Solaris 10 Could Brighten Sun
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and two days later his company hit another milestone. It released what&#39;s easily its most important product in more than nine years.
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Sivar writes &quot;Ace&#39;s Hardware and news.com.com.com report Solaris that 10 has been released. Improvements include a performance-enhanced TCP-IP stack to shed the &quot;Slowaris&quot; moniker and their much-vaunted ZFS (Z File System).
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(InfoWorld) - The key to Sun's success going forward is increased adoption of its Solaris 10 operating system, company CEO Jonathan Schwartz said Tuesday. Sun had 7 million free downloads of Solaris in recent months, and 70 percent of those downloading it have non-Sun hardware in their IT infrastructure, Schwartz said at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference this week in San Francisco. If IT people are running Solaris on hardware from IBM, HP, and Dell, they can be sold Sun hardware to replace those other brands. "If your OS is in front of a customer, you're now given permission to sell everything you've got in your portfolio," Schwartz said. Sun's servers and storage appliances are optimized to run on Solaris, though they can also run on the Linux OS. Sun is approaching the first anniversary ofÂ a restructuring planÂ announced by Schwartz after he took over from Scott McNealy, who remains chairman. Sun has eliminated 4,000 jobs at the company over the last year to reduce costs and there may be more workforce reductions ahead, but only through attrition, Schwartz said. The company currently has about 38,000 employees worldwide. Sun has an opportunity to grow as data centers continue to evolve, Schwartz said. Already, the number of rack-mounted servers has surpassed the number of tower servers sold, and blade servers are on track to outsell rack servers as data centers continue to consolidate. "Why do we even bother with racks?" Schwartz asked during an interview before a roomful of analysts. "Racks are optimized for people to interact with infrastructure. But if you talk to any IT administrator, the last thing they want in their data center is a person because they try to be helpful, but they bend pins and kick plugs and do all kinds of bad things. "The long-term evolution of this marketplace will see data centers emerge in a standardized form factor at large scale," he said. Sun is planning to serve that market with its Project Blackbox, a data center that is installed in a 20-foot shipping container, delivered to a customer and operated from the container. It is scheduled to begin shipping later this year. In its first profitable quarter in more than a year, Sun posted net income of $126 million, or $0.03 per share, on a 7 percent gain in revenue to $3.56 billion, in its fiscal 2007 second quarter, which ended Dec. 31, 2006. Analysts, including those at firms besides Morgan Stanley, forecast Sun to earn $0.01 a share in the current quarter on $3.42 billion in revenue. For fiscal 2007, they estimate Sun will earn $0.10 a share on revenue of $14.88 billion, according to an average of analyst estimates from Thomson Financial. In recent months, Sun has begun again to use Intel chips in its hardware. Sun also announced a $700 million investment in the company by KKR Private Equity Investors, the publicly traded fund of the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. KKR will also nominate a director to Sun's board. KKR's investment will provide Sun the opportunity to market to all the other firms in which KKR invests, Schwartz said. Â
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Scientists create a tiny image of the Sun using a technique which could be used to make silicon chips.
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Sun Microsystems has quietly delivered on its promise of a Solaris flavor of JDS (Java Desktop System), its alternative to Microsoft Windows.
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As it tries to reclaim former Sun worshippers Comment Sun has announced a series of updates to its flagship Solaris operating system. Solaris 10 11/06 OS enhances efficiency, safety, and reliability.â¦
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Company touts advantages of its Solaris operating system running on  AMD Opteron processors
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Sun is getting into the open-source business with Solaris, but will this automatically translate into better sales?
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SAN JOSE, Calif.--When Sun Microsystems releases Solaris as open-source software, it plans to provide legal protection from patent-infringement suits to outsiders using or developing the operating system--one of several ways Sun hopes to make Solaris more
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Turns desktops into thin clients Sun Microsystems upgraded the Solaris 10 operating system today, most notably enabling its OS to run Linux and its applications on x86 systems.â¦
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Increased adoption of Sun's freely distributed Solaris operating system, its recently announced partnership with Intel and other strategic moves  will help the company grow revenue, Sun executives said.
