Solaris Containers (otherwise known as Zones, although there is a minor distinction) are a slightly different type of virtualization, if you use a wide-ish generic term.

There's a very good Q&A on Consolidating Servers and Applications with Solaris Containers on the Sun Dialogue Programs page.

There are some limits to the Solaris Container (they are designed to provide multiple Solaris containers - there is no emulation of other operating systems, although a Linux container module is showing some promise), but for compartmentalizing multiple Solaris applications (and web application serving is a good example) they are a more efficient virtualization model than some other solutions.

You might have guessed that I'm keen on virtualization technology. I see its usefulness as falling into a number of categories, from a useful test and development environment, through to improving and making better use of your hardware environment.

For that latter purpose, there are some good tips on Understanding Virtualization.

There's also another virtualization product on the horizon that I haven't investigated fully yet. Parallels. A Test Drive is available at Newsforge, and you can download a 45-day free trial at the Parallels website.

Unless you missed the hubbub, Sun are offering the T1000/T2000 on 'Try and Buy', and I'm sure there's has been a recent spurt because of Jonathan Schwartz's suggestion that receivers that provide good reviews might be allowed to keep them.

Now I'm no stranger to Sun kit, having reviewed a few items before now. Earlier this year, I also reviewed the Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation and that review will be hitting a website soon.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) promises lots, not least of which is the ability to migrate your SOA application to a grid like environment.

Actually migrating your applications and realizing the difference it can make is a different story. But DreamWorks have managed it, They've converted many of their internal ERP applications into SOA applications, and that has reduced their server requirements, giving more rack space to the server farms that render CGI animation.

In one of my first posts here at ComputerWorld, I talked about the Nokia 770 as a potentially useful business device, along the lines of the pads you see frequently in Star Trek. Finally they are beginning to appear in the hands of reviewers and interested users, and there's a good example here. There are also reviews here and here.

There are few things more likely to put you in a bad mood first thing on a Monday morning than the power going off at 8:45am. Not only was this minutes before I was due to start work, it was also just seconds before I was about to make my first cup of the coffee for the day!

As usual, I double checked that everything was working fine on the UPSs, and waited 10 minutes, before safely shutting the servers down a full half hour before the UPS batteries would have run out. I wait ten minutes, just in case it's a minor blip, and I always shutdown early if I can so that there is some juice left in the batteries in case I need to bring the machines back up to get some information.

Whenever you talk about a GUI under Unix or Linux, your first thought is KDE or Gnome. But KDE and Gnome would be nothing without the X Window System, or more simply X11 or X, on which they rely. Free Software Magazine has an excellent, in-depth look to answer the question What is X?.

X is a windowing environment that provides a bare skeleton for GUI operations. Ignoring the display elements for a second, one of the key elements of X is that the computer on which the application is running, and the machine on which the interface to that application is provided do not need to be the same machine. I can run Mozilla on one of my Linux servers, but control and use the application on my Mac OS X desktop.