Analyze This: Sun Analyst Relations

Strong growth for Sun Storage... and our disk systems that are the foundation of Open Storage. Leading analyst firms are reporting significant quarterly growth for Sun disk sales, with both IDC and Gartner issuing news releases highlighting Sun's achievements. In releasing its Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker for Q2 CY08, IDC reports that the External Disk Storage Systems market saw the largest growth rate in two years at 16.7% year-over-year. Sun had nearly triple the growth rate of the overall market in total revenue (29.2% vs. 10.9%), and realized growth at a double-digit pace year-over-year in total revenue, terabytes and units shipped. In a press release, Gartner recognized increased sales in our 2000, 6000 and 9000 series as contributing to the highest growth year-over-year in the worldwide external controller-based disk storage market. Sun's Jason Schaffer, senior director, storage product management, says the "results demonstrate that Sun's unique and open approach to storage is fast gaining acceptance with those that matter most – our customers.” Link here for more details.

According to my colleagues at On the Record like this mug is the new big brain behind Sun's cloud efforts.

The visage in question is Lew Tucker, who was hired in August as the Vice President and CTO of Sun's Cloud Computing initiative. David Douglas, Senior Vice President of Network.com and head of Sun's cloud computing initiative, had this to say about Tucker's bacground, "Lew's career has been focused on scalable computing and web development. He spent much of the '90s at Sun and contributed to the explosive growth of Java and growing Sun's presence on the Internet. In 2002, Lew joined Salesforce.com and led the design and implementation of App Exchange, which remains one of the largest cloud computing success stories to date. After Salesforce.com, Lew was CTO at Radar Networks, where he focused on the scalable design and build out of its semantic web service. With this background, Lew brings a unique combination of technical experience and past success in Sun, which will be a great asset to the Network.com team."

Today is quite the day for developers here at Sun. In addition to the xVM VirtualBox 2.0 release, today we are announcing the availability of Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.0, which now supports Linux distributions, as well as Solaris and OpenSolaris OSs.

For the most complete roundup of the announcement, cruise on over to Kuldip's blog. The short of it is that in addition to a complete line of HPC ready servers, Sun is also investing in complete HPC software stacks on both Solaris and Linux OSs. Plus, Kuldip notes a bunch more highlights, including:

• Based on the open source Open MPI project, version 1.3
• For the first time, available and supported on Linux (RHEL 4&5, SLES 9&10) as well as Solaris 10 OS
• Available with the next OpenSolaris OS release
• Supported with Sun Studio compilers and tools and GNU/gcc toolchains on both Solaris and Linux OSs
• MPI profiling support with Sun Studio Analyzer, plus support for VampirTrace and MPI PERUSE
• Infiniband multi-rail support
• Mellanox ConnectX Inifiniband support
• DTrace provider support on Solaris
• Enhanced performance and scalability, including processor affinity support
• Support for InifiBand, GbE, 10GbE, and Myrinet interconnect

Download Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.0 today!

Today Sun announced the availability of VirtualBox 2.0. You can download the new version here.

While the product has proven a runaway success--with more than 6.5 million downloads and more than 15,000 downloads per day--there is a interesting transformation taking place the way Sun talks about the lightwieght hypervisor. When we first started to discuss VirtualBox, we tended to position it as a developer tool--that is, as a way for developers to build pre-configured virtual images of software stacks (for example, an application infrastructure built on OpenSolaris, MySQL and GlassFish) ready for deployment to a virtualized environment (perhaps one built around xVM Server). And to be certain, there are a number of new features in the 2.0 release that will appeal to developers, including:

• support for 64-bit guest OSes (Microsoft Windows Vista and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5)
• support for AMD RVI
• support for Microsoft VHD virtual disk format
• new interface for Apple Mac OS edition (native 10.5 Leopard GUI)
• Python API (for Solaris and Linux hosts only)

But a funny thing happened on the way to the virtual lab. It turns out that enterprises are also keen on the little hypervisor that could. One of the more interesting aspects of today's release is the fact that Sun is now offering enterprise support subscriptions for VirtualBox 2.0. That's because, as the press release points out, organizations like the German government have installed VirtualBox on 12,000 PCs (a enterprise scale deployment if ever I heard one!) in order to preserve its investment in its client software. It turns out by installing a small hypervisor between the hardware and the OS, VirtualBox allows enterprises to future-proof their software purchases--and this brings enormous benefits in terms of flexibility and cost savings.

