Jonathan Schwartz was delivered a brief presentation then answered questions from financial analysts at the Bank of America 38th Annual Investment Conference. The questions asked about
how Sun sees its competitors in different market segments, if hardware competitors who are now doing vis-a-via Solaris are helping (or not). There were questions on restructuring, cost structure, gross margin, gross margin pressure, and the large investment from KKR.
Jonathan Schwartz reminisces about an evening in the days before cloud computing that he spent in the convivial company of some individuals responsible for the health and welfare of high value, high scale data centers. The discourse was made all the more pleasant, he writes, by the availability of some of the Napa Valley's finer wines.
September 20, 2008 has been declared Software Freedom Day (SFD) by Sun in an effort to persuade consumers to adopt open source software and to participate in a global education program designed to improve awareness around the importance and benefits of open source technologies.
The OpenSolaris Community Innovation Awards Program was designed to fuel innovation around OpenSolaris.
The program included both a contest and a student grant component and was part of Sun's Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program, a multi-year program running across several open source communities with a $1 Million total prize.
"Solaris has always been the 'gold standard' for other operating systems to emulate, and Sun took the Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) movement by storm by publishing Solaris' source code," said Grand Prize winner Al Hopper of Genunix.Org. "The OpenSolaris project is now more than three years old, has a healthy and growing user community and continues to gain mindshare. In the future, the launch of OpenSolaris will be seen as a major landmark in the history of computing and will be viewed as a significant precursor to the runaway success of the F/OSS revolution."
See the list of 18 Prize-Winning Contest Entries and 6 teams of Grant-Winning Students Teams ...
Sun reports that its new customer adoption numbers show a significant up tick in adoption rates for the various technologies with the OpenSolaris communities. Hundreds of new Sun enterprise, Web 2.0 and other customers have joined the 150,000+ strong OpenSolaris community, leveraging Solaris ZFS and other open source software combined with Sun's industry standard hardware and world-class service and support to save money and break free from the chains of closed, proprietary software.
"The innovative features of OpenSolaris - such as ZFS, DTrace and its unique distribution model - along with the speed of deployment and execution it allows, have struck a cord with customers," said Tim Cramer, senior director of OpenSolaris engineering, Sun Microsystems Inc.
There is a wiki page on genunix.org devoted to many different HOWTOs and Guides. Here newcomers to OpenSolaris and the curious expert can experience some of the basic and not so basic tutorials tools on the Solaris OS.
Chris Melissinos, Sun's chief gaming officer, interviewed Sharon Sloane, president and CEO of WILL Interactive, producer of Virtual Experience Immersive Learning Simulations (VEILS), so-called "serious games" that are designed for training purposes in military applications, among others.
The latest information on "Sun x64 Systems -- Microsoft Windows Compatibility" features four tabular presentations that outline Sun certifications and support for Microsoft® Windows® on Sun x64 systems.
Data Center Pulse, an exclusive group of global datacenter owners, operators and users, was just inaugurated by Dean Nelson, senior director at Sun in his regular blog, Geekism. The declared goal of Data Center Pulse is to track the pulse of datacenter trends through discussions and debate.
Sun announced strong partner support for its Sun xVM virtualization portfolio, the industry's most comprehensive offerings for virtualizing desktop to datacenter. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), Value Added Resellers (VARs) and technology leaders alike are leveraging Sun xVM to meet growing customer demand for comprehensive virtualization solutions and to increase their growth and profitability.
Sun xVM VirtualBox Enterprise Subscriptions are for those organizations that want to deploy VirtualBox for mission-critical operations. The Subscription consists of a commercial Sun Right-To-Use license and a 1 year Premium Service Plan.
Get to know Sun's software offerings. A great place to start is the new Sun brochure on the company's software portfolio. As an indication of just how broad the range of Sun software solutions is, consider that more than 6600 applications on over 1000 platforms are available for the Solaris 10 OS.
In his paper "Grand Challenge: Millisecond-scale Molecular Dynamics Simulations," Eduardo D'Azevedo, a member of the Computer Science and mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, discusses the work in molecular dynamics (MD) simulation being conducted by D.E. Shaw Research (DESRES), a company headed by David E. Shaw, a senior research fellow at the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Columbia University.
The Sun Fire X4450 server and Sun Blade X6450 server module, powered by Intel Xeon processor 7400 series with up to six processing cores, run a variety of operating systems, including Solaris 10 10/08, Linux, Windows and VMware.
"Sun's Intel Xeon-based products are seeing strong customer adoption and stellar product reviews," said Lisa Sieker, vice president, Systems Marketing, Sun Microsystems. "Today we're adding new value for customers with Intel's next-generation six-core Xeon chips in our high-density, highly scalable, energy-efficient systems. We also continue to work with Intel to optimize Solaris for Xeon processors."
Sun has produced a nice two-page summary of its 1 to 4 socket servers.
SUN x64 SERVERS (x86 64-bit)
Sun Fire X2100 M2, Sun Fire X2200 M2, Sun Fire X2250, Sun Fire X4100 M2, Sun Fire X4200 M2, Sun Fire X4140, Sun Fire X4150, Sun Fire X4240, Sun Fire X4250, Sun Fire X4440, Sun Fire X4450, Sun Fire X4600 M2
SUN SERVERS WITH COOLTHREADS TECHNOLOGY
Sun Fire/Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000 Servers, Sun Fire/Sun SPARC Enterprise T2000 Servers, Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120, Sun SPARC Enterprise T522, Sun SPARC Enterprise T514, Sun SPARC, Enterprise T5240
Dominic Kay has written a Sun BluePrint entitled "Provisioning with ISCSI and Solaris ZFS in 10 Minutes that offers a solution to the long-standing problem of using ISCSI interfaces to create configurations that are easy to administer. Kay shows how low-cost devices can be combined with the Solaris ZFS file system to take advantage of file system robustness and ease of administration. The article provides a streamlined set of instructions for provisioning an iSCSI array with the Solaris ZFS file system. Kay includes instructions for both the Solaris 10 OS and the OpenSolaris OS, which uses the COMSTAR framework.
