Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and President of Sun, delivered a talk entitled "Executing in a Changing Economy" in the Webcast of Sun's quarterly analyst series. Schwartz speaks about Sun's business in the face of global challenges; the market opportunities available to Sun and the products and services Sun has developed to exploit those opportunities. He also gives an indication of the direction Sun will take in the future.
Rahul N. Merchant will be taking a seat on Sun's Board of Directors, the company announced, noting the former EVP, CIO, and executive committee member of Fannie Mae has managed some of the world's largest technology budgets and has first-hand knowledge of Sun's products and innovation roadmap. Merchant was nominated to join Sun's Board as part of the previously announced agreement with Southeastern Asset Management, Inc. to add two new independent members to Sun's Board of Directors.
Each month Sun Marketing publishes the "Good News" about Sun. This month there are 12 items and three groups:
Customers Choose Sun: Sun Java Wireless Client, Sun servers, Sun storage, Solaris 10, Sun StorageTek SL8500 modular library system and Sun StorageTek T10000B tape drives.
Leading Market Conversations: OpenStorage, NetBeans, Q-Layer and cloud computing, and MySQL
Product Reviews Underscore Innovation: Sun Storage 7110, Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.1, OpenSolaris, Sun Fire X4150, and Sun StorageTek 5800.
A two-page PDF of the "Good News" from Sun is available in English and several other languages.
On January 22, Sun and Intel celebrated the second year anniversary of the Sun and Intel joint agreement, and David Stewart (Intel) blogs on the updates of this effort. The joint efforts are to optimize the Solaris operating system for Intel Xeon processors.
Sun's enhancements to OpenSolaris 2008.11 show that Sun will not follow IBM and HP in letting Linux take over the platform space once dominated by Unix. Sun released this free Solaris-based operating system late last year with improvements around software package management and incorporating community-packaging efforts.
Sun is helping people connect. The top social networking sites all use Sun IT infrastructure to support their respective missions of helping subscribers establish affinities and express their creativity. Sun IT expertise is playing a role as well in helping emerging musical talent to offer their work and to support NBCOlympics in its coverage of the world games.
Sun's Open Source software was used to build CONNECT: "A software solution that lets federal agencies securely link their existing systems to the NHIN," said Bill Vass. "More than 20 organizations collaborated to build CONNECT through the Federal Health Architecture (FHA), and as a result, agencies are heading down the road toward interoperability."
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 data centers. This most recent is a freely available download and extends its support for virtualization with the new Solaris Container Cluster, providing business continuity capabilities for deployment of solutions, such as Oracle RAC databases, in Solaris virtualized environments. It also enables increased HA, improved ease of use, flexibility, more application support, and more support for application versions out-of-the-box.
The Solaris 10 5/08 release has passed through the independently-tested Common Criteria process, which is recognized world-wide by governments and security-conscious customers as the Gold standard and a green light for production deployments. Sun reports that testing for the Solaris 10 OS included both SPARC and x86 architectures in a mix of environments, with full naming services, GUI management, and virtualized guests.
Part of a series, this Sun BluePrints article by Luojia Chen describes how taking advantage of Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) probes can help simplify MySQL database application tuning. The author uses examples to show some of the specific aspects of MySQL database server operation that can be observed through DTrace probes. This author assumes a basic understanding of the Solaris OS, DTrace, the MySQL database server, among readers of the paper, which is titled "Optimizing MySQL Database Application Performance with Solaris Dynamic Tracing."
The new 3D capability in VirtualBox 2.1 has enabled Glen Faden to create a YouTube video with an instance of VirtualBox running in each labeled zone and an instance of Microsoft Vista running in each VirtualBox, where Google Earth runs at high speed using the experimental virtual XGL driver that is included in the VirtualBox Guest Additions. Faden reports his creation in a recent blog.
Sun has released an early access version of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Software that includes support for VMware Infrastructure 3 and adds support for Sun xVM virtualization and the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems. Features include virtual desktop access, added flexibility in using virtual machines, high security connections, high quality user experience, simple software licensing, and desktop choice.
A new collection of preconfigured and pre-architected hardware and software tools mixed with professional services that Sun is offering through its channel partners are considered by Paul Weinberg in an eChannelLine posting that examines the potential for these solutions to meet customer network infrastructure requirements around Web build out, datacenter efficiency and high performance computing.
Sun is adding Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with Sun x64 Rack Servers and Blades to its existing Windows ecosystems which already includes Windows certifications, Windows service support, and various Windows tools and utilities. Windows Server 2008 options will be delivered via XATO options and will consist of DVD media, a certificate of authenticity (COA) and documentation. Installation is not an option.
