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

Sun partner Zeus Technology threw down a price/performance lightning bolt announcing that its Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager (ZXTM) software running on Sun's SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5140 servers delivers the highest price/performance and scalability across any server platform, based on the latest industry standard throughput tests.

Commenting on the achievement, Sohrab Modi, vice president, Advanced Technologies, at Sun said: “Today's announcement by Zeus confirms the exemplary performance of their application delivery on our SPARC CMT Enterprise servers. The overall value of the Zeus/Sun solution highlights Sun's continued commitment to helping customers derive superior price performance benefits."

More information on Zeus' ZXTM running on SPARC Enterprise servers is available here.

Zeus' press release is here.

Howdy, ya’ll. This has been a busy week for Sun at the annual Supercomputing (SC08) conference, located in Austin, Texas, this year. We started things off on Monday night with John Fowler, EVP of Sun’s Systems Group, accepting an award commemorating Sun’s 20th appearance at Supercomputing – going back to the very first SC show in Orlando.

On Monday during the show's opening gala, HPCwire also did a short podcast with John to get an overview of Sun's presence at SC08. Take a listen.

On Tuesday, we made three announcements -- highlighting some exciting customer deployments, announcing new products, and claiming that 9 of the top 10 supercomputers on the TOP500 list use Sun Storage technologies. Check out the SC08 press kit to see these press releases, hear podcasts about Sun’s activities at the show, and more.

On Wednesday, I took some time to chat with Bjorn Andersson, director, HPC marketing, to get his perspective on the show and the new Sun Compute Cluster and Sun Storage Cluster.

Overall, an exciting show for Sun! See ya'll at SC09 in Portland.

John Fowler (left) shows off the new Sun Storage 7000 "Amber Road" family at SC08.

IDC names Sun leader in Tape Storage Automation!

Sun has reclaimed its position as the leading vendor of total tape automation according to IDC's recent Branded Tape Report. Hot off the back of Sun’s Amber Road Unified Storage 7000 Series launch, the second quarter's worldwide tape systems results highlight Tape as a strategic tier of storage for data protection and archive. Success is also due to the recent launch of Sun’s SL3000 midrange tape library which improved overall storage results and signaled a strong return to market space. Midrange and enterprise customers are faced with the increasing challenge of balancing rapid data growth, spiraling energy costs and lengthier data retention periods with flat IT budgets . In the current economic climate, Sun's open, tiered approach to storage and innovative design is helping customers large and small achieve record performance and cost gains.

For more information, see  sun.com/unifiedstorage

At last week's Insight Partner Forum in Phoenix, Sun received the prestigious "Top Partner Alignment" award. The award recognizes those partners best aligned with Insight's priorities. Sun was selected based on a number of criteria including partner investment, initiatives, involvement, synergy, creativity, and growth in the following areas: warranties and integration; field engagement; service, product and category training; and services infrastructure.

Here's Sun's Douglas Fulmer (second from left) accepting the award on behalf of Sun along with Insight's Dave Casillo, Gene Hanchar and Mark McGrath.

"Sun Microsystems is highly invested in our partnership with Insight and is proud to have received the Insight 2008 Top Partner Alignment Award," said Tom Wagner, vice president, North America Partner Sales. "Sun is working diligently to empower our partners by enhancing business propositions and dramatically simplifying the ways we work with them. Insight plays a pivotal role in our plans to expand into new markets and grow our existing customer base. This award highlights our synergies with Insight."

2008 CommunityOne San Francisco was such a success, that we're expanding the program with TWO CommunityOne events for 2009

CommunityOne East - March 18, 2009	CommunityOne West - June 1, 2009
Marriott Marquis (Broadway @ W46th St.)	Moscone Center (Howard St. between Third St. and Fourth St.)
New York City	San Francisco, CA

How great is that?!

CommunityOne Is Defined by Your Participation

It’s your conference. Help define this year's event by submitting a 50-minute technical session, a 50-minute community panel, or a 5-to-10-minute lightning talk on:

   1. Next-Generation Platforms - Development and deployment in the cloud; virtualization.
   2. Social and Collaborative Platforms - Social networks and Web 2.0 trends.
   3. RIAs and Scripting - Rich Internet Applications, scripting and tools.
   4. Web Platforms - Dynamic languages, databases, and web and application servers.
   5. Mobile Development - Mobile platforms, devices, tools and application development.
   6. Native Development - HPC, chip multithreading, code base development, customization and contribution.
   7. Open - Any and all subjects are fair game.

Submissions are due by December 11.

CommunityOne is a conference sponsored by Sun Microsystems focused on open source innovation and implementation. It brings together developers, technologists and students for technical education and exchange.

How to Submit - Get details and submit talks here

Questions or Comments?

Post to our wiki, or email the conference team with general questions at:
communityoneeast@eventreg.com   or   communityonewest@eventreg.com

Today, Sun donated a Sun Modular Datacenter (Sun MD) to the China National Disaster Reduction Center (CNDRC).  The Center, under China's Ministry of Civil Affairs, is tasked with improving national disaster reduction efforts and providing the government with critical information and research on disaster reduction and relief.  The Center will use the Sun MD for back-up storage and management of data and applications including environment and disaster monitoring and forecasting.

Sun technologies powering the Sun MD include: SPARC Enterprise M5000 (database servers), T5220 (web servers), as well as Sun Fire X4200 servers and Sun Fire X4540 storage servers. The CNDRC's Sun MD will also use Sun software including MySQL, Solaris Cluster and the Lustre file system.

To read more on the Sun MD donation to the China National Disaster Reduction Center see the press release or for more info on the Sun MD visit http://www.sun.com/sunmd.

