Analyze This: Sun Analyst Relations

Exciting news from Sun Storage this month with the announcement of the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array (codename Lightning Flash) and a preview of the Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe Card as well as the announcement of the Sun Storage 6180 Array .

Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array
With the recent announcement of the new Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array, Sun is the first enterprise server and storage company to bring fully-integrated Flash-based storage with Flash-optimized software to the enterprise. The F5100 is the world's fastest solid-state flash array delivering unprecedented performance and eco-efficiency for accelerating databases, improving response times and reducing operating costs at 1/100th the space and power of disk drives.

The F5100 is the first and only solid state storage array in the world that delivers well over 1 million read and write IOPS in 1RU of space, making it ideal for accelerating Oracle and large MySQL database environments by up to a factor of 10, with up to 80% reduction in operating costs.

You can find information on several industry leading benchmarks for the Sun Storage 5100 Flash Array here and more details about Sun's integrated approach to Flash can be found here.

Sun Storage 6180 Array
Sun has also announced the addition of the Sun Storage 6180 Array to our disk storage portfolio. Built upon multiple generations of Sun modular storage technology, the Sun Storage 6180 Array delivers 50% more performance than Sun's previous generation, and over 70% better price/performance than the IBM DS5020. The Sun Storage 6180 array provides the power to achieve better performance with fewer drives - lowering customer acquisition, support and operational costs.

More information about the Sun Storage 6180 Array is available here.

In case you missed news from Oracle Open World this week,Sun announced new world records and the world's fastest flash array among the Sun products making industry news this week...

One of the key announcements focused on Sun's revamped SPARC Enterprise Server Line:

Sun and Fujitsu announce new, faster, quad-core SPARC64 VII processors and an enhanced memory controller for the SPARC Enterprise server line . This enhanced server line has already proven itself by setting four new world records, and the faster processors deliver customers up to 20 percent better performance than the previous generation. The update we're announcing today makes it possible for customers to increase the performance of their mission-critical enterprise applications while capitalizing on existing infrastructure investments -- with upgrades at half the cost of IBM.

Our SPARC Enterprise servers, together with Solaris, offer an unequaled combination of mainframe-class performance and reliability, as well as virtualization and consolidation capabilities, in an open system.

Taking into account Sunday's announcement of Sun FlashFire, this week's announcements demonstrate Sun's continued innovation across the systems portfolio, from high-end servers to the integration of Flash technology across our entire software, server and storage portfolio.

For more information on this week's Sun news check out the following:

Oracle Open World Highlights
OOW McNealy Keynote Highlights
OOW Ellison Keynote Highlights

Sun recently announced new releases of Sun Ops Center and the Solaris Operating System (OS) . Sun will be at the upcoming Oracle OpenWorld conference October 11-15, 2009, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, where we will be showcasing these new releases, and will present demos of the latest innovations for Oracle applications. Click here for the latest information about Sun at Oracle OpenWorld, including presentations.

Sun Ops Center 2.5

Most folks familiar with Sun's data center software management offerings know Sun Ops Center as a systems management solution that includes virtualization management, provisioning, and patching, and monitoring features and functionalities. Sun Ops Center is designed to control server sprawl, enable a flexible environment, improve compliance and increase productivity in the data center. The latest version, Sun Ops Center 2.5, extends lifecycle management capabilities to Sun's built-in virtualization technologies, including Solaris Containers and Sun Logical Domains (LDoms). In addition, Sun Ops Center 2.5 can help customers lay the foundation for managing private cloud environments.

Click here and listen to Steve Wilson, Vice President of Systems Management at Sun, (aka Virtual Steve ), talk more about the new and exciting features of Sun Ops Center 2.5. These are also outlined in the press release.

Solaris 10 10/09

The Solaris 10 OS is a proven, industry-leading operating system that is supported on over 1,000 x86 and SPARC-based platforms and runs over 11,000 unique applications. With over two decades of Sun/Oracle collaboration, there are more Oracle database deployments on the SPARC/Solaris combination than any other OS and Sun is leading the way to bring high-performance solutions for the entire range of Oracle products.

