Sun stockholders are scheduled to meet on July 16, 2009, to vote on the adoption of the merger agreement between Sun and Oracle. The proposal to adopt the merger agreement must be approved by a majority of the outstanding shares of Sun's common stock. Back in April, the company's Board of Directors unanimously approved to sell Sun to Oracle for $9.50 per share in cash for 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.
In the quest to find which IT companies are doing the most to help tackle climate change, Greenpeace has concluded Sun and IBM have the best records. Both received the highest scores in the Greenpeace Cool IT challenge that scrutinized which IT vendors offer greenhouse gas emissions-reducing technologies, advocate for global emission reduction, and actually implement these philosophies within their companies.
Computerworld's 2009 UNIX survey of IT executives and managers conducted online in March and April not only shows the various flavors of Solaris as the most popular UNIX version, but that the OS is still going strong. The survey had 211 respondents and of those 71 percent used a Solaris-based UNIX system. Survey indicators show that in the next five years UNIX will be "an essential operating system with continued widespread deployment," according to 47 percent of respondents.
Something you'd like to know about OpenSolaris? Have a look at the transcript of the Slashdot Chat Session on May 28, 2009. You should find an answer to your questions there. Tidbits shared were that work continues on OpenSolaris support for thin clients; that OS virtualization is possible with Solaris Containers; that enterprise support is available for OpenSolaris; suggestions on upgrading from one developer build to another; procedures for patching, and so forth.
Availability of High Availability Cluster software for OpenSolaris 2009.06 or Open HA Cluster 2009.06 has been announced by Sun. Based on Solaris Cluster 3.2 and Project Colorado, OpenHA Cluster 2009.06 includes new features that contribute to “hardware minimization,” allowing users to form a cluster with fewer physical hardware requirements. Open HA Cluster 2009.06 is free to use, with production level support offerings available for two-node clusters. This release runs on OpenSolaris 2009.06 only.
Sun has started porting its OpenSolaris operating system on to ARM processor cores, targeting mobile, handheld and embedded applications, on the heels of being made available on SPARC processors targeting mainframes and servers. The new ARM port is a multicore ARM11 based SoC and a reference board designed primarily for car computers and portable navigation devices.
When the pace of business demands made it clear to BC Ferry Services in Victoria British Columbia that outsourcing the management of its Oracle and Sybase database applications for reservations, scheduling, human resources (and the servers running them) was no longer a feasible solution, the company turned to Sun for IT infrastructure that would meet its needs and deliver savings and flexibility not available in their former operational environment.
When the six-year old social networking service hi5 doubled its user base in 2008, it became clear to management that a robust means of keeping pace with growth was called for. The 400+ TB of data the service manages just keeps growing, so the company looked to Sun for answers concerning their IT infrastructure. hi5 sought to scale its infrastructure to accommodate anticipated growth; reduce IT costs; provide for the management of hundreds of TBs of stored data; and maintain an easily scalable and manageable storage infrastructure. Sun came up with the answers.
Refer to this guide to learn how to consolidate applications onto a single server using Solaris Containers technology. This guide is geared towards users, system administrators, and developers unfamiliar with the Solaris 10 operating system.
Sun Distinguished Engineer Glenn Brunette addresses developments in three Cloud Computing security projects he has been associated with in a recent blog entitled "Cloud Security from Sun's CommunityOne." These projects include Security Hardened Virtual Machine Images, Cloud Safety Box, and Encrypted ZFS Backups.
Sun Secure Global Desktop (SGD) Software 4.5 is now available. This latest release introduces an innovative level of security when accessing data and applications with the new Secure Gateway, which allows users to move the SGD server out of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) and into the confines of the corporate firewall. It also adds new failover mechanisms that ensure consistent data availability, enhances device mapping, making it even easier to configure devices for large deployments, and adds native support for Novell eDirectory services.
Sun is using their vast experience in building supercomputing clusters to create High Performance Computing (HPC) guidelines for its customers. HPC infrastructure is complex and configurations can be difficult to scale if not done properly. The Sun BluePrint "Sun's High Performance Computing Reference Architecture" is designed to attend to these challenges.
The most powerful Sun technology-based computer in Europe is now online. The new Julich Supercomputer Center is supported by 2208 node Sun Constellation System and Sun Blade X6275 server modules. The Sun Constellation Systems operate with Intel Xeon processor 5570 series and communicate with each other via six newly developed "Project M9" InfiniBand switches from Sun that supply quad data rate (QDR) and up to 648 ports while slashing the amount of complex cabling required.
Server revenue declined 24 percent worldwide in the first quarter as compared to the same period last year, with shipments dropping 24.2 percent, published Gartner in its quarterly recap. All of the top five vendors - IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell Inc., Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu/Fujitsu Siemens - experienced double-digit declines during the reported quarter.
In "Sun Storage Augments Mainframe Renaissance", Fred Moore, president of Horison Information Strategies, an information strategies consulting firm, has undertaken to write a historical survey of developments in enterprise computing from the mainframe perspective that discusses what the newest mainframe operating system and storage solutions have in store.
While the iSCSI-based Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System tested by NetworkWorld's reviewer delivered as promised with respect to its high-performance claims, reviewer Logan Harbaugh expressed some reservations concerning usability and integration issues.
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 136 Issue 1, the top 10 articles were:
JavaDB 10.5.1.1 has been released following the earlier release of Apache Derby 10.5.1.1. JavaDB is functionally equivalent to Apache Derby 10.5.1.1 - both contain the exact same jar files - but with JavaDB there are a few additional perks. Learn more about these as well as the latest features, which include SQL roles, generated columns, OFFSET/FETCH FIRST, in-memory back end, and more.
Performance testing and developing best practices for the Sun Storage 7000 series is the subject of a three-part blog by Fishworks Engineer Brendan Gregg. The complexities of the hybrid storage pool make performance testing a more complicated but no less necessary process, he notes.
Colorado State University's new Computer Science Building boasts 30 Sun Fire X4100 servers, 24 Sun Ray monitors and peripherals, 200 chairs, 30 tables and 60 cubicles, among other items that are estimated to be worth over $233,000 and the higher learning institution got it all for free. Sun helped furnish the Fort Collins university's state-of-the-art computer science center, which recently held its official grand opening.
Sun helps University of Central Florida (UCF) solve many challenges for increasing throughput and storage capacity. UCF turned to Sun Solutions because it needed to implement a scalable, reliable storage area network. However, it also needed to increase computing power, improve efficiency and cost effectiveness, and deploy more cost-effective storage for its disaster-recovery program.
Sun provides a Firmware Flash Utility for updating the expander firmware on SPARC and X64 based platforms. This unbundled product requires the Solaris 10 10/08 OS or later. Here are installation instructions from a Sun engineer.
Here's the question: What, exactly, are the economic and performance benefits of changing out HDDs and replacing them with SSDs? Blogger Mr. Benchmark addresses the question in his posting "Running Your Oracle Database on Internal Solid State Disks: A Good Idea?"
Integration of the MySQL database with Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) 3 is the subject of a recent blog by Tino Rachui, the engineer who was responsible for the database integration aspect of the release. He presents some alternatives to the three-host requirement that has raised considerable comment since the release.
This white paper will show users how to use the GlassFish Load Balancer to accomplish scalability and fault tolerance. In order to deploy an enterprise application successfully, businesses need to be able to balance these requirements. By efficiently deploying scalability, businesses will benefit with the ability to size their system to meet their customer traffic needs.
The white paper "Guide to Open Source Identity Management" explores the advantages of open-source identity software and provides a look at Sun Identity Source, the open-source identity initiative, which currently includes OpenSSO and OpenDS.
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