This week's issue looks at several companies finding success with Sun.
Inmarsat Ltd. is selecting Sun for support of its mobile satellite
communications network [12543]. Rural Seguros is moving its insurance
business to the Sun platform [12572], while Sun and Vignette are
working together to build virtual meeting places [12580].
The Security section offers information on preventing unauthorized
access with Sun Alerts [12466] while the JavaTM technology section
looks at JavaTM Specification Request 127: JavaServerTM Faces
[12511].
Read about Sun promotions for the N1TM Service Provisioning System
[12547], Sun FireTM V480/V880 servers [12546] and Sun FireTM
12K-15K server Upgrade Kits [12544].
The Education section looks at how three educational institutions are
choosing Sun [12455].
The Manufacturing section looks at how two companies are offering the
industry solutions using Sun technology [12562] and [12527].
Find out how to register for the JavaOneSM Conference in the section
devoted to that event [12500].
Those installed base customers of the Sun Fire 12K server who are
interested in scaling to the capacity of the Sun Fire 15K server
can, for a limited time, receive a 35 percent discount off the upgrade
kit list price when making the upgrade. The offer will expire on
September 30, 2004.
As part of the Upgrade Advantage Program (UAP), Sun is offering its
customers new upgrade options designed to protect investments in Sun
Fire server UltraSPARC III processor-based midrange and high-end
servers. The program also offers affordable migration paths to Sun Fire
UltraSPARC IV technology.
Sun is extending its Trade-in, Trade-up promotion on the Sun Fire
V480 and V880 servers and expanding it
to include the Sun Fire V440 server. The promotion is
pushing back its original last order date of March 31, 2004, and will
now end on June 30, 2004.
Sun is offering a limited time price promotion on the N1 Grid Service
Provisioning System for customers who purchase Sun Fire Enterprise
Servers -- including the Sun Fire E2900, E4900, E6900, E20k and
E25k servers -- along with 40 or more licenses when buying the bundled
services SKU.
The Sun Java Enterprise System will support Inmarsat Ltd.'s new
broadband mobile satellite communications network. Selected for its
value, simplicity and security services, the Sun Java Enterprise System
will act as the business support infrastructure for Inmarsat's
Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) service.
Rural Seguros -- part of the Credito Agricola Group, a cooperative of
158 local banks serving the farming community of Portugal -- has
adopted Sun technology to run COGEN in
managing the sale of general insurance products to its agricultural
customers.
Several different Sun customers such as Boeing and Siemens are
experiencing increases in performance and investment protection with
the UltraSPARC IV processor-based and Solaris Operating System
(Solaris OS) -based Sun Fire systems for the mid-range and
high-end. Sun's new
benchmark results show the company has moved ahead of the competition
as a result of the performance increases from these new systems.
The new infrastructure at the Chicago Tribune relies on technology from Sun,
AT&T and Nortel Networks to ensure enterprise continuity.
It will link two Chicago sites, ensuring reliable access and real-time
"mirroring" of data and applications.
OEM software distributor Markement has
sold over a million copies of StarOffice software. Markement
distributes
StarOffice productivity suite licenses with its software bundle PCSuite
to personal computer manufacturers and large retail store chains in
Germany.
Focusing on the specialized needs of medium- to large-sized
corporations, Sun and Vignette will market a joint collaboration
suite targeted for this market. The SunWeb Collaboration Suite,
Sun's internal implementation of the Vignette Business Workspaces
collaboration solution, unites employees worldwide with
its virtual meeting places.
At CeBIT 2004 in Hannover, Germany, Sun announced a complete stack of
products and custom services to complement SAP NetWeaver. For example,
the SAP Enterprise Portal 6.0 has been enhanced by security and
identity management services of the Sun Java Enterprise System.
Both recent college hires and established Sun employees now have the
opportunity, through the Sun Engineering Enrichment and Development
(SEED) program, to be paired with senior staff for a mentoring
experience running from six months to a year that is designed to
improve job satisfaction and the opportunity for advancement.
Yemenia, the national airline of Yemen, has adopted the Sun Ray
appliance in an IT upgrade designed to run its new revenue accounting
system, Mercator's RAPID, according to Christine Haugseth, reporting
for www.ameinfo.com.