All of which is to say that VirtualBox 2.0 is now developer and enterprise ready!

Leading experts from Gartner and Sun Microsystems look at the challenges and best practices that will help you virtualize your server environment.

...as visualized by Wordle

Here's a fairly high-level look at the Sun xVM product family in white paper form. Since we get scads of requests for briefings, this should be required reading for anyone who is looking for an introduction to xVM Virtual Box, xVM Server, xVM Ops Center and xVM VDI. Also, the newly redesigned Sun virtualization solutions Web site is looking pretty spiffy and is chocked-full of useful info.

How cool is Geek Stalker! As a self proclaimed geek groupie I'm jealous i didn't think of it first.
The latest Geek Stalker episode features Todd Fast CTO of Zembly, the first development environment for Facebook and other social computing platforms.


Check it out! but remember you saw it here first!

As I used to contribute to customer reference efforts for the Dell Enterprise Group, it's a bit odd for me to be writing about PowerEdge servers as a Sun employee--but not so odd when you consider the ever-increasing demand for running Solaris on x86-based systems from Sun, Dell and IBM.

Today's news: Dell is now shipping and supporting Solaris 10 as an OS option on nine of its most popular Intel and AMD based PowerEdge servers.

Click here for more info about running Solaris on Dell PowerEdge servers, or here for all the latest goodness about Solaris, including a complete list of certified systems.

Don't kill me Virtual Steve but unbeknown to anyone I snapped this screenshot during an xVM pre-briefing Steve was doing with a certain analyst firm (this is all very hush hush, of course):


That screenshot is showing an ultra top secret demo of xVM Server. Steve is logged in to a server in Colorado on which he is managing the virtual resources. Btw, the xVM Server interface is identical to the xVM Ops Center interface minus some functionality that lets you manage virtual and physical servers at scale. What's more the analysts are sitting in Minnesota, presumably, while watching the demo.

If that's not enough virtualization for ya, just moments before, Steve had booted up a VirtualBox VM on his Mac in order to answer an analyst question about why he wasn't running OpenSolaris. Within moments, Steve was running OpenSolaris as a guest for all the analysts to see over the presentation software.

Still not enough virtualization for ya? I captured this screenshot while sitting across campus. I'm on a Sun Ray, natch, so my desktop is being served to me from somewhere across the Bay Area, and I'm watching Steve give this live demo of a virtualized server in Colarado, while the analysts sit half way across the country watching the same thing.

xVM Server, xVM Ops Center, VirtualBox and VDI - it's desktop to datacenter, baby! And in case you hadn't heard that's the motto of Sun xVM virtualization product family.

Perhaps I am one of a few, or one of many that can relate to this analogy. It's been a while since I first blogged. I get this feeling of anxiety and my mind races when I think of the many things happening with Software Infrastructure/middleware and I often tell myself, "I need to blog about this and that", such as the Where's the Logic campaign that we unveiled today. You can also read more about this from Mark , and you can check out this humorous but clever You Tube Video to learn more about how we can help customers save money on SOA.

I get this same exact feeling of anxiety when I put together on-line photobooks of my two daughters in an effort to capture their milestones (babysteps) that can be shared real-time with friends and family in Ireland. Every time I take a picture, I tell myself, "I need to send photos of this and that to Ireland". I used to send monthly photobooks, which led to bi-yearly photobooks, and then eventually the 12-month calendar version of our girls. What once took me about 15 minutes to send-- upload all, select all, send all, now easily takes a couple of hours -- download all, organize all, and select and send a few (yes, 60+ being a few). It becomes a challenge picking the "12" best photos because every photo depicts a special moment that tells a unique story, even the five snapshots of practically the same photo (action shots of daughter swinging on the gymnastic rings or other daughter taking her first steps and falling). You get the picture -- literally.

