Schwartz and Lehman on Sun's State of Affairs; McNealy on Open Source; Sun Ranks as Most Admired; Sun Storage 6780, Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5440 Benchmarks; M3000; 300GB 10K SAS Drives, Sun StorageTek 9900; M-series; OpenSSO 8.1; Good News
Sun executives offer insight into Sun's current state of affairs with Jonathan Schwartz posting the first video blog in a series outlining Sun's business plan and Sun CFO Mike Lehman detailing the company's financial status in a 12-minute video presentation.
Also speaking out, Scott McNealy explains why open source is anything but "anti-capitalist."
Over the next few weeks Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz plans on explaining exactly "what makes Sun tick" and "where Sun's headed as a company" in a series of video blogs hosted on his blog site. In the first of three to four promised video blogs with an accompanying transcript, Schwartz presents a general overview of Sun in the current economic state and the three things Sun needs to focus on in relation to the company as a business.
In a 12-minute video, Sun CFO and EVP of Corporate Resources Mike Lehman reviews the company's financial status and what is being done during this tough economic time. The key message Lehman wants everyone to hear and understand is that "Sun is a very strong, stable company that is offering products and services that people care about and we're going to be here for the long run."
Sun ranks 5th in the computer industry category of the 2009 "World's Most Admired Companies" selected by Fortune magazine, moving up a rank from last year's number six position. The number one position for the year is Xerox, followed by Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Canon. There are 64 industry lists and Fortune's survey partners Hay Group asked executives, directors, and analysts to rate companies in their own industry on nine criteria, from investment value to social responsibility.
Each month Sun Marketing publishes the "Good News" about Sun. This month there are 13 items and three groups:
Customers Choose Sun: MySQL database and Cluster software, Sun Open Storage, Sun Fire servers, Solaris 10 OS, ZFS file system, OpenSSO Enterprise, Identity Management
Leading Market Conversations: Solaris OS, cloud computing, JavaFX Mobile software, free and open-source technologies
Product Reviews Underscore Innovation: Sun Storage 7210, JavaFX, OpenOffice.org 3, Sun Storage 7000 series
A two-page PDF of the "Good News" from Sun is available in English and several other languages.
Storage is the only technology expected to show overall growth this year, reports a new study conducted by Millward Brown, Research International, and Lightspeed Research in collaboration with LinkedIn, which shows overall spending for storage is expected to rise, but only less than 1%. Although the increase is only a marginal amount, it is better than other hardware categories which are anticipated to show declines between 2-3%.
Open source is very much more than just another business model, Scott McNealy maintains in a continuing effort to persuade the federal government to move toward wider adoption of open source solutions. He further urges the appointment of a cabinet-level CIO, whose office could coordinate federal IT policy in a more comprehensive manner than a federal CTO can. Patrick Thibodeau reports on McNealy's campaign in a recent Computerworld article.
Registration is now open for the Fifth Annual MySQL Conference and Expo 2009, which will be held at the Santa Clara, Calif. Convention Center and the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara on April 20-23. Conferees are expected to number more than 2,000 as open source and database advocates come together to consider optimizing the range of solutions available in the MySQL ecosystem.
Version 4.1 of the Sun Role Manager is Sun's solution that provides comprehensive role lifecycle management and identity compliance capabilities to streamline operations, enhance compliance, and reduce costs. Formerly Vaau's RBACx product, the Sun Role Manager has multiple features and benefits including enhancements for identity certification, UI for user access certification, role engineering & administration, and API support; improvements for identity warehouse & custom reporting and integration with Sun Identity Manager; and MySQL support.
Registration is open for the Lustre User Group Meeting 2009 (LUG09) at The Cavallo Point Lodge in Sausalito, California on April 16 to 17, 2009. This event provides the opportunity learning new technical information, acquiring best practices, and sharing knowledge about Lustre technology.
Customers can save money on licensing fees with the new one dual-core SPARC64 VII processor for the Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000 server. This latest edition to the M3000 product category, the dual-core, single CPU system reduces the number of Oracle licenses required and allows for greater customer choice and flexibility in managing Oracle licensing costs.
The 300GB 10K SAS drives are now available for Sun servers including the Sun Fire X4140, X4240, X4440, and X4600 M2 servers as an X-option or in Assemble to Order (XATO) configurations. The specifications on this drive include an average seek time of 3.5 msec / 4.0 msec, 170 IOPs to 350 IOPS, and a Maximum instantaneous data transfer rate of 300 Mbytes per sec (Dual Port).
The Sun Blade T6320 and T6340 Server Modules now support 300GB 10K RPM 2.5" SAS hard disk drives.
