Sun keeps pumping servers full of Jalapenos
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The not so hot kind Sun Microsystems has sold 2m UltraSPARC IIIs and isn't ready to quit hawking the chips just yet.â¦
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Zend has a new download for those out there interested in using PHP on a Sun Java System Web Server - the PHP Enabler for the Java System Web Server.
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NetBeans or bust Sun Microsystems is finally giving up building its own Java integrated tools suites after a long and painful slog.â¦
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Azul Systems said new Java servers, using Vega 2 processors, run three times faster than predecessors.
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(InfoWorld) - Azul Systems Inc. is doubling the capacity of its "computing appliance," a device that uses multiple multicore processors and is a departure from the typical server-based approach to large scale computing. Azul Thursday is scheduled to launch two new models of its Vega 2 computing appliances that feature up to 16 chips with a total 768 cores for running Java software applications. Rather than add more servers with dual- or quad-core chips as computing needs grow, Azul describes its product as a pool of processing power that applications can dip into as needed. The company calls it "network-attached processing," because of its similarity to network-attached storage. Besides the Vega 2 7280, Azul is also launching the model 7240 with eight chips and a total 384 cores. This follows the December 2006 launch of the Vega 2 3210 with two chips and 96 cores and the 3220 with 4 chips and 192 cores. Network-attached processing is more energy-efficient than the multiple servers that would be needed to deliver the same performance, said Stephen DeWitt, CEO of the 5-year-old firm. He compares the concept to that of an electric utility. "Imagine, if you will, in New York City trying to power every light, toaster or refrigerator with a battery. It's incredibly inefficient. Instead, what everyone does is tap into a big [electrical] grid," De Witt said. In an Azul system, one server could be loaded with multiple Java applications and would connect to the appliance to do the processing. Azul is taking a contrarian approach to delivering processing power, said Cal Braunstein, CEO of the research firm Robert Frances Group. Azul processors act as attached processors to the server and only handle the Java code, Braunstein explained, which allows the server processors to perform more work by shifting the Java execution to the Azul appliance. Although Azul's approach shares similarities with IBM Corp. mainframe computers, there are also important differences. "Azul's model is unique," Braunstein said in an e-mail interview. "I am not aware of any other companies pursuing this particular model." But since Azul is new and small, big companies that could use it may be reluctant to buy technology they're not familiar with, he said. An Azul Vega 2 is running part of the network at Pegasus Solutions Inc., a company that provides the back-end technology for making hotel reservations through online travel sites, hotels and travel agencies. The Azul system easily handles the workload of nine servers, said Steve Lapekas, chief technology officer for Pegasus. "I can't get the box to sweat," Lapekas said. Pegasus limits its use of Azul to a portion of its data center, though he said it may expand its use elsewhere. DeWitt and the founders of Azul started the company after leaving Sun Microsystems Inc. The two companies are embroiled in a patent dispute dating back to March 2006 in which Sun accuses Azul executives of taking Sun's patented technology with them to start Azul. A lawsuit is still pending in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, DeWitt said. Â
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In deciding to buy MySQL last month, Sun was attracted to the open-source database company's very rapid growth rate and its revenue model, Sun President/CEO Jonathan Schwartz said in a keynote presentation Wednesday at SugarCRM's SugarCon 2008 conference in San Jose, Calif.MySQL was driving real value, innovation, and choice, Schwartz said. Sun agreed to buy the company in a $1 billion deal."What was attractive was how profound their distribution was," Schwartz said. MySQL offers access to about 11 million deployments around the world, and Sun began to see MySQL delivering real value, innovation, and choice, he said. MySQL sells services and support for its database.Asked if Sun planned to scale the MySQL database to compete with Oracle, Schwartz said Sun will not compete with Oracle but "will scale MySQL to extraordinary heights."The future lies in open source, innovation, and freedom of choice, according to Schwartz. Open source, he said, represents choice for CIOs. Developers, meanwhile, are making decisions about what runs in data centers, something that used to be the sole domain of the CIO, said Schwartz.Schwartz also stressed the importance of communities. "With every mainstream asset at Sun, we're investing to create a community," of developers and users regardless of whether they pay any money, he said.Schwartz's being a keynote presenter at the conference presents a bit of irony in that the open-source Sugar CRM package is written in PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) rather than the Java language created and promoted by Sun. But Schwartz noted the Java Virtual Machine is being expanded to accommodate other languages. The JVM enables Java applications to run on platforms supporting the JVM."I think what you'll see from Sun is that we're just going to take the J off the JVM and just make it a VM," Schwartz said. He cited Sun's Da Vinci Machine project, which is an effort to expand language coverage of the JVM.In other developments at the conference, SugarCRM laid out a roadmap of Sugar product releases planned for 2008.Due in April or May, the 5.1 edition of Sugar focuses on SMBs. It will feature improvements in reporting, including about 20 pre-canned reports, as well as a new systems management console via the company's DCE (Data Center Edition) 1.0.Wireless and tracker enhancements also are planned. The tracker will be able to tell who and how many users are online. Also, it will reveal the CRM usage level for a particular team and what modules are being used the most.The 5.2 edition, expected in July, is to feature real-time and global grid capabilities.Sugar 