Posts by BoydWaters

The differences that silicon can make to the desktop

Intel market segmentation defeats management solutions

Management is not going to get much better as long as Intel insists upon artificially disabling features in their chipsets and processors. Intel persues a market-segmentation strategy, which makes it impossible to procure systems that implement the silicon-aided managment and security features. I have been sifting through the Intel product database for weeks, trying to figure out how to deploy systems based upon Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) as well as error-correcting RAM, only to find that this is only supported in a handful of their highest-end server platforms. This nonsense is in stark contrast to AMD, who support ECC and and Secure Virtual Machine (SVM) on every chip they sell. (Some vendors do not support SVM in the BIOS, but many do so.) Intel thinks that we want McAfee anti-virus as part of vPro. Ha. I'd settle for ECC and TXT across all product lines.

Solaris, OpenSolaris, and the Oracle wall of secrecy

Real signs of progress

I am an OpenSolaris user and I've been following this issue closely these past two weeks, in an effort at deploying a ZFS-based SOHO server.

Updates to the development branch of OpenSolaris were frozen at build 134, in preparation for the 2010.03 release. I never saw that release, but Oracle posted an official update of thier "Open Storage" server software that seemed to incorporate those bits. Google for the "Fishworks" storage appliance.

Richard Lowe posted a "build 142" update to OpenSolaris at http://genunix.org last week. This drop shows active development to address performance issues with ZFS de-duplication, which is quite interesting to me. But I was advised to wait for the release of OpenSolaris 2010.H1 by another developer, who said that this new release would be out very soon. http://twitter.com/zalez

Your article is spot-on: Oracle have "gone dark" regarding any Sun development, an about-face to the blogging culture that many Sun developers enjoyed. What remains is not a controlled, focused message, but rather significant confusion. As a tech-head I can put up with some measure of this, but enterprise customers must stand by what little reassurance thier support contacts have to offer.