Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Sun Wins Top Tech Innovation Award

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fun-with-hardware dept.

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Sun's DTrace trouble-shooting software won top prize in the Wall Street Journal's 2006 Technology Innovation Awards competition. It's the second time in three years that Sun took the top award. From the article, which also names a dozen other winners: 'Where most debugging takes place as software is being developed, DTrace analyzes problems with systems that are in production — running a company's database, say, or executing stock trades. It does this with a process called "dynamic tracing," which enables a developer or systems administrator to run diagnostic tests on a system without causing it to crash. Before DTrace, such tests often took days or weeks to reproduce the problem and identify the cause. With DTrace, performance problems can be tracked to their underlying causes in hours, even minutes.'"

5 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. The real kudos go to the WSJ by csoto · · Score: 5, Interesting

    After all, it takes a considerable amount of insight to pick a code analyzer (admittedly one as brilliant as dtrace) as important and newsworthy. Good job, guys! It shows you can look deeply at a topic and understand what makes computer systems valuable. A lesser effort would award something from Microsoft, Google or Apple, whose products are great, but lack the sophistication of many Sun innovations.

    --
    There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
    1. Re:The real kudos go to the WSJ by I+Like+Pudding · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Sun open-sourced Dtrace. As such, somebody ported it to FreeBSD, and Apple picked it up for Leopard. The next version of Xcode is going to have a guified version called Xray built on top.

      All in all, I'm really glad to see Sun getting back into the zone with some excellent products. Dtrace and Niagra might actually get me looking at Solaris once again. I don't particularly care for the that flavor, but it's stable as hell.

  2. dtrace is a great peice of software by QuantumG · · Score: 4, Interesting

    and maybe after it is ported to linux/*bsd and ten years have gone by, admins will actually start using it to its full potential. Now, if someone were to code a nice gui frontend to dtrace, that'd be innovation, because it would take an absolute master of UI design to turn using dtrace into something that was easy-to-do for the uninitiated.

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
    1. Re:dtrace is a great peice of software by bdash · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Apple announced that the Xray developers tool in the upcoming Leopard version of Mac OS X will leverage dtrace to perform application tracing, amongst other things. Take a look at the bottom section of http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/xcode.html for more information.

  3. Re:This isn't so easy to copy by comay · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One of the most intriguing mashups of technology that's available today via OpenSolaris is BrandZ and DTrace http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/brandz/ BrandZ allows OpenSolaris Containers/Zones to take on different OS personalities and the primary personality is one that emulates Linux. Using DTrace, one can actually dynamically trace Linux applications running (without recompilation) under OpenSolaris.