Like previous versions of the Solaris OS, Solaris 10 10/09 leverages the innovation and contributions of the OpenSolaris community, including investments by third-party companies such as Intel and AMD. Additionally, installation, update and patch features have been enhanced; support for new systems and power management capabilities are now available; and Solaris ZFS has been updated to integrate Flash technology, the next revolution in storage hardware, into the operating system in Solaris 10 10/09. Solaris ZFS also now allows administrators greater flexibility in setting usage limits in several ways, including by individual file system, user or group.

Click here to get the Solaris or OpenSolaris Operating System.

Across industries, the Sun Storage 7000 family is gaining in popularity. In only 9 months, Sun has shipped over 35 petabytes in its Unified Storage systems portfolio and has doubled the number of customers quarter-over-quarter across industries including education, financial services, government, healthcare, media and entertainment, manufacturing and others that require faster access to data and easier migration paths. This shouldn't come as a huge surprise knowing how much the Unified Storage systems portfolio boosts performance as complexity is decreased.

Today Sun announced additional features and improvements (more than 16 !) to the Sun Storage 7000 family including best-in-class data protection with triple parity-RAID and triple mirroring, enhanced ISCSI support using COMSTAR, Shadow Data Migration, faster cluster take-over times and improved administration. Additionally, there is now up to 30% more controller performance from the Sun(TM) Storage 7410, with new CPUs with up to 24 cores and doubling the cache, which boosts system bandwidth and throughput.

As Sun's Graham Lovell, senior director of Open Storage, puts it: “ Today Sun raises the bar on the industry with added performance and resiliency to the industry's fastest Unified Storage System. Customers can realize as much as a 30% increase in performance and in most cases, faster access to data, simplified data management and easier data migration, even in complex environments. “

More details can be found here.

Today Sun announced its new Cloud Strategic Planning Service which is a portfolio of professional services that are designed to help businesses - no matter the size - evaluate, plan and implement cloud strategies, including helping customers to address:

* Decreasing overall IT and/or facilities costs;
* Upgrading, migrating, consolidating or building a more agile datacenter or private clouds to support mergers and acquisitions, consolidation or divestiture activity;
* Accelerating IT resource deployment in the cloud;
* Improving IT alignment to support key business drivers;
* Becoming more cost effective at managing peak workload requirements in a cloud environment;
* Increasing IT flexibility, capacity and capability through a cloud computing model;
* Shifting users or key applications or facilities-related assets and management to a cloud computing vendor.

Sun leverages its rich 25 years of datacenter innovation and leadership in delivering this service. As Sun's Amy O'Connor, vice president, Services Marketing explains: "Cloud Computing has been billed by the industry as the answer to today's IT woes, without much clarity on how to get there. At Sun, we are applying our industry specific consulting and technology expertise to offer secure, practical guidance to companies looking to drive new levels of efficiency by leveraging this emerging computing model."

More details can be found here.

Sun StorageTek VSM solutions continue to grow in popularity and we recently announced new enhancements to our virtual tape solutions as well as services that help ease migration to tape virtualization storage archive solutions.

You can find more details about the capacity and performance enhancements made to our tape virtualization storage archive solutions and Sun tape archive innovations here:
Tape Virtualization/VSM
Enterprise Library Software
SL3000 Modular Library
T10000B Tape Drive

Sun also offers services that help make migration to tape virtualization storage archive solutions easier and more efficient, including Storage Assessment, Encryption and Data Readiness Services. You can find more details here: Storage Assessment Service
Encryption Services
Data Readiness Service

Today, Sun added several new software components to the newly released Sun Java Enterprise System Release 6 (Java ES R6).

As Paul Hinz mentions, Sun Java Enterprise System is a comprehensive set of subscription-based services that combines software, support, professional services, and educational services in a single package with a simplified price. The Java Enterprise System consists of a set of principles unique in the industry which aligns a broad set of platform components. All products within Java ES are coordinated during development for common components and features, released along identical time lines and are quality assurance tested together for interoperability and compatibility.

