Sun's Board of Directors has unanimously approved to sell the company to Oracle for $9.50 per share in cash for Sun common stock. The value of the deal breaks down to approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. The deal is expected to close this summer, subject to Sun stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. The two companies made the announcement April 20 with a conference call detailing the specifics of the transaction. A live audio webcast of the call will be available April 21 through April 27 from the Oracle Website.
The Uptime Institute 2009 Global Green 100 is a list of companies demonstrating an integral commitment to and progress toward reducing their energy consumption and carbon footprint. Sun is one of the 100 recognized this year. Greenpeace also is honoring Sun as the IT leader in its Climate Leadership Challenge.
Sun's Open Network Systems with the GlassFish Portfolio and MySQL Enterprise Server gives customers the most scalable platforms for large-scale web buildout, Sun claims, and up to three times more density for storing rich media than the competition at 70% off the cost. Sun also revealed the addition of Flash solid state disks (SSDs) to the Sun Systems for MySQL Virtualization solution, which leverages Sun's chip multithreading (CMT) servers, Solaris Containers and Logical Domains (LDoms) to consolidate multiple MySQL deployments to fewer, more eco-efficient servers.
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Consulting companies and service providers can now offer MySQL Enterprise directly to their clients by becoming an Authorized MySQL Enterprise 'Remote DBA' partner, as part of Sun's MySQL Enterprise Connection Alliance (MECA) partner program. Companies are becoming more interested in outsourcing remote DBA service providers to reduce costs, enhance their existing DBA teams' effectiveness on specific project work, while bringing proper processes and industry best-practices.
A free cooling calculator is accessible from the Green Grid to help datacenter and facilities managers easily determine how much free cooling and free evaporative cooling is available for individual datacenters. Using zip codes, the Green Grid online tool allows users in the United States and Canada to input their specific variables to determine the energy savings for individual facilities.
Michal Pyrc, collaborating with Marina Sum, writes about "Managing Boot Environments [BE] With OpenSolaris Package Manager." This operation makes use of the capability enabled by the ZFS file system in OpenSolaris. The article introduces an example BE set and describes how to manage BEs with Package Manager.
If you are interested harnessing the power of advanced OpenSolaris features, check out the video presentation, "Becoming an OpenSolaris Power User." Nick Solter and Dave Miner, who authored, "Open Solaris Bible," presented this topic at the CommunityOne East seminar.
The Solaris engineering team gets together in this video series, "Inside Solaris Engineering" and describes what they are doing to contribute to the technology behind the Intel Xeon Processor 5500. The partnership of Solaris and Intel Xeon 5500 delivers record-breaking performance, power efficiency, and reliability.
Endeavors Technologies offers an application virtualization product called Application Jukebox that enables existing windows applications to be streamed to client computers where they are subsequently virtualized and executed as if natively installed using the PC’s local resources to run. Application streaming and virtualization enables organizations to reduce the total cost of ownership while improving service levels, simplifying the management of computers and improving security and reliability. If you're curious about the performance and scalability of Application Jukebox on Solaris OS, Bruce Chapman put the product to the test.
MySQL 5.4 is the next version of Sun's open source database and a preview release is now available for download for 64-bit versions of Linux and Solaris 10. MySQL 5.4 is working toward improvements in performance and scalability to enable the InnoDB storage engine to scale up to 16-way x86 servers and 64-way CMT servers. This version also will offer new subquery optimizations and JOIN improvements with early testing resulting in 90% better response times for certain queries. An estimated release date for the GA version will be announced later this year.
The high-availability open source database software for real-time, mission-critical applications MySQL Cluster has a major new release on the horizon. Version 7.0 includes enhanced performance and scalability; support for popular LDAP directories; and simplified cluster back-up and maintenance. MySQL Cluster combines the open source database and a fault tolerant "shared nothing" architecture that reaches 99.999% availability, Sun reports. This new release is scheduled to be generally available this quarter under the GPL open source license.
With all the hype of Cloud Computing, Ian Murdock, Sun VP of Emerging Technologies, said that Cloud Computing brings some substance: "This is unarguably the biggest thing that has happened to the computer industry since client servers." Murdock addressed the CommunityOne Oslo event via video on the relationship between Open Source and Cloud Computing.
Sun's GlassFish Portfolio, OpenSSO, and OpenDS software are now available via the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to help easily build and secure cloud applications and enable users to pay only for the infrastructure software services and capacity that they actually use. The availability of Sun's open source software infrastructure on Amazon EC2 is the first phase of a multi-phased program to offer full support and indemnification for Sun's portfolio of open source software on a variety of cloud platforms, including the Sun Cloud.
