The Official Site for Breaking News and the Latest Information from Sun On The Record

GlassFish is one of the leading open source application servers in the industry today with more than seven million downloads since its release in May 2005. MySQL is the most popular open source database software in the world.

GlassFish and MySQL Unlimited is a new offering from Sun - designed to help customers significantly reduce the costs of deploying and managing database and application server software.

Proprietary software vendors often charge their customers pricing "penalties" if users want to deploy the software on multi-CPU, multi-core hardware and the latest virtualization technologies (in addition to the traditional software licensing costs their customers already pay)

And then there are the price increases...

For example, as this CRN article points out, Oracle recently hiked prices between 10 and 20 percent (or more) for many of its core software products.

With GlassFish and MySQL Unlimited, customers eliminate proprietary pricing constraints, and gain the flexibility to deploy the latest innovations, for a flat annual subscription – without having to count servers, CPUs, cores or virtual machines.

GlassFish and MySQL Unlimited pricing starts at $65,000 USD a year for an unlimited number of servers across a customer's entire organization (for companies with fewer than 1,000 employees). Pricing is tiered by employee size for larger companies.

Mark and John have more to say on the potential cost savings for customers of GlassFish and MySQL Unlimited - compared to similar, proprietary offerings. And Mark also did a Sun News podcast about this announcement.

Sun is proud to announce that it was ranked #14 in Computerworld's 100 Best Places to Work in IT. This U.S survey highlights companies that offer their IT staffs the best benefits, competitive salaries, opportunities for training and advancement, as well as interesting project work and a flexible and diverse work environment.

IT employees at Sun consider Sun's eco-responsibility, flexible work program, and innovative spirit the top three things that make Sun IT among the best places to work.

Check out Sun's profile here: http://www.computerworld.com/spring/bp/detail/14 

For the full list of winners, visit http://www.computerworld.com/spring/bp/2008/1

Sun collaborated with Media Grid to launch the highly anticipated open source Education Grid in the Project Wonderland virtual world last week.

Educators, Media Grid, and ISIG members from the University of Essex, the University of Oregon, Saint Paul College, Common Need, the New Media Consortium and Sun Microsystems showcased their virtual environments in Project Wonderland. We reached our capacity in Second Life even before the start of the event!

Guests waiting for the opening ceremony to start.

Aaron Walsh of Media Grid and Kevin Roebuck of Sun hosted the opening ceremony at the Sun Pavilion in Second Life and invited guests to enter the various virtual schools in Wonderland.

Here is a press release we issued today.

Sachin Nayyar, former CEO of Vaau, is now the new chief identity strategist for Sun Microsystems. In this new role, Sachin will be responsible for the strategy and vision of Sun's identity portfolio -- from identity, role and access management to federation and directory server. Sachin has more than 12 years of experience in enterprise security, risk management, identity management and regulatory compliance and joined Sun as part of the Vaau acquisition.

Many of you may have already met Sachin, as he is a frequent speaker at industry events on identity management, identity compliance and role-based access control. Prior to joining Vaau, Sachin worked for Ernst and Young where he managed and led several role definition, identity management, security assessment and design and compliance projects.

Since Sachin joined the team, Sun has already announced Sun Role Manager in March and today, announced the availability of Sun Identity Manager 8.0. With numerous product enhancements and new functionality, such as data export and attestation capabilities, Sun Identity Manager 8.0 is the first user provisioning software to truly provide role-based user provisioning, enabling customers to use business roles for both identity lifecycle management and identity auditing across enterprise and extranet environments.

Sachin has also been traveling all over the world to meet with customers - for example, this week he's in London at the Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit and then will be in San Diego at the Burton Catalyst Conference.

Stay tuned b/c you'll definitely be hearing more from Sachin and Sun's identity group.

Welcome aboard!

While Sun's long history in Europe spans multiple disciplines and multiple industries, high-performance computing has become a centerpoint of Sun's European presence. With Sun Grid Engine, Lustre and Sun Datacenter Switch 3456/Sun Datacenter Switch 3x24 engineering teams dotted across the region and a new Sun Solution Center in Linlithgow, Scottland, customers and partners can now leverage Sun's HPC expertise and state-of-the-art technology in simulated environments to build and test innovative HPC solutions.

