Also see Partner articles on ASG-Mobius (enterprise archiving and records management) and Creative Healthcare (affordable and robust health information systems).
IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Tracker for the first quarter of 2008 reportedly shows Sun midrange disk system revenue grew, making it the ninth consecutive quarter that the company has shown a profit in the midrange disk storage market. According to Sun, notable products within this market segment include the Sun StorageTek 6540, 6140 and the Sun Fire x4500 (Thumper), the latter of which more than doubled in unit shipments and revenue.
Sun CoolThreads Servers earned top marks from eWeek and ServerWatch in their Excellence Award programs. eWeek identified the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 Server as an award winner in the Infrastructure Hardware category, while ServerWatch placed the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 Server in first place within the Midrange Server category in its Excellence Award Program.
InfoWorld's 25 Best CTOs for 2008 includes Sun's own Greg Papadopoulos, who was chosen along with the other 24 by a panel of the magazine's editors and Test Center analysts. In Papadopoulos' profile, InfoWorld Test Center Executive Editor Doug Dineley identifies a few key projects that prove this longtime Sun veteran is a great engineer and innovator.
Sun's Chief Researcher and Vice President of its Science Office John Gage officially retired from the company on June 1st to focus on eco-technology investments for Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley's largest and most prominent venture capital firms. Gage will be joining Sun co-founder Bill Joy and former Vice President Al Gore as a partner with the firm.
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 Series: Optimizing OpenSolaris on Intel Xeon Processors; OpenSolaris Project: COMSTAR - COmmon Multiprotocol SCSI TARget; zembly - First Collaborative Environment for Creating Social Applications; Installing Sun Studio or GNU Tools on OpenSolaris; New Sun Radio Program: "Innovation Insider"; Sun Java CAPS 6 Release; Debut of Sun Master Data Management (MDM) Suite; OpenSolaris Storage Community and Qlogic; UltraSPARC Virtual Machine Spec / Hypervisor API Spec for Logical Domains; Firmware Released for SPARC 64-VI Servers; and Webcast: Sun's Solid State Storage.
ASG-Mobius enterprise archiving and records management solutions enable organizations
to cost effectively store, use, and dispose of all the digital information in the enterprise.
ASG-Mobius solutions manage the entire life-cycle of information -- in any format, from any source -- and guarantee its long-term integrity and availability, both to meet the operational needs of the business and to ensure legal and regulatory compliance.
Sun is launching a pilot project for ISVs and startups developing on Apache, MySQL and PHP (AMP) who would like to test and evaluate the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) and virtualization. Known as the EZStack offering, this demonstrator will give interested users access to an AMP stack that is up and running on a virtual server.
Fujitsu Siemens Computers will be offering pre-configured Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS)-based PRIMERGY systems and related support services direct from its factory for the first time under a new multi-year OEM agreement between itself and Sun. The two companies plan to work together to certify solutions based on the Solaris OS and PRIMERGY hardware.
In something of a polemic, Solaris administrator Robert Escue responds to the reviews published after the release of OpenSolaris by ArsTechnica and phoronix.com. His aim, he writes, was to produce a piece that examines more than simply whether OpenSolaris is a worthy rival to Ubuntu or Fedora as a desktop OS. Escue examines the use by OpenSolaris of ZFS, reported network problems, the use of bash and differences between OpenSolaris and Solaris Express.
Skeptical at first, Ryan Paul of ArsTechnical found himself impressed, for the most part, with OpenSolaris 2008.05, which he reviewed recently. Considering the solution's announced aims, Paul concludes that, "...the first release of OpenSolaris definitely delivers on much of what it promises." Work remains to be done, however, he writes, since OpenSolaris isn't quite ready to replace desktop distros of Linux, he says, noting some significant problems with configuration and hardware support in this release [20101].
Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz states in his June 10th blog why Sun has chosen to incorporate Flash technology into its product portfolio and how ZFS is making this move a real opportunity for the enterprise.
