Monday May 05, 2008
Monday May 05, 2008 | Today we
are launching a new Student
Reviews Program. Here students worldwide
can get hands-on experience on Sun offerings, post their reviews of Sun
products, discuss the cutting-edge technologies, give feedback to Sun,
get connected with technical experts, participate in contests, and win
cool prizes! The companion Student Views and Reviews site is also up and running with the inaugural blog post. |
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| The first student reviews contest has also been announced. Students can review OpenSolaris OS and/or NetBeans IDE 6.1, and get upto $250 in debit cards. |
Wednesday April 09, 2008 | Today
is
the day!!! We are going multi-socket with Niagara-based systems. 2 CMT CPUs X 8 cores/CPU X 8 threads/core = 128 threads/system. In simple terms, TONS of horsepower to run LOTS of applications. As Wall Street Journal reports, IT.com found out early how these systems can change their business... |
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And Alan has a nice post on the reactions from the amped up engineers.
Let's cap it off with the best news -- our Try & Buy users can save up to 45% if they purchase trial units before June 30.
UPDATE: InfoWorld published a preview of the system today with the full review to come in the next couple of weeks.
Tuesday April 08, 2008 | Yesterday
we introduced
data deduplication technologies in our storage and tape
portfolio. The new technologies are part of the Sun
StorageTek VTL
Prime line, and they lower the overall cost of physical storage by
storing only unique data. The StorageTek VTL Prime can be used as
a standalone virtual tape library or implemented with the StorageTek
VTL Plus for a cost-effective, tiered data protection architecture. Here is InformationWeek's take on the announcement... |
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Wednesday March 05, 2008 | The Kuali
Foundation manages a portfolio of open source applications for
colleges
and universities. These enterprise-focused applications
range from
finance, research administration, endowment management to student
systems management. The rSmart Group, which provides services and support to academic institutions for open source software, is collaborating with us to develop Kuali-based programs that are certified to run on Sun's collection of systems and open source infrastructure software, including Solaris, MySQL, GlassFish, OpenSSO and OpenESB. We are also helping to establish several institutions as Sun Centers of Excellence for the Kuali solutions. As reported in Campus Technology, this collaboration, coupled with Kuali open source software, will help colleges and universities cut the costs of administrative computing while benefiting from enterprise applications built for education by education. The typical barrier to entry for open source software in education -- lack of professional support from an established vendor -- goes away with Sun's commitment to this (and other education-related) efforts. Echoing Gary, we are really pleased to be a part of this important initiative. |
(Image courtesy: Kuali Foundation)
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Tuesday February 19, 2008 | Last week,
we announced
addition of 14 new applications in the Network.com Catalog, a
collection of online grid-enabled applications that are available from
Network.com's Sun
Grid compute utility service on a pay-per-use basis. In addition,
we announced a new partner program, "Sun Network.com Connection,"
for ISV to create and expand on-demand service offerings and also
expanded Network.com's international availability. |
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With overviews of the Network.com history since it was first announced, IT Jungle commented, "... utility computing is still something that the company believes in as a long-term prospect for the IT industry." HPCWire highlighted the ISV support, and BetaNews liked Network.com's support of open source technology with applications like Blender, Zeus and GAP.
My favorite one came from InsideHPC, who wrote that Sun "sent a Valentine to potential Network.com customers" with the expanded catalog.
Yes, indeed!
Thursday February 14, 2008 | The now
ubiquitous XML language
is approaching its 10th birthday, and the World
Wide Web Consortium is planning to
celebrate the 10-year
anniversary of XML 1.0. "There is essentially no computer in the world, desktop, hand-held or back room, that doesn't process XML sometimes," said Tim Bray, our Director of Web Technologies and co-editor of the XML standard. "This is a good thing, because it shows that information can be packaged and transmitted and used in a way that's independent of the kinds of computer and software that are involved. XML won't be the last neutral information-wrapping system; but as the first, it's done very well." Send in your XML 10 greeting today... |
 (Image Courtsey: Wikipedia) |
Wednesday February 13, 2008 | A lot of
ink has already been spent on trying to define Web 2.0... Another recent Computer Weekly article describes this Web 2.0 trend, saying, "Four years on from the first serious attempt to define it, there is no firm consensus about what constitutes Web 2.0. Within the past few months, it has been described by senior industry commentators as "a major trend that is building steadily" and "a bagful of old technologies under a new name." |
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So what does our venerable Tim Bray, Sun Director of Web Technologies, say? He explains, "Until Web 2.0 the learning curve to creating websites was quite high, complex, and a definite barrier to entry... Now the new tools that are web oriented, like PHP and Rails, have no other objective than building websites, easier and faster, and the effect is that the number of potential developers is growing."
