Deploying MySQL Database in Solaris Cluster Environments

MySQL™ database, an open source database, delivers high performance and reliability while keeping costs low by eliminating licensing fees. The Solaris™ Cluster product is an integrated hardware and software environment that can be used to create highly-available data services. This article explains how to deploy the MySQL database in a Solaris Cluster environment. The article addresses the following topics: * "Advantages of Deploying MySQL Database with Solaris Cluster" on page 1 discusses the benefits provided by a Solaris Cluster deployment of the MySQL database. * "Overview of Solaris Cluster" on page 2 provides a high-level description of the hardware and software components of the Solaris Cluster. * "Installation and Configuration" on page 8 explains the procedure for deploying the MySQL database on a Solaris Cluster. This article assumes that readers have a basic understanding of Solaris Cluster and MySQL database installation and administration.

Click to read more ...

Web Consolidation on the Sun Fire T1000 using Solaris Containers

Reducing the costs of IT infrastructure and improving the manageability and efficiency of web services pose significant challenges for many organizations in today's economic climate. Recent studies describe the challenges IT managers face administering the proliferation of x86-based servers used to run web services applications. Those reports reveal that using large number of x86-based systems can increase space and power consumption, as well as cost and asset management overhead. In addition, many of these x86-based systems run a mixture of operating system and application software leading to increased management complexity and potential security concerns. Faced with these challenges, many organizations are attracted by the idea of consolidating web and application services from multiple x86-based servers to a smaller number of high-performance servers. This approach strives to help simplify management, improve performance, and increase the efficiency of delivering web services. The combined capabilities of the Sun Fire T1000 server and Solaris Containers technology in particular offer significant promise as a web-tier consolidation platform. The Sun Fire T1000 server offers high aggregate throughput performance in a small, power-efficient footprint. Solaris containers provide a complete, isolated, and secure runtime environment for applications, enabling multiple web servers to run safely and efficiently on the same platform. This paper explores the configuration and testing of the Sun Fire T1000 server as a web-tier consolidation platform. It discusses methodologies used to consolidate multiple web servers onto a single Sun Fire T1000 server, and explains the steps used to configure the Solaris Containers. In addition, to determine the effectiveness of this approach, testing was performed to evaluate the consolidated Sun Fire T1000 system against a baseline configuration of current Xeon servers, a popular choice as web server platform.

Click to read more ...

Sun's High-Performance and Reliable Web Proxy Solution

As individuals and businesses depend on the Web more than ever to conduct business, rapid and reliable content retrieval is critical. Reducing wait time improves productivity and increases user satisfaction. Web proxy technology has emerged as an effective solution to improve performance, help ensure content availability and enhance network security by caching and filtering Web content. The combination of Sun SPARC Enterprise servers with CoolThreads technology and the Sun Java System Web Proxy Server software provides a compelling foundation for a robust Web proxy solution. Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000 and T2000 servers include the UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology, offering six or eight cores with four threads per core. The Sun Java System Web Proxy Server software is highly threaded and takes advantage of the large number of threads supported by Sun UltraSPARC T1 processors with CoolThreads technology. Together, these products provide a highly scalable solution that accommodates a large number of requests, addresses peak loads, and provides future headroom for growth. This document explores the use of a Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000 server and the Sun Java System Web Proxy Server software as a replacement for an existing Web proxy implementation that used the SQUID Web proxy server software deployed on x86 servers.

Click to read more ...

Breakthrough Web-Tier Solutions with Record-Breaking Performance

With the explosive growth of the Internet, increasing complexity of user requirements, and wide choice of hardware, operating systems, and middleware, IT executives are facing new challenges in their application infrastructures. Rapid expansion of the application tier has resulted in significant cost and complexity, and many organizations are simply running out of datacenter space, power, and cooling.

Click to read more ...

MySQL Database Scale-out and Replication for High Growth Businesses

It is widely recognized that MySQL is the most popular database software in the world. Since its inception in 1995, there have been 11 million product installations around the world in a wide variety of markets. There are more installations of MySQL in use today than any other database architecture. From startup companies hoping to be the next Web2.0 poster child to large global enterprises, the MySQL database architecture has proven to be flexible, extendable, scalable, and more than capable of filling high-capacity database roles in very different venues.

Click to read more ...

