News Highlights for March 2008:

Evidence of Growth and Momentum

MySQL and Sun come together. MySQL's fast, innovative, open database is now available with Sun's world-class service and support. Press Release

Sun broadened its virtualization presence in the market with the intent to acquire virtualization software provider innotek. VirtualBox, innotek's open source product, will extend the Sun xVM infrastructure onto the desktop. Press Release

Sun extended its industry-leading Open Archive portfolio with several new innovative, scalable, open archive solutions that change the economic equation for companies, including a scalable, energy-conscious midrange tape library. Sun also donated the source code for the Sun StorageTek 5800 System (formerly known as Honeycomb), making object archive free, open, and accessible to anyone. Press Release

Sun and the Ministry of Education for the People's Republic of China announced a three-year collaboration agreement based on OpenSPARC technology, designed to meet China's demand for cultivating integrated circuit talent and industry development. Press Release

Sun Chosen Over Competition

The French National Institute of Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics chose Sun over three other vendors to bolster its existing infrastructure, swayed by Solaris ZFS because it's an excellent tool for managing storage, simplifies administration, detects and corrects data corruption. The Solaris 10 OS also beat Linux in a performance comparison. The Institute deployed Sun Fire X4500 servers and Sun StorageTek tape libraries and drives, and utilized Sun service and support. Customer Profile

Bundesrechenzentrum GmbH, IT services provider for the Republic of Austria, replaced its predominantly AIX- and Linux-based platforms with Sun servers running the Solaris 10 OS. As a result, the organization now ranks #1 in a European Union egovernment survey for moving citizen services online. Customer Profile

Following an in-depth market analysis and a preliminary multivendor test, communications management and e-procurement services provider Postel decided to use the high-end 64-bit Sun Blade 8000 Modular System for two projects. "We benefited from the added value provided by the Sun Blade Modular System, which guaranteed a simple, robust, open infrastructure—perfect for the virtualization and consolidation needs of Postel," says Paolo Piaggio, System Administrator, Chief Information and Operations for Postel. Customer Profile

German health insurance fund Barmer Ersatzkasse replaced its legacy mainframe environment and was up and running SAP modules in less than four months with a variety of Sun servers, software, storage, and services. "Tasks that used to take several days are now completed in around half an hour, and it takes us even less time to move a SAP system from one machine to another, as required," says Barmer's Volker Haak, Head of the Account Management Department. Customer Profile

Business Results from Customers

Web search engine marketing software provider SearchForce saw a 70% reduction in power consumption and a 3x increase in server throughput with lower TCO by replacing its Dell and Linux environment with Sun Fire servers running the Solaris 10 OS and StorageTek disk systems. SearchForce migrated with assistance from the Sun Startup Essentials and Try and Buy programs. Customer Profile

Kuwait's Savings and Credit Bank (SCB) dramatically reduced the volume of support calls to close to zero. "Performance has increased more than 200 times. A job which previously took more than two or three hours now takes four to five minutes. Even backup which would take two hours previously, now takes just 20 minutes. It's a big difference," says Fawzi Al Asfoor, operation and technical support supervisor for the bank. SCB is the first financial institution in that country to roll out a large scale deployment of Sun Ray ultra-thin clients, as a part of a wideranging effort to centralize its desktop operations and support. Ray of light, Imthishan Giado, ITP.net, 2/10/2008

Portugal's University of Coimbra achieved 8x the compute power of its existing supercomputer by deploying Sun Fire servers into a new supercomputer named Milipeia. Despite having 5x the number of processors in the system, power consumption increased only 3x. Customer Profile

The United States Army reduced the time it takes soldiers' to access their Official Military Personnel Files from weeks to minutes with its new Personnel Electronic Record Management System, built with Sun Fire and Sun SPARC Enterprise servers, Sun software, and Sun Professional Services. As a result, the US Army has saved hundreds of thousands of support staff hours and achieved a 99.9% server uptime, exceeding its customer Service Level Agreement. Customer Profile