The Sun Studio Express 11/08 release is now available. This latest release contains full compiler support for OpenMP 3.0 APIs which offers developers a more general approach to multi-threaded programming with task queuing, support for performance analysis of MPI applications, remote development and debugging capabilities, a new lightweight stand-alone GUI debugger and leading-edge performance for Intel x86, AMD x86, UltraSPARC and SPARC64-based systems. Based on the NetBeans IDE 6.5, developing parallel applications for the multi-core era has never been easier!

Check out Liang Chen's Blog or view the Sun Studio Express 11/08 Podcast to learn more.

Download your free copy of Sun Studio

Register your Sun Studio product and receive access to technical content:

• Sample chapter from the book Solaris Application Programming by Darryl Gove titled, Correctness and Debug
• Guide to Selecting the Best Compiler Options
• Booklet on Using Sun Studio to Develop Parallel Applications

Check out the updated OpenEco.org site launched today.  Whether you're a tree hugger or just interested in being a little more environmentally conscious, OpenEco.org is the perfect place for you to get a handle on how you're impacting the environment. 

It makes it super easy to calculate, compare and reduce your GHG emissions. With personalized dashboards (see Sun's below), members simply select their carbon emissions source, input data and track results.  Easy as 1-2-3.  Get your neighbors or the start-up down the hall to join too.  What better way to have some fun than with a little healthy competition with those around you?

Looking for more information on how to use OpenEco.org? Listen to the BlogTalkRadio segment featuring Sun's Eco Responsibility Program Manager Lori Duval

As you may have seen, Microsoft today released Windows Essential Business Server 2008, a new bundled software package that includes Windows Server 2008, Exchange Server 2007 and other software that midsized businesses require.

Expanding its portfolio of mid-market solutions, Sun introduced the Sun for Windows Essential Business Server Solution, a pre-configured, competitively priced server and storage solution that makes it easy to get EBS up and running.

Usually, EBS runs on 3 separate servers, but the Sun EBS Solution takes advantage of the software’s virtualization capabilities to run on just 1 system (Sun’s x4150 or x4250 server with attached J4200 storage). This saves on space and up-front costs – not to mention the resources it takes to power, cool and manage more servers – and can mean real savings for customers. For example, a company using a medium configuration of the Sun EBS solution (for 100-200 users) can save more than 80% in power and cooling expenses and 29% in total spend over 3 years vs. competitive solutions for EBS.

Sun expects EBS to present a great opportunity for its channel partners with Microsoft and Sun expertise. Companies interested in checking out the Sun solution can do so for free through Sun's Try and Buy program.

We had a surprise visitor to the Sun campus in Menlo Park, CA yesterday.

Rock legend Neil Young came over to show James Gosling and other Sun employees the Linc Volt - a classic 1959 Lincoln Continental Mk IV re-powered with a new series-hybrid system that runs on biodiesel and electricity, enabling it to achieve up to 100 miles per gallon.

Why?  It wasn't to celebrate his birthday b/c that's today.

Yes, you guessed it - the Linc Volt uses Java! 

Perrone Robotics (the team behind Tommy & Tommy Jr autonomous vehicles) has installed sensors on the vehicle that use Java technology to monitor performance elements of the Linc Volt as the team travels down the road. This data is then displayed on a touch-screen panel in the car. In the future when the team starts long distance testing we will be displaying this information on java.com

For the past 14 months, Young has been working on Linc Volt, his entry into the X Automotive PRIZE.

Visit java.com to learn more on how Java technology is helping to revolutionize the way we look at cars through the Linc Volt project.  And enjoy more photos here.

Thx Neil for visiting us - hope you have a Happy Birthday!

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Great news! OpenSSO Enterprise 8, Sun's first open, high-performance and unified solution for access management, federation and secure Web services capabilities to address the core single sign-on (SSO) problems that organizations face today, is now available for download here:

- At opensso.dev.java.net: https://opensso.dev.java.net/public/use/index.html


OpenSSO Enterprise 8 is the only integrated open source, access and federation management offering on the market today. Sun allows customers to deploy commercial or open source versions of OpenSSO Enterprise, known by OpenSSO community members as Express builds, and provides full support and indemnification. As a result, customers benefit from an active open source community, support and service from Sun, direct access to Sun engineering and expertise, direct access to OpenSSO source code, and easy access to the latest product innovations.

    * Much, much more - centralized server configuration (no more AMConfig.properties text file), centralized agent configuration (no more AMAgent.properties text files)...

Check out the 2nd Life event here: http://www.sun.com/emrkt/campaign_assets/secondlife/opensso.jsp

Piggy backing off the successful mid-market launch in the US earlier this year, Sun recently announced a new initiative targeting the European mid-market where customers in countries such as Italy, Spain and the Netherlands can learn more about Sun's solutions for mid-sized companies – like the Sun Infrastructure Solution for Microsoft Exchange. Sun is offering complete solutions, based on its x86 product family and storage offerings, and leveraging its extensive partner network in the region – to provide customers with enterprise-class products without the associated costs and complexities.

Check out how Sun customer, Yuntaa, a Belgian-based Web 2.0 company is using Sun solutions to help grow their business.

Starting today, when U.S.-based Internet Explorer users download the Java Runtime Environment from java.com, they will also be given the option of downloading the MSN toolbar, powered by Microsoft Live Search.

You can read more about the agreement in the press release and also listen to Eric Klein, VP of Java Marketing at Sun, offer his thoughts on the announcement on Sun News Radio.

Sun and IBM launched a new OpenDocument Format (ODF) Community project this week.

Listen to Jim Parkinson on WallSt.TV. Public Access is limited so don't delay, 2 Days 5 Hours 35 Mins from now.