sunflash-Distributed to mailing list sun/NC/north-carolina sunflash-Send requests, problems to owner-sunflash@suntri.east.sun.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Florida SunFlash Third Party Product Announcements SunFLASH Vol 58 #16 October 1993 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Abstracts 58.16.A New Aurora 32 Port Synchronous comms server Server features on-board dedicated RISC processing, hardware flow control, and multi-protocol support for improved system performance and reliability 58.16.B Box Hill Systems Corporation and SunIntegration join forces SunIntegration Services has announced an agreement with Box Hill Systems Corporation to resell Box Hill Hot-Swappable Removable Storage Subsystems, the Box Hill RAID Box, and the Box Hill Tape Box and Media Changers. 58.16.C SBus Compressed Memory Card/solid State Disk CERAM has announced the availability of a new, higher-speed version of its popular TurboCard compressed memory SBus card/solid state disk. 58.16.D CRUSHER, The Compressed File System CRUSHER is a new file system type that provides users the capability to create compressed partitions on any disk drive. Data written to or read from the partition will be automatically compressed/decompressed transparently on-the-fly. 58.16.E O'Reilly's GNN launched free Internet-based information center, is up and running. GNN consists of a regular weekly news service, an online magazine, The Online Whole Internet Catalog, and a global marketplace containing information about products and services. 58.16.F O'Reilly ORACLE Tuning book We have just released this book that pulls together the experiences of many ORACLE system users and administrators who have learned how to tune their ORACLE systems 58.16.G O'Reilly's X Resource Issue 8 featured articles include: "The X User: Drawing Figures With Xfig," by David Flanagan, "Imakefile Troubleshooting," by Paul DuBois, etc. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Details -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: New Aurora comms server From: balasco@auratek.com (Alfred P. Balasco) Contact: Aurora Technologies Phone; (617) 290-4800 FAX: (617) 290-4844 Emai: sales@auratek.com AURORA INTRODUCES 32 PORT SYNCHRONOUS COMMUNICATIONS SERVER FOR HIGH-SPEED SPARC WIDE AREA NETWORKS Server features on-board dedicated RISC processing, hardware flow control, and multi-protocol support for improved system performance and reliability Waltham, MA, October 19, 1993 -- Aurora Technologies today introduced a synchronous communications server that adds 32 serial communication lines to any SPARC system from a single SBus slot. The 3200S+ is designed for the growing number of applications, like financial data, radar and satellite signal feeds, which depend on the speed, reliability and security of synchronous communications. The high-capacity server combines 80 MIPS dedicated RISC processors, extended DMA double buffers, and flow control processing to assume I/O workloads from the host CPU. The results are consistently higher data throughput levels, guaranteed data integrity, up to 128Kbps per line transmission speed, and a marked improvement in system performance. Since the server is SBus-based, it adds no traffic to already overtaxed network bandwidth. The 3200S+ supports several standard communication protocols for off-the-shelf compatibility with existing network infrastructures. Aurora's Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) offers low-cost remote links with other workstations, PCs, and mobile computers over standard phone lines. Aurora also offers X.25 software, which is widely used by organizations with international networks. For users who want to build custom software, Aurora offers the link-layer protocols HDLC and SDLC, and application programming interfaces (API). The modular design of the 3200S+ permits easy customization with a variety of hardware options, and inexpensive scalability through its entire family of SBus serial communication products which supply from 4 to 128 ports. Aurora offers rack-mountable DB-25 or RJ45 connectors to match existing wiring schemes. With DB-25 connectors, users can choose from RS-232, RS-422 (for connections to 4,000 feet), and RS-485 (for multiple connections along a single serial line) signals. For added flexibility, each port can be configured separately to support asynchronous or synchronous peripheral devices. The 3200S+ driver supports Solaris 1.X or 2.X running on the SS1, SS1+, SS2, IPC, IPX, MP600, SS10, SPARCserver 1000/2000, SPARCclassic, SPARCstation LX, SPARC Engine 1E/2E, and most compatibles. The 3200S+ is now shipping. Unit price is $5999.00. Aurora Technologies, Inc., engineers, manufactures, and markets a complete range of workstation performance enhancement and expansion products that provide the foundation for business-wide open systems solutions based on the SPARC architecture. These include SBus terminal and peripheral servers, system expansion products, networking communications products, and imaging and OCR software. Aurora products are designed to offer users, resellers, and OEMs broad functionality and easy systems integration. Founded in 1988 by members of Sun Microsystems' marketing and engineering teams, Aurora is a member of SPARC International and a Strategic level member of Sun's third- party developer Catalyst program. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Box Hill Systems Corporation and SunIntegration join forces From: info@boxhill.com Contact: Box Hill Systems Corp. SunIntegration Services Cheryl Sidote David Callahan cheryl@boxhill.com David.Callahan@West.Sun.COM 212/989-4455 310/607-2474 800/727-3863 SUN INTEGRATION SERVICES AGREES TO RESELL BOX HILL HIGH-AVAILABILITY STORAGE MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS New York, N.Y. (October 8, 1993) -- SunIntegration Services has announced an agreement with Box Hill Systems Corporation to resell Box Hill Hot-Swappable Removable Storage Subsystems, the Box Hill RAID Box, and the Box Hill Tape Box and Media Changers. Box Hill Storage Subsystems come in a variety of enclosures with removable "hot-swappable" disk and tape drives, offering capacities ranging from 200 MB to 50 GB of data. Each drive module can be easily removed for upgrading, replacement, or maintenance, creating a high-availability mass storage subsystem. The Box Hill RAID Box is a Redundant Array of Independent Disks that implements level 5 R.A.I.D. to provide a new level of on-line disk storage protection against potential disk faults. The RAID Box utilizes a 17, 12, 9, 8, 6, or 4 GB high-speed, fault-tolerant disk array of "hot-swappable" drives to eliminate computer downtime due to a disk failure. The Box Hill Tape Box is a dedicated network tape server for tape drives and media changers. Data is sent directly from any workstation on a network to the Tape Box via standard TCP/IP protocols. The Tape Box then writes any specified tape format to the tape device. Just add the Tape Box to an Ethernet LAN and connect a Box Hill Tape Drive or Media Changer. The Tape Box and Box Hill Media Changer can back-up from 16 GB to over 1 Terabyte of data without any operator intervention. The Tape Box and Box Hill Media Changer can also back-up Sybase databases. Box Hill Systems Corporation develops and manufactures a comprehensive line of high-availability UNIX storage management solutions and network backup products. For further information, please contact your local SunIntegration Services Resource or Box Hill Systems Corporation, 161 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York, 10013; Phone: (212)989-4455 or (800)727-3863; FAX: (212)989-6817; email: cheryl@boxhill.com. All products mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: SBus Compressed Memory Card/solid State Disk email: info@ceram.com phone: 1-800-237-8600 CERAM has announced the availability of a new, higher-speed version of its popular TurboCard compressed memory SBus card/solid state disk. The new version of the card supports larger SBus burst transfers and achieves measured data rates of higher than 8 MBytes per second (for fully random access of data on a SPARCserver 10 model 51). The new higher-speed TurboCard supports more than 2000 IO operations per second or 500 to 1000 database transactions per second. TurboCard is an SBus memory card with built in loss-less data compression to boost memory capacity and speed. TurboCard incorporates the world's fastest data compression engine! Supported uses for TurboCard include: SOLID STATE DISK (raw and block IO supported, volatile storage) SWAP MEMORY NFS CACHE (optional software available) NEW-> DISK CACHE (optional software available) Used as swap device TurboCard effectively BLOWS AWAY MEMORY LIMITATIONS. Put up to almost 1GByte of memory on any Sun machine! And, because its compressed memory, it's much less expensive per MB than other memory upgrades; especially for memory upgrades of 256MB or higher! Used as Disk Cache TurboCard IMPROVES AVERAGE RESPONSE TIME of file servers and database servers by a factor of 10 to 100! FREE SYSTEM PERFORMANCE MONTIOR UTILITY identifies memory and IO bottlenecks which can be eliminated with TurboCard. email turbotool@ceram.