Sun's Competitive Advantage

"Having Sun buy MySQL AB escalates the scale of the enterprise support. There are companies who would go with Oracle just because of the big name Fortune company behind it and the support contracts. That has to have an effect increasing the breadth and pace of adoption of mySQL in the corporate world," writes choogendyk. mySQL is *still* open source, LinuxQuestions.org, 2/26/2008

The Sun Modular Datacenter, widely known as Project Blackbox, can offer up to 18 teraFLOPS or 18 trillion calculations per second of computing power and up to 3 petabytes of disk capacity. Sun Gets \'Blackbox\' Ready to Roll, Scott Ferguson, eWEEK, 1/28/2008

Sun debuted the Sun Blade X8450 server module, bringing the energyefficient performance of quad-core Intel Xeon processors to the Sun Blade 8000 system family. "Sun's blades don't have the limitations the other blade chassis have when you start bumping into the ceiling on memory and I/O," says IDC's Jed Scaramella. "It's really a forwardlooking blade. They are designing it not for people's needs last year or this year but maybe next year." Can Sun\'s Blade Slice Server Sprawl?, Andy Patrizio, internetnews.com, 2/20/2008

"Sun's forthcoming 'Rock' chip has hardware support for two features not found in other widely used CPUs: thread scouting and transactional memory," says ZDNet's Paul Murphy. "(As a result,) the next Solaris generation will scale the way grids do—but without the computational inefficiencies, power use, space requirements, and software management overheads that go with grids." Transactional Memory and Solaris, Paul Murphy, ZDNet, 2/19/2008

"The Sun StorageTek tape library systems have long been the standard by which all others are compared, and there's a very good reason for that," says Wright State University's Phil Neff. "The Sun StorageTek SL8500 modular library gave us faster performance for a lower price and a better, more open development path than competitive solutions. The Sun StorageTek T10000 tape drives also meet our requirements for data encryption and faster backup windows. Plus, we can still use our older archived tapes." Customer Profile

Awards and Accolades

Fast Company named Sun one of The World's Most Innovative Companies, for its "mad-scientist approach to energy efficiency," citing the UltraSPARC T2 processor, the Sun Modular Datacenter (widely known as Project Blackbox), and Sun's own datacenter consolidation. The World\'s Most Innovative Companies, Fast Company, 3/1/2008

Sun ranked #19 in CRO's 100 Best Corporate Citizens 2008 based on Climate Change, Employee Relations, Environment, Financial, Governance, Human Rights, Lobbying, and Philanthropy. IBM ranked #21. Neither HP or Dell made the list, and HP made the "Penalty Box." 100 Best Corporate Citizens 2008, Dennis Schaal, CRO, 2/21/2008

OpenOffice.org software was #1 in CNET's Top 5 Best Downloads of 2007. CNET touted OpenOffice.org's Microsoft Office compatibility and the fact that it's free. CNET Top 5 Best Downloads of 2007, Tom Merritt, CNET TV, 2/1/2008

What Others Are Saying

"Two decades ago, Sun Microsystems prophesied: 'The network is the computer'," reports The Wall Street Journal's Bret Swanson and George Gilder. "Today, BitTorrent video and 3D graphics flood the Internet, Apple iPhones tap the Net's computing power, and PC-king Microsoft pursues Net-centric Yahoo. Sun's mantra has become reality." Unleashing the \'Exaflood\', 2/22/2008

"(When) I compare these two big acquisitions (Oracle of BEA and Sun of MySQL) . . . (I) walk away with a view that Oracle paid $8.5 (billion) to carve up an older steer and have a BBQ while Sun paid $1 (billion) to buy the most promising race horse to win the Kentucky Derby," says Smoothspan's Bob Warfield. "What a brilliant move for Sun! Now they've united a couple of the big elements out there, Java being one and MySQL (being) the other." Sun\'s MySQL Move: A Win-Win, Stephen Swoyer, Application Development Trends, 1/24/2008

"Working with Sun has helped us to lower our costs, improve our technology, raise our reputation with prospective partners, and clarify our vision. We're making smarter decisions than we were six or seven months ago," says Sapotek Inc. CEO Joshua Rand. Customer Profile [...read more...]

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