Listen in as Philippe Trautmann, Business Development Manager, High Performance Computing, Global Government, Education and Healthcare, Sun Microsystems, discusses how Sun's innovative technologies and HPC expertise together with a growing partner community in Europe make for game-changing HPC solutions.

Learn more about Sun and HPC in Europe at: https://hpc.sun.com/overview. 

Downloads:

Sun Grid Engine

Lustre File System

Sun HPC Cluster Tools

More information on Sun Solution Centers is available at: http://www.sun.com/solutioncenters/index.jsp.

NXTcomm 08 wound down today in Las Vegas.  It's the biggest annual trade show held in the U.S. targeted at the global telecommunications market.  And because the telecom industry is one of Sun's largest customer bases, it's a big show for us too.

Truth be told, THE Sun was probably the biggest news out of NXTcomm this year.  The 100+ degree temperatures during the week caused more than a few conventioneers to ditch the suit and tie for a cooler business casual look. (read: polos and cargo shorts).  Despite the heat, Sun's communications and media practice team had a busy week at the show. Among the highlights:

Scott McNealy Takes the Stage at NXTcomm08

Sun Chairman Scott McNealy took to the main stage at NXTcomm on Wednesday morning to deliver his keynote address.  McNealy touched upon the arrival of convergence in the telecom space and the importance of sharing in this new environment. His main charge for network operators was that they should strive harder to package and offer services and content directly to customers, rather than offering them network access and connectivity alone.  "Become a destination site, or the destination site will become you," McNealy told the audience.

During a private lunch with press and industry analysts later that afternoon, McNealy expounded upon that point and shared some more advice for operators seeking to win the battle against the dominant Internet destination sites for subscriber eyeballs. "They [operators] don't have to out-YouTube YouTube.  They just have to out last them," he said.

Not surprisingly, the potential for open source software to be a "game-changer" in the communications market was another topic McNealy focused on. As the industry becomes more software-driven, he said, more players in the space need to take advantage of the technical and cost advantages of free, open source software.

Speaking of free, open source software... 

Sun Announces MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition 6.3

Sun took the opportunity at NXTcomm to announce the latest version of its open source database platform for carrier grade telecommunications environments,  MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition 6.3. MySQL Cluster is a a high availability "shared nothing" database and is at the heart of subscriber data management systems for leading network equipment providers including Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia, Siemens Networks and Nortel. It's enabled companies to save millions over closed source legacy database systems.  And to steal a phrase McNealy repeated many times over during his NXTcomm keynote, "Did we mention it's free?"

Sun Goes Green at NXTcomm

Finally, Sun was making its presence felt on the NXTcomm exhibition floor in the show's Green Pavilion - a special section of the exhibition hall dedicated to eco-friendly products for the telecom industry.  Sun showed off a number of technologies, solutions and services that enable customers to increase efficiencies throughout their businesses - while producing results that are beneficial environmentally as well as economically. Perhaps the biggest attraction (literally and figuratively) was the Sun Modular Datacenter, which was wheeled into the Las Vegas Convention Center on a semi-truck and available for walk-through tours during NXTcomm's exhibition hours.

The Top 500 Supercomputers list was announced this morning at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Dresden, Germany.

Sun took the #4 position with its deployment of the Sun Constellation System at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in Austin.

Other key Sun highlights:

*Based on the Sun Constellation System, TACC's Ranger supercomputer is the highest ranking system built on an open architecture.

*Sun's Lustre File System manages 6 of the top 10 systems and nearly half of the top 50 systems.

*Nearly half of the top 50 systems are archiving data on Sun storage.

Check out Sun at ISC: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/presskits/2008-0618/index.jsp. 

Participants in the Czech Open Source 2008 survey selected Sun Microsystems Czech as the company of the year in the category of companies developing and supporting open source software products.

The goal of the Czech Open Source 2008 survey, organized by the Root.cz portal -- is to support the development of the Czech open source community and present its work to the general public.

A jury of professionals as well as the general public voted for the best software, project, personality, event, blog and company. Approximately 2,500 members participated in the vote.