Two stories on developments in the area of 64-bit computing circulated
recently. The first concerned the CMP XChange in Nashville, TN, and the
second reviewed market highlights based on IDC's European Server Tracker
for 4Q03.
Chris Melissinos, Sun's Chief Gaming
Officer, shared his visions for the Game Technologies Group (GTG).
Chief among them was the need to develop applications with the same
scalability available to online traders on Wall Street.
Sun kicked off its NC 04 strategy
and business model in conjunction with the Sun Analyst Symposium (SAS)
on February 10. Now, Sun is bringing the biggest product refresh in
Sun's history to you at a special morning briefing. The event will be in
Denver, CO, on March 24 and in Broomfield, CO on March 25.
The Bio-IT World Conference + Expo brings together professionals from
life science, IT and healthcare to discuss and evaluate the latest
scientific, technological and IT breakthroughs. The conference will be
held at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston.
The 2004 iForce Partner Summit begins April 19, with keynotes from Sun
executives Scott McNealy, Jonathan Schwartz and Robert Youngjohns on
Monday evening. The event will be held at the Manchester Grand Hyatt San
Diego.
Oracle Developer Days events are free and delivered as space-limited
workshops where developers can directly interact with development
managers and engineers from Oracle. The workshops cover topics such
as: Grid Computing, Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition
(J2EE), Linux, Web Services, etc.
At the OASIS Symposium on Reliable Infrastructures for XML, experts and
developers can exchange ideas and present results of standards
work-in-progress. The event also offers the opportunity to identify
topics in need of standards development and areas where coordination
between standards efforts would promote interoperability.
This conference is for IT professionals, business managers and channel
experts wanting to tailor their conference experience by selectively
choosing from five distinct areas -- security, wireless, collaboration
and VoIP, performance & data center and infrastructure & services.
The Sun Crypto Accelerator (SCA) 4000 Software Rev 1.1 effortlessly
migrates keys from existing infrastructure to the tamper-proof
centralized on-board key store. Leveraging the board's acceleration
features is also easy with additional third party security
applications, including HSM and OpenSSL based applications. This
software update is available on CD only.
The new Sun XVR-100 Graphics accelerator card is now supported on the
Sun Blade 150 workstations, Sun Blade 1500 and Sun Blade 2500
workstations. An old card is being ended.
The "Sun Blade 2500 Hardware Documentation Collection" contains the
following documents: Product Notes, a Getting Started Guide, a poster
for cabling the workstation and a guide on the Sun Install Check Tool.
If it's time to upgrade a server, trade in the old system and receive
an allowance with the purchase of a Sun Fire V20z server. Sun's
Upgrade Advantage Program also is offering trade in values to
upgrade the Sun Fire V20z server with component trade ins such as CPU,
memory or disks.
Industry watchers are predicting server blades will be a hot commodity
in the next few years with some estimates at $2.3 billion by 2005. With
this in mind, Sun is weighing whether to standardize Infiniband as
a system interconnect or to include Ethernet and PCI Express in the
deal.
Backup of the Sun Fire V60x and V65x servers on the Solaris
Operating System (Solaris OS) (x86 Platform Edition) can now be made to a low-cost,
tape-based media with all standalone versions of the Sun StorEdge L8
tape autoloader, SDLT 320 and LTO2 desktop tape drives. The limited tape support is available through SCSI cable to the on-board SCSI port.
EqualLogic provides the industry's only iSCSI solution for both the
Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) and Linux for Blade Servers.
PeerStorage Array 100E is the first block-level, iSCSI storage solution
certified for the Solaris OS, verified for Blade Servers and supports
other Sun servers.
Sun StorEdge 9900 Series HiCommand Tuning Manager software version
3.2 is a monitoring, reporting and forecasting solution for management
of storage resources, especially large enterprises using Oracle that
have standardized on Brocade SANs.
The Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) project aims to provide the
most widely and internationally accepted locale data values across
platforms. Unified locale data is necessary to ensure accurate data
transfer and support for the formatting and parsing of dates, times,
numbers and currencies. Linguistic and cultural differences throughout
the world present challenges to globalization engineers.
