Scout Thread and Rock

Interesting article on upcoming Rock CPU focused mostly on Scout Thread technology.

Nevada New Features

Some selected by me new features in last several builds up-to build 88

• New mega_sas driver which supports the LSI SAS1078 SAS RAID Storage Adapters and Dell PERC 5/E, 5/i, 6E, 6/i and CERC 6/i RAID Controllers
• Project Brussels has been integrated - standarized and easy way to configure network interfaces (no more custom ndd scripts, etc.)
• 3D driver for ATI Radeon
• xVM - aka XEN has been integrated
• NEw native CIFS server
  
• CIFS client inegrated
• Default router for a Zone
  
• DTrace NFSv3 Provider
• DTrace NFSv4 Provider
• ZFS L2ARC
• ZFS cachefile property (quicker imports for large SANs)
  
• ZFS zpool failmode
• Several network and wifi drivers have been integrated

Of course there is much much more.

128 Virtual CPUs in 1U

Sun has revealed two new Niagara servers: T5140 and T5240. Both of them have two UltraSparcT2+ processors which gives you 16 physical cores in a system with 128 threads in total. T5240, which is 2U version, also allows you to put up-to 16 SAS disks and up-to 128GB of memory - wow!

Prices - recently Sun re-priced old Niagara systems and now you can buy T5240 with 2x Niagara for the same price you could buy old 1x CPU Niagara system just a week ago - cool.

While T2+ has slighlty faster memory controllers but it has only two of them per CPU instead of four in T2... I wonder how it will impact performance.

Couple of technical blogs on new servers: 1 2 3 4

Solaris Cluster 3.2 U1

Change log:

Core enhancements:

• Support for Logical Domains
• Support of EMC SRDF in a campus cluster configuration
• Support for Sun StorageTek NAS storage
• 8 nodes cluster configuration with x64 servers
• Support for Veritas File System on x64 servers
• Service Tags
• GUI enhancements

Geographic Edition enhancements:

• Support for Oracle RAC 10g/11g with EMC SRDF & HDS TrueCopy
• Support for HDS TrueCopy on X64 servers
• Support for EMC SRDF/S on X64 servers
• Support for Solaris Containers

New supported applications and agents:

• Oracle 11g RAC supported with Solaris Cluster on SPARC
• New applications version supported
• Support for Solaris Containers for Linux and Solaris 8 in HA Container Agent