"The award received from the professional community's vote belongs primarily to our colleagues from the Prague Engineering Centre, who are devoting themselves to building a community of developers and users of Java, OpenSolaris and MySQL,” said Zdeněk Pilz, country manager of Sun Czech. “I'm confident that our collaboration with the open source community will continue to develop successfully.” Sun's Prague Engineering Centre currently employs hundreds of individuals that devote themselves to developing Sun's key open source technologies, in particular the Java platform, the NetBeans IDE, GlassFish and OpenSolaris.

As one of the largest supporters of open source software in the world, Sun is releasing the source code of all its key software products (Java, NetBeans, Solaris, etc.). Sun has also released the design of the UltraSPARC T2 processor under the GPL license. The complete results of this year's Czech Open Source survey are available here.

The buzz about the benefits of open source software continues with the recent review of OpenOffice.org in the Orlando Sentinel.

In an article posted by Captain Count-the-Change, he has compared free and open source software as 'a generic version of a prescription'. Check it out and take a couple of minutes to read the comments.

As featured Monday night on ABC 7 News, Sun released the findings of an internal study it undertook to monitor the energy usage of more than 100 of the 19,000 participants in Sun’s Open Work flexible work program. Almost 10 years ago, Sun realized that the network would fundamentally change the way we work. At Sun, the Network is the both the Computer and the Office, with more than 56 percent of our workforce working wherever they need or want to be with Open Work, our flexible work program. Sun discovered that by being unbound to an single office and schedule, Open Workers are actually more productive, and tend to put as much as 60 percent of the time they saved by not commuting toward their careers.

Sun’s sustainable computing team created the Open Work Energy Measurement Project to compare home and work energy use in order to determine if Open Work really saves energy, or just transfers the energy cost and load to the employee. Sun found that by eliminating commuting just 2.5 days per week, an employee reduces energy used for work by the equivalent of 5,400 Kilowatt hours/year. Commuting was more than 98 percent of each employee's carbon footprint for work, compared to less than 1.7 percent of total carbon emissions to power office equipment.  Sometimes the most effective way to reduce one’s carbon footprint is to simply stay home!

On a related note, Reuters recently reported on a survey of 1,500 U.S. technology workers that found more than a third would accept pay cuts of up to 10 percent to work from home and avoid the expense of commuting to the office. Sun’s flexible work program is a great lure for tech workers tired of the commute, florescent lighting or chilly AC, but not the discount-rated ones, just the best!

Sun Releases Code that Let's Customers  Save Time and Money with Open Storage Arrays built with OpenSolaris COMSTAR

COMSTAR (Common Multiprotocol SCSI Target) -- now available in the latest OpenSolaris community build let's a standard x86 server transform into an Open Storage array. COMSTAR basically
allows the server to act like a block storage device. To the host system, a server running OpenSolaris
and configured with COMSTAR walks, talks and responds as a storage array.

COMSTAR is a open, pluggable architecture that allows developers to quickly add new storage targets (think iSCSI or Fibre Channel targets) and add new transports (the actual protocol support to talk to various devices (FC, SAS, etc.).

Director of Storage Platforms Scott Tracy wrote about the versatility of COMSTAR in this blog at blogs.sun.com/quicksticks

Recycle, reuse, repurpose. Make the most of your existing industry standard equipment. It's one of the many benefits of Open Storage.

Amy O'Connor Brings More Than 25 Years of Engineering, Marketing and Information Technology Experience to New Role

Sun has named Amy O'Connor Vice President of Services Marketing. O'Connor will report directly to CMO Anil Gadre. O'Connor is a 15-year Sun veteran with extensive experience in business planning, marketing strategy, product management, and engineering . In her new role, O'Connor and her team are responsible for Sun's Services strategy and market positioning, the product management of the services portfolio, and services demand creation activities.

“Amy is an exceptional business strategist who is well-positioned to help deliver on initiatives aimed towards furthering Sun's overall market positioning,” says Anil Gadre, Chief Marketing Officer. “I'm delighted to have her join the team to continue driving Services growth and improve the customer experience through services innovation and expertise. I look forward to working with Amy to further strengthen Sun's Infrastructure Services capabilities to fully complement the overall Sun strategy.”

