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The OpenSolaris team is getting ready for the 2009 CommunityOne conference, June 1-3, 2009, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and planning a whole series of sessions, events and activities. You can see the full listing here.

Some highlights include:

General session keynotes - On June 1 at 9am pacific, John Fowler, executive vice president of Systems, and Dave Douglas, senior vice president of Cloud Computing and Chief Sustainability Officer of Sun will open the 2009 CommunityOne conference.

OpenSolaris Technical and Deep Dive Sessions - OpenSolaris content will be featured as part of the general Operating Systems/Platform track. There will also be two OpenSolaris software specific tracks, one for developers and one for system administrators. On Tuesday, June 2, developers and systems administrators can also participate in OpenSolaris deep-dive sessions.

For those who can not attend CommunityOne in person, the opening general session keynotes and the OpenSolaris technical sessions will also be available online.

OpenSolaris Install Lounge - Located in Booth #322 on the Pavilion floor, the Install Lounge will consist of three areas: an OpenSolaris Install Fest area, RockBand 2 area and the “Apps of Steel” showcase area, which will highlight the winners of the Apps of Steel Challenge. Toshiba will also be participating in the OpenSolaris Install Lounge to showcase the Toshiba Tecra M10 and Portégé R600 laptops that come with OpenSolaris software pre-installed.

OpenSolaris and Sun Cloud Party - The evening of June 1is also the OpenSolaris and Sun Cloud party, from 7-9 p.m. at the Moscone Center in Hall A.

For overall information about the 2009 CommunityOne conference, visit: http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone, view updates on Twitter or join the CommunityOne Facebook group.

Head over to Channel Sun to check out some of the video entries coming in for the 2009 JavaOne "Dude, Where's My Pass" contest.

Don't forget - Deadline for submission is: May 12, 2009 at 11:59 P.M. (PT)

Full contest details, rules, regulations, etc are available here.

Good news from the Sun identity management team attending the European Identity Conference (EIC) in Munich this week.

At the European Identity Award ceremony, OpenSSO Fedlet won “Best Innovation” in Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC).

The European Identity Award recognizes outstanding projects as well as innovations and additional developments of standards and are presented by the analyst firm Kuppinger Cole.

Congratulations to the OpenSSO team!

Join the community of JavaOne conference supporters through our new Affiliate Program.

Here's an opportunity to earn money to promote the 2009 JavaOne conference and recommend it to your friends & industry contacts.

We make it easy by providing all the tools you need for promoting the JavaOne through your Web site and/or blog.

To join the program, contact: javaone_marketing@eventreg.com to obtain your priority code.

For every attendee who uses your priority code when registering, we’ll pay you $20 (USD).



**Rules and Regulations**
Participants in the Affiliate Program are not eligible for the JavaOne Conference Refer a Friend Program. The maximum number of attendees using your code that you can be credited for is 25. The program applies to Conference, Conference Plus and All Access passes. Payments will be calculated according to the number of fully paid attendees - cancellations will not be credited – and will be made by check after the event.

The latest update release of Solaris 10 is available now.

Highlights of Solaris 10 5/09 include:

• Performance, energy efficiency and reliability enhancements for the new Intel Xeon processor 5500 series (Read more about how the Sun Solaris Platform Advancements Unleash the Power of the Intel Xeon Processor 5500 Series)

• The Power Aware Dispatcher, which automatically monitors and optimizes a company's system to maximize performance while minimizing power consumption. For example, it can be used in conjuction with Intel's new Deep C-States to dramatically reduce power consumed by idle cores.

• Solaris Containers updates including the ability to leverage ZFS filesystem cloning as the basis for container cloning - to provide significant speed and efficiency improvements

• The Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) suite of security protocols integration with Solaris Service Manager, allowing simplified management of overall security functions. IPsec is also now usable as the interconnect for Solaris Cluster, to manage fast, secure failover of session information among nodes of a cluster

• Logical Domains (LDoms) enhancements including virtual disk updates to streamline performance and extended VTOC (virtual table of contents) support for very large files, as well as VNET and VSW support for jumbo frames

• SSH performance enhancements on CMT systems, such as the ability to leverage hardware crypto acceleration on UltraSPARC T2 based systems

• Sun Validation Test Suite (VTS) updates to support diagnostics of new Sun systems

Full technical details on what's new in Solaris 10 5/09 are available here.

All the enhancements in Solaris 10 5/09 are happening in conjunction with the global OpenSolaris community, which Intel is a key contributor to.

Look for more about OpenSolaris during the upcoming CommunityOne conference, being held June 1st in San Francisco.

Sun is sponsoring a new contest where 5 winners will receive a full JavaOne conference pass and $1,500 (USD) to offset travel expenses. All you need to do is submit a 30 second video commercial on why you should be at JavaOne this year and why it is THE event to attend. Deadline for submission is: May 12, 2009 at 11:59 P.M. (PT) Full contest details, rules, regulations, etc are available here. You can also learn more about the "Dude, Where's My Pass?" contest in Chris Melissinos' latest JavaOne video.

Today, Sun is announcing a new version of Java Enterprise System - Release 6

As you probably know, Java Enterprise System, or Java ES for short, is Sun's comprehensive set of subscription-based services that combines software, support, professional services and educational services in a single package - for a single price, which is based on employee count.

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
    * 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.

Java ES R6 includes several new software compontents -  Sun GlassFish Web Space Server and Sun OpenSSO Enterprise, as well as GlassFish Portfolio, an open web and application platform. In addition, the Java ES Base suite is now tested with the Identity Management and Java CAPS suites.