The new software components in Java ES R6 include the Sun GlassFish Web Space Server, Sun OpenSSO Enterprise, as well as GlassFish Portfolio, an open web and application platform. Additional upgraded versions of the Suite components are included in this latest version. You can also view a chart that compares Java ES R5 U1 with this latest version, Java ES R6 in Paul's blog.

Java ES R6 is comprised of several Java System Suites:

* Sun Java Enterprise System Base
* Sun GlassFish Portfolio
* Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS)
* Sun Java Identity Management Suite and
* Sun Java Availability Suite

This allows customers to purchase Java ES components based on their business requirements. And then, as business needs change, they can easily add additional Suites.

To learn more about what our customers think of Java ES, click here

Click here to get it.

Earlier today Sun delivered some more good news with the announcement of New Open Network Systems which can rapidly scale MySQL-Based Web services to potentially millions of users with major cost savings.

Combining Sun's Open Network Systems with the Sun GlassFish Portfolio and Sun's MySQL Enterprise Server Sun's Open Network Systems approach gives customers faster MySQL and GlassFish performance, the fastest data-warehousing platform, the most scalable platforms for large-scale web buildout, and up to three times more density for storing rich media than the competition at 70% off the cost.

More specifically, this architecture comprises:
* Sun Blade 6000 Modular System with AMD Opteron, Intel Xeon or UltraSPARC processors
* Sun Blade 6000 Virtualized Multi-Fabric 10GbE Network Express Module (NEM)
* Sun Storage 7000 "Amber Road" family
* Sun's next-generation enterprise Flash products
* Sun's MySQL Enterprise Server, the Sun GlassFish Portfolio, Solaris ZFS and a choice of OpenSolaris, Solaris or Linux operating systems
* Sun support and professional services, including a Web services assessment workshop

For a deeper dive on the Internet reference architecture, click here

Sun also announced the addition of Flash solid state disks (SSDs) to the Sun Systems for MySQL Virtualization solution, which leverages Sun's chip multithreading (CMT) servers, Solaris Containers and Logical Domains (LDoms) to consolidate multiple MySQL deployments to fewer, more eco-efficient servers and you can find all of this news by clicking here

All in all, lots of good news from Sun!

In addition to the updates my colleague Teri posted about MySQL 5.4, MySQL Cluster 7 and Remote DBA, Sun has also made a few other exciting announcements during the MySQL Conference & Expo, and RSA Conference this week.

Today, we announced expanded interoperability between the Sun Identity Management Suite and the MySQL database , which will let customers deploy Identity Management more cost effectively and create more dynamic identity architectures.

In addition, today Sun became the first and only open source access management vendor to provide out-of-the-box federation support for Google Apps . The new Sun OpenSSO Express release lets employees use their enterprise logins to access Google Apps Premier Edition (Google's SaaS solution for business messaging and collaboration), which improves security and makes administration easier. Sun also announced a new server & storage system designed for large-scale Web deployments using MySQL.

And finally, yes, there is some news about cloud computing… Sun also announced that the GlassFish Portfolio and open source identity management offerings – OpenSSO and OpenDS – are now available to ISVs and system integrators via Amazon's EC2. Sun's open source software infrastructure can be deployed quickly on Amazon's cloud to easily demonstrate how to build and secure cloud applications, and ISVs and SIs pay only for the infrastructure software services and capacity that they actually use. This announcement is an example of Sun's commitment to the concept of cloud computing, and in particular to an open cloud. It is part of Sun's long-term plan to offer our open source software on all popular cloud platforms, including our own and we are very pleased that Amazon has chosen to include these offerings in their cloud platform.

For more information on our Identity Management Suite, click here.

On Tuesday April 21 at the MySQL Conference, Sun announced two exciting new releases of MySQL that demonstrate its readiness for mission-critical, enterprise-scale applications, even those requiring the highest levels of availability and disaster recovery.