Sun FireTM X4540 Server as Backup Server for Zmanda's Amanda Enterprise 2.6 Software

Sun FireTM X4540 Server as Backup Server for Zmanda's Amanda Enterprise 2.6 Software by Thomas Hanvey (Sun Microsystems) and Dmitri Joukovski and Ken Crandall (Zmanda) September, 2008 Explosive data growth, combined with demanding requirements for data availability, has placed a tremendous burden on IT operations staff at businesses of all sizes. Yet, many organizations do not have the staff or budget to purchase and manage complex and expensive backup and recovery software products. The Sun FireTM X4540 server can deliver massive storage capacity and remarkable throughput so it is well-suited as a nearline storage platform for backup and restore applications. Combining the power of the SolarisTM 10 Operating System with the data integrity and simplified administration of ZFS, the Sun Fire X4540 server can be an ideal candidate for streamlining and improving backup and restore operations. Amanda Enterprise Edition from Zmanda was designed to address these challenges, providing a backup and recovery solution that combines fast installation, simplified management, enterprise-class functionality, and low-cost subscription fees. As an open source product, Amanda Enterprise Edition uses only standard formats and tools, effectively freeing you from being locked into a vendor to recover your archived data. This guide discusses how to quickly configure the Sun Fire X4540 server as a backup server for Amanda Enterprise Edition software.

Click to read more ...

An Open Source Web Solution - Lighttpd Web Server and Chip Multithreading Technology

With more users interacting, working, purchasing, and communicating over the network than ever before, Web 2.0 infrastructure is taking center stage in many organizations. Demand is rising, and companies are looking for ways to tackle the performance and scalability needs placed on Web infrastructure without raising IT operational expenses. Today companies are turning to efficient, high-performance, open source solutions as a way to decrease acquisition, licensing, and other ongoing costs and stay within budget constraints.

Click to read more ...

Tokyo Tech Tsubame Grid Storage Implementation

This Sun BluePrint article describes the storage architecture of the Tokyo Institute of Technology TSUBAME grid. The Tokyo Institute of Technology is of the world's leading technical institutes, and recently created the fastest supercomputer in Asia, and one of the largest supercomputers outside of the United States. By deploying Sun Fire x64 servers and data servers in a grid architecture, Tokyo Tech built a cost-effective and flexible supercomputer consisting of hundreds of systems, thousands of processors, terabytes of memory and a petabyte of storage that supports users running common off-the-shelf applications. This is the second of a three-article series. It describes the steps to install and configuring the Lustre file system within the storage architecture.

Click to read more ...

The Tokyo Institute of Technology Supercomputer Grid: Architecture and Performance Overview

One of the world's leading technical institutes, the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) created the fastest supercomputer in Asia, and one of the largest outside of the United States. Using Sun x64 servers and data servers deployed in a grid architecture, Tokyo Tech built a cost-effective, flexible supercomputer that meets the demands of compute and data-intensive applications. Built in just 35 days, the TSUBAME grid includes hundreds of systems incorporating thousands of processor cores and terabytes of memory, and delivers 47.38 trillion floating-point operations per second (TeraFLOPS) of sustained LINPACK benchmark performance and 1.1 petabyte of storage to users running common off-the-shelf applications. Based on the deployment architecture, the grid is expected to reach 100 TeraFLOPS in the future. This article provides an overview of the Tokyo Tech grid, named TSUBAME. The first in a series of Sun BluePrints articles on the TSUBAME grid, this document discusses the requirements and overall system architecture of the grid, as well as the tuning performed to achieve high LINPACK benchmark performance results.

Click to read more ...

Sun Customer Ready HPC Cluster: Reference Configurations with Sun Fire X4100, X4200, and X4600 Servers

The reference configurations described in this paper are starting points for building Sun Customer Ready HPC Clusters configured with the Sun Fire X4100, X4200, and X4600 families of servers. The configurations define how Sun Systems Group products can be configured in a typical grid rack deployment. This document describes configurations using Sun Fire X4100 and X4100 M2 servers with a Gigabit Ethernet data fabric and with a high-speed InfiniBand fabric. In addition, this document describes configurations using Sun Fire X4200, X4200 M2, X4600, and X4600 M2 servers with an InfiniBand data fabric. These configurations focus on single rack solutions, with external connections through uplink ports of the switches. These reference configurations have been architected using Sun's expertise gained in actual, real-world installations. Within certain constraints, as described in the later sections, the system can be tailored to the customer needs. Certain system components described in this document are only available through Sun's factory integration. Although the information contained here could be used during an integration on-site, the optimal benefit is achieved through Sun Customer Ready System integration.

Click to read more ...