Halcyon's Neuron Integration for Sun xVM Ops Center enables users of such network operating center frameworks as IBM Tivoli, HP Openview, CA Unicenter or Sun MC to route notifications and alerts from one program to another, Tivoli to Sun xVM Ops Center, for example. Owen Allen blogs on the solution, sharing what he learned from Iain McKone and Mike Kirk at Halcyon.
There are several benefits the Sun Ultra 27 Workstation with Intel Xeon Processor 3500 Series offers varying IT personnel to advance their projects and IT environments including software developers, electronic design engineers, mechanical engineers, and IT managers. The Sun Ultra 27 Workstation deploys quickly and dependably, ready to use right, preinstalled with software tools, fast I/O bandwidth, visualization-class graphics, high-performance hard-drive interfaces, and reliable memory.
The authors of "Using OpenMP: Portable Shared Memory Parallel Programming" have made 41 of the examples provided in the book available to readers as zip file downloads. Each download is free under the BSD license and each comes with a copy of the license, which users are requested not to remove.
Radio HPC podcast gives listeners an opportunity to learn more about the Intel Xeon processors released for the Sun Constellation System when Michael Schulman, HPC, discusses its features. Then, the Tech Corner part of the program features Tony Kay who describes the new Xeon processor architecture features for HPC.
Tests of the scalability of MySQL on Nehalem systems are reported in the blog of Neelakanth Nadgir, who conducted his tests on an early access model of the Sun Fire X4270 two-socket server that featured hyperthreading, allowing the OS to see 16 CPUs. Generally, the blogger found that MySQL workloads experience very good scaling from one socket to two sockets.
There's a new way datacenters can be cooled and it is more efficient than traditional methods. The Sun Cooling Door Systems attach to the back of Sun Blade modular systems, removing heat right at the source with a choice of using either chilled water or refrigerants.
Finding considerable interest in how the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System leverages SSDs and how it handles SSD failure, Ryan Matthews has put together a Q&A blog on the topics for readers interested in them.
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 134 Issue 3, the top 10 articles were:
Sun and the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs of People's Republic of China (SAFEA) have committed to a long-term cooperation relationship to improve the quality and capability of university personnel and students in China via a series of customized seminars, trainings, workshops, and internship programs leveraging open source technologies. This agreement with Sun is expected to help China's higher education talent get exposed to the forefront of information technology and promote it more widely throughout the country.
Moving from Network Information Service (NIS) or NIS+ to Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)? Read this first. Topics include DIT design and implementation of a hybrid DIT.
The entire list of devices compatible with Sun Ray clients is now
available on the Hardware Compatibility List. Tables display the compatible peripherals and third-party components, including smart card, printing, monitor, and USB devices.
Sun and Zmanda team up to show users how-to deploy and configure Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL, using the Sun Storage J4400 array for disk storage. This article provided an introduction to configuring the Sun Fire X4200 M2 server with the Sun Storage J4400 array as a backup server for Zmanda Recovery Manager.
"Sun's Open Network System Design Approach to Virtualization" is Ron Graham's blog subject in which he explains the virtues of virtualization, defines some of its components and then discusses putting a virtualized system together.
"Using OpenSSO To Protect Java EE Applications, Part 1: Setting Up X.509 Client Authentication" by Bruno Bonfils and Rick Palkovic is the first part of a two-part tutorial that explains how to use OpenSSO to protect a Java EE application. The example it illustrates grants access -- which requires authentication by a certificate -- to part of an application. The authors assume that readers will already have deployed OpenSSO on GlassFish, JBoss or another application server. The choice of application server makes a difference, as described later in this article.
If you haven't tried NetBeans IDE, the developer's tool for Sun's Cloud, Matt Thompson, Senior Director of Sun's Developer Cloud Tools, gives a few reasons why. Thompson speaks out for the NetBeans IDE tool and discusses the effect on the community, future developments, and most importantly what NetBeans can do for Sun's Cloud platform.
Blogger javajeff wrote recently in JavaWorld on the subject of creating "A skinnable button component for JavaFX." The author takes advantage of Sun's having provided the javafx.scene.control package, which circumvents a user's prior inability to change a component's appearance and/or behavior without rewriting the component.
Interoperability between the Sun Identity Management Suite and MySQL has been expanded providing a highly flexible, scalable and efficient approach for customers to manage their identity data infrastructure, whether they are using an LDAP directory or relational database. "Identity management over the years has been making the promise to consolidate, bind together and manage identity information, and Sun Microsystems has an extensive identity management offering that does exactly that," said Felix Gaehtgens, Senior Analyst from Kuppinger-Cole.
Sun OpenSSO Express release provides organizations using Google Apps Premier Edition a rapid, federated single sign-on (SSO), enabling employees to use their enterprise logins to access Google Apps for increased security, accelerated user adoption, and improved administration benefits. Sun also is offering a starter kit for Google Apps, which is a simple step-by-step guide along with teaching tools.
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