This week Sun launched the M3000, a single socket server, powered by a quad-core SPARC64 VII processor and Solaris 10. The Sun SPARC Enterprise M-Series servers have scored a number of new wins.
Sun announced results for Q1 of FY09 and Jonathan Schwartz has posted a blog with his analysis of those results and the outlook for Sun.
The latest release of Solatis 10, ("update 6"), Solaris 10 10/08, is now available for download, as is the Sun Ray Software 4 10/08.
Enhancements to the Sun Blade 6000 line incude the Sun T6340 module, the Sun Blade 6000 Disk Module and the Sun Blade 6000 Multi-Fabric Network Express Module (NEM+).
In the storage section, we feature two excellent videos - Mike Shapiro on Open Storage and Andy Bechtolsheim on the Solid State Storage Revolution.
Sun and Fujitsu have expanded the SPARC Enterprise server family by adding the entry-level SPARC Enterprise M3000 server, powered by a single quad-core SPARC64 VII processor and Solaris 10. The SPARC Enterprise M3000 server inherits the mission-critical features of the SPARC64-based SPARC Enterprise server family, delivering mainframe-class reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) in an ultra-dense open system at an entry-level price. The new systems are ideal platforms for single-threaded enterprise applications including databases, BIDW, ERP and CRM.
"The SPARC Enterprise M3000 server provides a perfect balance between mission-critical features, compact form factor and power efficiency," said Masami Yamamoto, corporate senior vice president of Fujitsu. "The new SPARC Enterprise server offers excellent performance for a broad range of application areas and will facilitate innovation in customers’ business processes."
Revenues for the first quarter of fiscal 2009 were $2.990 billion, a decrease of 7.1 percent as compared with $3.219 billion for the first quarter of fiscal 2008. Total gross margin as a percent of revenues was 40.2, a decrease of 8.3 percentage points, as compared with the first quarter of fiscal 2008.
Net loss for the first quarter of fiscal 2009 on a GAAP basis was $1.677 billion, or $(2.24) per share on a diluted basis, as compared with a net income of $89 million, or $0.10 per share, for the first quarter of fiscal 2008. GAAP net loss per share includes a $1.445 billion non-cash charge for goodwill impairment.
Sun CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz characterizes Q1FY09 as "...a tough quarter for Sun and our customers - but we're emboldened by the progress we made in our emerging markets and technology areas, investments we plan on amplifying and accelerating." His thoughts on the quarter are contained in the latest installment of Jonathan's Blog.
Join Sun Microsystems on November 10, 2008
for a live webcast and live chat
and see how Sun is helping to change storage economics for your business with the benefits of Open Storage. Enjoy increased performance and scalability without costly downtime, while reducing power consumption and operational costs to meet your business's storage challenges and needs.
Change Your Storage Economics
Date: November 10, 2008
Time: 3:30 p.m. PT
Mark your calendars! Formal invitation with details coming soon.
Open Learning Center
An Interactive Environment For Technology Professionals And Students To More Easily Obtain Certification Preparation Content
Award-Winning Programs Help Sun Surpass 500,000 Sun-Certified IT Professionals Worldwide
Sun launched its new Sun Open Learning Center, an interactive environment for technology professionals and students to more easily obtain certification preparation content. In addition, Sun released findings from a new IDC white paper showing that certification on relevant Sun technologies and processes results in enhanced operational performance.
The Sun Inner Circle reports on several success stories that demonstrate the appeal to customers in the emerging markets who chose Sun solutions in the construction of their IT infrastructure. Users worldwide choose Sun for its reputation as a company that delivers a technology capable of ensuring reliable service delivery to a rapidly growing customer base.
Sun has it right when it comes to the cost of things, or so Scott McNealy told Stephen Pritchard in a recent interview headlined "What IT Means to Me: Eco-nomical and Eco-logical." The current financial crisis presents Sun with an opportunity, McNealy says, because the company is positioned to sell to customers who are trimming their budgets.
Solaris 10 10/08
Latest Enhancements to Award Winning Solaris 10 Operating System
Sun announced the latest version of the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) - Solaris 10 10/08. The new version builds on the core strengths of the Solaris 10 OS to help customers maximize asset usage and systems performance, manage datacenter complexity, preserve business continuity and reduce costs. Solaris 10 10/08 includes numerous product updates and enhancements, several of which were done through the OpenSolaris community. Solaris 10 10/08 is available now on Sun systems and will be available for download in early November at:
http://www.sun.com/solaris.
In an interview with Jim McHugh, vice president of software infrastructure marketing, Sun Microsystems, the VP describes the state of Solaris in today’s marketplace to Paul Krill at the company's California campus. Solaris, Sun’s Unix platform maintains it has the technological advantages and accommodations for open source to keep Solaris in the game versus Linux.
Sun offers a comprehensive suite of professional services intended to help customers strategize, design and build datacenters optimized for energy, space, and cost efficiency. Continuing Sun's broad eco leadership, Sun consultants can now retrofit existing datacenters to meet minimum power and efficiency needs, or develop new modular datacenter design concepts that can maximize space utilization, increase power and minimize operating costs, based on customers' specific business needs.
