Volume 118 - System News

Weekly Summary:

News Highlights for December 2007:

Sun delivered its 7th straight quarter of revenue growth in the server market, according to IDC. Sun holds the number 4 slot in the overall server market and maintained revenue share at 10.2%. Sun outpaced the x86 market with 10.4% revenue growth. Sun also moved into the top 5 in the fast-growing blade server market, with a statistical tie for the number 5 position in revenues, reflecting the value of a complete, truly differentiated blade portfolio spanning AMD, Intel and UltraSPARC. From IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, November 2007. See [19053]

Sun reported its fourth consecutive quarter of profit and sixth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth on November 5. Sun generated $574 million in cash from operations—the highest level in a first quarter since 2001. Read more.

Dell is now offering rack or blade servers with the Solaris OS or OpenSolaris software installed. "There are three main reasons we are doing this," says vice president of solutions in Dell's Product Group. "No. 1 is Sun's new and strong commitment to x86 systems; secondly, a lot of people are already using the Solaris [OS]; and third, our existing customers are asking for this option." Read more.

Red Hat announced it will join the Sun-led OpenJDK effort, supporting and influencing Java development. As part of the collaboration with Sun, Red Hat will also get access to the Java SE Technology Compatibility Kit. Read more.

Sun debuted its Sun Constellation System high performance computing (HPC) product line at Supercomputing 2007. "It says that Sun is in this game to win business," said IDC's Steve Conway. "There are parts of the market that are more receptive to UltraSPARC and parts of the market that are more receptive to x86. It's not a one size fits all, and if you want to be a serious player in this market you need to offer choices." Read more.

Sun's Competitive Advantage

The Solaris 10 OS provides a 20% cost-of ownership advantage over Red Hat Enterprise Linux, according to a new cost-of-ownership study conducted by the Crimson Consulting Group. Read more.

"The [Solaris] ZFS/[Sun Fire] x4500 [Thumper] combination is not just the precursor for a new generation of Sun storage, it's so far ahead of anything IBM has that a fully loaded 24TB [Thumper] now costs about one third as much as the 7TB DS4800 array used with the Power6 p570 gear," ZDNet's Paul Murphy writes. Read more.

"NetBeans 6.0 comes with a massive number of new and improved features and certainly deserves the major version bump," writes JDJ product reviewer Osvaldo Pinali. "If NetBeans 5.5 was wide, NetBeans 6.0 is also deep. Developers upgrading to the latest version will not only have extensive support for all kinds of Java development but also a best-of breed feature set in every important functionality area." Read more.

With capacity for connection of up to 3456 HPC nodes, the Sun Datacenter Switch 3456 system "allows deployment of more teraflops per dollar and lower complexity and power consumption than is possible from alternative solutions." Read more.

Business Results from Customers

Thiess, one of Australia’s largest construction companies, reduced its month-end processing time by at least half a day and now completes batch jobs 30 minutes faster - even after a 25% jump in transactions - as a result of upgrading its infrastructure with Sun Fire servers and Sun StorageTek disk and tape storage systems and software. Customer Profile

Swisscom Mobile AG saves approximately $4 million per year and expects a full ROI in 3 years from deploying Sun Fire T2000 servers and Java System Access Manager and Identity Manager software. Swisscom's 1200 retail stores can now immediately connect to Siebel-based customer relationship management and point-of-sale applications, so customers get faster access to more services, and Swisscom increases sales. Customer Profile

"With the implementation of the Sun StorageTek SL8500 platform, Televisió de Catalunya achieved a digital video file capacity of 140,000 hours, 175% higher than before, as well as [created] an efficient and nondisruptive means of integrating and accessing different recording technologies," says the television network's head of engineering, Xavier Ferrandiz. "The Sun solution has enabled the network to achieve its goal." Customer Profile

The Canary Islands Health Service reduced energy consumption by 95% by switching from PCs to Sun Ray virtual display clients supported by a Sun Fire T2000 server, the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), and Java Card technology. "For us, the low energy consumption of the Sun Ray virtual display clients and the Sun servers based on the UltraSPARC T1 processor ratify one of the basic principles of the Canary Islands Energy Plan: the saving of energy," says Wenceslao Berriel, head of the Computer Programming Service, Canary Islands Health Service. Customer Profile

Sun Chosen Over Competition

Job search website publisher en-japan, Inc. turned to Sun to help manage its 150% annual growth. en-japan enhanced its service responsiveness during peak usage times by migrating from a Linux-based solution to the Solaris 10 OS on x86 servers running Oracle 10g EE. Customer Profile

"With the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server, we enjoy unparalleled response times; the highest ratios of security, performance, and flexibility; and costs that are nearly 50% less than former platforms," says Carlos Lafitte, an advisor to Spanish conglomerate Grupo Villa Mir. The company increased processing power to one teraflop, servicing more than 15,000 users and managing more than 1.8 million business transactions daily. Customer Profile

Tokyo-based media service provider C.A. Mobile, Ltd. evaluated several vendors for its new datacenter and chose Sun for its high-performance, energy- and space-efficient servers and storage. "Our initial plan was a terabyte-class network-attached storage (NAS) configuration with over 100 Intel-based servers," says Tomohiko Saito, system group manager at C.A. Mobile. "But Sun's proposal cut the number of servers by nearly half while tripling the content storage capacity with the Sun Fire X4500s at the same price range." C.A. Mobile achieved a 50% to 100% higher server capacity, and anticipates up to 30% savings in operating costs annually. Customer Profile

After evaluating the competition, including the Dell servers they were using, Siteworx president Tim McLaughlin says that investing in a fleet of Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers was "a nobrainer." "The technology is simply better and the price was right," McLaughlin says. Siteworx reduced administrative time by as much as 90% through the use of the Solaris 10 OS with ZFS. Together with Java SE 6 software, Siteworx could maintain 100% uptime, reduce rack space rental costs by 80%, and decrease power consumption costs by 65%. Customer Profile

Evidence of Technological Innovation and Leadership

Project Blackbox is capable of hosting a configuration that would place it among the top 200 fastest supercomputers worldwide. It can accommodate 250 Sun Fire T1000 or x64 servers, handle up to 10,000 simultaneous desktop users, and provide 7 TB of memory, and it has sufficient power and cooling to support 200 kW of rackmounted equipment. Read more.

Sun's StorageTek 5800 system (Honeycomb) provides quick access to terabytes of unstructured information through metadata processing, allowing enterprises to create petabyte-scale, safeguarded, and intelligent digital repositories. It's also the first commercially available fixed-content storage system with a commitment to open source its code. Read more.

What Others Are Saying

Gartner has positioned Sun in the Leaders quadrant for Web Access Management. Read more.

"If you want proof that open source is turning the world on its head, look no further than this announcement that Dell will be distributing Solaris on select Dell PowerEdge servers," writes CNET's Matt Asay. Read more.

"I do not doubt that when Sun says 'open,' it means 'open,' but for others it can be a smokescreen, disguising an application or system really aimed at shutting out rivals, securing market share, or making life easier for manufacturers," says the Financial Times' Peter Whitehead. Read more.

"For those of you unfamiliar with [Solaris] DTrace, it is, basically, magic," writes blogger Garry Bulmer. "It has several critical properties: 1. A program does not need any changes. . . . 2. When not DTrace'ing, the cost . . . is almost zero. . . . 3. It is 'secure'. . . . and 4. [It] can cross process boundaries, and trace the kernel itself." Read more.

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