Sun SPARC Enterprise M-Series servers support a variety of tools to create a virtualized environment and simplify management of application and resource isolation. Through examples, this white paper provides insight to the virtualization capabilities provided by Sun SPARC Enterprise M-Series servers. Provided are detailed descriptions of Dynamic Domains, Dynamic Reconfiguration, and Solaris Containers technologies.
Sun StorageTek 9900 Software Suite offers a full suite of software designed to optimize your storage system performance. The Sun StorageTek 9900 High Performance Connectivity for IBM FICON for Sun StorageTek 9900 systems is an enhancement release for the Sun StorageTek ST9990V and ST9985V system platforms.
The task of designing storage for both Oracle and MySQL databases necessitates taking into consideration the impact of using controller-based storage arrays vs. non-controller-based arrays on IOPS and response time, writes Grant Sleesman in a recent blog. He finds that both databases have greater workload and less latency on controller-based arrays.
When it comes to flash storage technology and to its ZFS file system, Sun has placed itself in a so-far unique market niche that allows the company to provide an attractive balance between cost and performance. The competition, on the other hand, is reduced to marketing flash as merely disk replacement, writes Paul Murphy in a ZDNet article on the subject.
The experience of Digitar -- an Idaho-based e-mail processing company that strips customers' e-mail of unwanted spam, virus and other malware before delivering the sanitized e-mail to the addressee -- goes a long way toward providing further validation of Sun's open-source marketing strategy. Following a move from a more costly Linux-based infrastructure to OpenSolaris, Digitar COO and CTO Jason Williams says, "If it hadn't been free, we would never have looked at it, yet it made our I/O and corruption problems go away." Drew Robb reports on the company's experience in an enterprisestorageforum.com article.
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 132 Issue 4, the top 10 articles were:
Offering software as a service is just one of the many changes in the IT industry that cloud computing brings with the potential to reshape the way IT hardware is designed and purchased.
Developers no longer need to waste money on costly resources and can still capture potential customers easier than ever before.
The OpenSSO team has released a roadmap toward its next enterprise commercial release of the identity management software. Beginning this coming April with the anticipated Express 7 release, all the way through to the commercial release of OpenSSO Enterprise 8.1 expected in March of 2010, the roadmap offers details on upcoming features and progress.
What keeps Damodaram Bashyam, director of IT Verizon Wireless, up at night? Security and how to protect his company and its customers. In his presentation given at Gartner's Identity & Access Management Conference in Orlando this past fall, Bashyam presents how Verizon simplified their identity management solution to improve security and the customer experience online by implementing OpenSSO Enterprise with Sun Access Manager 7.0 and Sun Federation Manager 6.2.
Yet another benchmarking result reported by BM Seer. This time, the Sun Storage 6780 Array, which achieved best-in-class-$/performance on the SPC-2 Benchmark at roughly half the price of the IBM DS5300.
In a BM Seer report on Sun hardware performance results for the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5440 servers on the SPECjAppServer 2004 JOPS@Standard benchmarking tests, he notes that four Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 servers and one Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server delivered a result of 9500.76, outperforming the HP competition.
The device_remap Perl script, included in OpenSolaris build 106, can manage I/O topology changes due to CPU failures. For example, Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 and T5440 servers have an integrated Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) topology that causes the I/O device paths to change when a CMP node fails. A change to the boot path requires reinstallation of the OS. The device_remap script addresses the need to reinstall the OS after I/O topology changes.
Here is a procedure for installing the Solaris OS from a flash archive onto a server dynamically, so that the server is available during installation. This tech tip from a BigAdmin reader shows an example of upgrading from Solaris 8 to the Solaris 9 9/04 release.
The impact of software on processor capacity is the topic Albert Leigh addresses in his blog entitled "Co-locating Multiple Instances of WebSphere on Scalable Sun Servers." He uses the SPECjAppServer 2004 benchmark to discover just how many WAS instances are required to drive various Sun servers to full utilization.
The GlassFish Portfolio is an open source platform for a competitive price and performance with feature-rich application development and enterprise-class support. Some of the features and benefits of the Sun GlassFish portfolio will appeal directly to Enterprise IT Executives, Web Application Developers/Project Leads, and Partners (ISVs, SIs). The Sun GlassFish Portfolio provides middleware software and services to deliver web applications throughout the enterprise in a predictable and cost effective manner.
Attention exhibitors and attendees, registration is underway for the JavaOne Conference 2009, so mark your calendars for June 2 to 5 for the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Learn from experts in Java technology, get hands-on experience, network with their peers, and have the opportunity to connect with technology experts and industry leaders.
Sun has plans for the Identity and Access Management (IAM) segment of the market, reports Brian Prince, reporting for eWEEK.com. Working with Passlogix and ActivIdentity on enterprise single sign-on, Sun is striving to establish deeper technical integration across Sun’s products. Enterprises can expect enhancements to Sun’s identity management offerings around SSO later this year, Prince reports.
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