Good News from Sun Marketing

Customers Choose Sun

At the launch of Intel's Xeon 5500 Series, Sun announced key optimization of its Solaris OS to unleash the full power of the new processors and announced broad customer demand. New customers using Sun's systems featuring the 5500 series include Juelich Supercomputer Center, Sandia National Laboratories, Australian Board of Meteorology, Project Galileu, Motorola and the Centre for High Performance Computing in South Africa. Read more

Around the world, the largest national libraries, the most respected universities, and the most ambitious research organizations all trust their irreplaceable data archives to Sun storage. The nonprofit Internet Archive, for example, is building the world's largest free digital archive by taking snapshots of the Internet every two months since 1996, and that archive is growing at the speed of the Internet. To handle all this data while keeping energy consumption to a minimum, the Internet Archive chose to move its data to a Sun Modular Datacenter at Sun's Santa Clara, California, campus. The portable datacenter is equipped with 60 Sun Fire X4500 Open Storage servers. Read more

Sun Microsystems announced a $30 million deal for two of its Sun Constellation System supercomputers. The systems will be used in Australia to provide support for weather forecasting and academic research. The two Sun Constellation Systems will include more than 2,500 blade servers based on the newly launched Nehalem EP Xeon 5500 processors from Intel. Of the 2,500+ blades, more than 1,500 will be installed at the Australian National University in Canberra, supporting various kinds of research across multiple universities in the country (mostly climate modeling and earth science), and more than 1,000 will be installed at the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne for weather forecasting. Read more

A case study written by Forrester Research considers Reliant Security’s experiences in using open source software - including OpenSolaris and MySQL - to help reduce costs and increase flexibility. The case study states, “Reliant Security proves that even small companies can benefit from adoption of open-source software.” Read more

Sony Canada chose Sun to deploy SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator software on Sun servers and storage. In addition, older Sun hardware has been replaced by newer Sun CoolThreads technology-based servers, offering faster processing in a smaller footprint. The new solution has greatly improved data query response rates and boosted productivity. “Some queries that used to take six to seven minutes now take less than 10 seconds,” comments Wayne Ground, chief information officer, Sony Canada. He adds, “Although we’ve continued to expand our application footprint, our costs are continually coming down. We attribute part of our cost savings to Sun hardware and maintenance.” Read more

An article in The Guardian considers the rising popularity of open source software – and quotes Chris Waite, IT director of Travel Republic, a large online travel agent that was listed as the UK’s fastest-growing private company in 2007: "The cost of the Microsoft Office suite is prohibitive, so we chose OpenOffice and it does everything we need. It's saved us about £18,000. I just wish we'd deployed more open source software from the outset." Read more

Leading Market Conversations

Sun's CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, created a four part video blog series to review Sun's three major strategic imperatives: driving technology adoption with developers and students - a long term strategy to drive affinity for Sun's innovation, creating commercial offerings that combine strengths of computing, storage and networking and, in the final video blog, Sun's strategy to efficiently connect the two, of which cloud computing is an important piece. Read more

In an Information Week article, David Berlind highlights Sun’s Cloud Computing announcement, “You don't necessarily have to be a developer to understand the elegance of what Sun has done here,” comments Berlind. “The key is that Sun has put all of the tools to bring up, provision, and tear down a full-blown virtual datacenter with little more than Web URI representation.” The article also has a link to a podcast interview with Juan Carlos Soto, Sun's vice president of marketing for cloud computing. Read more

InfoWorld highlights the competitiveness of Sun's entrance into cloud computing. “Move over, Amazon...VDC [Virtual Data Center] offers developers a single management interface for staging an application running on OpenSolaris, Linux, and Windows.” The flexibility, compatibility and interoperability for developers of the Sun Cloud are highlighted, and IDC analyst Jean Bozman comments that with the Sun Cloud developers can have “pay as you go” computing without having to worry about capacity. Read more

Information Week features an interview with Sun’s CTO, Greg Papadopoulos – who reveals the high level of interest that customers have in cloud computing, open source and open storage. Greg states: “If you're using a cloud – especially a public cloud – proprietary software licensing hasn't caught up there yet. It's really difficult to run Oracle or Windows in these cloud environments. Because the open source stuff is freely accessible, developers can make it happen more easily.” Read more

In an article that quotes Michael Cornwell – Sun’s lead technologist for flash memory – The Wall Street Journal examines the role that flash memory could play in transforming corporate data centers and identifies Sun as ‘a surprise innovator’. The article reveals that Sun plans to produce compact servers with no disk drives. Read more

Sun announced that the Internet Archive, one of the fastest growing digital libraries in the world, has migrated its digital archive efforts onto Sun's open hardware and software platforms - and established a new primary datacenter that will be housed at Sun's Santa Clara, California, campus. Computerworld's Lucas Mearian writes, “The Internet Archive has been taking a snapshot of the World Wide Web every two months since [1996], and the images are made available through the Wayback Machine, a Web site that gets about 200,000 visitors a day or about 500 hits per second on the 4.5 petabyte database.” Read more

In a Marketwatch.com video, Polya Lesova talks with Simon Phipps, Chief open source officer at Sun, and assesses how open-source technology is bringing benefits to emerging markets - including Brazil and South Africa. Read more

Product Reviews Underscore Innovation

ILM Informatique reviews the Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage System, and comments: “The easy-to-use appliance is ideal for enterprise workgroups, remote offices or SMBs, and offers enterprise storage at entry-level prices.” As part of its conclusion, the article also states: “… you will not regret your investment.” Read more

ZDNet’s Paul Murphy compares the IBM System p570 server with the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 server. Although Murphy states that IBM doesn’t publish detailed pricing for the p570, he reveals that the combined price for the SPARC Enterprise T5220 and T5120 servers has “a six times performance advantage per dollar if you could buy the p570 and get the p550 and disk free.” Read more

In Dr Dobb’s CodeTalk, Eric Bruno discusses JavaFX software, commenting: “It's an exciting time to be a Java developer, as it gets easier to build media-rich applications that run on desktops, mobile devices, and (in the future) TV.” Read more

PC Pro’s review of the Sun Fire X4140 states that the server is “… big on performance…”. The reviewer writes, “The X4140 packs so much more into its chassis than the rest, it's extremely well built and designed, and easily matches HP's ProLiant DL365 G5 on price.” In addition to awarding the Sun Fire X4140 Server five stars and PC Pro’s “Recommended” rating, the article reaches the verdict, “The Sun Fire X4140 is one classy 1U rack server that has more of everything than the competition and is very competitively priced.” Read more [...read more...]

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