We continue experimenting with short "News Bite" articles with 15 items in three articles.
News this week for Intel features an IDC white paper which examines the growing server market and how the x86-based Sun server line using Intel Xeon processors are designed to meet its future needs. Also featured is a paper that discusses the high level of optimizations made to the Sun JVM specifically for the Intel Xeon processor.
An article that says My SQL 5.1 is now available for download is our 21,000th article!
Despite the slowing economy, Sun managed to register growth in the third quarter sales of its enterprise disk systems, which grew faster than all other major storage vendors with a 25% year-over-year increase in revenue. The news release noted the recognition given Sun by the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker.
With the nation's economic downturn a confirmed recession, many industry observers are speculating about the viability of some of IT's mainstays. Sun has been a favorite of these speculators who propose an inevitable buyout for the company. However, in a perspective piece for internetnews.com, Paul Shread outlines in economic terms why Sun is doing better than many may think.
Two new independent members will be added to Sun’s Board of Directors following approval from both Sun and Southeastern Asset Management. Southeastern Asset Management is Sun’s largest shareholder with approximately 162 million shares or 22 percent of the company’s common stock.
In an October 2008 IDC white paper, analyst Kenneth Cayton notes that advances in server technology have changed so rapidly that end users can build more flexible and efficient environments with a server refresh and receive more powerful systems while taking advantage of the latest capabilities, such as virtualization to maximize their environment. Cayton examines the growing server market and how the x86-based Sun server line using Intel Xeon processors are designed to meet its future needs.
The Sun-Intel alliance has brought about many technical advances between the two companies' technologies. A case in point is the high level of optimizations made to the Sun JVM specifically for the Intel Xeon processor. A 68 percent benchmark improvement on Java performance tuning has been reported by the two firms. JVM enhancements are delivering excellent performance on all current generations of Sun server hardware based on Intel processors right out of the box.
NBCOlympics.com serves as the online home of the Olympic Games, including the recent 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, China, and the upcoming 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, British Columbia. A destination for millions of fans of the Olympics, the site provides streaming real-time video coverage of Olympic events, television listings, athlete biographies, and breaking news stories.
To support its Web infrastructure, NBCOlympics.com implemented 160 Sun Fire servers, split between its California and New Jersey datacenters. In addition, the site received end-to-end technical support and services from Sun.
Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC) has signed a deal with Sun to upgrade their IT infrastructure. This "Saudi utility giant" faces challenges many corporations encounter including global expansion and privatization. The SWCC has undertaken an IT infrastructure overhaul following its Electronic Transformation program (e-TP Program) to benefit from the latest technology and international expertise.
Sun has equipped SWCC's datacenter with its SPARC Enterprise M5000 server designed with unique built-in mainframe-class virtualization capabilities, making it ideal for consolidating and computing large shared memory applications.The datacenter is housed at SWCC's Riyadh headquarters and will power applications at all 30 plants. The M5000's consolidation platform of up to 4 dynamic domains will support thousands of Solaris containers that is also part of the deployment.
In her interview with JavaFX Media Lead Engineer Tony Wyant, Janice J. Heiss inquires into the current status of JavaFX and attempts to discover where this versatile rich client platform might take us. The article is imaginatively entitled "Encode Once, Play Anywhere."
The recent news on OpenSolaris is that release 2008.11 is now available. New features in OpenSolaris 2008.11 include Time Slider, an easy to use graphical interface that brings powerful ZFS functionality, like instant snapshots, to all users. Developers also will appreciate the expanded access to repositories allowing them to get innovations -- from testbed to worldwide deployment -- out to all OpenSolaris users through the updated package manager.
The OpenSolaris development community launched its second release - version 2008.11. Ryan Paul with Ars Technica gave OpenSolaris 2008.11 a run. He stated that the new version boosts hardware compatibility and brings some impressive improvements that illuminate the potential of OpenSolaris as a desktop platform. He took a look at:
This major release of the open source database is designed to improve performance and simplify management of large-scale database applications. MySQL 5.1 is compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SuSE Enterprise Linux Server, Microsoft Windows, Solaris 10, Macintosh OS X, Free BSD, HP-UX, IBM AIX, IBM i5/OS and other popular Linux distributions.
Confidence in implementing open source database management systems (DBMS) is growing in the marketplace and for industry analysts, who applaud the market's shrewdness. A recent Gartner report states that open DBMSs are advisable for non-mission-critical applications and, if the staff's technical capabilities are strong, even for mission-critical environments.
If you've been pondering the purchase of Sun Studio Express 11/08, the pot has been sweetened for you in Sun's offer of a pair of Bose headphones, a Wii game system, or a Guitar Hero World Tour Band Kit. You need only register your Sun Studio Express 07/08 or Sun Studio Express 11/08 product to be eligible to receive one of these incentives.
