You are invited to join our free Webinar on storage for you database, Wednesday October the 14th 3pm Paris & Berlin, 2pm London, 4pm Jerusalem.

This webinar focuses on how ZFS, SSDs and the Unified Storage Systems are changing the rules in the database storage industry. You will learn how to increase data security, storage scalability, and reduce the price/performance ratio with these technologies. This webinar includes ZFS best practises for databases backup and performance.

To register click here.

Probably the number one question I get asked when out and about representing the StartUp Essentials program is, "Would Sun give me a free server?"

Whether this is said 'tongue-in-cheek' or not, I'm happy to say that it does happen...as blogged by Jonathan Schwartz.

In December 2008 Seedcamp along with Sun Microsystems and Orange hosted a competition for startups at LeWeb Paris.  30 startups from around the world were shortlisted and given 7 minutes each to present their solution and company plan, and then judged on various criteria.

[Image by Nikan_gr ]

Congratualations to the winners, 

1- Viewdle 

2- Webnode 

3- Zoover 

who each receive one of Sun's technologically advanced severs, as well as having time on the main-stage to showcase their offering. The announcement can be found here.

It's exciting to support and follow the success of the startups in the StartUp Essentials program, which is free and without commitment.

You may also have noticed we added subscription options on the blog, register your interest, stay tuned, and come chat with us at the startup events, we have more to offer and give away!  

Dear startups,

scale your Solaris based solution to any level you need to with the right tools. Our engineers are maintaining the"Solaris Performance Primer" with all freely available Solaris tools on the web. Bookmark this page if you need to know:

• how do I monitor entire farms of systems with a freely available tool like dimstat
• which process is overruning the disk and which file is it accessing?
  
• Do I have enough threads and process to be able to exhaust our massive parallel T-class systems?
• Am I overloading my network interface?
• how to visually monitor Solaris systems for all the key parameters?
  

So I recently ran a competition to award a Startup Essential Member a FREE stand in the startup area at Future of Web Apps 08....and we have a winner, Jake Stride from Tactile CRM was the lucky winner plucked from my pink hat.

So who are Tactile CRM ?

 * Affordable web based, simple CRM for your business - an easy way to
track your sales, deals, emails and customer contact.

* Manage your contacts, sales & emails in one easy to use web-based system.

* Easy, web-based, contact and sales management for small business.

Some more detail on Techcrunch UK here 

But not only that I gave away a second prize out of the hat to the cool guys at Veedow, they will have a space on the Sun Lounge to demo their new version to be launched at Future of Web Apps, so well done guys.

Look out for next weeks competition to win FULL CONF tickets worth £495 each to the Future of Web Apps.

In the meantime, get your startups to join Startup Essentials, use the ref code FOWA08DSC and Ill give them a code for 15% off FULL CONF passes and a FREE EXPO pass ticket as well.

Have you ever heard the expression "There's no such thing as a free lunch?", well....

...forget about lunch, how about a totally FREE, yes, as in, no cost, full conference entry ticket to RailsConf Europe in Germany next week?!  A 1000EUR value, for zero cost, courtesy of Startup Essentials!

We have tickets to give away to the first four new sign-ups to the also free, Start-up Essentials program.

All you have to do is be sure you can make it to the conference, sign-up below, then send me an email : matt dot hosanee at sun dot com .  We have rolled out Start-up Essentials to many countries but will be expanding rapidly in the coming months. [can I announce that Ed?! :-o ]

If you can't make it - sign-up anyway and keep an eye here for our next community event where you could quite literally get a free lunch

More about Sun @ RailsConf here

Hope to see you there!
Matt

An Irish company will today reveal controversial technology that allegedly defies basic laws of physics to produce free power.

Steorn, which is based in Dublin, claims to have discovered a method
of creating clean, constant energy, which it claims could end the
global fuel crisis.

The Orbo will also be viewable live on the
internet from 11pm this evening (4 July) at

 
www.steorn.com/orbo/demo,
with four webcams focused on the machine 24 hours a day.

If this is true, and validated, how will this change the world we live in ? Clean constant energy, and how could that change the way we travel, and leave our own planet..amazing times ahead if it is true.