Interesting read.
Tuesday February 05, 2008 | A recent
Smart Enterprise Magazine article
highlights efforts that CIOs can take
to reduce consumption within the data center and highlights Sun's work
in this area. The piece notes, "Awareness
among CIOs is growing,
thanks to skyrocketing energy prices, growing concerns over global
warming, a series of worldwide droughts and the general prominence --
on both the political and cultural fronts -- of the need for greater
energy conservation. Many CIOs also have a floor-space problem:
While they're being asked to do
more, they are not being given
additional funding for extra data-center space." So what's the solution? |
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Wednesday January 30, 2008 ZDNet blogger Dan Kusnetzky discusses his conversation with Steve Wilson, Sun's Vice President of xVM and Connected Systems, regarding our xVM hypervisor. He says, "If Sun's efforts in operating system virtualization and partitioning are used as a guide, I know that Sun will bring really powerful technology to market. It's going to be interesting to see how Sun competes with all of the others that are trying to offer similar capabilities in their own way."
In a blog post discussing the conversation, Steve goes on to add,"... we at Sun are putting a lot more focus on Windows consolidation and management that Dan thinks. Clearly Windows is a platform where customers want consolidation and we're putting a huge amount of work into optimizing xVM Server to be a great host for Windows."
Tuesday November 20, 2007 Sun introduces new projects to improve file-sharing between Windows and OpenSolaris. The CIFS Server features software code that implements the common internet file system protocol, enabling Microsoft users to store files on an OpenSolaris system. Conversely, CIFS client enables OpenSolaris systems to act as CIFS clients in a Microsoft environment. The client stores and retrieves files on a Microsoft CIFS system, thus completing file-sharing capabilities between OpenSolaris and Microsoft environments.
Monday November 19, 2007 This ServerWatch
article spotlights Sun’s busy week from new high performance computing
offerings to new Netras to unveiling xVM inking deals with Dell. The
piece notes, “At Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz
officially unveiled Sun xVM, its new virtualization technology. If that
weren't big enough news, the even bigger news to come out of the show was the
OEM deal Sun inked with Dell to distribute and support Sun's Solaris OS on Dell
PowerEdge servers.”
Monday November 12, 2007 Our new high-performance computing (HPC) system, the Constellation, has the potential to create the largest supercomputer on the planet. The system is built on mainstream operating systems and hardware but users a new storage system, the Sun StorageTek 5800, which is capable of holding half a petabyte of storage per rack. According to our HPC Director Bjorn Andersson, what we have done is to take general-purpose, industry-standard products coupled with open-source software and "designed it as an open, scalable architecture." Check out the ComputerWorld story here, plus the video of what a Sun StorageTek 5800 customer has to say about the latest innovation from Sun.
Tuesday November 06, 2007 | InformationWeek analyzes the potential benefits of our OpenSolaris project, including the next-generation ZFS file system. The piece notes, "The origins and development of OpenSolaris are markedly different from how Linux itself came to be, but Sun is banking hard on bringing Linux enthusiasts into the Sun fold. Not just to code for Solaris, but to use it the way they'd use Linux as their desktop operating system, and not just something that runs their servers." | 
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Monday November 05, 2007
Wednesday October 31, 2007 Couple of weeks ago, we talked with press and analyst about out virtualization strategy. Yesterday, Rich Green, our executive vice president of software division, sat down with IT Week to discuss virtualization and our roadmap. Check out the insider scoops from Rich here.