thin slice: a thin slice of business intelligence news and views

After the announcements from Oracle Open World and new TPC benchmark, a lot of focus has been on Sun and the innovation DNA that drives the company.  The announcements focus on flash and their increasing use in computing: 

• Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe Card

• Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array

So what is the secret sauce in these?  These are essentially caching data and are made up of 94GB (4 x 24GB modules) of single-level cell NAND flash, in the F20 card and a staggering 1.92TB (80 modules) for the F5100 flash array.

The F5100 Flash Array has 64 SAS lanes (16 x 4-wide ports), 4 domains and SAS zoning, It can perform 1.6m read IOPS and 1.2M write IOPS, with a bandwidth of 12.8GB/sec.

This read IOPS figure is equivalent to 3,000 hard drives in 14 rack cabinets. The F5100 uses 1/100th of the space and power, of such a collection of hard drives.

This is an amazing database accelerator for Oracle and MySQL. The unit can be zoned into 16 partitions, one for each of up to 16 hosts. The device can form part of a Sun ZFS hybrid storage pool, embracing solid state and hard disk drives.

Further Notes: Sequential Read = 9.7GB/sec; Read/Write Latency (1M transfers) = 0.41ms/0.28ms; Average Power 300 watts (Idle = 213W ; 100% = 386W).  More spec info here.

So if you have need to speed up your Databases, Storage grids, HPC computing or Financial modeling look at what flash SSDs can offer.

Download the Sun Flash Analyzer and install on your server and see where SSDs can help accelerate system performance today.

It won't be long before all computers come with flash as standard as either a separate or hybrid disk to speed up response times . . . OpenSolaris can already do this today with ZFS Storage Pools.

Sun last week announced the release of the latest version of the Sun Java Communications Suite (what a mouthful), it's now version 7!

So what are the key products and features?

• Calendar Server 7, with CalDAV support, enabling interoperability with Mac iCal/iPhone and Mozilla Thunderbird.
• Sun Convergence 1 U3,  provides an AJAX rich client web experience for all the components.
• Indexing and Search Service 1, provides real time indexing and search of messaging and attachments.
• Instant Messaging 8, supporting standards compliant IM for fixed and mobile users.
• Messaging Server 7 U3, the latest highly scalable, secure and high performing messaging platform.
  

 Interested?  

1. Do you have over 1,000 users of communications/collaboration software?
2. Is your Communications/Collaboration solution critical to the success of your business?
3. What is the total cost of ownership of your current communications/collaboration implementation? Or, how much are you spending per month to keep this solution up and running?
4. Are you locked into a single vendor's proprietary communications solution or do you have choice through open standards?
5. Are you worried about your implementation's susceptibility to viruses, worms, and spam?

Hot on the heels of the previous WSJ ads is this teaser for launch 15th Sept @1PM PST:

What is it? this is the blurb from the teaser: "the world’s first OLTP database machine with Sun FlashFire technology"

It's great to see some collaboration and new technology

You can sign up for the webcast here.

Great news, as seen in the Wall Street Journal:

Oracle promises to invest in SPARC and Solaris technology. Thanks Larry

Footnote: I should add that it's not just thanks to Larry, but Charles, Safra and the other 85,000 employees too.

As a definite power user of StarOffice there are times when the tool doesn't really help, or actually makes it difficult to do your job.

Thankfully with an open extension framework other can submit ideas and create improvements for all.

A great example of this is DataPilot Tools for OpenOffice.org Calc.

Using DataPilot (similar to Pivot tables within Excel) in StarOffice can be a bit tiresome as it doesn't tell you what the range is that feeds the DataPilot, so if you suddenly have more data or what to make sure all the data is included you can't.

That's where this handy extension comes in, it gets added as part of the DataPilot toolbar menu and tells you:

• what the source data range is
• can update the source data range
• provides and option for refreshing all the DataPilots.

Great news, thanks Peter!

Javaone may be over, but that doesn't mean the learning has to stop, PDF versions of the technical session slides are available to SDN members here.

How can you win?   Share what you have learned either attending or via the presentations.  Blog about the sessions and follow the contest rules and you will get entered into the chance to win one of ten USD $300 American Express Gift Cards.

Get cracking ! ! !

Java is everywhere, it's on computers, mobile phones, blu-ray players and next week the world's largest developer conference happens in San Francisco.

But you don't have to travel to the US to rub shoulders with the techies.

You can chat with the authors of the latest Sun Microsystems Press books in Second Life next week!

And there's tons of downloads available from the site: http://java.sun.com/javaone/

As a plug I've update my blog theme.

A lot has been happening recently with little spare time so here's some catch up items:

Sun announced last month that it has beta testing (internally) a cloud option within Sun.  So what's the Cloud appeal?  2 items really:

1. Allowing faster implementation - once cloud infrastructure and applications are in place, connecting or adding new services is much faster.

2. Reduces the infrastructure companies need to have on-site, reducing complexity and costs (hopefully). 

So how does this pan out for normal workers?  An example is utilising an extension for StarOffice/OpenOffice. It's very easy:

1. Install the extension for StarOffice:

2. Log in to the cloud, with ID and password.

3. Save and Open from the menu as you do normally:

It means I now have an online archive where I can access files from anywhere (so long as I setup and remember the cloud details) and no need to email them to myself or anything like that, or making sure I know what the latest version is.