Over the course of her career at Sun, O'Connor has served as senior director of software business planning and strategy on the Software marketing team, and held positions within the Storage unit including senior director of Storage strategy, and engineering director for Sun's storage data services products. Amy also brings the perspective of a Sun customer as she has held IT technology positions with a dot-com and internet service provider.

O'Connor holds bachelor of science degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the University of Connecticut.

Announced today the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 server has been awarded an eWEEK Excellence Award in the Infrastructure Hardware category.

The goal of the eWEEK Excellence Awards program is to aid in selecting and purchasing technology by pointing IT buyers to the most promising new enterprise products and technologies.

eWEEK editors judged the entries on:

• Innovation
• Practical integration of emerging technologies
• Suitability to task
• Cost effectiveness
• Potential for helping companies create business efficiencies
• Manageability
• Potential for helping companies develop competitive advantage
• Securability

eWEEK had this to say about the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120:
The T5120 leverages Sun’s work in server manageability and reliability to earn our top marks as a server platform that will support computing workloads for years to come, without forcing IT pros to compromise on performance. In addition to virtualization technologies including Solaris Containers and Logical Domains, the T5120 comes with on-chip integrated cryptographic accelerators to handle the security needs of the future. Speaking of future-proofing, Sun equipped the T5120 with 10 Gigabit Ethernet network cards, to ensure that high-capacity workloads don’t slow down in the data center infrastructure.

Check out the entire article in eWEEK: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/eWEEK-Excellence-Awards-Honorees-Reflect-New-IT-Computing-Trends-Challenges/

Today's win highlights continued momentum around Sun's innovative CMT server line.

Just last week the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 server was awarded 1st place in the Midrange Server category in the Serverwatch Product Excellence Award Program.

According to Serverwatch:
The midrange server category has evolved to point where it's unclear what it means. Multicore has muddied the waters and no one is looking at raw processors anymore. Still, there are servers that are neither entry-level nor high-end and that are designed to meet needs that don't fall neatly into either category.

And some servers, like the *Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220*, which took first place, are particularly nimble. Unveiled in October, the T5220 was one of the the first rack-mount systems to use Sun's T2 processor, which features eight cores and supports eight threads per core. Although the 2U server contains a single processor, a spec that would not place it in the midrange categories of yore, it contains 64GB of memory and has room for eight hot-pluggable drives and can run either a 1.2GHz or 1.4GHz processor.

For the entire Serverwatch article click here.

For more information about the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220, click here.

What product do you think will have the biggest impact on Business moving forward? Click here and cast your vote for eWEEK's 'Best In Show' award.

Flash Storage...Thumper...Disk Momentum...OH MY!

Wha Sut a week!  Sun outgrew the total disk storage systems market in revenue and Terabytes shipped (as shown in the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Tracker.)

Sun continued its momentum in midrange disk storage as it grew midrange disk system revenue for the ninth consecutive quarter. The Sun StorageTek ST6000 product family, specifically the ST6540 and ST6140, continue to sell very well. Also notable in this segment is the strength of the Sun Fire x4500 (Thumper) as it more than doubled in unit shipments and revenue. The new Sun StorageTek VTL products are also ramping up well with 3x Q/Q revenue growth. Sun's products in the midrange are well positioned to take advantage of the growth that is forecast for the midrange segment, which is the largest of the market.

In the high-end (classified by Sun as disk storage systems priced above $300K), Sun had strong growth as it posted the strongest growth of all top vendors in revenue and unit shipments, outgrowing the market. The Sun StorageTek ST9900 family had excellent growth in the quarter.

"Sun outgrew the market in year-over-year revenue and gained marketshare in key areas, as shown in the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker," said Jason Schaffer, senior director, storage marketing. "We also demonstrated significant growth for our Sun StorageTek x4500 Thumper line, which demonstrates the momentum in the market for the Open Storage revolution. As we add new products that offer better economics and performance through the combination of open source software on general purpose hardware, we anticipate stealing marketshare from the competition."

And it doesn't stop there...

John Fowler brought a team of people to Boston to speak to multiple audiences about Sun's plans to bring Flash storage to market in an open and game-changing way later this year. (see photo below). These puppies are going to be 100x faster at 1/5 the power consumption...I wonder how much the "shuffle" version will be?