The final results of Sun's second quarter fiscal year 2008 show the company's profits nearly doubling during the three months prior to the period's end of December 30, 2007 [19226].
The MySQL acquisition is still making news. Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz responds to the most speculated points surrounding the takeover [19330]. MySQL CEO Marten Mickos offers his thoughts in a recent interview [19317] as does Open Source Alliance (OSA) President Dominic Sartorio [19316].
The FOSS section also covers the Open Document Format Alliance's report that corrects a recent Burton Group report containing factual errors on the ODF [19333]. Others in the community also are attempting to dispel myths about the standard [19302].
The UltraSPARC T2 has set a new world record single-chip SPECint_rate2006 [19282]. The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers are Gold Award Winners. See by whom and why [19308].
Two recent white papers investigate the capabilities of the Lustre File System [19303], and find out the latest on Lustre since Sun's fall acquisition of Cluster File Systems [19319].
Final second quarter fiscal year 2008 financial results for Sun show net income to be $260 million, or $0.31 per share, which is nearly double when compared to Sun's net income from last year at this time with $133 million, or $0.15 per share. GAAP net income for the second quarter of fiscal 2008, which ended December 30, 2007, included a $32 million restructuring charge.
Sun's announcement last week that it was buying MySQL raised many questions and has the industry speculating on the who, what, when, and whys of the acquisition. Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz decided to directly answer some of these, including questions about its commitment to PostgreSQL, relationship with Oracle, MySQL licensing, among others.
The next release of Lustre will be version 1.8 and plans are for it to be accessible to users by the summer. It is expected to introduce user space servers for Linux and the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS), running with ZFS/DMU. These details were revealed by Lustre Group Director of Engineering Peter Bojanic, who highlighted what Sun's Lustre team has been doing over the past three months since the acquirement of Cluster File Systems.
Interested in learning more about Redshift? Take a look at a 22-page PDF Sun recently released exploring the phenomenon. Noted as a kind of "primer," the publication hosts writings on the topic from a few Sun insiders who reveal how network scale computing is changing the face of IT. Sun CTO and Executive VP of Research and Development Greg Papadopoulos and Sun's Chief Operating Platforms Officer Ian Murdock comment as do a few others.
Sun products took six wins in Developer.com's 2008 Product of the Year awards. The Java SE 6 JDK and NetBeans IDE were named as winners in the Framework and Development Tool categories, respectively. The Java SE 6 JDK not only was named as the favorite in the Framework category, but also received the largest number of votes when all of the categories were combined.
A new venture for Sun is the launch of service-oriented architecture (SOA) computing solutions in the Indian market, which seeks to have contracts with as many as a dozen clients by mid-2008. Sun sees a $90 million, growing market for SOA in India, where the company will join competitors IBM Global Services, Oracle, and BEA Systems.
System News posts items of interest for Sun users on a regular basis on the System News For Sun Users blog. Some of those items will become detailed articles in this newsletter. A quick recap of posts for the last week includes Sun Blade X6250 Aces FLUENT Benchmark Test Suites, Webcast: UltraSPARC T2 and its Architecture, Sun xVM Ops Center Resources, and Using MySQL in NetBeans IDE.
The latest Sun Java System Access Manager - v7.1 Update 1 - is available from the Sun Download Center. This security foundation software is designed to manage secure access to an enterprises' Web applications both within the enterprise and across business-to-business (B2B) value chains.
Part 1 of the two-part article on "Developing Secure Applications With Sun Java System Access Manager," is now followed by "Part 2: Advanced Authorization." Authors Robert Skoczylas and Marina Sum show readers how to satisfy some of the most common yet complex enterprise deployment and quality requirements that arise in the use of Sun Java System Access Manager for authorizing users of EB Health, a fictional health-care company.
Sun Java B2B Suite 2.0 v5.1.1 comes with new protocol managers for AS2 and ebXML, support for secure messaging, and many other improvements. This software suite provides an integrated B2B platform for automating trading partner management, transaction visibility, and full-cycle transaction auditing in both enterprise and extranet environments.
There is a useful assortment of FAQs to be found on the Sun Java System Access Manager and Sun Java System Federation Manager: Liberty Alliance and Security Assertion Markup Language. Topics range from support for both SAMLv2 metadata and element attributes of such SAML2.0 assertion conditions as NotOnOrAfter, NotBefore, etc., as well as support for particular SAML v2 profiles.
