Sun was one of only three vendors that grew factory revenue during the first quarter of 2008 in the x86 server space. IDC and Gartner offer the rundown on Sun's rankings in the worldwide server market.
IDC and Gartner released worldwide server market results for the first quarter of 2008, with both analyst firms documenting growth in the market overall despite a slowdown in the U.S. economy and an increase in server virtualization technology.
In an 18 month period, Sun xVM VirtualBox has been downloaded more than five million times, Sun reports. Version 1.6 of the open source desktop virtualization software is the first free hypervisor to support all major host operating systems. It includes more than 2,000 enhancements and features newly added support for high performance virtual devices, improved scalability and Web services for remote administration.
Developers named NetBeans and Sun Studio as two of their eight favorite Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) based on fifteen different yet common features. Responding to an Evan's Data Corporation (EDC) survey this past spring, more than 1200 developers, all of which were actual users of the environments, ranked the features of the IDE.
This month Microsoft announced that with the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2), scheduled for the first half of 2009, it will include support for the Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1. The company also plans on becoming an active participant in the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium, which drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society.
Sun Microsystems India was one of 74 Indian business brands chosen from among 987 entries across 129 categories by independent brand arbiter Superbrands India as one of the country's strongest brands.
System News posts items of interest for Sun users on a regular basis on the System News For Sun Users blog. A quick recap of posts for the last week includes: Video: Sun Distinguished Engineer Harriet Covertson on Object-Based, Intelligent Storage; Review: Sun Fire X4150 Sizzles in Performance; PCIe and PCI-X Cards Now Supported by Sun Blades; How to Mount NTFS/Ext2/Ext3/FAT 16/FAT 32 Partitions in the Solaris OS; and Sun BluePrints: Understanding the Sun xVM Hypervisor Architecture.
Sun Fellow Dr. Tim Marsland, VP and CTO in the Software Organization at Sun, says he is often asked to recommend a virtualization technology. Given the multiplicity of choices, he blogs on the subject in an effort to provide the answer users seek. He suggests that the answer lies in combining technologies.
A blog by Dan Price includes both some basic information on levels of zone functionality for OpenSolaris 2008.05 and the promise that zones support in the open source OS will evolve substantially in the months to come. He provides line-by-line code samples for the configuration and installation of an ipkg zone (non-native) using the CPU Caps resource management feature to establish some resource limits on the zone.
The new binary release based on the open source OpenSolaris community project, OpenSolaris 2008.05 operating system, has two software subscription offerings - Production and Essentials - for customers whose time-to-market and timely access to innovation is important to their business needs as well as OS stability, security and reliability.
Listen to two recent interviews hosted on Barton's Blog that delve into the relationship OpenSolaris has with Intel and AMD. The first features Dave Stewart, the head of Intel's "Team Solaris," while the second offers the views of Margaret Lewis, director of Commercial Software at AMD.
"Sun is offering server virtualization capabilities across all its hardware platforms," writes Deni Connor, principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW in an article in CIO that reviews the evolution of virtualization concerns in the company. Sun's principal virtualization solution, she continues, is based on Solaris Containers, a virtualization or partitioning technology that has been part of the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) and available on x86-based and SPARC server platforms since January 2005.
Sun has signed a collaborative agreement with the University of Tokyo for two projects involving the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology. One project will seek to develop a library based on skeletal parallel programming in Fortress, which is expected to significantly enhance the convenience of parallel programming. The second project has the aim of implementing an MVM environment, which is expected to make Ruby programs run more efficiently, on both Ruby and JRuby.
The move at Cincinnati Bell to desktop virtualization using VMware Infrastructure 2 and Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is the subject of an InformationWeek article by Charles Babcock, who writes that the company is in the first stages of a move to shift certain call center, help desk, sales and service desk employees from Windows 2000 PCs to Sun Ray thin clients.
Get support for the UltraSPARC T2 Plus, UltraSPARC T2 and UltraSPARC T1-based servers in the latest download of Logical Domains (LDoms) version 1.0.3, which also offers a number of virtual I/O enhancements with the Solaris 10 5/08 Operating System (Solaris OS). It includes the optional LDoms Systems Management Tools: LDoms Management Information Base, libvirt for LDoms and LDoms Browser User Interface.
One of the most enthusiastic responses around to the various file system choices in the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) can be found in the OSNews article by John Finigan, who says, "Solaris 10 provides admins with more [storage] choices than any other operating system."
Never one to pass up a challenge, Jim Laurent decided to test the ability of VirtualBox 1.6 to import VMDK image files from VMware into itself using Solaris 10 Operating System 08/07 (Solaris OS). He reports the results in a recent blog.
A recent BigAdmin wiki question requests clarification on support for the Solaris 8 Operating System (Solaris OS). Support and licensing requirements for the platform are addressed along with the offering of some helpful links for users of the Solaris 8 OS as it transitions into retirement.
The HPC Community Portal has posted a video of the keynote presentation by Fritz Ferstly, director of Sun Grid Engineering and HPC on Solaris, given during the Open Source Grid & Cluster Conference held May 12-16. During the 20-minute replay, Ferstly highlights the major trends over the past few years, explores whether this technology is in a hype sequence or truly evolving, and offers an overview comparison between batch and transactional processing.
The OpenSolaris HPC Community was recognized by insideHPC.com's John Leidel, who made a point of promoting the site as one dedicated to igniting interest and exchanges on using the open source platform for high performance computing.
Readers just getting introduced to the subject of open storage should have look at both a Sun white paper and a blog by Taylor Allis in Storage Intelligence at Sun. The primer-like quality of both documents makes for an accessible introduction to the topic that readers are sure to find helpful.
On May 28th, Sun announced that it had shipped more than 10,000 Sun StorageTek SL500 tape libraries during the past four years, and it now has begun to ship in mass production the Sun StorageTek SL3000 midrange modular library.
George Waterson, lead solutions architect in Sun Client Solutions, offers a comparison of sorts between the Sun StorageTek 9990V and EMC DMX-4. Most of the features detailed by Waterson regarding the DMX-4 have not kept up with the advancements in the industry, making the once viable contender an antiquated one.
Among its several virtues, open source network performance measurement tool UPerf can simulate all sorts of network traffic, which it can specify in XML format, and can gather comprehensive network performance data from both the System Under Test (SUT) and from remote clients as well.
The latest in directory services includes Sun's open-source project OpenDS and the open-source virtual Penrose, both of which were the subject of a CommunityOne presentation lead by OpenDS Community Lead Ludovic Poitou and Penrose Project Lead Jim Yang.
Work with MediaWiki servers without having to learn the syntax of the markup language with the newly available Sun Wiki Publisher, which simplifies the process of publishing an OpenOffice.org Writer document directly to a compatible MediaWiki wiki from OpenOffice.org 2.4 or later without the need for a Web browser.
Anyone curious about the OpenMP Application Program Interface (API), which supports multi-platform shared-memory parallel programming in C/C++ and Fortran on all architectures, including Unix and Windows NT platforms, should take at look at the community's recently revamped website.
Sun's enterprise-class open source application server is gaining in popularity. If you haven't kept up with GlassFish technology or even been properly introduced, then you may want to look into spending some time learning more about it through free and discounted training offers from Sun.
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