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(InfoWorld) - You've heard of LAMP, the popular open-source infrastructure stack featuring the Linux operating system, the Apache Web server, MySQL's database, and the Perl, Python and PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) scripting languages. Well, Sun plans to spotlight a variation on that mixture, replacing Linux with its own Solaris Unix OS as part of its Solaris + AMP, or SAMP, stack for building Web applications. Featured in Sun's rollout on Tuesday are versions of the open-source AMP components optimized for the Solaris 10 OS plus Sun developer tools. The Solaris + AMP unveiling is part of a multifaceted announcement of free development offerings to debut on Tuesday with Sun hoping to sell support as a way to generate revenues. While stressing that Sun was not trying to compete with LAMP itself, Dan Roberts, Sun's director of developer tools marketing, did note that Sun believes its Solaris platform presents a viable competitor to Linux. Developers can build to Apache, MySQL, and the scripting languages but deploy their applications on Solaris or the open-source variant, OpenSolaris, to get advantages such as reliability and security, he said. "We're very much competing [with] Red Hat," and Suse, Roberts said. The company is featuring the PostgreSQL object-relational database as part of the stack along with MySQL. Sun tools and other open-source technologies also are included, and step-by-step instructions on deploying the stack are offered. Analysts recognized Sun's Solaris + AMP effort as a way to entice open-source developers to the Sun camp. "Theyâre trying to make it more comfortable for those who had been working in Linux to consider coming to Solaris as an alternative," said analyst Jean Bozman of IDC. Although IDC does not rank operating systems, Sun does have tools in its Solaris arsenal, such as the DTrace tracing framework and ZFS (Zettabyte File System), that could be attractive to Linux developers, Bozman said. "It's very clear that Sun is going after the same set of developers in the open-source community," as Linux, she said. Making a stronger case for Sun, Andi Mann, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates, said Sun with Solaris + AMP had taken the best parts of the LAMP stack, swapped out Linux with Solaris, and added other open-source technologies. "In terms of standing a chance against LAMP, absolutely, I think it's a very strong offering," Mann said. But Sun faces an obstacle in that Solaris still is considered by some to be a proprietary Unix variant, even if that is not true anymore, Mann said. "It's going to be difficult just to get mind share over Linux," he said. Users of Solaris + AMP also can avail themselves to Sun's Try and Buy program, in which customers can try out Sun hardware for 60 days. Sun also plans to unveil Solaris Express, Developer Edition on Tuesday. "Itâs a new distribution of OpenSolaris specifically targeted at developers on x86 or x64 workstations or Intel AMD-based laptops and workstations," Roberts said. Developers can use the OpenSolaris distribution to build applications that would then be deployed on Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris. "It's just like [how] a Windows developer can deploy a solution that runs on Linux." Roberts said. An integrated environment for developing applications for Solaris, Java, and Web 2.0 is featured, and a simplified install mechanism is part of the package. Also included is an improved Gnome-based desktop and Sun development tools, including Sun Studio 11 and the NetBeans 5.5 IDE. Sun is packaging more than 150 open-source applications with Solaris Express, Developer Edition. The Glassfish application server is featured as well. Also on Tuesday, Sun will offer a second iteration of its Startup Essentials Program for startup firms to use discounted Sun hardware and Solaris. New to the program is the inclusion of storage solutions and low-end SPARC systems. Discounts have been 60 percent to 70 percent less than list prices. Through its Sun Developer Expert Assistance Program, Sun offers support for $49 per request. An annual subscription featuring support for unlimited requests costs $249.
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Calling it &quot;the biggest thing we&#39;ve done&quot; in nearly a decade, Sun Microsystems&#39; chairman and chief executive Scott McNealy yesterday officially launched the Solaris 10 operating system.
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InfoWorld - Sun&#160;has ambitious plans for the commercial and open-source versions of its Solaris operating system, hoping to achieve for Solaris the kind of ubiquity already enjoyed by Java. To come close to reaching that goal, Sun needs to reach out more to developers and endeavor to overcome some long-held prejudices against the OS.
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Sun's 'Project Indiana' will revamp Solaris to lure open-source developers.
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Adoption of the Solaris 10 OS is key to Sun's future success, CEO Schwartz says.
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The sun's next cycle of increased activity might have begun last week, according to a NASA scientist.