http://sun.systemnews.com News http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/127/1/news/20546 In the IDC Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker for Q2CY08, Sun showed strong results for disk storage systems sales. Sun outpaced all major storage vendors to see a 29.2% year-over-year increase in factory revenue for the second quarter of 2008, outperforming the market by nearly three times. The second quarter's worldwide disk systems results shows continued strength, with the total market increasing to $6.9B in revenues, up from a 10.9% increase from Q2 CY07. Sun disk storage systems outgrew the market in many major revenue categories for Q2 CY2008. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/127/1/news/20214 The "Good News" from Sun for September 2008 includes 600 new members have joined Sun's OpenSolaris Storage community Customers Choose Sun: Web 2.0, Emerging Market Governments, Thin-Client Environments Leading Market Conversations: Open Source, Cloud Computing, OpenSolaris, Sun Ray, Java CAPS, Partners Product Reviews Underscore Innovation: VirtualBox, Sun Fire, JavaFX, OpenOffice.org http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/127/1/news/20545 Sun announced Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0, a high performance, free and open source desktop virtualization software, and Sun xVM VirtualBox Software Enterprise Subscription, a new offering for 24/7 premium support for enterprise users. Enterprises will be able to fully reap the benefits of the xVM VirtualBox platform and deploy it across their organizations with guaranteed technical support from Sun. xVM VirtualBox software is the first major open source hypervisor to support the most popular host operating systems (OS), including Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, Solaris and OpenSolaris. Sun's xVM VirtualBox software has received awards and positive reviews from top industry experts. Most recently, the software won InfoWorld's 2008 Bossies (Best of Open Source Software) Awards in the "Best of open source platforms and middleware: Desktop virtualization" category. xVM VirtualBox software was chosen for its OS support and seamless Windows support. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/127/1/news/20494 Scott McNeally and Terry Matthews of Mitel answer questions put to them by Andy Canham of Sun on the subject of their companies' most recent collaboration, the world's first converged voice and data desktop for the thin client. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/4/news/20513 Sun's Shailender Chaudhry delivered a presentation at the August 2008 "Hot Chips" conference. Slides from the talk, "Rock: A third Generation 65nm, 16-Core, 32 Thread + 32 Scout-Threads CMT SPARC Processor" are available on-line in PDF format. "The goals for this high-end commercial microprocessor are high throughput and high single-thread performance, mainframe-class reliability, hardware transactional memory, and linear scalability. We show how these goals are met by the logical and physical design of this 2.3GHz 396mm2 16-core 32-thread plus 32-scout-thread microprocessor." http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/4/news/20502 Fujitsu’s Takumi Maruyama delivered a presentation on Tuesday at the Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, Calif. According to a report in Computerworld, at the end of that presentation there was a brief discussion of a future eight-core version of the quad-core SPARC64 VII. The eight core chip has a code name of “Venus”. Sun and Fujitsu jointly developed the SPARC Enterprise server line that uses the SPARC64 chips and Solaris 10. A 64-way SPARC Enterprise M9000 equipped with quad-core 2.52GHz SPARC64 VII processors delivered 2.023 TFLOPS on the Linpack HPC benchmark. Maruyama provided few details, including when the processor will ship other than it will be manufactured using a 45-nanometer process, a step up from the 65-nanometer process used for the quad-core SPARC64 VII. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/4/news/20481 BM Seer blogs yet again on his favorite subject, the record setting results racked up by Sun products in benchmarking exercises. This time he writes about the Sun Fire X4600 M2 (8 Opteron 2.5 Ghz QC) running Sun Java SE 6 Update 6-p, which achieved a result of 683542 SPECjbb2005 bops, 85443 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM for the best score for all x86 based servers on the SPECjbb2005 benchmark. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/3/news/20484 Sun has nearly doubled shipments of its Sun Ray thin clients during the Q2 of 2008 , compared to Q1 2008. Sun Ray unit shipments are growing faster than the thin client industry at large, underscoring the increased appeal thin client and desktop virtualization solutions are experiencing among businesses and organizations. Contributing to this growth is strong market demand for Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Software 2.0, which now ships on approximately 25% of Sun Ray units since being introduced in March 2008, in addition to the choice Sun Ray thin clients offer customers, enabling them to display Solaris, Windows or Linux desktops on the same device. Sun Ray virtual display clients, Sun Ray Sofware and Sun VDI Software 2.0 are key components of Sun's broad desktop virtualization offering, which are a set of core desktop technologies and solutions within Sun's xVM virtualization portfolio. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/3/news/20485 As part of Sun's commitment to its Partner-first strategy, there will be enhancements to the Sun Partner Advantage Program that will provide new resources to accelerate business growth and momentum for channel partners in the US. Sun augmented its Partner Growth Fund (PGF) with a new Demand Generation component to enable partners to earn additional marketing funds and bolstered its incentive program for those partners that are broadening Sun's footprint by selling Sun solutions to new customers. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/3/news/20486 The adoption numbers for the OpenSolaris Storage community that showed over 20% growth in registered members in just six months. The community now has over 40 projects that range from a peer to peer distributed storage system to the latest drivers for storage connectivity. This growing and diverse community support for the Open Storage eco-system is comprised of Enterprise, Web 2.0 and high performance computing developers and researchers as well as storage administrators and architects from around the world. Anyone can join the Open Storage community.