http://sun.systemnews.com Features http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/125/3/feature/20256 Carl Benefiel, Product Manager with the newly renamed Managed Operations for Sun Identity Management Solutions" offers a view of the services available in a brief on-demand nettalk. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/125/3/feature/20001 Real Time Matrix Corp., which provides content delivery technology and aggregation services for websites, always thought of itself as a dyed-in-the-wool Linux shop. That is, until it attempted to install Ubuntu on its SunFire T1000 Server. Megan Santosus reports (for SearchEnterpriseLinux.com) that founder and CEO Jeff Whitehead complained, "...we found Ubuntu to be very difficult to install on the T1000." As a result of this difficulty, Real Time Matrix adopted the Solaris 10 OS for many of its production systems. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/125/3/feature/20144 Ashok Krishnamoorthy has a dream, one that he shares with the other members of his team at work on microelectronics at Sun. Krishmanoorthy, a Sun distinguished engineer, and his team are hard at work on a project that has caught the attention of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has awarded Sun $44 million to fund research on applying photonics to the problem of optimizing interconnects in computer circuits. Al Riske reports the story. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/125/3/feature/19406 Corporate Express France, wanting to improve the responsiveness and productivity of their sales team, which had been providing customers information on such things as price quotes, checking on orders, retrieving client information and assigning tariffs manually, moved its catalogs to the internet and equipped its sales personnel with laptops, which enables them to respond to customers using either 3G wireless or EDGE cards for anywhere, anytime response capability. Corporate Express France found the solutions it sought with Sun. With the new system in place, customers of Corporate Express France, such as IT professionals, purchasing staff and selected suppliers, are able to access the business network from remote locations. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/125/2/feature/20245 In a recent blog, Taylor Allis recounts the experiences of some early adopters of Open Storage. He refers readers to his earlier "Open Storage Adoption White Paper," which also included customer reactions to Open Storage. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/125/2/feature/19877 Sun's Chief Architect for xVM, Mike Wookey, spoke with Virtual Strategy Magazine about the evolution of virtualization at Sun. Virtualization, as Wookey sees it, is largely an issue of resource management, bringing the best available resources to bear on the applications a user might be running. He suggests that the Solaris OS, even in its early iterations, represented that kind of thinking, which has now matured and continues to evolve in the virtualization efforts that Sun pursues with such solutions as xVM. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/125/2/feature/20185 Chris Wood, Sun's CTO for Data Storage Management Practice, has some ideas about the role of tape in current enterprise settings, and he shared those in a Sun Inner Circle newsletter that examined "the allure of tape." The three forces Wood sees as driving the increasing need for long-term data archiving are increased regulatory compliance requirements, the need for good corporate governance, and the realization that historical information can be a competitive weapon. Each year, the volume of archived data doubles because of these three influences, he said, adding that it is critical for managers to distinguish between material that is backed up as opposed to material that is archived. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/125/2/feature/20198 Robots all but took over the Del Mar Fairgrounds near San Diego in late June as Sun, Wintriss Technical Schools and the San Diego Java User's Group partnered in sponsoring the inaugural International Autonomous Robot Contest (iARoC). "All but took over" is an overstatement because these robots were well behaved, having been programmed to perform specific tasks by the contestants, students from grades five through 12. At the heart of each robotic application was the Sun SPOT hardware platform, a small, battery operated, wireless device running the Squawk Java Virtual Machine (VM). The VM acts as both operating system and software application platform. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/125/1/feature/20158 The team of Advanced Micro Devices, Sun Microsystems, and TACC is pleased to announce an upgrade to Ranger. All 15,744 AMD 2.0 GHz, quad-core processors (62,976 cores) are being replaced with 2.3 GHz processors to create an upgraded system that will provide the user community access to a resource with a theoretical peak performance of approximately 580 Teraflops. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/125/1/feature/20176 100 meters under the ground in Japan, Sun along with ten other IT firms are building a datacenter. The datacenter is located at such a low depth to take advantage of the cooler air as a means to bring the 40 percent of energy usage, for cooling, down a few notches.