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.
Get trade-in discounts of 25 percent when you trade in existing Sun Fire enterprise class systems and upgrade to UltraSPARC IV+ 1.8GHz Uniboards. Get performance increases that are five times better.
Sun is offering a promotional reprice of the Sun Blade 6000 and 8000 Modular Systems in its starter kits. Choose from six starter kits marked with savings up to 25 percent off the list price of comparable configurations. Experience industry-leading performance and a longer life cycle at competitive prices.
Sun is offering a risk-free, cost-free three month trial of the Sun Grid Compute Utility. Sign up now for up to 200 CPU-hours of this service but do so before the December 31, 2007 expiration.
The first commercial release of Sun xVM Ops Center is expected to be available on Jan. 8, 2008, and its open source version hosted on OpenxVM.org will be receiving code releases from Sun, starting with the contribution of the Common Agent Container (CAC) source code on Dec. 10, under the GNU General Public License version three (GPLv3).
Sun's newly announced Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program will recognize some of the most interesting initiatives within Sun-sponsored open source communities with prizes totaling approximately $1 million (USD) a year. Specific program details are to be announced January 14th.
A new IBM-tuned version of OpenSolaris is expected to be ready soon, according to David Noyes, president and CTO of Sine Nomine Associates, who demonstrated the enterprise-level system running on a System z mainframe during the Gartner Data Center Conference 2007.
Sun has won a million dollar (AUD) contract to provide eco-friendly server hardware to Macquarie Hosting. The Sydney, Australia-based Web host and division of Macquarie Telecom, selected Sun over its incumbent supplier Hewlett Packard (HP) in large part due to Sun's ability to significantly reduce the organization's carbon footprint.
The "Good News" from Sun for December 2007 includes the company delivering its 7th straight quarter of revenue growth in the server market, its fourth consecutive quarter of profit and sixth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth, Dell offering rack or blade servers with the Solaris OS or OpenSolaris, among others. Also see Sun's competitive advantage, customers' business results using Sun technology, plus much more.
SNI Editor-in-Chief/CTO John J. McLaughlin posts items of interest to Sun Users on a
regular basis on his blog. A quick recap of John's posts for the last week, include How Much is that Power in the Cabinet?(Sun Blade 6048), DTrace Documentation/Wikis and Sun's VMworld 2007 Sessions On-line.
Some of the latest partner activity at Sun over the last few weeks includes Sun and NEC Corp. targeting mid-market and large companies with new HPC professional services, Agfa Healthcare's selection of Sun infrastructure to power its digital imaging platform, Mellanox Technologies' ConnectX 20Gb/s InfiniBand HCA support for Sun’s Blade Modular Systems, BakBone Software's support for the Sun StorageTek 5800 System, and much more.
Early stage companies in the United Kingdom and Israel can now turn to the Sun Startup Essentials program to help them bring their applications to market quickly and cost-effectively. Sun announced its expansion into the European and Middle East markets along with the addition of the first Europe, Middle East and Africa-based Web hosting partner NTT Europe Online, who will provide its services to members of the Sun Startup Essentials program.
The Sun Partner Advantage Program is offering commercial developers a free Sun Fire X4150 quad-core server running on Intel Xeon processor with 73 GB disk and DVD drive preloaded with Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) when they commit to commercially release an application on the Solaris 10 OS for x86/x64 platforms.
SAS and Sun have put together a webcast introducing a new initiative the companies announced at the end of November that is designed to help organizations establish an enterprise-wide analytic architecture built on a highly available, scalable, secure and cost-effective platform.
As Gartner sees things, developers working on Web 2.0 are guilty of the same shortsightedness as those who developed Web 1.0: They are leaving security concerns, by and large, to the user in their haste to get applications to market. Fortunately, writes Kat Rollin Sun and Trend Micro are doing their collaborative best to remedy the situation.
Web developer Walter Hardy shares his learning curve on getting up to speed with the Sun Java System Portal Server 7.1 in this series of blogs that includes a step-by-step tutorial on installing it on a system running the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS).
A Sun Developer Network article covers the Sun N1 Service Provisioning System 6.0 (N1SPS) Plug-In for the Sun Java System Application Server 9.1, 8.1 and 8.2 as well as the open source GlassFish version 2. This plug-in is designed to ease installation, configuration, deployment and management of applications within a network computing environment.
Sun has released a patch version of its Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition under version 6.2, which is also provided as part of Sun Java System Enterprise Edition 5 Update 1. This latest update is now available for download. Sun also is retiring the Sun Java System Directory Server 5.2 with a last order date set for March 21, 2008.
If you ever wanted to know what the hardware requirements are for the Sun Java System Access Manager, how to secure administrative and management tasks on Access Manager, or if there are any dependencies for the application integrations supported by the Sun Java System Federation Manager, then take a look at the frequently asked questions page for these Sun Identity Management solutions.
IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker reports 0.5% year over year growth to $13.1 billion in the third quarter of 2007 (3Q07) in the worldwide server market. At the same time, server unit shipment growth of 6.3% year over year in 3Q07 represented a slight decrease over the 7.8% year-over-year growth reported in 3Q06.
The Sun Blade 6048 Modular System is now available for customers interested in having up to 48 server modules that may be a mix of SPARC, AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon
technologies, up to 8 NEMs (two per shelf) and up to 96 EMs (two per server module). This high density blade computing platform delivers up to 71 percent more compute power in a 42U unibody rack design that weighs almost 500 pounds less and provides 20 percent more density than comparable rack/chassis combinations.
Sun will be replacing four configurations of the 512MB DIMMs in the Sun SPARC Enterprise and Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 families with 1GB DIMMs due to an anticipated shortage in the memory modules. Only the configurations that use the 512MB DIMMs will be retired.
Sun Market Strategy & Intelligence professional Taylor Allis listed the top 10 emerging technologies in the storage arena recently identified by his team as an end of the year assignment. The list contains open storage platform, virtualization, thin provisioning, data deduplication, data encryption, and five others.
Sun StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) 5 has improved its throughput by 53 percent and the virtual tape library now performs a sustained write at 613 MBps, up from 400 MBps 15 months ago, said Jay Wallace, marketing director for Sun mainframe storage.
New features are now available for the Sun StorageTek Virtual Tape Library - Value (VTL-V) product line. These include a new capacity option for 12TB of storage using 48 - 250GB SATA disk drives, secure tape to encrypt data on virtual volumes, and iSCSI support to use native IP interface in target mode.
The StorageSwitch File System Gateway (StorageSwitch)is a multifaceted, robust filesystem gateway offering unlimited scalability, enterprise-class reliability, complete flexibility and advanced functionality, is ideal for managing fixed-content information, whatever the source, wherever the destination.
Coupled with the Sun StorageTek 5800 system, Nirvana's Storage Resource Broker (SRB) enables an enterprise-wide, unified view of all data, no matter its location, data type or storage device, resulting in a genuine Global Namespace. This implementation, which gives users the ability to store objects in what is essentially a new category of storage systems, one that is optimized to store large amounts of such digital content as x-ray scans, photographs, images, research data sets, and the digitized books such as are available from the Google books projects.
Each week, we determine which articles have been most frequently referenced by logged-in subscribers to provide you with a list of the most popular articles for the last 4 issues. The top 10 articles for last week, Vol 117 Issue 4, were:
Solaris OS on x86 Systems Promising According to Gartner [19028]
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