Sun reported its fourth consecutive profitable quarter with a net income of $89 million in its 2008 earnings report released this week [18780].

World-record setting benchmarks continue to be reported, this time on:

• SAP Sales and Distribution Benchmark with Sun T2000 systems [18919]
• SPEC CPU with GCCfss with the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 servers [18938]
• TPC-H with Sun Fire X4100 using Paraccel Analytic Database [18914]
• MCAD: Pro/E Wildfire OCUS V5 Benchmark with the Sun Ultra 24 Workstation [18884]
• Mathematica 6 Benchmarks with the Sun Ultra 24 Workstation [18905]

New product offerings include

• Opteron 8224SE (3.2GHz, 120W) processor for the Sun Fire X4600 M2 [18929]
• Capacity-on-demand (COD) uniboards with 1.95GHz UltraSPARC IV+ processors for Sun Fire servers [18925]
• Riser cards that enhance configuring I/O for the Sun Fire V215 and V245 servers [18816]

On the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS), see:

• The "best" security guide on the OS [18937]
• What ZFS can do for you besides just being a speedy file system [18871]
• 12 common myths on the OS be busted [18831]
• A Gartner Report that explains how and where the OS is relevant to IT infrastructure [18917]
  
  

Learn more about the world's largest InfiniBand core switch - the Sun Datacenter Switch 3456 [19003]. For more on Sun's HPC innovations, listen to a podcast featuring Distinguished Engineer Josh Simons, who discusses the company's latest HPC technologies [19014].

Sign-up for an upcoming live Web chat with Sun engineers on the latest Sun/Microsoft interoperability [19018]

Interesting new OpenSolaris projects include CIFS Server and CIFS Client for Solaris [18957] and the Common Multiprotocol SCSI Target (COMSTAR) [19011]. In other OpenSolaris news: ZFS Automatic Snapshot Service 0.9 and Backup Service 0.2 are available [18936] as are Solaris Package Companion v0.7 [18954] and Fault Management Architecture Demo Kit [18935].

Security covers Sun's encryption strategies [18986], Distinguished Engineer Glenn Brunette's deconstruction of Solaris 10 OS security capabilities [19001], and the release of the UltraSPARC T2 cryptographic activation file [18969].

Recent software releases include:

• Sun HPC ClusterTools 7.1 [19019]
• CoolTuner 1.0.6 [19023]
• Sun Management Center 4.0 [18932]

Find out more about the new Sun Netra ATCA Product Family in a November white paper [19000], Sun Blade T6320 SPARC Server Module [18968], and Sun Fire X4450 Intel Xeon-based x64 Server [18810].

Developer articles cover setting up PostgreSQL 8.2 on SXDE 9/07 to work with NetBeans 6.0 [18950], object-based storage device (OSD) support in the Solaris OS [18791], and deploying PHP5 runtime within the Sun Java System Web Server 7 [18951].

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New product announcements from Sun headline this week's edition. Some were revealed during the Supercomputing 2007 Conference, such as the Sun Constellation System and Sun StorageTek 5800 System [18961]; others during the Oracle OpenWorld 2007 Conference, which introduced the Oracle Optimized Warehouse for Sun [18988] and announced Solaris OS on Dell PowerEdge servers [18999]; while some others were just generally announced, including a soon-to-be released Sun Netra multi-core and multithreaded 10G Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA) portfolio [18993].

Other interesting updates include Sun's move to acquire Vaau, Inc. [18992]; Red Hat joining the OpenJDK community [18960]; Cool Stack 1.2's [18955] and JRuby 1.1 beta 1's [18974] release; and the first JavaFX Script technology book being published [18921].

Read Jonathan Schwartz's perspective on Sun's Q1 Report [18975].

Spec leads for the Java EE 6 discuss key design considerations for the upcoming version [18963]. The open source Java community takes a look back over the past year and into the future during the technology's one-year open source anniversary [18995].

In Partners news, see a recap of recently released solutions and partnerships from Sun and some of its partners [18989]; Sun Partner Advantage Program adds the T5120/T5220, X4150 and X4450 servers to its offerings [18930]; and Channel Chief Bill Cate briefly explains efficiency updates in Sun's global channel [18851].

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Two recently released reports from Gartner Inc. report on the benefits of the Sun/Dell OEM agreement for the two companies [19028] and worldwide server sales for the third quarter of 2007 [19047].

If High Performance Computing is of interest, Sun CTO and EVP of Research and Development Greg Papadopoulos offers his views on Sun's direction in the massive-scale computing market [19012] and there is an interesting webcast, less than 15 minutes long, on parallelizing applications [19049]. Also check out the latest developments on Sun's new HPC Community Portal [19050] and the latest update on TACC's Ranger, which is expected to be online in early December [18991].

In the free and open source market, learn more about OpenxVM - a community hub for open source projects related to virtualization software and data center automation tools [18998]. There is now a free service available to open source Java developers that finds defects in applications [19015]. MIT Press has a new book considered the most comprehensive on OpenMP API's parallel programming [18984].

New Sun server products include:

• Sun Fire X2200 M2 Server support for the quad-core AMD Opteron Model 2347 processor [18802]
• New Intel and AMD Opteron processors for Sun Blade X6250, X6220 Server Modules and 6000 Modular System [18808 ]
• 36TB and 48TB standard configurations for Sun Fire X4500 [18971]

Plus, don't miss the Software and SysAdmin sections also included in this week's edition.

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