The Solaris OS continues to lead the
UNIX system market and comprises
almost half of all UNIX server shipments,
according to IDC. Read more.
OpenSPARC source code has had more
than 6000 downloads, and more than 11
million SPARC processor-based threads
have shipped in Sun servers and
workstations in less than nine years. Read more.
Sun held the #4 position year over year
(Y/Y) in overall disk storage systems units
shipped and grew faster than both IBM
and EMC in the total UNIX disk storage
systems revenue market, according to IDC.
For the 16th straight quarter, Sun held the
#1 position in units shipped for UNIX disk
storage systems market share. Read more.
IBM officially endorsed OpenSolaris on its
System z mainframes. In addition, IBM
endorsed Sun's recently introduced Sun
xVM virtualization platform. "It makes
perfect sense to marry these two stalwarts
in a virtualized mainframe environment,"
said IBM's James Stallings. Read more.
SAS and Sun announced a new initiative
to help organizations establish an
enterprise-wide analytic architecture. The
SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform
powered by the Sun Datacenter of the
Future initiative helps organizations
better manage, optimize, and enhance
current and future SAS and Sun IT
infrastructures throughout the enterprise. Read more.
Sun's Competitive Advantage
OpenSolaris runs on mainframes too!
Sine Nomine Associates demonstrated
OpenSolaris running on an IBM System
Z mainframe at the Gartner Data Center
Conference. Read more.
In a ServerWatch review of Sun's Solaris
BrandZ, reviewer Carla Schroder points
out that because the operating system is
virtualized and inside a container, users
get privacy, security, and failure
operation. "So if you have a key
application that runs only on Linux but
you really want to move to Solaris, this
gives you a smooth migration path. Or, if
you're already a Solaris shop, you can
run Linux applications not available for
Solaris." Read more.
"NetBeans 6.0 [software], released
Wednesday, targets Ruby and Ruby on
Rails fans squarely with tools for code
refactoring, debugging and deployment,"
writes the Reg Developer's Gavin Clarke.
"JavaScript [technology] and C/C++ users
also get improved visual tools for building
web applications, web services and
mobile applications using UML models,
an enhanced code editor, and Swing GUI
builder and Swing Application
Framework and Beans binding
technology." Read more.
"IT managers looking for alternatives to
Microsoft Office, particularly those
unwilling to make the leap to Office 2007
or those with heterogeneous
environments will find OpenOffice.org
2.3 a suitable alternative." Read more.
Business Results from Customers
In addition to gaining the scalability,
reliability, and availability to support two
billion queries per month, Gracenote
achieved a 25% decrease in operating
expenses for power and cooling and a 25%
reduction in datacenter space
requirements by deploying a variety of
Sun Fire and Sun Blade systems running
the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS). Customer Profile.
The Japanese Overseas Migration
Museum, run by the Japan International
Cooperation Agency, reduced power
consumption by 66% while gaining the
ability to add new projects, such as
digitizing old documents and creating a
virtual town, by upgrading to Sun Ray 2
virtual display clients and software
supported by Sun Fire servers running
the Solaris 10 OS. Customer Profile.
After deploying the Sun Java Composite
Application Platform Suite, easycash
GmbH was able to integrate its business
process applications 6x faster than with
manual programming, and expects future
integrations to be even faster. "We needed
a flexible and scalable solution," says
Klaus Brück, head of payment services at
easycash in Germany. "Java CAPS enables
us to implement new requirements more
efficiently and therefore shorten the time
until product launch." Customer Profile.
The Dr. Zekai Tahir Burak Women's Health
Education and Research Hospital in Turkey
saw a 96.7% reduction in query time, from
45 minutes to 90 seconds, for its Webbased
suite of hospital management and
billing software after deploying Sun Ultra 20 M2 Workstations supported by Sun Fire
x4600 servers and a Sun StorageTek 6140
array. "When we evaluated the
cost/performance ratios of alternative
systems, Sun stood out by a large margin,"
says Dr. Ilker Sabuncuoglu. "As a result, we
decided to buy Sun systems without any
question marks in our minds." Customer Profile.
