Sun announced preliminary results for its fourth quarter of fiscal 2008, which ended June 30, 2008 - $3.725 to $3.800 billion, as compared with $3.835 billion for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007 and GAAP net income per diluted share for the fourth quarter in the range of $0.05 to $0.15.
"In these difficult economic times, we continue to see customers across the world look to open software and hardware as a source of savings, and feel Sun is well positioned with our most robust line ever of server, storage, software and service offerings," said Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems.
According to a blog posting by Sun, "The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server running 2.52GHz SPARC64 VII processors delivered 2.023 TFLOPS on the Linpack HPC benchmark.
For single servers, the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 server outperforms the best IBM Power 595 5GHz POWER6 published result by two times on the Linpack HPC benchmark. This system is the largest that IBM makes for its 5GHz Power6-based servers."
Once again, Sun has been chosen to provide the technology platform to NBC Universal for its web site during coverage of the upcoming 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Perkins Miller, Senior VP, Digital Media, NBC sports and Olympics, made the announcement, along with Peter Ryan, Executive VP, Global Sales and Services, Sun Microsystems.
The NBCOlympics.com site is supported by 160 Sun Fire X4450 and Sun Fire X4150 servers. These Intel Xeon processor-based x64 servers combine world-class performance, high compute density and storage with compact footprints and leading energy efficiency. In the lead-up to and during the games, Sun Services will provide installation, engineering expertise and support to NBCOlympics.com.
The OpenSolaris community received the new Enterprise LAMP Stack for Solaris and Linux courtesy of Sun. The Web Stack software includes the open source, standards-based software most commonly used for Web-tier application development and services.
Sun's new StarOffice 9 beta software, now available for the first time on the Mac platform, includes more than 1,500 new features and improvements that will make StarOffice 9 an even stronger alternative to Microsoft Office, at a fraction of the cost.
Computerworld reported on a recent Samsung Electronics announcement about a high endurance 8GB single-level NAND flash memory chip that can markedly increase the life span and performance of solid state drives. The chip was jointly developed with Sun Microsystems.
The Solaris 10 OS comes in for some generous praise in Albert Leigh's weblog on the IBM Redbook entitled "WebSphere Application Server V6.1 on the Solaris 10 Operating System," which covers how to virtualize and manage WAS installation, deployment strategies and scenarios, the advanced features of Solaris 10 (e.g. SMF, Resource Management, Process Rights, Containers and Zones, ZFS, DTrace), and the differences of WAS on Solaris from other platforms.
3Tera has released the 2.3 Beta version of its AppLogic grid operating system, designed to work with the Solaris 10 OS and with the OpenSolaris operating system as well. The company announces that this release is the first step in delivering a complete web services solution stack based on Sun products and ready for incorporation into the Cloudware architecture.
How to make administration of a datacenter as easy and flexible as the use of a consumer device such as a mobile phone, wireless router or TV set-top box is the current challenge that Olaf Manczak, principal investigator of Project Live, has taken on. Al Riske reports on the venture in his sun.com article. There is no denying the complexity of the functions performed by the computers embedded in today's consumer devices. Yet, despite that complexity, users never have to do anything more than occasionally update firmware, if that.
"Virtualization: Driving Greater Data Center Efficiency" is the subject of a sun.com net talk featuring Dermot Duggan and Subodh Bapat, both of Sun, and John Humphreys of IDC and Steve Guntly of netINS. The panel covers market trends in virtualization; end-to-end virtualization and solution set, tips and best practices and the experience at netINS with virtualization.
When Kunle Olukotun asked Stanford's president, John Hennessy about the route to tenure, the answer was, "You have to do some really good work and become famous." Now a tenured professor and head of Stanford's Pervasive Parallelism Lab, Olukotun quickly set to work on multi-core processors, making contributions of sufficient importance to warrant being labeled by Ashlee Vance as "...one of the fathers of multi-core chips," in the introduction to a recorded audio interview.
Olukotun's company, Afara Websystems, was acquired by Sun in 2002. Their technology became Sun's UltraSPARC T1 product.
A featured product on Sun’s website this week is the new version of the Sun SPARC Enterprise: Sun SPARC64 VII with quad-core processors. With this new version users can increase server performance by 80 percent for business applications, and 100 percent for high performance computing applications. Each core will also use less power to run. Or the new M4000, M5000, M8000 and M9000 servers can be purchased for the same performance benefits.
Rafael Vanoni Polanczyk, from Sun's Solaris Kernel Performance Group
delivered a 40 minute talk called, "OpenSolaris and NUMA Architecture", at the Open Solaris Developer Conference.
The massive fields of science and engineering require computers that are capable of terascale capacities. However, turning super computers into machines with these kinds of capabilities will host the problems of heat, energy, cooling, cabling and weight. But now Sun’s Constellation System offers the world’s first petascale operating environment, through modular datacenter designs.
During the podcast learn how innovative customers take advantage of the The Sun Mobile Datacenter 20's mobility and space saving compute density. The Net Talk web cast also shows how the Sun Datacenter S20 can be set up in one tenth the time, consume one eighth the space, and use forty percent less cooling than a general purpose datacenter.
