Sun has publicly released proxy materials for its 2009 Annual Meeting of Stockholders, which is set for December 17, 2009, at 10:00 a.m. (PT) on Sun's Santa Clara Campus in Calif. If the proposed merger with Oracle is completed prior to this date, Sun will no longer have public stockholders and, therefore, the 2009 Annual Meeting of Stockholders will be canceled. Financial results for Sun's first quarter fiscal year 2010 are expected to be posted on the company's Investor Relations page upon the filing of the Company's Form 10-Q with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which is due no later than November 6, 2009.

The Sun Partner Advantage Program for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) has some new development hardware offerings that include Sun Ultra 27 Assemble to Order (ATO); Sun Fire X2270, X4170 X4270, and X4275 Servers ATO; standard configurations for the Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000, T5120, T5140, T5220, and T5240 Servers; among others. As part of this program, qualified Sun partners are able to purchase products, such as these, at discounted rates.

In today's economic climate, it is vital that organizations take careful consideration of their IT budgets. For most, investment protection is a top priority and that includes investing in solutions that can bridge support for future requirements. General Dynamics C4 Systems with Tadpole computing products (Tadpole) is answering this market need. Tadpole ensures customers of the ongoing reliability of existing deployments for years beyond a typical vendor agreement, while supporting technology refreshes with new products under a new warranty. Learn how organizations can sustain operations for UltraSPARC IIIi and Solaris 8.

Sean O'Dell has written a three-part tutorial on setting up Solaris Zones within an instance of OpenSolaris 2009.06 in the Amazon Cloud EC2 by utilizing the virtual networking features provided by Crossbow. His step-by-step guide explains how to get the environment up and running, and how to use Crossbow with NAT to build a complete virtual network connecting multiple Zones within a Solaris EC2 host. He also describes how to backup zones and save a fully configured environment and then clone it.

Sun Java Communications Suite 7 is the latest release of Sun's communications and collaboration solution. As reported back in September, a multitude of new features and capabilities have been added. One of these additions is Calendaring Extensions to WebDAV (CalDAV) - Sun's preferred calendaring protocol. A Sun blog explains the evolution of CalDAV and the importance in using a standard protocol, while another provides tips on the installation process of Communications Suite 7 itself.

Startups may be interested in registering for a free Sun Startup Essentials MasterClass where Senior Consultant Michael Bayler will help attendees focus their brand strategy and demonstrate why a strategic approach to brand management can play a crucial role in defining a strong, winning identity for a company.

There are new higher performance 2.88GHz quad-core SPARC64 VII processor/memory boards (CMU) with a higher throughput memory controller (MAC+) available to order for new Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000-64 servers. The 2.88GHz SPARC64 VII quad-core options can be mixed and matched in the SPARC Enterprise M9000 servers with the current SPARC64 VI (2.28 or 2.4GHz) and SPARC64 VII (2.52GHz) options. Availability of the CMU as field upgrades and on the SPARC Enterprise M8000 and M9000-32 servers are expected to be announced by year's end.

Takeover and failback are the two operations users most commonly associate with clusters. A recent Sun blog addresses how these operations in their latest iterations work on the Sun Storage 7310 and 7410 NAS appliances.

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 140 Issue 1, the top 10 articles were:

• Oracle President Meets with EU Competition Commissioner
• Freeware and Open Source Tools and Applications for Windows
• Cloud Storage for Cloud Computing
• Oracle VM Server Virtualization Software 2.2
• Logical Domains Security Questions Answered
• Accelerate Databases with the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array
• OpenSolaris News Bites
• Tuning Your Storage System for Database Workloads
• Sun StorageTek Automated Cartridge Systems Library Software (ACSLS) 8.0
• Optimizing Sun HPC Hardware for ANSYS FLUENT

The longer version of this article has list of top ten articles for the last 8 weeks.

This five-part series by Mrudul Uchil, Kamna Jain and Rick Palkovic considers the virtue of using a standardized interface language in enterprise architecture in order to liberate the application that publishes a service from having to know anything at all about the calling application. The result of this practice makes service-oriented architecture (SOA) especially useful for both enterprise and inter-enterprise architectures, the authors contend in their introduction to the series.

The Sun BestPerf blog "Oracle Flash Cache -- SGA Caching on Sun Storage F5100" posted by Senthil Ramanujam reports on the combination of new features delivered by Oracle and Sun's Flash Cache technology and its effect on the improved database performance of the Sun Storage F5100. The benchmark results in this blog deal with the performance of Oracle Database 11 (Release2), which enables extending the System Global Area (SGA) size and caching beyond physical memory, to a large flash memory storage device as the Sun Storage F5100 flash array.

Driver/Device Lists Updated for the Solaris 10 10/09 Release

The Device and Third-party Solaris Device Driver Reference Lists on the BigAdmin HCL have been updated. One list includes devices and drivers supported on the Solaris OS or OpenSolaris OS on x86 systems, showing PCI ID, Driver, Type, Vendor and more. Another list features third-party drivers; many of these are used by hardware devices that have not been certified by the Sun Hardware Certification Test Suite.

New: HCL for Virtualization Platforms

This new section of the BigAdmin Hardware Compatibility List identifies virtualization platforms (such as VMware and Sun VirtualBox) that are compatible with the OpenSolaris and Solaris OS. For more info, see the BigAdmin blog entry, "Are you bored with the BigAdmin HCL?"

Enterprises using Linux virtualize roughly 30 percent more than those that prefer Windows. What this means for enterprises incorporating Linux into their environments is cost savings in hardware and licensing fees, and a significant advantage in total cost of ownership (TCO). These conclusions are based on a Gabriel Consulting Group survey conducted on predominantly mixed environments of Linux and Windows. CNET's Matt Asay shares more of the survey findings.

Hudson is an open source continuous integration (CI) server, initially developed by Sun, that brings a new level of efficiency and productivity to collaborative software development. By automating the build-and-test process, Hudson saves time, cuts errors and risks, and brings a higher level of transparency to projects. This paper describes the capabilities of Hudson, compares Hudson’s key features to those of competitive offerings, and summarizes why Hudson has quickly become the industry’s most widely adopted open source CI server.

The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has identified the most critical web application security vulnerabilities, writes blogger Carol McDonald in the posting "The Top 10 Web Application Security Vulnerabilities Starting with XSS." McDonald writes that adopting the OWASP Top Ten is perhaps the most effective first step towards changing the software development culture within an organization into one that produces secure code.