Issue 3 of the Sun/Gartner HPC Newsletter contains several interesting features, including Bjorn Andersson's "What Could HPC Do for Your Business?" and an excerpt from "The High-Performance Computing Scenario" by Carl Claunch, VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner, Inc.
With its newly enhanced line of Sun Fire x64 servers and Sun Blade Systems, Sun has developed solutions that deliver up to 35 percent better performance over previous generations. With the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, Sun's strengthened x64 server line offers exceptional scalability, virtualization and consolidation capabilities with up to twice the storage, memory and I/O capacity as compared to competing servers.
A six page white paper has been produced that explains the blending of tape virtualization and data deduplication, which will optimize data protection performance and costs.
The article gets in depth about the business and regulatory requirements that are driving most enterprises to re-evaluate how they handle data protection. Legacy backup and restore infrastructures built entirely around tape are increasingly unable to adequately address the challenges with which backup administrators are dealing today: shrinking backup windows, increasingly stringent recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) requirements, and recovery reliability.
Phase-change memory technology could be the future of digital archiving, particularly for university and college libraries whose magnetic storage technologies are reaching their physical limits, said Chris Wood, Sun CTO for storage and data management, during a recent meeting of the Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) in Baltimore.
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 130 Issue 1, the top 10 articles were:
During the last quarter (September, October, November), the web site for this newsletter had 183k unique visitors who viewed 438k pages. (For the past 12 months: 593k unique visitors and 1.47 million page views.)
Each week, we determine which articles have been most frequently referenced by logged-in subscribers to provide you with a list of the most popular articles for each of the last 8 issues.
These are the 10 most popular articles for November, 2008 (Vol 129):
David Frith wrote an opinion story for Australian IT comparing Microsoft office to Sun's OpenOffice. OpenOffice is an open-source software outfit responsible for a bundle of productivity software that competes with MS Office. Sun's version does almost everything MS Office does but, unlike the Microsoft product, it's free. This means, no cash upfront, no licensing fees and no advertising support.
The newly-released Sun GlassFish Enterprise Platform is a "best of breed" enterprise web platform that delivers a compelling combination of middleware, software and services in a flexible and cost effective way for users throughout the enterprise. The Sun GlassFish Enterprise Platform eliminates the complex and time consuming need to count sockets, CPUs, or cores. The pricing model accommodates all levels of enterprises, from large Fortune 500 enterprises to small and medium businesses (SMB) and start-ups, to small departments within an enterprise.
The SPARC Enterprise M9000 Server, equipped with 64 SPARC64 VI processors, delivered breakthrough world records on both on-line and off-line versions of LHS BSCS iX Release 2 billing benchmark. The Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 Server, optimized for 24x7 mission critical computing, runs the Solaris 10 OS to to maximize asset utilization. The SPARC Enterprise M9000 Server is ideal for large shared memory applications and business process computing such as BIDW and OLTP.
New among the tools for building rich internet applications (RIA) is JavaFX 1.0, just released by Sun and which extends the capabilities of the Java platform to rich applications on screens from the desktop to the mobile device. Design Lead Tony Wyant discusses the release elsewhere in this issue [20971].
The general release notes for Java SE Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 Update 11 (which is included in the Java SE Development Kit (JDK) 6 Update 11) reports that the release provides a new Java Plug-in that combines features of applet and Java Web Start technologies, a new Direct3D pipeline for Microsoft platforms, an updated documentation bundle, and more.
Hal Stern, VP, Global Systems Engineering, and Danny Coward, Chief Architect of Sun's Client Software Group talk on the release of JavaFX 1.0. Java FX is described as a leading-edge software platform for creating Rich Internet Applications across all screens, including browsers, desktops, mobile devices and TV.
NetBeans 6.5
A Free, Open-source Integrated Development Environment For Software Developers
The latest release of NetBeans IDE, 6.5, will be welcomed by developers and web designers who will find the solution enables them to create web, enterprise, desktop and mobile applications rapidly with Java, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Groovy and C/C++. New features include a robust IDE for PHP, JavaScript debugging for Firefox and IE, and support for Groovy and Grails. This release also delivers a number of enhancements for Java, Ruby on Rails, and C/C++ development. Java highlights in this release include built-in support for Hibernate, Eclipse project import, and compile on save.
Sun has released yet another open source solution to its customers in the form of the OpenSSO Enterprise, the first open, high-performance and unified solution for access management, federation and secure Web services capabilities to address the core single sign-on (SSO) problems that organizations face today.
Customized news reports about Sun Microsystems. Just the news you need, none of what you don't. 50,000+ Members. 20,000+ Articles Published since 1998.