This is such an innovative product that other vendors will create similar products.
Drew Robb from Serverwatch.com gave quite a bit of recognition to the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220. In his article, dedicated to giving a few bits and pieces about leading servers, he summarized the Sun Netra T5220 server. Sun calls this server their fastest design for virtualization.
The white paper "Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000, M5000, M8000, AND M9000 Server Architecture: Flexible, Mainframe-Class Compute Power" explains Sun's response to the need of its customers for greater levels of scalability, reliability, and manageability in the datacenter with infrastructures that provide ever-increasing performance and capacity while becoming simpler to deploy, adjust, and manage. These are the Sun SPARC Enterprise servers, equipped with dual-core Fujitsu SPARC64 VI and SPARC VIII processors.
A 65-page
white paper has been released by Sun explaining the system and resource management of the Sun SPARC Enterprise servers. This very detailed guide offers walkthroughs on:
Things Needed other than Hardware
Managing Sun SPARC Enterprise Servers
Managing Resources and Domains
Fine-Grained Resource Management
Managing Other Resources, Monitoring, and Accounting
Sun’s COMSTAR team is constantly looking for ways of improving storage using the COMSTAR software which is the framework that uses a Solaris host as a SCSI Target platform. They use multiprotocol SCSI target mode framework to increase the list of things that can be done with their builds, rapidly, every day.
If in need of tuning the performance of tape drives, administrators should take a look at the article by Vincent Esposito, released May 2008. In this article Esposito shows how to determine the optimal block size to be used for back ups and restores. Esposito goes on further about the ways that time and money can be optimized to distinguish the optimal settings for servers, more details on backups and restores, and other helpful clues for the begging fellow developer.
We track how frequently each article is viewed on the web site to determine which the readers consider the most important.
The top 10 articles for last week, Vol 125 Issue 3, were:
Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu Unveil Next-Generation SPARC Enterprise Servers [20295]
SourceForge, Inc. announced the winners of its second annual SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards. "The awards recognize open source projects which not only have the most supportive community following, but also those which the SourceForge.net community's members believe are built with the highest quality, productivity and ingenuity. "
44 projects were
nominated in 12 categories. 25 projects were nominated two more more times.
Amiram Hayardeny leave no doubt about it: He's a fan of open source solutions, as his blog makes clear. He blogs here to dispel some of the common myths and misconceptions surrounding open source:
The Open-Source Cult Myth
The Open-Source Free Myth
There's No Free Lunch Myth
The Open-Source Poor Quality Myth
This blog was inspired by this comment from European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes: "No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one, through a government having made that choice first."
Cloud computing, no idle, vaporous dream, becomes an increasingly solid reality in the world of IT, as Richard Martin and J. Nicholas Hoover note in their InformationWeek article that considers the subject from the perspective of eight of the most prominent practitioners and/or vendors of the technology.
Sun and Joyent Inc. have collaborated on the development of social applications for Facebook and OpenSocial environments. The collaboration will provide, "up to 12 months free web hosting on Joyent's Cloud, a flexible first-class infrastructure powered by OpenSolaris on Sun's ultra-scalable servers, as well as training on web-scale application development, the program lets developers deploy their social applications on an entirely open infrastructure at no initial cost."
The purpose of Peter A. Wilson's Sun BluePrints series article is to address reliability techniques using Logical Domains and the internal disk resources of the Sun servers on which they run.
In a July 2008 article by Dominic Kay, “Configuring J4000 and ZFS in Ten Minutes”, you can see how powerful the combination of low cost JBODs and ZFS can be. Dominic shows how easy it is have ZFS handle the management of two arrays each containing 12 x 136.72 GB disks - approximately 3.2 TB.
This article by Irina Fedortsova entitled "Using the Scene Graph to Present Visual Objects in JavaFX Script" describes a demo that uses the scene graph features in JavaFX. The demo provides nodes with three different types of contents and enables the user to apply animation and translucency effects. The user can select any combination of nodes to make them visible. The data binding mechanism is extensively used in this demo, providing an automatic synchronization of GUI elements and application data.
Hadoop Primer
Java's Hadoop Feeds High Traffic Website Developers' Needs
When large companies, such as Google and Yahoo, need to manage large databases that are used to process 10,000 or more nodes and/or have a need for several hundred gigabytes of email log data, the software they use is Hadoop. Hadoop is a component to the JAVA software, and its current release, 0.17.1, is a computing platform that can manage vast amounts of data.
Sun OpenSSO Express
Open Source Identity Management and Web Single Sign-on Software
Sun announced the industry's first enterprise support for open source identity management and web single sign-on software. OpenSSO Express is the world's largest program of its kind, and it provides highly scalable, high-performance and secure web service capabilities. Sun plans to continue the releases of a new version of the OpenSSO software every three months to provide access to the latest technology available at any given time.
The Solaris 10 11/06 Operating System (OS) with Solaris Trusted Extensions has achieved Common Criteria Certification for the Labeled Security Protection Profile (LSPP) at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+, the highest commonly recognized global security certification, it has just been announced. Completion of this certification allows Solaris 10 to be deployed by customers requiring Multi-Level Security (MLS) protection and independent validation of an OS security model.
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