Openomics: innovation drives value

Did you ever have a performance problem and not know where to start looking? Well, who didn't? In such a situation, it is important to perform a proper monitoring of the system and resist the immediate urge to blame the processing power --the storage subsystem is often overlooked. Now that I spoiled the suspense giving away the answer, give me 5 minutes to illustrate this with a typical example. Why typical? Because this is a case I meet quite often with startup companies who rightly concentrate on their core business and not on their IT infrastructure --that's what we are here for.

One of our partners, Squid Solutions, recently reported a performance problem with an Oracle database; they had engaged our team as part of the Sun Startup Essentials support program. Squid Solutions makes a software called Nautilus that performs intensive analytics on database systems, whatever their kind or size. They call Nautilus an SQL Knowledge Engine because it models data and business knowledge, and then automatically generates SQL code to execute the data processing tasks. Nautilus is sold as a service performed by Squid's engineers as Customer Intelligence projects.

So, Squid Solutions had purchased a brand-new Sun Fire X2250 server --quad-core Intel Xeon with 4 GB of RAM, running Solaris 10--, and was experiencing poor performance --much lower than their old system of previous generation-- when executing a read-n-write intensive workload on the database. When I first got on the server, something jumped right to my eyes…

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This large international System Integrator, where today's proofpoint was carried out, had been using and loving Java as a software language for the comfort of development and maintenance. When the request to build some kind of a system and network management application, involving intensive LAN communication, came from a classified customer, the partner knew the non-deterministic nature of Java SE (though Java 5 and 6 made big improvements in predictability) would not fit the bill. Indeed, the Java Virtual Machine stops application threads for garbage collection and other maintenance tasks so it is not possible to guarantee bounded pauses, especially when the maximal latency allowed for serving requests in this project was in order of tens of millisecond (for worst case scenarios).

That said, Java, as a runtime, can take many forms. Expressive Java FX for rich clients, lightweight Java ME for mobile device, transactional Java EE for enterprise services and real-time Java RTS for deterministic applications. Our partner had no previous experience with Java Real Time but the motivation to stay on Java was so strong that they engaged in a proof-of-concept to evaluate Java RTS 2.1 on Solaris 10. With the support of Sun and our ISV Engineering team…

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"Thanks to Sun technology, we are continuing to bring innovative identity management solutions to market and driving growth."
Hervé Prot, CEO, Symeos

Specialized in Web services security, Symeos provides online identity management, federated authentication services and single sign-on technologies for customers across multiple industries, including banking and finance. With the support of Sun, Symeos has developed a new scalable identity management product called EGO to support the more than 10 million expected users.

Read the whole story at http://www.sun.com/customers/servers/symeos.xml  to learn how the combinaison of Sun systems, storage and software reduced the Symeos development cost by 60%, delivered a 99.999% infrastructure availability and improved Web application server performance by 92%. Symeos is a member of the Sun Startup Essentials program.

The HAR 2.x source code has been published today --I apologize for the delay-- and is now available under the CDDL 1.0 license on Project Kenai, a collaborative hosting site for open-source projects sponsored by Sun Microsystems. HAR users are encourage to join the discussion --whether on the wiki or mailing lists-- there.

If you feel like checking out --and why not, contributing to-- the HAR code, note that Subversion was selected as the version control system; the Subversion URI is https://kenai.com/svn/har~har-repository. If you are not very familiar with Subversion and do not have yet a preferred IDE, NetBeans 6.x comes in with a built-in integration with Subversion. Basically, if the Subversion client is already installed on your system --try which svn on a Unix-like system--, just select Tools->Subversion->Check Out... in NetBeans --have your Kenai login and password handy.

Below is a snapshot of what you should be ending with.

Dimitri Kravtchuk has released yesterday dim_STAT 8.3, a final maintenance update release before a big move to 9.0. Release 8.3 brings a series of bug fixes, improvements and new add-ons, including the latest version of the HAR hardware counter performance monitoring tool. Get all the details on dim's blog.