Archive for the 'Hardware' Category

I’m really starting to look forward to Sun being taken over by Oracle, especially if their current advertising battle is an indication of things to come.
In the on-going battle between Oracle and IBM, comes the latest TPC-C benchmark results which pit a 9 rack Sun/Oracle T5440/F5100 configuration (TPC-C results) against IBM’s monster 76 rack POWER [...]

In an interview (PDF) just posted on the Oracle site, Larry Ellison confirms his commitment to SPARC…

Once we own Sun we’re going to increase the investment in SPARC. We think designing our own chips is very, very important. Even Apple is designing its own chips these days. Right now, SPARC chips do some things [...]

The Sun Storage 7000 simulator has just been updated to reflect the changes introduced in the 2009.Q2.0.0 release of the “firmware” and at the same time a Virtualbox image of the simulator has been released (get it here)
I’ve been waiting for this for a while as I don’t have VMWare and didn’t really want to [...]

Updating the firmware on an Ultra 20 is a really simple matter: download the “Tools and Drivers” ISO image, burn it to DVD (as it’s about 1.3GB), boot from the DVD and select option 2 to perform the update.
However, it very quickly becomes way more complicated if you don’t have a DVD burner or [...]

Ahead of today’s Macworld keynote speech it’s been revealed Apple will be introducing a revolutionary new laptop with no keyboard. Instead it’ll have a giant touch wheel…
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard
You’ve got to love The Onion.

If you’re ever had concerns about the effect of noise on your disk performance, let Brendan Gregg put your mind at rest. Thanks to the brilliant Analytics (aka Dtrace with a brilliant web interface) on the a Sun Storage 7410 we can clearly see noise does have an effect, and in this extreme case [...]

Oooo, I like. I think I best start saving.
Update: Ok, I don’t think I want one anymore now that I’ve read into it a bit more. It looks lovely, but it has a lot of limitations.

Following the most recent data loss by HMRC, they and other companies should seriously start considering dumping laptops in favour of Sun’s Sunray technology for their “Work from home” users, and maybe even all of their normal desktop users.
For those who don’t know, Sunray is a secure, truly stateless device that effectively presents a working [...]

Sun has now announced the much anticipated UltraSPARC T2 (aka Niagara 2) processor to the world, and under the GPL too.
The T2 is quite a beast too… it’s ONE chip with 8 cores that provides the capability of running 64 threads simultaneously. Add to that multi-threaded 10 Gb ethernet networking, crypto acceleration, PCI-Express I/O [...]