Sun CIO Bob Worrall is leading the charge to cut in-house IT costs and discover efficiencies. The key to his approach is application rationalization and consolidation. Worrall shared the experience with Forbes' Ed Sperling in a recent interview.
The path to reliability and stability in the job of EDA verification is at hand, according to Kat Rollin, and it leads to Sunopsys VCS with the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) on multicore x64 systems. The dual- and quad-core Intel Xeon processors in the Sun Fire X4150 and X4450 servers and the ability of Synopsys VCS to deliver faster verification performance through its ability to take advantage of multiple cores in the compute farm makes for an attractive combination, she writes.
The latest version of Sun's service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business integration software, Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS) 6 has been released along with the new master data management (MDM) suite, Sun MDM, that gives users a single view of their customer data and helps them more effectively manage customer relationships.
The Sun Java System Identity Manager merges comprehensive provisioning with identity auditing capabilities to prevent and detect compliance violations. Version 8.0 of the identity management software suite is available for download, offering expanded Role support, enhanced reporting capabilities and updated resource adapter support.
The free download of the Sun Java System Portal Server 7.2 brings with it multiple new features, including Visual Desktop Design Tool, DesignView (Dreamweaver Plugin) and Microsoft Sharepoint Integration, plus updates to the overall product. The Sun Java System Portal Server provides identity-based content delivery, which enables enterprises to define portal pages and provide users with access to content specific to organizations, suborganizations, roles and even user-defined communities.
The latest installment for Radio HPC provides highlights on the most current happenings and products related to Sun HPC; an examination of Sun partner Force 10 Networks, its relationship with Sun and value-add for customers; and product information on Sun xVM Ops Center.
Quickly install a complete set of HPC development tools on an existing system running the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) or OpenSolaris with this preview download. The Solaris HPC Developer Preview brings together the Sun Grid Engine, Sun Studio software and Sun HPC ClusterTools for developers to develop and optimize HPC applications, and then seamlessly deploy the software in a parallel environment.
The Sun White Paper "Open Storage Adoption" defines open storage systems as those built with an open architecture using industry-standard hardware and open-source software. With this approach, today's changing market dictated by the demands of Web 2.0, eco-responsible IT, high-performance computing (HPC) and virtualization can be successfully addressed, the paper suggests. Sun believes that open storage products and services will represent just under 12 percent of the total storage market by 2011.
Open source storage is receiving a great deal of emphasis at Sun, reports Paul Weinberg for eChannelLine, who writes that the company is promising current and prospective customers that they can have storage systems on Fibre Channel or iSCSI without relying on proprietary storage arrays.
Improve the performance and reliability of existing backup and recovery application processes with the Sun StorageTek Virtual Tape Library (VTL) Plus 2.0, which is now generally available. This Sun solution is the answer to a shrinking backup window, too much data, slow one-tape-at-a-time transfers and backup failure delays.
Sun StorageTek Automated Cartridge System Library Software (ACSLS) is for customers who require comprehensive and scalable monitoring, management, sharing and data protection. Version 7.3, released earlier this spring, supports the Sun StorageTek SL3000 Automated Tape Library, offers new statistical reporting features and new customizable features supporting some dynamic variables.
Installing Sun compilers and developer tools or the GNU developer tools on OpenSolaris 2008.05 can be a bit daunting since the compiler packages were not categorized appropriately. This error will be fixed, but in the meantime, Sun's Josh Simons has taken it upon himself to post instructions on how to set up Sun Studio - Sun's compiler and tools suite - and GNU tools to ease users' minds.
Bernd Schemmer wanted to create a USB stick for rescue tasks in Linux and in OpenSolaris for x86 platforms that would include a bootable OpenSolaris OS, bootable Linux OS and be able to boot in a virtual PC environment. The USB stick should also be usable in Microsoft Windows to save files on the stick, and all components used must be open source or at least freeware. See his results in a BigAdmin article.
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