First, MySQL 5.4 significantly increases the performance throughput and scale-up profile of the DBMS to large scale 16-way servers. Internal improvements also include subquery optimization and join performance enhancements, which demonstrate immediate improvement in application performance without any changes to code - customers can upgrade and take advantage of the improvements immediately without any additional work. A preview of this release is available for download immediately here. More information can be found here. The full press kit for this announcement, as well as all the announcements from the conference, is here. Please also take a moment to listen to the great podcast interview with Robin Schumacher, MySQL Product Manager, on 5.4 located on the same page.

The other great release news is MySQL Cluster 7. This new version is available immediately and is in production today. Just as with MySQL 5.4, MySQL Cluster 7 includes significant performance and scalability enhancements, as well as support for popular LDAP directories and simplified cluster back-up and maintenance. This release also takes MySQL Cluster to 5 Nines high availability. MySQL Cluster has already proven itself in the telecommunications industry, where it can claim the full roster of top tier providers as customers, as well as in the financial industry and in heavy-demand Web 2.0 industries. This latest release should expand its appeal and use in these sectors as well as in other horizontal, high-demand implementations. More information, including two new white papers, can be found here. The official press release is available in the press kit here.

In addition to the product release news, Sun also announced the creation of a new MySQL Enterprise partner program, which allows consulting companies and service providers to work closely with Sun's database team to offer Remote DBA services that let them bring the benefits of MySQL Enterprise directly to their clients. The Pythian Group (www.pythian.com) now becomes the first Authorized MySQL Enterprise Remote DBA Partner via this program, but there will be many more to come. This program will help scale the community supporting MySQL via MySQL Enterprise beyond the resources here at Sun to encompass partners across the globe wherever MySQL customers need them over time. More information on the program can be found here. The press release can be found here.

There's more exciting news for MySQL watchers in our additional announcements from our Identity and Software Infrastructure product areas, as well as on our new Open Network Systems for rapidly scaling MySQL-based web services. All press releases are contained in the press kit here, and are discussed by my Analyst Relations colleagues in blog postings as well. Please read all to make sure you have all the news!

And don’t hesitate to contact me or any of my colleagues for more information or to schedule a briefing.
Teri Palanca

Check out the first of a three video series by Sun's Ian Murdock and Jim Parkinson defining and describing Connected Developer.

As Sun delivers on its cloud computing strategy the Connected Developer concept will be the the driving force of the developer services we offer for building and deploying applications on and to the cloud!

For more about our cloud strategy and cloud developer services take a look at Dave Douglas and Lew Tucker's keynote from last week's CommunityOne East conference the focus of which was our cloud computing strategy.
You can view this and other way cool videos on our SAS portal.

Earlier this week, Sun announced several customers that have selected Sun Fire(TM) x64 servers to power deployments in a wide range of industries from education to telecommunications to media and entertainment. Sun continues to see strong growth in the x64 market growing factory revenue by over 21.3 percent year over year, in Q4CY08 and also outperformed the blades market with year over year growth of more than 60 percent.

Sun's new deployments at Blue Sky Studios, Clemson University, Last.fm, Marteleron, Northern Arizona University and Reliant Security, along with three new world record benchmarks announced, show Sun's x64 systems, based on the Intel(R) Xeon(R) and AMD(R) Opteron(R) processor technology, provide the performance, efficiency and scale to help power and simplify IT infrastructures.

For more details and the full press release, please visit here

Today Sun strengthens its leadership in system storage and Flash innovation as the first provider to integrate SSD flash technology across software, storage and its entire systems portfolio including Blades, CMT and x64 servers. Our announcement today is the latest step in our strategy for end-to-end Flash solutions. SSDs based on Flash technology are now an enterprise-class storage option for faster I/O performance at a compelling price point with incredibly low power requirements. Like the recently announced Sun Storage 7000 series, Sun servers with SSDs leverage the power of Solaris ZFS to provide automated Hybrid Storage Pool data management and storage optimization.

