Monthly news, results and views on Sun in the network economy.

Evidence of Growth and Momentum

In a recent pre-Supernova interview, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s president and CEO, discusses the things that are on his radar, such as how he sees the tech industry changing over the next 10 years. He responds to being the poster child for CEO bloggers, and talks about how Sun’s tagline, “The Network Is the Computer” is more accurate today than ever. Read more.

Jonathan Schwartz shared the stage with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at an Environmental Defense Fund event to launch its first “Innovations Review” report. USA Today reports that Sun aims to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2012 through a range of practices, including using cooler, energy-saving technology and allowing thousands of its employees to work at home. Read more.

“IBM and HP better take notice: Sun has thrown down the proverbial gauntlet. We would be happy to review HP and IBM systems, but we think it will be very difficult to beat the Sun Fire X4450 unless the servers are also 2U designs. There is life outside the blade world. It is time to return to the drawing board and bring that kind of innovation to the four socket servers.” Read more.

“What was really interesting to hear was the level of engagement that each of the students showed in their grasp of Java and its components. They were excited about the possibilities that all the flavors of Java provided. Java SE and Java ME ... were the staples of most students’ computer science departments. JavaFX, Sun SPOT, and Sun xVM VirtualBox were pegged as the ‘way cool’ projects.” Read more.

Sun Chosen Over the Competition

“Real Time Matrix conducted a head-to-head competition pitting the Fedora Linux distribution (which the company uses for production) against Solaris 10 OS and it turned out that Solaris 10 had a throughput that was 50 times better.” Read more.

DigiTar increased the performance and operational efficiency of its MySQL messaging services by consolidating 8 HP servers to 2 Sun T2000 CoolThreads servers. The company estimates a 4.5x performance improvement per server, a doubling of its database processing capacity, and a 75% reduction in operating costs for its MySQL applications. Read more.

Sun xVM VirtualBox came out on top in a ZDNet head-to-head review against VMware Server 2.0 beta 2. “[Sun] xVM VirtualBox has the clear advantage of being the only free personal/SMB virtualization product that runs on all the major computing platforms,” writes ZDNet’s Jason Perlow. The review illustrates the easy installation and raved about the performance of the application. Read more.

The Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) at the University of Texas built a cluster on 23 Sun Fire x2200 servers, which used 28% less power than Xeon–based servers, helping cut cooling costs. “There’s a big difference between the heat coming off my Intel clusters and my Sun Opteron clusters,” says Chris Simmons, manager of Computing Services, ICES. Read more.

Business Results from Customers

Glasses Direct migrated its IT architecture from the LAMP community-software stack to the SAMP open-software stack running on Sun servers using the Solaris OS, accelerating performance by more than 300% and increasing system availability from 98% to 99.99%. Read more

The binary compatibility of Sun SPARC Enterprise servers running the Solaris 10 OS helped save Singapore’s SIM University (UniSIM) time and money because the university’s applications didn’t need to be recompiled. “That is where Sun has been most helpful — to ensure that we get a robust, stable, and scalable architecture right from the beginning,” says Gary Teo, Senior Manager, Education Technology and Production, UniSIM. Read more.

“Uptime and reliability have been excellent, and we get very good high-performance computing for the value. This has been invaluable in reducing our total cost of ownership,” says Karl Schubert, CTO and corporate VP of Research & Development, Lifetouch. “Sun provides us with a reliable, cost-effective, continually developing platform to create applications that allow us to run our business and be competitive.” Read more.

Sun's Competitive Advantage

“‘Java-in-the-cloud’ will lead us to ‘Platform-as-a-Service’ and as I continue to think about it, Sun has more of the pieces than any other Big Co -- the right hardware, operating system (Solaris) and development environment (Java) [when compared to] HP, IBM, or Microsoft. And don’t forget that they also have MySQL and a huge development community.” Read more.

“By implementing Wallstreet FX software on the Solaris 10 OS with the Solaris Cluster software, Wall Street Systems ... offers customers an excellent level of system availability. Using Wallstreet FX, the front-to-back solution for complete trade lifecycle management, financial institutions are able to simultaneously decrease processing time for FX transactions and increase business process efficiencies.” Read more.

“The number of job seekers accessing our site has increased more than we expected, and their usage styles have been varied,” says Mr. Takayoshi Hashizume, development group manager for Media Development, en-japan. “On our previous system, the site might have been overloaded, but our new system, based on [the] Solaris 10 OS has significantly contributed to our business.” Read more.

Awards and Accolades

Sun was ranked one of 2008’s Top 60 Best Places to Work in Greater Boston. Read more.

Five women from Sun were awarded prestigious honors from top Silicon Valley organizations. Susan Landau, distinguished engineer, was named the Anita Borg Institute 2008 Women of Vision Award winner in the Social Impact category. The YWCA of Silicon Valley awarded four Sun employees a 2008 Tribute to Women (TWIN) award: Cheryl Cook, VP of sales; Beverly Glasser, senior director of IT; Noreen Krall, VP and chief intellectual property officer; and Karen Tegan Padir, VP, software infrastructure. Read more.

Sun Microsystems India has been declared one of India’s strongest business brands by Superbrands India. Sun was accorded the Business Superbrands status for “its outstanding service and contribution to the global open-source platform, its revolutionary technologies and for believing that collaboration among communities interconnected by technology and driven by a common purpose is the way the world must go forward.” Read more.

Sun’s storage systems were recognized in several categories in this year’s Diogenes Labs-Storage magazine Quality Awards, including: being named #1 in enterprise tape libraries in product features, initial product quality, and product reliability, beating IBM and Quantum; and #1 in midrange tape overall, sales-force competence, initial product quality, product reliability, and technical support, beating IBM, Dell, Quantum, Overland, and HP. Read more.

What Others Are Saying

Two of the most impressive aspects of the OpenSolaris OS are its easy installation experience and the new package management system. Markus Thielmann called the new version a “fully fledged desktop OS,” adding that it “works flawlessly, everything seems to work out of the box.” Read more.

Sun Microsystems expanded its ... offerings with three new Sun Fire [servers] featuring AMD’s quad-core Opteron processor, codenamed “Barcelona.” The launch could prove a boon to both Sun and AMD. While older Sun servers with the [dual-core Opteron processor] can be upgraded to quad-core, the new machines - the Sun Fire X4140, X4240 and X4440 rackmount servers - have some improvements over prior generations. They can be loaded with a variety of operating systems - Solaris 10 OS, Linux and Windows - as well as VMware for virtualized systems. Read more.

“The Sun Fire X4150, with four Intel cores, fast drives, and oodles of I/O, brings surprising heft and sizzling performance to a 1U frame... The most suitable roles for the Sun Fire X4150 will be in database, Web serving, and virtualization tasks. In these spaces, [it] provides significant bang for the buck in nearly all respects.” Read more.

Sun’s new server virtualization product, Sun xVM software for x86 servers, can host several guest operating systems, including Windows and Linux. Servers running Sun xVM software can take advantage of Solaris features like Predictive Self-Healing and Zettabyte File System (ZFS). Read more. [...read more...]

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