Joerg Moellenkamp, a Senior Systems Engineer at Sun and the author of the "Lesser Known Features of Solaris"
tutorials, has posted a excellent presentation called "SSD at Sun" that asks "Why Solid State Disks?"
The 67-page slide presentation is designed to be read on-line. We have also included a link to a technical review on SSDs at anandtech.com by Anand Lal Shimpi.
The Sun StorageTek 2500 Series of Arrays is adding a 450GB 15K SAS Drive to the portfolio. Existing customers can add the new drive to their current systems. New customers can create custom configurations with the new drives.
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 127 Issue 2, were:
Open Source and Storage Combine to Foster Revenue Growth for Sun [20562]
Sun xVM Server Software and Sun xVM Ops Center 2.0 Target Windows, Linux UNIX Virtualization Markets [20573]
Stanislav Mekhanoshin is the team lead of the Sun Studio Opteron Performance team, which is based at the Sun Saint Petersburg Development Center in Russia. His article entitled "Getting The Best AMD64 Performance With Sun Studio Compilers" brings developers completely up to date on the means to employ in optimizing the performance of this processor and compiler combination.
Given the decreased emphasis on faster processor speeds and the increasing number of multithreaded parallel programming applications being developed to run on multicore hardware platforms, along with the diverse open-source solutions that are now available, it is fortuitous that Sun Studio 12 software is available because it was designed for the current development scene.
GlassFish Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and its open source counterpart, Open ESB, have a staunch fan in Sébastien Stormacq, senior software architect at Sun Microsystems. In a recent blog he informs readers of the availability of and support for
GlassFishESB.
"Install Sun xVM Hypervisor and Use It to Configure Domains is a Sun technical brief written for users new to the Sun xVM hypervisor. Readers will learn how to install, configure and use the Sun xVM hypervisor product/technology. This brief is based upon the Sun xVM hypervisor components contained within the Solaris Express Community Edition.
In Part 1 of his technical brief "Configure and Use ZFS-hosted iSCSI Guest Storage Within the Sun xVM Hypervisor" Simon Hayler has written a guide for readers familiar with the Sun xVM hypervisor who have followed the instructions in his earlier "Install the Sun xVM Hpervisor and Use It to Configure Domains" [20596].
Part 2 of Simon Hayler's technical brief on the Sun xVM hypervisor deals with configuring and using ZFS-hosted iSCSI guest storage within the Sun xVM Hypervisor. As with Part 1, [20597] the brief is written for users familiar with the Sun xVM hypervisor who have used the “Install Sun xVM Hypervisor and Use it to Configure Domains” technical brief to install domains.
David Bryant, (Sr. Director, Java Marketing), reports that he is having a great time as co-host of the weekly "This Ain't Your Dad's Java" podcast.
He started the series in July with Eric Klein, his boss and the VP of Java Marketing, Jennifer Winger (Marketing Programs for Java Marketing) who is the show producer.
David said, "Our idea is to have episodes more or less weekly and talk about all things Java. We'll share news of what's going on in the Java product group at Sun, have a special guest to chat with us about a topic of particular interest, and introduce cool new Java products from all corners of the marketplace."
There is now a download available that provides the latest revision of the Crypto Activation CD for UltraSPARC T2 and UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor-based Sun servers. The UltraSPARC T2 and T2 Plus processors support 10 industry-standard security ciphers, including those approved by the NSA, via the on-chip, integrated cryptographic accelerators.
The Netra X4450 servers are general-purpose servers that are NEBS compliant, designed for deployment in a wide variety of architectures. Different architecture can be leveraged with Solaris Cluster to help customers deploy mission-critical solutions with acclaimed performance.
Sun Open Suite for SWIFT is a complete end-to-end software and hardware infrastructure solution to help corporate treasuries and financial institutions kick-start fast and secure SWIFTNet integration.
"As a market leader in payments, Sun is once again ahead of competition in launching one of the industry's first complete and open SWIFTNet-integration solution," said Ambreesh Khanna, Global Head of Financial Services, Sun Microsystems. "Given the current dynamics of the financial industry, we need to provide innovative technology solutions that are cost-effective, risk-free and easy to deploy. We are confident that with the Sun Open Suite for SWIFT, our customers can turn cost centers into opportunities for new revenue streams."
Grupo ACOTEL is made up of several highly specialized IT companies (Communiction Management, IT Management, System Engineering and Software Delivery). Grupo Acotel announced that it will launch new SWIFT-ready services to help corporate and bank customers in Spain better manage financial communications via the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) platform.
"Our customers are looking for a hassle-free way to connect to the SWIFT network. While it is important for them to automate and standardize their financial processes, they cannot afford programs associated with high upfront and maintenance costs," said Carlos Pastor, CEO Red Financiera - Grupo Acotel SWIFT Service Bureau. "We selected Sun's Open Suite for SWIFT solution as it is the most cost-effective and innovative available today."
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