New Technologies from Sun
There has been huge debate around the last few gems that Sun recently announced, or is planning to launch in the near future.
No one can deny that Sun is pushing technology to higher levels, enabling new fields of systems and application performance improvement. While many argue that some technologies are still in early stages of acceptance by the industry, due to it's eventual immaturity, I'm sure we'll be able to look back and thank Sun for taking the first steps, breaking through with disruptive pieces of technology.
Some nice and recent examples range from a complete overhauling of an already great OS, Solaris, available for free and with an Open Source Project around it housing a huge community of developers, to a radically new concept of CPU design, released as the new UltraSPARC T1 and UltraSPARC T2 Processors.
And by the way, these were also released to the community as a truly Open Project.
While doing lots of research around new multi-core chip designs, Sun's labs have been working extensively with new transactional approaches to old concepts, like the ZFS Filesystem already delivered as part of Solaris 10, or Transactional Memory, which will boost the application performance of applications on the new ROCK processor even beyond what would be expected with the novel speculative thread mechanism.
Sun is today a great place for engineers to play around with bits and pieces of the future IT industry. I have no doubts we'll be seeing some of these technologies come up in other players long-term plans (or wish lists).
No one can deny that Sun is pushing technology to higher levels, enabling new fields of systems and application performance improvement. While many argue that some technologies are still in early stages of acceptance by the industry, due to it's eventual immaturity, I'm sure we'll be able to look back and thank Sun for taking the first steps, breaking through with disruptive pieces of technology.
Some nice and recent examples range from a complete overhauling of an already great OS, Solaris, available for free and with an Open Source Project around it housing a huge community of developers, to a radically new concept of CPU design, released as the new UltraSPARC T1 and UltraSPARC T2 Processors.
And by the way, these were also released to the community as a truly Open Project.
While doing lots of research around new multi-core chip designs, Sun's labs have been working extensively with new transactional approaches to old concepts, like the ZFS Filesystem already delivered as part of Solaris 10, or Transactional Memory, which will boost the application performance of applications on the new ROCK processor even beyond what would be expected with the novel speculative thread mechanism.
Sun is today a great place for engineers to play around with bits and pieces of the future IT industry. I have no doubts we'll be seeing some of these technologies come up in other players long-term plans (or wish lists).
