Addressing "anything Sun", that is: anything I come across in my role as a Systems Practice Solutions Architect. Your mileage may vary ;-) Mousebits: Bart Muijzer's Blog

Report from the 8th NLOSUG get-together, July 2nd 2009[Read More]

Some thoughts on the day I am 10 years with Sun...[Read More]

Impression from NLOSUG booth at NLUUG spring 2009 conference on "Filesystems and Storage".[Read More]

Removed "What's the color of Oracle" entry.[Read More]

Some considerations when positioning ZFS on top of smart (i.e. non JBOD) storage.[Read More]

Impressions of an almost perfect NLOSUG meeting[Read More]

Entering 2009 - some thoughts written down at the beginning of a new year[Read More]

Thanks to my friends at the Dutch UNIX Users Group (NLUUG), the OpenSolaris 2008.11 release is now available from the NLUUG archives. Here's the access info (from their announcing email).

 

ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/opensolaris
http://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/opensolaris
rsync://ftp.nluug.nl/opensolaris

ftp://ftp.surfnet.nl/pub/os/opensolaris
http://ftp.surfnet.nl/pub/os/opensolaris
rsync://ftp.surfnet.nl/opensolaris

Download statistics can be found at: http://ftp.nluug.nl/.statistics
ALL current and future OpenSolaris releases will be made available the same way.

Recently there was an internal poll amongst the OS Ambassadors to learn what reasons people have to choose Solaris on our own x86 hardware. As opposed to other Operating Systems like Linux or Windows. I thought it would be educational to share what's come out of this poll.

Reasons to choose Solaris on SUN x86 hardware (in no particular order):

• Technical if not superior features not otherwise available and that 'max out' the x86 hardware and peripherals. Examples:
  
• ZFS on SSD
  
• Predictive Self healing, especially the Fault Management Architecture component
  
• DTrace
• Zones and Containers
  
• One support contract (Spectrum) to cover both the hardware and the OS. This translates into a strong offering regarding Supportability levels, and creates enough granularity to implement the right level of risk avoidance for the customer
  
• No need to cross company boundaries diagnosing problems non-obviously related to hardware/firmware/OS. It's only SUN you need to talk to!
  
• The hardware itself. "Designed by Andy" (Bechtolsheim) means the hardware itself is datacenter-grade, well balanced and differentiates in the areas of powerconsumption, cooling and accessibility to the individual components.
• Hardware design innovation (ie can mix Intel/AMD/SPARC in the same Blade chassis)  
  
• No need to install third party drivers (that is: when installing Solaris on SUN x86 gear -- check out the Solaris HCLs otherwise). At a higher-level: tight integration of the hardware with (systems)software, and with the OS
• SUN is a leader in adopting the latest Intel and AMD chips. Not only by building systems based on the latest chips available, but also by tightly integrating chip-specific features with Solaris from day 1 on. Look here for some great examples by Jim Laurent of what I mean.
  
• Tight integration of the pieces in a Solaris world (FMA, ZFS, DTrace, zones, ...)
  
• Solaris on SPARC.  Only Fujitsu can make a similar claim. The benefits to customers are two-fold:
• Solaris is being developed for two platforms, resulting in an overall better product for both platforms
• Customers running Solaris (on SPARC) have a low barrier to also use Solaris on x86. From the OS layer on, everything is the same
  
• Indemnification
  
• Low barrier to exit,  i.e. Want to virtualize with VMware as an alternative, tomorrow? They've got whitepapers on phenomenal scalability on our gear.
  
• SUN runs benchmarks on SUN x86 hardware and performs finetuning to the microlevel to max out on performance and stability.

Happy choosing!

Impression of a succesful 6th meeting of the Netherlands OpenSolaris Usergroup, with talks on IPS, OpenSolaris non-technical and an overview of current OpenSolaris projects. Presentations can be found on the NLOSUG website.[Read More]

Yesterday, 1:05pm, I got the call from the nursery home: my Oma had passed away. Quietly, alone, in her sleep. She reached the age of 100 years and 10+ months.

Oma had been in bed for the past week. She no longer wanted to live. I am so glad and so grateful that I went to visit her every day and that every time she knew it was me.

I have the memories. And loads of pictures. All is like it's meant to be.

In one of my latest blogs entries I promised there was more great news to come about the distribution of OpenSolaris 2008.05 in The Netherlands. Well, here goes:

The June edition of c't Magazine has an article 'Solaris contra Linux' in which OpenSolaris is tested and described, and comes with a bootable DVD that carries OpenSolaris 2008.05 (amongst a pile of other software). The direct link is here  -- sorry, it's in Dutch only.

c't Magazine is distributed in a large (tens of thousands) amount of copies in Holland and Germany. The idea of distributing OpenSolaris with this magazine was born at the NLUUG Spring Conference and Menno Lageman, co-Sunnie, Solaris resource management guru and NLOSUG core member worked with the people of c't Magazine to create the bootable DVD.  Again, this shows what good relationships, sense of community and several hours of personal time from Menno can lead to!

From the whispersuite: Menno might blog about this in the near future... 

NLOSUG will take a short summer break but behind the screens we keep going.
Happy (summer)hacking!

Impression from NLOSUG event, April 2008[Read More]

OpenSolaris 2008.05 distribution available through Dutch Unix Users Group.[Read More]

So now I've created a new catagory on blogs.sun.com to vent personal stuff about myself. Reason to do so is that I don't need the techstuff I blog about to show up on Hyves or LinkedIn. So, consider this particular message as a test message. And if you dare, watch for more in this catagory