Innovations in Sun's chips, interconnects, operating system and data management products are emphasizing the fact that Sun is a Systems company, and not just a hardware company, or a software or a storage one. At the Customer Engineering Conference this year, the buzz is around products that combine these components into a system more valuable than the sum of the parts.

Sun Microsystems spends approximately two billion dollars annually on Research and Development. Over the past couple of days at CEC, several sessions have focused on the outcome of this investment into innovation. I put together a list of products and solutions unveiled over the last couple of years or are being worked on as we speak.

These are just names that I can remember, and given the inefficient RAM technology that my brain was shipped with, I am sure to have left out a few. The line-up is awe-inspiring, and the next 18 months are actually going to see an acceleration in the introduction of game-changing offerings.

Systems and Components	Software	Storage	Development/Deployment Models and Services
UltraSPARC T1 and T2	Solaris Containers	Project Fishworks	Open Source
Sun Fire X4600 and X4450	DTrace	Sun Fire X4500 (Thumper)	Java Enterprise System
Scout Threading	ZFS File System	Sun Storagetek 5800 (Honeycomb)	Solaris Express
Transactional Memory	Predictive Self Healing	StorageTek T10000	Sun Connection
Proximity Communication	Solaris Trusted Extensions
Project Neptune	Project Crossbow
Magnum Infiniband Switch	Sun xVM Virtualization Platform
Sun Streaming System	Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
Sun Constellation System	JavaFX
Blackbox	Project Darkstar

Another thing that strikes one is the dilemma of which column to assign a technology to. The distinctions between server, storage, networking and software is blurring to a point where we can introduce terms like chipvers, storvers and servage, as one of our keynote speakers Jim Baty pointed out more than a year ago.

Tags : suncec2007