With Sun SSD Flash solutions:

* Customers can instantly and efficiently accelerate application I/O performance simply by adding an SSD to Sun servers.
* Sun servers deliver dramatic performance gains, with up to 65x faster response times.
* Power and space efficiencies are improved -- consuming 38% less power/GB and 98% less power/IO compared to spinning disks.
* SSDs are hot swappable and as easy to add as an HDD; you simply plug in and instantly accelerate server performance.
* Flash performance and storage utilization are maximized with automated data placement from Solaris ZFS software.
* Sun servers can increase I/O intensive application performance and efficiency.

Today Sun also announced the Sun Flash Analyzer, the industry's first tool that gives customers insight into their SSD-based servers to understand how to increase application performance. The Sun Flash Analyzer runs on Solaris 10 OS, Windows and Linux operating environments and can easily be downloaded here.

For more information about Sun's new SSD server portfolio, the Sun Flash Analyzer tool or the Solaris OS, click here.

In the past two weeks I have read numerous analyst reports, case studies or articles about how open source is gaining more traction in this time of economic turmoil. Those of us who have been proponents of open source are not surprised. As a matter of fact many of us may be saying "well DUH"! Whereas a year ago the cost savings of open source argument was not all that compelling it seems to be at the forefront of what I've been reading. Which is great, and not to dismiss the importance of cost savings, but I think there is more to it than cost savings. There has to be. I want to believe that open source is not just about practical imperative. Call me naive but I believe it is a way of thinking about the world and our fellow citizens and that it's not about "free as in beer" but free as in "freedom".

Case and point.

Most recently I read Scott McNeally's Op-Ed piece in LiveMint.com in which he puts forth the idea that India is particularly well-positioned to take advantage of open source technology as a way of driving its economic growth though innovation and job creation. Which is all good for sure. But my favorite part of his piece is where he reiterates the notion that the citizens of India and the government which supports them can remain free from the clutches of commercial vendors (and lock-in) allowing them to maintain control of their data for many years to come. Which, of course we all know is not only true about India or emerging markets for that matter.

According to Mr. McNealy the advice he gives India "mirrors the advice I’ve given to the new US administration and to governments around the world—develop an open source policy and standardize your country’s IT and vital data on standards, not on vendors."

I hope they've been listening.

Today, Sun released the Sun(TM) GlassFish Portfolio to enable companies to deliver next-generation Web applications with better price/performance. The Sun GlassFish Portfolio packages many leading open source projects including Apache Tomcat, Ruby, PHP, LifeRay Portal and GlassFish, into a complete, pre-integrated and fully-tested platform. It is well suited for extremely high-scale mission-critical environments as well as departmental applications. The GlassFish Portfolio includes the GlassFish Application Server, along with the following new components:

• Sun GlassFish Web Stack – A complete and fully integrated LAMP stack designed for developers wanting a light-weight Web solution. The GlassFish Web Stack includes Tomcat, Memcached, Squid and Lighttpd with support for PHP, Ruby and the Java Platform.
• Sun GlassFish Web Space Server – Based on LifeRay Portal, the leading open source portal technology, helps companies simplify Web site development and build collaborative work spaces, including portals and social networking sites.
• Sun GlassFish ESB – A lightweight, open source ESB platform for department-scale and enterprise SOA deployments that connects existing and new applications to deliver content and services to the Web.
• Sun Enterprise Manager – For enterprise scale management and monitoring of the GlassFish Portfolio including SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) support.

Check out Cotė's videoblog that includes an interview with Sun's Kevin Schmidt and Suresh Potiny, along with a demo with Frank Kieviet on Sun GlassFish ESB:



The Sun GlassFish Portfolio is available immediately via a flexible subscription-based pricing model starting at $999 per server (USD).

Additionally, Sun announced an add-on to the GlassFish Portfolio, the Sun(TM) GlassFish Communications Server, a telecommunications-grade, open source foundation for converged multimedia applications. This solution is based on the joint development with Ericsson in the open source Project SailFin. You can click here and here to learn more about Sun GlassFish Portfolio and Sun GlassFish Communications Server.

Sun also announced several new GlassFish customers and ISV partners today. Please read more about how they are using the technology.