As I have gathered some of my high level thoughts around the exciting events that have occurred within our Software Infrastructure, I've tried to line list a few (milestones and babysteps) that you ought to know since my last entry on the Sun/Accenture Partnership, noting that the excitement won't end here. Maybe next time you'll get a monthly blog instead of a calendar version.

May 2008
* Announced our Partnership with LifeRay
* Announced a technology Preview of Open Source Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server and New Sun GlassFish Communications Server

June 2008
* Launched Sun Java CAPS 6 and Sun Master Data Management Suite at Gartner's AADI Summit. Make sure to view videos and learn more about how Carrefour and Medavie Blue Cross use our technology.
* Announced Sun Identity Manager 8.0 at Burton Catalyst.
* Announced the GlassFish and MySQL Unlimited offering .
* In the same month, Gartner graded Sun as Overall Positive in a recent Vendor Rating Report . In that same report, our Identity Management offerings received a Strong Positive rating.

July 2008
* Made available our first Sun Mobile Enterprise Platform
* Announced our LAMP Stack for Solaris and Linux .
* Announced OpenSSO Express. Don't forget to learn more about the Fedlet -- see a Live Demo . Alternatively, you can get more from the Smoking Monkey, where you'll see comments from RedMonk's Michael Cote .

August 2008
* As referenced above, we unveiled an offering that can help customers save money on SOA with Sun. Read more from Kevin.

Today Sun announced Sun Fire X2250 and Sun Fire X4250 servers, powered by one or two dual- or quad-core Intel Xeon processors 5200 or 5400 series.

The Sun Fire X2250 server is a perfect 1U server for HPC workloads such as MCAE, EDA, energy and financial services, giving customers an inexpensive compute engine for highly dense, power-sensitive environments that delivers lightning-fast performance and can easily scale for parallel processing. When used in conjunction with the freely available record-breaking integer, floating point and integer throughput scores on the industry-standard SPEC CPU2006 benchmark, which measures the performance of the processor, memory and compiler on the tested system by executing a range of tasks and capturing the time it takes to complete each of them. Sun's server shows versatility by delivering these results under the OpenSolaris and Linux operating systems.

The Sun Fire X4250 server is the most expandable 2U enterprise-class system powered by Intel Xeon processors, with the highest disk count of any comparable server in the market. It is an ideal platform for customers running Web 2.0, back office and database applications who want the features of the Sun Fire X4150 server, but need more internal storage and PCI Express slots for expandability.

If you have a question about the JavaFX Preview, post your questions during this session and get answers from members of Sun's JavaFX engineering team: Josh Marinacci, Martin Brehovsky, and Larry McDonough. Typically, a one week period is designated for questions on a specific Ask the Experts topic. You can submit a question on that topic any time during that week. We'll collect the questions periodically and send them to the experts. We'll then post a selected set of questions and answers. Although the experts will try to answer as many questions as feasible, there is no guarantee that all questions will be answered. Get more information at the Ask The Experts website.

I have to admit i stole part of my headline from Kuldip Oberoi's blog post about the availability of NetNeans 6.5 beta which you can download here.

The latest version of NetBeans is just another milestone in NetBeans' continued support of scripting languages. But that's not all - this version has an improved editor and debugging features as well as better database capabilities. You can see the full list of what's new here.

This just in from the very cool department: RedMonk's Cote has posted two videos dedicated to xVM, including a real live demo of xVM Server. Since the xVM Early Access program is currently closed, these videos certainly beg the question: How does Cote score all these cool scoops? Only the shadow knows.

The first clip is an interview with Steve Wilson (aka Virtual Steve) about the product family, and the second is a hands on demo of xVM Server. Here they are in all their glory.

xVM Overview

xVM Server Demo