The new Sun Storage 6580 and 6780 modular arrays are for midrange and high-end enterprise and throughput-intensive workloads that target database and enterprise-email applications. Offering up to three times better price/performance than the competition, these latest modular arrays enable customers to consolidate workloads within the same data center footprint for greater efficiency.
Know your data and its value to the business of the day, Gaetano Bisaz would seem to be saying in his series of blogs on backup practices. If it doesn't affect current operations, maybe it needs to be stored differently from data that does. In Part 3 of the article series entitled "Classic backup is a dead-end", he considers where to put data that no longer can claim space on primary storage and how best to back it up.
In the white paper "The Market Opportunity for Enterprise Tape" IDC considers the role of enterprise-class tape drives and particularly Sun's StorageTek T10000B tape drive, in the context of Sun's storage portfolio as well as in the secondary storage market.
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 131 Issue 4, the top 10 articles were:
The Book, 'How to Castrate a Bull' by David Hitz [21250]
Getting Started with Sun ZFS by Ben Rockwood [21176]
Sun's Second Quarter Fiscal 2009 Financial Results [21254]
Here's a brief introduction to cloud computing technology that comes in the form of a blog by Helena of the Java ES Prague Team, who terms the concept "...usage of technology services via the Internet, without needing to know or control the infrastructure which supports them." The key, she notes, is reliance on the Internet to satisfy user computing needs.
The United States Department of Defense (DoD) has launched a new site - Forge.mil - as its own open source repository. Built on the same technology used by SourceForge.net, the Forge.mil project does have an added layer of security to meet DoD standards, including the use of smart cards for system authorization. The early access version of the Forge.mil and software.forge.mil collaboration capability is for internal DoD testers only, reports Guy Martin, Open Source Community Manager at CollabNet, but it is a first step in the government's shift toward open source technology.
OpenMQ 4.3 Product Update
Presentations and Screencasts: Speakers Ed Bratt, Linda Schenider, Sun Microsystems
What's new with the Open Source Message Queue 4.3 (MQ) and the Universal Messaging System REST API presentations included the following: updates, including the Universal Message Service (UMS) background, set up samples, and how to design and build a simple enterprise style application with OpenMQ and some deployment examples.
For a good example of how the community makes contributions to developing software, have a look at the brief video in which systems engineer Chad Mynhier describes his experience in becoming involved with bug fixes in DTrace. He says, among other things, that the high quality code constituting the Solaris OS is one of the things that attracted him to the project. Viewers will find the audio quality of this interview marginal.
Developer Frank Kieviet used the NetBeans' Matisse, an interactive editor to save time filtering an HTTP access log. He published the "pimped up" version of this editor as a downloadable JNLP Application; instructions for using this editor are also included in his blog.
The virtual ribbon cutting ceremony for Sun Center of Excellence (COE) held by Sun and Saint Paul College on January 21 celebrated the opening of Open Virtual Worlds. The virtual audience will be comprised of local and remote students attending the college of Computer Science at St. Paul College.
This article describes a performance analysis for a scenario regarding the LDAP server component of the Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition. The primary complaint was timeouts from the Linux clients. On the Solaris Operating System, clients would access LDAP through nscd, which maintained a persistent connection. The Linux clients, on the other hand, would use an open/query/close methodology. The author describes tests, evaluations, alternative approaches, and a script that might also be useful.
Here are instructions for deploying Sun Java System Directory Server as a naming service for UNIX clients that run AIX 5.3, Red Hat Linux Release 4 Update 4, or the Solaris 8, 9, or 10 Operating System. Spanish, French, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese translations are now available for both Part 1 (Installation and Configuration) and Part 2 (Client Configurations for the Solaris OS).
At the SOA Consortium meeting in December 2008, Sun CTO of SOA and Business Integration Ross Altman led an interactive discussion with meeting attendees on SOA myths, misunderstandings and realities. The 64-minute event, entitled "The Future of SOA -- Myths and Realities?" is now available as a podcast and slide deck.
Slick as anything, Linda Fellingham has written up a procedure for combining VirtualGL and VirtualBox for the purpose of enabling hardware acceleration for any OpenGL application running on a Windows desktop. With this process, multiple users can share the resources on Windows, taking advantage of as many cores and CPUs as can be put on a system, all of whom can get acceleration.
What has been the benefit to Sun of its now two year old tactic to open source its Java technology implementations, wonders Paul Krill of InfoWorld. Others wonder as well, including James Gosling, father of Java, who suggests, "This was mostly about community relations." On the other hand, Sun Senior VP for the Java client group Jeet Kaul sees it differently: "We have gotten a lot of people who have taken up the code and started building solutions with it. So the adoption that we have had, the adoption curve has grown dramatically ever since we did open source."
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