mountain, der Zuckerhut, Sockertoppen).

As a European, I again noted …