BM Seer reports on the new world record for the UltraSPARC T2 single-chip in a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 server running at 1.4 GHz on the SPECint_rate2006 in a recent blog entry. According to Seer, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 using the GCC for SPARC Systems (gccfss) compiler topped all competitor's single chip results, including beating the IBM p570 single-chip 4.7 GHZ POWER6 result by 37%. IBM used its proprietary compiler, XL C/C++.
The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers have been named SearchDataCenter.com's Gold Award winners in the small server category (four processors and under) as part of its 2007 Products of the Year.
Intel Xeon Processor 5400 series are replacing the current configurations and processor options based on the Intel Xeon Processor 5300 series for the Sun Fire X4150 and Sun Blade X6250 servers. In addition, the Sun Fire X4150 and X4450 servers now have 73GB 15K RPM 2.5-inch SAS drive options. Retirement and repricing of some of these servers and others also have been announced.
Sun Blade and Sun Fire servers have new options available. The Sun Blade X6250 server now has the option of a new Intel Xeon dual-core 3.33GHz; the Sun Blade T6320 has a RAID expansion module available; and the Sun Fire X2100 M2 and X2200 M2 servers have access to a 1TB hard disk drive.
Two recent publications provide information on several aspects of the Lustre File System. These sun.com papers cover basic information about Lustre architecture, networking, high availability, and comparison with other shared/cluster file systems.
You can now get a Multiple Library TCP/IP Host Interface for the Sun StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System. The TCP/IP interface to HSC or ACSLS can host up to four libraries in a pass-through port complex providing additional redundancy for a library complex. With these additional connections, if the master library went down, another library in the complex will be able to take control.
Sun StorageTek 9900 Business Continuity Manager version 5.5 is an enhancement release for the Sun StorageTek 9910, 9960, 9970, 9980, 9985, 9990, 9990V and 9985V system platforms. Features and enhancements include support of HUR 6x6 Extended Consistency Group, ISPF improvement, PPRC migration feature, and YKLOAD improvement.
Sun Net Talks have two recent on-demand webcasts focusing on Sun storage and virtualization. The first is a 14-minute webcast discussing how Sun Virtual Tape Library products can help solve many of the issues found in IT environments today, while the second highlights the features of the Sun Virtual Storage Manager in an 11-minute webcast.
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 119 Issue 3, were:
Glenn Brunette's Top Five Solaris 10 Security Features [19270]
One happy camper in the wake of Sun's acquisition of MySQL is CEO Marten Mickos, who told CMP Channel's Nathan Eddy that he saw Sun as having the attributes of a startup though it ranks among the Fortune 500.
Like MySQL CEO Marten Mickos [19317], Dominic Sartorio, president of the Open Source Alliance, is supremely enthusiastic about Sun's acquisition of the open source company. "Finally we have a billion dollar open source valuation. Now we're moving," Sartorio told CMP Channel's Nathan Eddy.
The ODF Alliance is responding to the Burton Group's report "What's Up, .DOC? ODF, OOXML, and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications" in a PDF paper that refutes 18 points made by the IT consulting service.
Erwin Tenhumberg took on the challenge of myth busting the Open Document Format (ODF) in his blog, where he noted others, like David Faure with the free software project KDE, to help bring the truth about the open standard format.
Are you aware that OpenOffice.org can be turned into a conversion engine and used to convert the formats of documents? No Thick Manuals has an entry that explains how to use the open source office suite as a conversion engine. This feature is ideal for converting files from a system without OpenOffice.org.
The Open Service Availability Framework (OpenSAF) Foundation was officially announced this week with the activation of its website where visitors have free access to OpenSAF release 1.0. This open source project whose objective is to develop a high availability base platform middleware based on Service Availability Forum specifications, is supported by a number of telecommunications and enterprise computing companies including Sun.
With both Sun and IBM committing substantial sums to the development of open source projects in India, speculation is rising over whether that region might become the spearhead of the global open source effort. Sun Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps appears to think India is the correct bet, given his comment that, "(India is) where I expect the greatest open source community growth to come from in the near future."
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