Sun recently introduced Sun Ray Software 4 10/08 with enhanced multimedia playback capabilities on the Sun Ray 2 family of clients for H.264 (MPEG4) and VC-1 (Windows Media Video 9) streams using Windows Media Player on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. This is an optimal solution for server resource conservation and network bandwidth consumption, ideal for corporate communications and training videos. Also released with this announcement is the Sun Ray Connector for VMware Virtual Desktop Manager.
The Sun T6340 module and options, recently announced by Sun, is the latest and the most powerful CMT server blade based on UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor. Boasting the largest memory foot print in its class and extreme core/thread density, T6340 is ideal for large scale data center virtualization and consolidation.
Demonstrating the tremendous momentum behind its SPARC Enterprise M-series server family, Sun announced five new customers have selected SPARC Enterprise M-series servers to power
mission-critical deployments in key industries including financial services, gaming and education. Based on the quad-core SPARC64 VII processor and the Solaris Operating System (OS), Sun's SPARC Enterprise servers deliver a highly scalable enterprise-class virtualization and consolidation platform, ideal for high-availability, mission-critical enterprise applications including large-scale databases, BIDW, ERP and CRM.
Sun has released the results of the 14,000-user Siebel 8.0 PSPP benchmark on its Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 Server. An Oracle white paper with Sun's 14,000 user benchmark results is available on Oracle's Siebel benchmark web site as well. The content in this blog post complements the benchmark white paper.
The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 Server, the first modular, quad socket CMT-based, blends the scalability and performance of traditional mid-range servers, with the openness, economy and efficiency of CoolThreads technology, making it ideal in the creation of virtualized infrastructure to support the most demanding web scale environments as well as OLTP database and related multi-threaded enterprise applications such as ERP, CRM, data analysis/mining, transaction processing and modeling. Sun launched this solution on October 13, 2008.
On Wednesday Oct 15, 2008, Mike Shapiro gave a 53-minute talk at Sun’s first Open Storage Summit. In his overview of Open Storage, he described Sun’s Open Storage Economic Model, including its architecture, performance, capacity, and keys for change.
There has been growing interest in using Flash memory for storage applications. Flash offers significantly higher IOPS performance than traditional hard disks, although it is also significantly more expensive in terms of cost per capacity. This talk discusses ways of combining Flash and hard disks to achieve optimal storage performance and the implications of using Flash for the storage interconnect.
While he does not apply the label "disruptive" to the three technologies he writes about, Henry Newman does consider Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), Object-based Storage Device (OSD), and Parallel Network File System (pNFS) as possible worthy candidates for the distinction once they become standards.
Each module of the Sun Blade 6000 Disk Module and the Sun Blade 6000 Multi-Fabric Network Express Module (NEM+) just announced by Sun can provide up to 1.17TB of direct attach storage space for the Sun Blade 6000 Modular System, conveniently and cost effectively without either the cost or the management overhead that comes with external storage. The Sun Blade 6000 Disk Module supports such storage-hungry applications as file service, MySQL and many other web infrastructure applications.
Sun offers standard configurations for the Sun Fire and SPARC Enterprise T1000 Server with CoolThreads technology that feature 250GB 3.5" SATA hard disk drives. Sun will transition existing Sun Fire and SPARC Enterprise T1000 standard configurations utilizing the 160GB SATA hard disk drive, as well as 160GB SATA X-option parts.
The (X)RA-SS2CD-73G15K 73GB 15,000 rpm disk drive in Nemo bracket is now supported on T6300 server module. The 15,000 rpm drive is a step up from the usual 10,000 rpm drive in terms of random and sequential performance. The increased performance is especially beneficial for boot disk and interaction with database tables.
We track how frequently each article is viewed on the web site to determine which the readers consider the most important. For last week, Vol 128 Issue 4, the top 10 articles were:
Southeastern Asset Management Now Owns 21% of Sun [20773]
OpenOffice.org released its new 3.0 version, a free, open-source replacement for Microsoft Office, says Edward Mendelson in his PC Magazine review. The OpenOffice.org, 3.0, sleek and fast, retains the essential look and feel of Microsoft Office 2003 and earlier versions, which is a plus for many users switching to a new application.
Sun launched two social networking portals especially designed to connect and empower the global education community. The new EduConnection.org community serves Sun's education sector customers, while Open Source University Meetup (OSUM, pronounced "awesome") caters to students interested in open source programming tools and platforms.
The Sun StorageTek Common Array Manager (CAM) software provides an easy-to-use interface from which you can configure, manage, and monitor Sun StorageTek and Sun Storage arrays. To obtain the most current software release and related information, navigate to the "Get It" tab which contains the latest information and version available.
Solaris Cluster is a multi-system, multi-site disaster recovery solution that manages the availability of applications services and data across local, regional and vastly dispersed datacenters.
Sun has announced Solaris Cluster 3.1 8/05, and 3.2 2/08 support for the Sun Fire X4540, Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 and the Sun Blade T6340.
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