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: CRUSHER, The Compressed File System From: ed@magma.COM (Ed Romascan) Contact: Michael Seidel Phone: (800) 285-8990 (619) 457-0750 FAX: (619) 457-0798 email: sales@magma.com CRUSHER, The Compressed File System Now Available for Classics and LXs running SunOS 4.1.3C and Older Sun 3 and Sun 4 Systems Running SunOS 4.1.1 CRUSHER is a new file system type that provides users the capability to create compressed partitions on any disk drive. Data written to or read from the partition will be automatically compressed/decompressed transparently on-the-fly. The compressed files appear in all respects identical to UFS files. CRUSHER typically delivers a 2:1 compression ratio. CRUSHER supports all file types, including directories, executables, plain files, sparse files, links, sockets, mapped files, mail and files from custom applications. All system ad- ministration tools, programming languages, office productivity tools and CAD programs will operate in concert with CRUSHER. CRUSHER will operate with On-Line Disk Suite, Open Windows, Motif, X Windows and other GUIs. Compressed partitions can be created on a server and NFS mounted from any client. Diskless clients can even boot from compressed exported file systems. Tests show that SPARC executables compress at a 1.7:1 ratio, /usr/openwin compresses at a 2.1:1 ratio and data files usually compress above 2.5:1. Installation is simple using an automatic installation script. No kernel reconfiguration or recompiling of programs is necessary. CRUSHER is a true UNIX file system that only operates on the data being used, not a application that selectively compresses and decompresses entire files. At no time is it necessary to have a space wasting uncompressed version of a file hanging around on your disk, no reserved disk space is needed to decompress files. Files on disk drives, Magneto-Optical drives and floppies can be compressed. CRUSHER is available for Sun 3 and Sun 4 systems running SunOS 4.1.1, Sun 4c and Sun 4m systems running SunOS 4.1.x, and Classics and LXs running SunOS 4.1.3C. Solaris 2 versions for SPARC and X86 systems will be available soon. CRUSHER also operates on all laptops and clones that meet the above specifications. CRUSHER is priced at $189 for workstations, $489 for servers. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: O'Reilly's GNN launched From: Brian Erwin Org: O'Reilly & Associates Address: 103A Morris Street, Sebastopol CA 95472 Phone: 707-829-0515 Fax: 707-829-0104 Global Network Navigator *Launched* An Internet-based Information Center O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. Free Subscription (send mail to info@gnn.com) The Global Network Navigator (GNN), our free Internet-based information center, is up and running. GNN consists of a regular weekly news service, an online magazine, The Online Whole Internet Catalog, and a global marketplace containing information about products and services. Global Network Navigator is an application of the World Wide Web (WWW), developed at CERN in Switzerland. Most of the current development on World Wide Web technology is centered at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Champaign, Illinois. NCSA's Mosaic is a World Wide Web browser available for UNIX systems with beta versions for PC Windows and the Macintosh also available. Any World Wide Web browsers can be used to access GNN as well as other network services such as gopher and WAIS. What's in the first issue The premier issue of GNN Magazine assesses the public interest in tapping the potential of the Internet. The U.S. Government seems to be looking at the Internet as the model for a National Data Superhighway. This infrastructure can work for many people, including businesses, but just how will it work and who will pay for it? Some interesting factoids * GNN has 600 (not around, not approximately, but 600 on the nose) outside links * GNN has 5,088 internal and external links * GNN has 44,978 lines, 230,703 words, and 1,918,553 characters. If we printed this out on a printer getting 60 lines per page, we'd see a stack of 749 pages, probably about 3 inches thick. How To Subscribe To subscribe to Global Network Navigator, send email to info@gnn.com. If you are interested in space in GNN's Marketplace, send mail to Linda Walsh at linda@ora.com. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: O'Reilly ORACLE Tuning book From: Brian Erwin ORACLE Performance Tuning By Peter Corrigan & Mark Gurry 642 pages, ISBN: 1-56592-048-1, $34.95 (US) We have just released this book that pulls together the experiences of many ORACLE system users and administrators who have learned how to tune their ORACLE systems --running either RDBMS Version 6 or Version 7--to best advantage. It answers questions like: - "I've been waiting 30 minutes for a response to my query-- what's going on?" - "My system administrator says our system is I/O-bound-- what can I do?" - "Our application ran fine in testing, but the response is terrible now that we're in production--help!" - "Our backups take too long--how can we speed them up?" It is written for managers, designers, programmers, database administrators, and system administrators, interested in dramatically increasing the performance of existing ORACLE system. Chapter 1: Introduction to ORACLE Performance Tuning Chapter 2: What Causes Performance Problems? Chapter 3: Planning and Managing the Tuning Process Chapter 4: Defining System Standards Chapter 5: Designing Your Data Model for Performance Chapter 6: Defining Indexes Chapter 7: Tuning SQL Chapter 8: Tuning PL/SQL Chapter 9: Tuning SQL*Forms Chapter 10: Selecting a Locking Strategy Chapter 11: Tuning a New Database Chapter 12: Diagnostic and Tuning Tools Chapter 13: Monitoring and Tuning an Existing Database Chapter 14: Tuning the Data Dictionary Chapter 15: Tuning Long-running Jobs Chapter 16: Tuning in the Client-server Environment Chapter 17: Capacity Planning Chapter 18: Tuning for Specific Systems Appendix A: Planning for Version 7 Appendix B: Hot Tuning Tips Appendix C: Tuning ORACLE Financials ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This and other O'Reilly products are available in the Americas and Japan through bookstores, or directly from the publisher. Access our gopher catalog by "telnet gopher.ora.com" (log in as "gopher"). To contact us: telephone 707-829-0515 (800-998-9938 in US & Canada); FAX 707-829-0104; email order@ora.com; or write O'Reilly & Associates, 103A Morris St., Sebastopol, CA, 95472, USA. GSA # GS-02F-6095A. Our international distributors are: * Europe (except German-speaking countries), Middle East, and Africa through International Thomson Publishing, Berkshire House, 168-173 High Holborn, London WC1V 7AA, UK. Telephone 44-71-497-1422; FAX 44-71-497-1426; or email samantha.jones@itpuk.co.uk * German-speaking countries through International Thomson Publishing, Konigswinterer Strasse 418, 53227 Bonn, Germany. Telephone 49-228-445171; FAX 49-228-441342; or email 100272.2422@compuserve.com * Asia through International Thomson Publishing, 221 Henderson Rd., #05-10 Henderson Building, Singapore 0315. Telephone 65-272-6496; FAX 65-272-6498 * Australia and New Zealand through WoodsLane, Unit 8, 101 Darley Street, Mona Vale, NSW 2103, Australia. Telephone 61-2-979-5944; FAX 61-2-997-3348; or email woods@tmx.mhs.oz.au -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Brian Erwin Subject: O'Reilly's X Resource Issue 8 The X Resource: Issue 8 Edited by Adrian Nye 170 pages, ISBN: 1-56592-023-6, $22.50 We have just published Issue 8 of The X Resource. Here are the featured articles: DEPARTMENTS - "The X User: Drawing Figures With Xfig," by David Flanagan - "Imakefile Troubleshooting," by Paul DuBois - "Best of Netnews," Edited by Marc Albert PAPERS - "Xm++: Another Way to Program the X Toolkit," by Bernhard Strassl - "Current Efforts in Client/Server Audio," by George V. Neville-Neil - "Widget Architecture for Data Display," by David Flanagan - "xtent 3.0: Improvements on Programming with Resources," by Doug Blewett and Meg Kilduff DOCUMENTATION - "The Multi-Buffering Extension: Smooth Animation Effortlessly," by Tom Gaskins We're looking for material for future issues of The X Resource. If you have an article or paper you'd like to write, send a message to editor Adrian Nye at adrian@ora.com. ********************************************************************** For information about SunFlash send mail to info-sunflash@Sun.COM. Subscription requests should be sent to sunflash-request@Sun.COM. Archives are on draco.nova.edu, ftp.uu.net, sunsite.unc.edu, src.doc.ic.ac.uk and ftp.adelaide.edu.au All prices, availability, and other statements relating to Sun or third party products are valid in the U.S. only. Please contact your local Sales Representative for details of pricing and product availability in your region. Descriptions of, or references to products or publications within SunFlash does not imply an endorsement of that product or publication by Sun Microsystems. Send brief articles (e.g. third party announcements) and include contact information (non-800#, fax #, email, etc) to: John McLaughlin, SunFlash editor, flash@Sun.COM. +1 305 351 4909