There's a great post over on Paul Hinz's blog that gives an overview of Java ES R6. Paul's also got a chart that outlines the particular versions of each of the software components included in Java ES R6 - compared to Java ES R5.

What's particularly helpful about Java ES is that all the software components are rigorously tested to ensure interoperability and reliability. So that way, you know which version of GlassFish Enterprise Server works with NetBeans and OpenSSO Enterprise and Directory Server Enterprise Edition and so on...

The best way to learn about the benefits of Java Enterprise System is to read what some of our customers have to say.

Yesterday at the MySQL Conference & Expo, Karen Tegan Padir presented the annual MySQL awards to some of our best customers, partners and open source community contributors.

And the Winners are ...

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[Read More]

Powered by the Sun Java ME SDK, Samsung Mobile Innovator is a global website and suite of tools that enable the world’s mobile application developers to build Java technology based applications for Samsung’s mobile phones, more quickly and easily.

The features of Samsung SDK 1.1 include
▶ Support for mobile service APIs (MSA) and sensor APIs
▶ Easier integration with IDEs, such as NetBeans and Eclipse
▶ Multi-tasking virtual machine support
▶ Search feature in the SDK toolbar for querying any Samsung Mobile Innovator site’s data
▶ Debugging, performance and optimization tools to help build efficient mobile applications

VirtualBox 2.2 includes some significant performance enhancements and feature updates. You can get all the details here.

One of the most significant new features is support for the new Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard, which enables users to build virtual machines or appliances and effortlessly export them from a development environment and import them into a production environment.

Watch this replay of the VirtualBox Live Show, to get up to speed on the new features of VirtualBox 2.2 and see a demo.

Listen to this Sun News Radio Segment with Sun Senior Product Manager, Andy Hall as he gives host Chhandomay Mandal an update about what's new with VirtualBox 2.2.

With 11 million downloads worldwide, 3.5 million registrations since October 2007 and more than 25,000 downloads a day VirtualBox continues to grow in popularity. Download it here. A mere 50 megabytes, VirtualBox software is incredibly compact and efficient and installs in less than five minutes.

Dave Kearns posted a great article today in his Network World newsletter about Eve Maler, one of the identity management experts at Sun.

It centers around a recent blog post Eve did on a project she and other Sun colleagues are working on to determine "requirements around making the 'everyday identity' experience more responsive to what people want".

As part of their research, they've come up with a web protocol that they're calling  ProtectServe, which would dictate interactions among four parties: a User/User Agent, an Authorization Manager, a Service Provider, and a Consumer.

In addition to her work on Sun's Identity Management team, Dave's article also highlights some of Eve's other accomplishments, including being one of the inventors of XML and a contributor to other industry standards such as SAML and the Liberty Alliance. Plus, she sings in a rock band!

For more on ProtectServe and Eve, check out the article, as well as Eve's blog.

You can also catch up with Eve and Dave at the European Identity Conference this May 5-8 in Munich.

Really cool news today from the OpenSolaris team.

OpenSolaris Toshiba laptops are now available for purchase in the U.S. via the OpenSolaris.com shop.

There are 2 models for you to choose from, the Tecra M10 and the Portege R600

More info available here and via the Getting Started Guide.

As part of “Virtualization Ecosystem Month,” AMD’s month-long celebration of virtualization technology, AMD hosted a webcast with Sun, Oracle & VMWare to talk about hardware-assisted virtualization.

Joost Pronk, virtualization strategist at Sun participated in the event, along with Earl Stahl, AMD VP of Software, Monica Kumar, director marketing Linux & Virtualization, Oracle & Richard A. Brunner, chief platform architect, CTO office, VMware.

The panelists discussed a number of topics, ranging from virtualization adoption, how it’s faring in this current economic climate, to how virtualization is being implemented in data centers & how SMBs can leverage virtualization technologies.

In case you missed the live event, you can catch the replay here.

Russian PC World magazine, Mir PC, has published their list of the "Best Products of 2008".

They look at a long list of technologies for this annual survey - everything from digital cameras & games to developer tools, databases & motherboards

And I'm pleased to say that Sun had 2 winners in the software category!

Sun Studio 12 for "Best Open Source Development Tool"  and  MySQL for "Best Open Source DBMS"

The original story (in Russian) is here.

Since my Russian language skills are nonexistent, the team was kind enough to send me an automatically translated page.

Congratulations!

Found out some interesting news from our Java business team this morning. We've just launched Access Only - a new entry-level addition to the Java SE for Business Program.

The Access Only program is intended for customers who have been using stable Java applications for many years and who do not need technical support to resolve problems. It provides extended access to Java -- 10 years from initial release -- without any support.

This means that customers could continue to use their legacy applications (which are often tied to a specific version of the Java platform) and know that they are secure - without having to pay for support that they don't want.

With Access Only, customers will have access to the latest security updates such as the release of J2SE 1.4.2_20 released on 3/24/09 or any release of Java SE 5.0 after its EOL in October of 2009. They will also have access to any other bug fix releases that Sun provides, such as the upcoming release to support Windows 2008.

Pricing for the Access Only program starts as low as $5,000 (USD) per year for small companies or $2,500 (USD) per year for individual departments and can be purchased via the Sun Online Store.

And what about those companies thinking they want to get extended access to Java plus support? Don't worry, the team's got you covered. We're still offering three levels of support for Java SE for Business: Standard, Premium, and Premium-Plus. 

Full details of the Java SE For Business Program and the new Access-Only feature, are available here.