Poseidon for UML 2.2 from Gentleware AG is a professional UML Computer
Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tool. Poseidon for UML 2.2 helps
synchronize several developers working in a team. Version 2.2 has
been integrated with the new standard UML 2.0.
According to a report on the Sun Web site, membership in user groups
for Java technology (JUGs) has grown by over 150 percent since the
beginning of 2003.
A recent tech tip from the Sun Global Application Developer Corner Web site
teaches developers how to globalize their codes by using TimeZone
class. With this technology, developers can account for time zone
differences when writing code assisting them in globalizing software.
Examples demonstrate how to obtain and use all TimeZone IDs.
The solution of choice for three more educational institutions is with
Sun. The Singapore Ministry of Education, Argonne National Laboratory/University of Chicago and Ohlone College in California selected the Sun Java Enterprise System to help reduce IT cost and complexity.
Developers can learn how to integrate the e-learning software platform
Blackboard Learning System with the Sun Java System Identity Server
6.0 from the paper by Ezhilan Narasimhan, Sujeet Vasudevan and Marina
Sum.
Sun donated 24 Sun Blade 2500 workstations to the
Georgia Electronic Design Center to enable students
to use the latest technology and
equipment for computer-aided design (CAD).
The latest versions of Java Message Service (JMS) are introduced
in Kareem Yusuf's book "Enterprise Messaging Using JMS and IBM
WebSphere." Yusuf details how to build reliable, high-performance
JMS API-based messaging infrastructure by using IBM WebSphere technologies. The JMS API 1.1 and 1.02b are thoroughly examined, as is WebSphere JMS
development, configuration, deployment and administration.
Learn how to expediently develop full-scale Java 2 Platform,
Enterprise Edition (J2EE) applications with leading open
source tools. Touted as the first book to demonstrate how to leverage
best-of-breed open-source tools to build a complete J2EE platform application,
the work outlines each phase of the development process and which tool to use
when.
The Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) is Sun's Java platform
for multi-tier, server-oriented enterprise applications. "Beginning
J2EE 1.4: From Novice to Professional," is a summary of this extremely
powerful platform with information on how to use APIs, when and where
to use them, their strengths and weaknesses and best practices.
The Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee recently
approved Java Specification Request (JSR) 127, the JavaServer
Faces specification that defines an architecture and APIs which
simplify the creation and maintenance of JavaServer application
GUIs. A download is available online.
Results from a recent survey on the application performance of the
Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) indicate a
more efficient diagnostic process is needed when a problem arises. The
survey, sponsored by Wily Technologies, reported on average,
applications are available to service users only 88 percent of the
time.
From large corporations to small independent developers, the Java
Tools Community (JTC) revels in innovative developments created by its
diverse membership. Working directly with the Java Community Process
(JCP), the JTC is helping shape the future.
A secure operating system is the first solution to security. CIOs and
IT managers should ensure their operating systems are safe instead of
addressing security issues with perimeter defenses. Five areas to
assess in determining the security of an operating system are granular
user control, reduced security violations, increased privacy,
protection of local devices and independent certification.
Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) delivers a breakthrough
approach to systems security that is easy to use and built-in with new
military-grade security features. The OS will have stronger
authentication and smartcard interfaces that identify all user IDs and
N1 Grid Containers.
Ford Motor Company recently found it was failing to make the best use
of its considerable resources, which includes 335,000 employees and a
$3 billion IT organization. The result was longer and more costly
application development cycles that impacted overall revenues. By
choosing Sun and the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition
(J2EE), Ford was able to simplify its application portfolio.
Manugistics uses its Runtime Environment to allow IT organizations to
control hardware costs by using existing hardware assets, incrementally
expanding high-end hardware as the enterprise grows or leveraging
commodity computing according to an overall IT strategy.
Visiprise Manufacturing provides users with a Web-based, collaborative
production management system that is made up of components that
automate and improve the manufacturing process. Its unique
capabilities include manufacturing execution, operations performance
management, business process management and collaborative engineering.
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