ORACLE COMPLETES ACQUISITION OF SUN MICROSYSTEMS:

Following EU approval, Oracle has completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Many of our clients were concerned about the future of Sun hardware. Oracle has now stated their plans and we are pleased to confirm that all elements of the hardware stack including M-Series servers, T-Series, X86 servers and storage will be intrinsic elements of the Oracle value proposition. In summary, these are some of the changes that you should expect:

• Oracle bundled "appliance" offers comprising Oracle licenses and hardware in the style of Exadata-II
  
• Increased focus on Professional Services offering prospective clients a "one stop shop"
  
• Focus on mission critical systems based on Linux & Solaris. Oracle will continue to offer entry level X86 servers but with a focus on sophisticated deployments rather than the Windows mass market.
  
• Improvements to the Service offering with end-to-end support from the application layer through to hardware.

For more news: Click Here

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NEW SUN M3000 SERVER CONFIGURATION:

Oracle has announced a new 2.75Ghz version of the M3000 server. The new configuration requires Solaris 10 Update 6 or higher. Memory performance has also been improved with the adoption of 667Mhz modules as opposed to the previous 533Mhz technology.

For more information: Click Here

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ORACLE DOUBLE MEMORY CAPACITY FOR M4000 & M5000 SERVERS:

With the introduction of 8GB DIMMS, memory capacity for the Sun SPARC
Enterprise M4000 and M5000 has increased to 256GB and 512GB
respectively. Upgrades from 2GB and 4GB DIMMS are available. Please note
that firmware updates may be required in order to support the new DIMMs.

For more information: Click Here

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NEW M5000 SERVER PROMOTION FOR FEBRUARY:

Order one or more M5000 servers from BSI during the month of February
and receive an Apple iPAD with our compliments. Delivery of iPADs is
currently scheduled for March. (Offer is limited to one iPAD per
company)

For more information: Click Here

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NEW SUN BLADE 6000 OPTIONS:

The Sun Blade 6000 is the only server Blade solution that supports Intel
Nehalem, AMD and SPARC based Blades within the same 10U enclosure.
Supported Operating Systems include Solaris, Red Hat Linux and Windows.
Oracle has announced enhanced connectivity for high performance
environments with an I/O interface comprising of 14x 10Gb Ethernet
uplinks and 10x 10Gb downlinks. The 10Gb infrastructure provides ultra
low latency switching at 300ns with the non-blocking ports providing
aggregated bandwidth of 360 Million packets per second and 480Gbps. In
addition, link aggregation allows multiple SFP+ ports to be bonded
together to form ultra-fast pipes.

For more information: Click Here

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END OF SERVICE LIFE ON STORAGETEK PRODUCTS:

Following the acquisition of Storagetek, Sun Microsystems continued to
provide hardware support on legacy tape libraries and storage solutions.
The majority of these products have now reached end of service life. If
you have a legacy Storagetek branded solution, we would be delighted to
advise you on to the most appropriate upgrade path.

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SUN StorageTek 6180 REPLACES 6140 ARRAY:

The SUN StorageTek 6140 array has now been discontinued and is replaced
by the 6180 array. The 6180 provides enhanced performance and uses 8GB/s
Fibre Channel host ports. Existing Sun Storagetek 6140 users can migrate
to the 6180 by replacing the RAID controllers. Other enhancements within
the 6180 include:

• 60% improvement in throughput using a faster internal bus and faster CPUs
  
• Improved redundancy through persistent Cache backup
  
• Support for self-encrypting drives which will be available at a later date
  
• Support for Solid State Disks which will be available in a future announcement

For more information: Click Here

SOLARIS 2.6 and SOLARIS 7 VINTAGE SUPPORT:

Oracle has terminated Vintage support for Solaris 2.6 and Solaris 7.
With this announcement, all legacy patches are being withdrawn and will
no longer be available to anyone. It is therefore highly recommended to
migrate to a newer supported platform.

NEW 600GB 15k rpm FC-AL DISK DRIVE OPTIONS:

Oracle has announced a new 600GB FC-AL disk drive option for the Sun
Storage 6000 series and related expansion trays. The new higher capacity
drives reduce infrastructure footprint, power, cooling and management
costs.

For more information: Click Here

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ORACLE ENDS OEM AGREEMENT WITH RED HAT & VMware:

Oracle will no longer be selling Red Hat & VMware license subscription
and associated support as of the 12th March. Existing agreements can be
migrated to Red Hat or VMware by Business Systems International who
manage subscriptions for UK clients at competitive costs. All current
and future Sun X86 servers will continue to be certified for VMware and
at least two versions of Red Hat Enterprise. 

Red Hat Enterprise: Click Here

VMware: Click Here

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NEW Sun Fire X4640, 48 CORE SERVER:

The Sun Fire X4640 replaces the very popular X4600 8-socket AMD Opteron
server. The X4640 uses the same 4U chassis design but now supports
6-core AMD ("Istanbul") processors for a maximum of 48 Cores per
chassis.  The Sun Fire X6540 features four on-board Gigabit Ethernet
ports, four hot-swap SAS disk drives, up to 512GB memory, six PCI-e
slots and 2 PCI-X slots.

For more information: Click Here

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SUN FLASH ACCELERATOR F20 PCIe CARD:

The Sun Flash Accelerator F20 card is a PCI-e disk controller that
incorporates up to 96GB of solid-state Flash storage. The F20 Flash
Accelerator forms part of the Oracle Exadata-II solution. The Sun Flash
Accelerator delivers the I/O performance equalling that of up to 300
disk drives to accelerate applications, reduce storage latencies and
eliminate I/O bottlenecks without consuming disk slots. The integrated
disk controller allows support and management of a Solaris ZFS Hybrid
Storage Pool consisting of both Flash memory and disk drives. On initial
release the F20 card is supported in the SunFire X4270, Sun SPARC
Enterprise T5120, T5140, T5220, T5240 and T5440.

For more information: Click Here

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SATA DRIVES REACH 2TB CAPACITY:

Oracle has announced 2TB 7200rpm SATA disk drives for the J4200, J4400
and J4500 storage enclosures. Supported operating systems include
Solaris 10, Windows 2003, Red Hat Linux and SUSE Linux.

For more Information - J4200 : Click Here

For more Information - J4400 : Click Here

For more Information - J4500 : Click Here

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ANNOUNCING VERITAS STORAGE FOUNDATION v5.1:

Storage Foundation v5.1 incorporates some important enhancements
including:

• Simplified installation with the removal of license keys
  
• Support for IP v6
  
• Support for mixed SSD and HDD environments with Dynamic Storage
  Tiering
  
• Supports data migration between different operating systems.
  
• Database support functionality is now included for free in the base
  package

In addition to new functionality; two options are now available for
licensing. A tiered pricing model for the SPARC platform only, and a per
processor model for SPARC & X86

For more Information: Click Here