|
While many of our customers have been enjoying graduation parties and summer vacations, here at Sun we've had a busy summer. We hosted a meeting of some of the world's largest libraries and cultural institutions, hosted a gathering of HPC power users, introduced a new version of our industry-leading identity management product, and held the first virtual demonstration of Project Wonderland for immersive education.
The theme common to these diverse initiatives is community. In each area, Sun’s collaboration with special interest groups, leaders in education IT, and industry associations is helping to reshape education IT. Below you’ll find information on how you can take advantage of community resources and make your own contributions.
The Future of Digital Preservation
At the end of May, more than 180 experts from Sun, universities, libraries, and research organizations around the world attended the semi-annual meeting of the Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (Sun PASIG) in San Francisco. Attendees represented top institutions as diverse as the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, California Digital Library, National Library of New Zealand, National Library of Norway, Princeton University, and USC's Shoah Foundation Institute.
"It was encouraging to have so many organizations come together around a common need to find ways to archive, preserve, and share the world's important research and irreplaceable cultural materials," said Art Pasquinelli, Sun's Education Market Strategist and PASIG organizer. "Given our rich history of creating communities, Sun is proud to be driving this initiative and equipping our members with the technology, tools, and best practices to help solve these challenges."
The agenda at this exciting and far-reaching meeting featured case studies and repository studies, trends panels, working group discussions, one-to-one custom architectural review meetings, and technology deep-dive sessions. Key topics covered included tiered storage, data management and digital asset management (DAM), open storage, data curation, immersive technology, repositories and federated archives, and Web 2.0 services.
What were some of the conclusions drawn by this august group of academicians, technologists, librarians, and storage architects from around the world? For one, they agreed that the world's valuable research, audio-visual content, and cultural heritage materials can be preserved and more widely and safely shared — as long as there's close collaboration among all concerned. But much remains to be done to address issues in this evolving field.
"Organizations charged with the preservation of important data are currently at a crossroads," said Michael Keller, university librarian, director of Academic Information Resources, Stanford University. "Even as electronic data volumes increase exponentially, we recognize that we are in danger of losing valuable historical content, including films, books, and texts that are part of our cultural heritage. The formation of the Sun PASIG in 2007 was a key milestone in the history of digital preservation. Through our semi-annual meetings and ongoing projects, we are beginning to solve this issue by creating standards and putting technology and best practices into place."
Keller discussed these issues in a June 19 podcast on Blogtalkradio's Innovation Insider program.
Want to keep up to date? Over the last few months, Sun market and product experts and PASIG members have jointly hosted Webinars for the community to set out baseline technology trends. In preparation for the next PASIG meeting in Europe in the fall, we'll hold more Webinars to review leading-edge technology implementations.
TACC Breaks into Top Five on Top 500 Supercomputers List
At the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Dresden, Germany, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) supercomputer captured the number-four spot on the Top 500 Supercomputers list. Powered by the Sun Constellation System, the TACC supercomputer was the highest-ranking system based on an open architecture.
Demonstrating the pervasiveness of Sun technology on the list, Sun HPC software and storage also made strong showings, with Sun's Lustre file system managing data on six of the list's top 10 sites as well as nearly half of the top 50 supercomputers.
 |
Video: Ranger Supercomputer at TACC
|
Sun also expanded its HPC portfolio with new products and solutions aimed to enable mainstream HPC customers across all industries to take advantage of Sun's superscale computing technologies, including the Sun Constellation System.
Just before the ISC, 160 members of the Sun High Performance Computing Consortium (SHPCC) met for the group's semi-annual meeting in Dresden. You can read about the meeting on Josh Simon's blog, The Navel of Narcissus. Or view the online video repository of HPC Consortium talks, including the corresponding slides.
Sun Unveils Next-Generation Identity Manager Software
This year, identity and access management again made the top 10 list in the EDUCAUSE Current Issues Survey. "There has been a clarion call from IT leaders to educate and inform campus constituencies about the importance of I/AM (identity and access management) because so much depends on the risk awareness and active vigilance of individual network users," the survey's writers said.
On June 23, Sun took another step toward helping educators manage identity management with a new release of our flagship provisioning software. Sun Identity Manager 8.0 is the first user provisioning software to provide role-based provisioning, enabling institutions to use business roles for both identity lifecycle management and identity auditing. This is critical at institutions at which users often take on multiple roles, such a graduate student who also teaches.
Sun Identity Manager 8.0 features operational reporting updates that allow customers to analyze entitlement data to better control provisioning and auditing and achieve sustainable compliance. The resulting cost reductions can be a powerful incentive for cash-strapped education CIOs.
"By more closely integrating provisioning and role management, we're offering increased levels of automation,” said Mark Herring, vice president of marketing, Software Infrastructure, Sun Microsystems. “Our solutions help solve everyday identity problems that keep customers awake at night: on-boarding and off-boarding of students, faculty and staff, compliance with internal audit policies, and costs associated with access control processes."
Sun Identity Manager 8.0 also gives educational institutions flexibility in purchasing. It's available as a standalone product or with the Sun Java Identity Management Suite, which includes Sun Role Manager, Sun Java System Access Manager, Sun Java System Federation Manager, and Sun Java System Directory Server.
Bottom line — with Sun Identity Manager 8.0, educational institutions have new options to expand services via the Internet and address regulations in a consistent, automated, and cost-effective way, while increasing productivity and reducing security risks.
To learn more, read about the top three issues in higher education identity management in the February 2008 issue of EduConnection. Or join the Sun Identity Special Interest Group (Sun ID-SIG), a customer-driven forum that gives you an opportunity to exchange practical and technical knowledge and experiences with other Sun identity customers.
Immersive Education Becomes Reality
Last but not least, immersive education took another big step forward with the first demonstration of Project Wonderland, Sun's open source virtual world platform for the education community. At a virtual event in late June, members of the academic and IT communities explored secure and flexible virtual learning environments created by Boston College, the University of Essex, the University of Oregon and Saint Paul College, pioneer users of the platform for educational purposes. You can read more about the event in this month's Edu Insight feature.
If you're interested in keeping abreast of the latest developments in this space, join the Sun Immersion Special Interest Group (Sun I-SIG), a Sun-sponsored community dedicated to advancing the state of open source technology and content for virtual worlds and gaming in education.
Education Communities Moving Forward
In July, we began gearing up for a new fiscal year. A key element of our activities this year will be our focus on facilitating education communities like the Sun PASIG, the Sun I-SIG and the Sun ID-SIG. I've written about the importance and power of communities extensively in this space.
Please continue to send me your thoughts in the comments section of my blog, http://blogs.sun.com/joehartley/ or email me at education_info@sun.com.
Best wishes for a great summer,
Joe Hartley
VP, Global Government, Education and Healthcare
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
| 
