This Data Center Knowledge article describes how a part of The Internet Archive is moving into a Sun MD data center container. More than two petabytes of data will be stored in the 20-foot-long container.

This article describes Sun’s $30M deal with Australia’s BOM to build a supercomputer cluster.

Located at BOM in Melbourne and the ANU in Canberra, the HPC environments will have more than 2500 Sun Blade (1500 at ANU, 1000 at BOM) server modules based on the new Intel “Nehalem” Xeon processor.

Multiple sources this morning indicate that IBM may be in talks to acquire Sun Microsystems.

The Wall Street Journal, quoting “people familiar with the matter,” reported Wednesday that International Business Machines was in talks to buy Sun for at least $6.5 billion in cash, a premium of more than 100 percent over the company’s closing share price Tuesday. Officials of Sun and IBM could not immediately be reached for comment.

No matter what happens, SunHELP will stick around. I’ve worked on this for twelve years now, I’m not about to give up and quit!

I posted a modified version of this post to the SunHELP, Geeks, and Rescue mailing lists a few days ago.

A status update on the machine that hosts all these lists, SunHELP, an IRC server, and lots of folks’ DNS, email handling, shell accounts, and web sites (all for free):

The long-delayed upgrade of ohno.mrbill.net from an E420R (quad 450s, 4G RAM, dual 18G hard drives) to a T1000 (8 cores, 32 threads, 8G RAM) will finally happen in the next 30-60 days. I’ll be going to S10u6 with ZFS root of course.

Users of the system and members of the mailing lists have contributed financially, and I’ll be upgrading the factory 80G drive in the T1000 to a Western Digital RE3 “Raid Edition” 1-terabyte drive. In addition, a WD “Caviar Green” WD10EADS drive will be going into my rsnapshot server at home to back up the system remotely. I’d prefer to have mirrored drives in the T1K, but that’s not possible given that it only has space for a single 3.5″ drive – the second drive would have to be in a reliable rackmount eSATA enclosure.

If you have gotten use and enjoyment out of the sites, lists, and services I provide (12 years and counting so far!) and would like to contribute to the upgrade fund, email and please let me know.

There will be a few hours of downtime over a weekend sometime in the next couple of months. I’ll provide plenty of warning for the outage.

Sun has introduced new Flash-based solid state disks (SSDs) built around Intel technology. The new disks are available on Sun Blade, CMT, and 64 servers and storage systems.

The SSDs are available in a capacity of 32G and use Single-Level Cell (SLC) NAND Flash memory. Form factor is the industry-standard 2.5″, and sequential I/O performance is up to 250M/sec for reads and 170M/sec for writes.