Sun Chosen Over Competition
Macquarie Telecom, based in Australia,
passed over incumbent HP to award a $1
million contract to provide
environmentally friendly servers to Sun.
Macquarie Hosting managing director
Aidan Tudehope believes this agreement,
which includes about 200 servers over
the next six months, should cut
Macquar's carbon dioxide emissions by
600 tons a year. Customer Profile.
The U.S. Navy's Integrated Warfare
Systems Laboratory replaced X terminals
with Sun Ray clients supported by Sun
Fire servers running the Solaris 10 OS.
The lab saw improved performance while
reducing client deployment time by 80%
and the cost per client by 50%. Customer Profile.
Optimal Solutions, Inc., a brand of Harris
Corporation, achieved a 4-to-1 server
consolidation, 75% rack space reduction,
and a 66% reduction in platform cost by
switching from IBM servers to Sun Fire
X4600 servers. "The Sun Fire X4600 server
allows us to offer our software solution to
clients on a very tight budget, without
sacrificing performance," says Jeff
Richardson, manager of information
technology at Harris. "It's our
recommended platform for large to
enterprise-level clients." Customer Profile.
G10 achieved a market edge by
partnering with Sun to replace a
Windows-based surveillance solution
with one that can scale to support
recording from up to 2000 simultaneous
cameras. "Sun is a partnership that makes
sense for us. The Sun Fire X4500 server is
an excellent match to our need for
simultaneous camera recording and data
storage," says G10's CEO Keith Fisher.
"The strong security features in the
Solaris 10 Operating System mean that
we don't need many different packages to
accomplish our goals. From storage to
Java to services, Sun has helped our
business stay focused and stand out." Customer Profile.
Evidence of Technological Innovation and Leadership
Sun spent 14.5% on R&D as a percentage of
sales in 2006, compared to IBM at 6.2% and
HP at 3.9%, according to an IEEE report. Read more.
Sun announced the Open Source
Community Innovation Awards program,
which will foster innovation and recognize
interesting initiatives within Sun sponsored
open-source communities
worldwide. Prizes are expected to total at
least $1 million a year. Read more.
As one of the first to adopt the SEC's new
rule allowing companies to furnish proxy
materials to shareholders through a
"notice and access" model using the
Internet, Sun reduced hard-copy printing
of proxy materials by 92%, saving
$500,000. That translates into saving
about 100 million pieces of paper and
avoiding the generation of 1300 metric
tons of CO2 and 9.5 million gallons of
wastewater. Read more.
Sun will provide the OpenSPARC T2
register transfer level (RTL) processor
design to the open source community
under the GPL license. Sun also added five
universities to the OpenSPARC Technology Centers of Excellence. "For academics, this
is an order of magnitude improvement in
research tools," says Josep Torrellas,
professor of computer science at the
University of Illinois. "Computer
architecture researchers everywhere
should check it out." Read more.
Project Sun SPOT Development Kit, a
battery-operated platform for
development of radio-controlled sensor
networks, robotics, and personal
consumer electronics, is listed as one of
InfoWorld's must have-gadgets. Read more.
What Others Are Saying
Sun ranked 18th overall in the 2007 CIO
Insight Vendor Value survey, up from
22nd in 2006, with 65% of Sun customers
rating Sun as "Excellent" or "Good" in the
seven categories measured. Read more.
"The agreement between Sun and Dell is
another indication of the momentum
Solaris has gained on x86," says Errol
Rasit, a senior research analyst at
Gartner. "Increasingly, x86 Solaris is
viewed as a viable Windows/Linux
alternative, which is likely to add to
independent software vendor
participation, further accelerating the
increase in Solaris adoption. Customers
now have, in addition to Sun, two major
server vendors supporting Solaris on
their x86 platforms: IBM and Dell." Read more.
"While Microsoft .NET has been
extremely successful at winning back a
portion of the developer community
from the Java platform, Java has
remained the darling of the enterprise
and perhaps the most successful
software development platform in the
history of computing," says the Burton
Group's Richard Monson-Haefel.
"Microsoft really doesn't like the Java
platform very much. Java is Microsoft's
biggest competitor in software
development and is arguably the
platform to beat." Read more.[...read more...]
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