|
Thanks to the Sun BluePrints program, IT managers can implement projects with confidence
Inner Circle Subscriber Center
Get the content that meets your interests and needs:
Not a member?
|
Problems are the daily diet of IT managers. Once you find a solution, you need to implement it properly with scalability in mind.
Every solution today is a complex mixture of products, technologies, and services. These solution elements often come from multiple vendors. Every solution requires specialized skills and expertise on the part of your staff. And so many little things can go wrong.
- Once you identify the right fix for the problem at hand, how do you cut the risk of a configuration error or improperly installed software?
- How do you ensure that your engineers, architects, and administrators understand how to make the solution elements work — and work together — for optimal performance?
- How do you get new IT initiatives rolling faster without risking future problems due to inadequate testing, compatibility issues, or buggy software?
Sun has a compelling answer that is free of charge to the customer, partner, or system integrator: the Sun BluePrints program. Sun has created an extensive, in-depth resource library of technical best practices derived from the real-world experience of Sun engineers, for getting the most out of Sun solutions.
This month, Sun is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Sun BluePrints program. Over the years, we've covered literally hundreds of specific topics — migrating to the Solaris OS, patching mirrored systems, quick-starting the Lustre file system, and the list goes on.
All Sun Blueprints whitepapers address topics that are important to our customers and have been tested in Sun's state-of-the-art labs and peer-reviewed by Sun's world-class engineering teams to make life easier for your staff.
Highlighted below are just a few of the Sun BluePrints articles that are available now on some of our most popular products and solutions. For the full list visit the BluePrints Community site.
Using the Solaris Operating System to Optimize the Xeon Processor 5500 Series CPUs
Sun and Intel, as part of a broad strategic alliance, have been working together — from design and architecture through implementation — to ensure that the Solaris OS is optimized to unleash the power and capabilities of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series.
This Sun BluePrint article serves as a quick reference guide for developers and system administrators who want to optimize the Solaris OS on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series. It includes a short overview of the Sun and Intel collaboration along with brief technical descriptions of specific features and capabilities that can be implemented in the Solaris OS to optimize the specific capabilities of Intel Xeon processor 5500 series systems, specifically in the areas of intelligent performance, automated energy efficiency, reliability and availability, and developer tools.
Engineering teams from the two companies are collaborating on optimizing how the Solaris ecosystem and the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series work together, with compelling results, including:
- Increased performance as the Solaris OS takes advantage of Intel multi-core processor capabilities and Intel Turbo Boost Technology.
- Optimized power efficiency and utilization by enabling Solaris to take advantage of Intel Xeon processor 5500 series performance-enhanced dynamic power management capabilities.
- Extending Predictive capabilities to improve reliability by incorporating Intel Xeon processor 5500 series features into the Solaris Fault Management Architecture (FMA).
The Solaris ecosystem consists of the Solaris OS and the open source OpenSolaris OS, as well as the Sun Studio development tools, which form the core of a large developer community and a vast portfolio of applications. The OpenSolaris OS is a proven, industry leading operating system with features designed to save time and money in business-critical operations. The Solaris OS provides stability, massive scalability, high performance, and guaranteed forward binary compatibility.
This Sun BluePrints article can be downloaded here.
MySQL Guide for Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System
The sheer volume of data continues to grow at a staggering pace, making it difficult for IT to deliver fast and reliable information access while containing costs. Unfortunately, many storage solutions today are proprietary, complex, and expensive. Sun's solution is to combine the benefits of the open source MySQL database with the capabilities of the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems. This Sun BluePrints article provides a detailed guidance about hardware and software configurations, including installation procedures for MySQL software.
The Sun BluePrints article begins with a detailed overview of the open systems architecture of the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems. Sun created the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems to address the need for easy-to-manage, eco-friendly, and scalable storage solutions. These systems incorporate an open-systems approach that selects the best general-purpose servers and storage components, combines them with innovative technologies, and unifies them with storage software.
For MySQL database applications, the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems meet a range of functional requirements for availability, capacity, and performance. The Sun BluePrints article demonstrates how the Sun Storage 7000 series family of unified storage systems can be used to share NFS and iSCSI file systems with MySQL database servers deployed on Sun SPARC and x86 servers running the Solaris or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.2 operating systems.
In addition, this Sun BluePrints article shows how the built-in snapshot, clone, and rollback functionality of the Sun Storage 7000 unified storage systems can be used in conjunction with the MySQL database on these platforms.
"The Sun Storage 7000 family may well be in a class by itself," said John Webster, Principal IT Advisor, Illuminata, Inc. "The embedded hardware functionality and list of software add-ons are remarkable for the price of this appliance. This new family has the potential to become the most disruptive thing Sun has ever done in storage."
Independent software vendor (ISV) partners agree. "As a data protection, retention and discovery software and services provider, we believe the Sun 7000 series delivers a very attractive value proposition with very good high availability characteristics and presents a very simple, straightforward management model," said David Allen, CTO of i365 (A Seagate Company). "It attacks the most expensive and misunderstood element of storage: the operations costs. We look forward to rolling out the 7000 series in our production environment."
This Sun BluePrints article can be downloaded here.
Improving MySQL Database Scalability
In the past, databases ran entire workloads on a single server. However, the need for scalability drove software development toward multi-server scaling. MySQL databases can be scaled using the same techniques — but on an open, optimized platform that provides massive scaling, lower administrative costs, and datacenter space and energy efficiency. This Sun BluePrints article explains how MySQL databases can be configured to take advantage of the chip multithreading (CMT) capabilities of Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 servers and features in the Solaris OS to scale performance.
The Sun BluePrints article about MySQL scalability has been much in demand, and the reasons are highlighted by recent analyst studies. For example, an article entitled "The Growing Maturity of Open-Source Database Management Systems," published on November 28, 2008 by Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst Donald Feinberg, reports that a recently conducted study by the firm demonstrated a 50% increase from 2007 to 2008 in the usage of open source DBMSs in production. The report repeats previous findings that revenue growth in the open source DBMS segment grew at a rate of 42% from 2006 to 2007, far outpacing the overall DBMS market at 13%. Moving forward, Gartner projects 40% CAGR growth in the open source DBMS segment over the next five years, resulting in an estimated $1 billion market by 2013.
Feinberg offers guidance to those considering open-source DBMS products: "The cost benefits of using an open-source DBMS are increasing and the risk of using it is decreasing." Moreover, "if the technical capabilities of the staff are strong, use of an open-source DBMS in mission-critical environments is possible now — with obvious implications to the cost of resources to manage the DBMS and applications."
This Sun BluePrints article can be downloaded here.
Join the community
Whether you'd like to browse the exhaustive library of Sun BluePrints white papers, suggest a topic for a future Sun BluePrints paper, provide new information to help us update an existing article, or share tips and advice with your colleagues, there's one easy way to do it all: join the Sun BluePrints community today. Visit /blueprints for full details.
When you visit, be sure to take our survey by 7/31/09, and enter to win an iPod Nano!
Be sure to listen to some of our latest Ziff Davis eSeminars on:
If you are on Facebook, please take this opportunity to join our Sun BluePrints fan page and you will be notified of the latest updates!
| 