6.0, due in December, will be geared to large enterprises. Included will be portal-enabled partner relationship management and a new calendar with an AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) UI and a recurring meeting capability. Users also can create Web services-based mashups.A Java layer in version 6.0 will link Sugar to other applications, such as the Lucene search engine. DCE 2.0 will debut with advanced resource and systems management.In a morning keynote presentation, SugarCRM co-founder and CEO John Roberts touted a new era in "commercial open source.""We are at the end of the beginning in commercial open source these last four years, and open source is clearly in the mainstream now," Roberts said.SugarCRM founders in 2003 started questioning the proprietary lock-in of software, he said. They left their jobs in 2004 and began SugarCRM, Roberts recalled."We founded [the] Sugar open-source project before we even incorporated the company," Roberts said. The founders, who also include Clint Oram and Jacob Taylor, decided to post code in an effort to write software in a public venue, said Roberts.Roberts cited five forces shaping technology: ideas, willpower and the Internet; belief in the intelligence of crowds, consumerization of IT, cloud computing, and the global language of sharing. "It's exciting, and for me, it's clear that this journey we started on four years ago is real and there really isn't any stopping it," said Roberts. "The best thing I like about it is its focus on innovation," he added.A user of SugarCRM, Eddie White, director of Mania Technologie UK, which makes manufacturing equipment, uses the product as a database for marketing, customer care, and field service support."The investment was very cost-effective in terms of overall license costs," White said."We've been able to create a global database of customers and contacts," he said.Mania is looking to integrate its Sugar installation with its other systems, such as stock control and sales order management systems, White said.The biggest hurdle to deploying Sugar has been getting users to embrace it who had been used to doing things another way, according to White. "It's been easy to use; it's just a question of getting people to change their work practice," he said.While Mania did examine the source code of SugarCRM when doing administrative-level customization, it did not make any changes to the code. The company may do this when it expands use of the product for customer care.SugarCRM announced on Wednesday stack installers that provide a simplified, wizard-based installation for Sugar Community Edition for Solaris and OpenSolaris.
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After being blasted by security researchers, Sun is changing the way it updates Java.
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Once, twice, three times a lady Contrary to public perception, Sun Microsystems does want to play in the mainstream blade server market.â¦
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Sun Microsystems has added nVidia Quadro graphics technology to the Java Workstations it detailed last month. The vendor has included the technology in its W1100z and W2100z models, which are based on AMD
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Sun Microsystems wants to distinguish its future servers by fitting them with new chips that get their jobs done more efficiently.
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COPS: Silicon Valley Sun Microsystems has spent of lot of time insisting that customers actually want to buy some of its white trash, trailerized data centers. And now the company has a press release to back up its insistiation.â¦
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Compiling good time Users running Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system are getting something a little extra thrown into their contracts: developer support.â¦
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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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Six patents topped with a slice of avocado Sun Microsystems has spanked Network Appliance with another lawsuit, as relations between the two vendor continue to deteriorate at speed.â¦
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HP and Sun&#39;s ongoing bitter battle for server market share is being played out against overall global sales of servers that have surged strongly to surpass $11.
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(InfoWorld) - The problem may not rival the movies Poltergeist or The Amityville Horror for sheer terror, but CIOs and datacenter managers are still well advised to deal decisively with so-called ghost servers. Like celluloid zombies, these forgotten pieces of equipment are dead when it comes to improving the bottom line, but they are very much alive when it comes to eating up IT budgets. The unproductive -- and usually undocumented -- servers take up valuable real estate, consume increasingly expensive electricity and, in some cases, absorb ongoing maintenance and lease payments. "You can find ghost servers in a lot of enterprises," says John Phelps, an analyst at Gartner. "And the larger and more diverse the company, the harder it can be to have a single group or technology platform that provides control over all corporate assets." Sun Microsystems, through case studies of two large corporate datacenter operations and anecdotal analysis of efforts with many customers, believes that 8 percent to 10 percent of all servers in large corporations have no identifiable function. In the two datacenter studies, 150 ghost servers were found in an installation of 1,800 servers, and 354 ghost servers were found in an installation of 3,500 servers. One of the companies studied was Sun itself. Sun used system performance tools to monitor CPU utilization and I/O and network traffic, collecting the data over the course of a month, and sorted out machines with zero utilization. Sun removed the questionable servers from operation for 90 days to determine any impact. At the end of the period, it found that 60 percent of the servers could be permanently decommissioned, says Mark Monroe, director of sustainable computing at Sun. The company now conducts quarterly reviews of utilization rates. "It's hard to get people to admit they have unused infrastructure," Monroe says. "It's expensive, wasteful, and having a CIO admit he's got millions of dollars of idle assets lying around could get a guy fired. I think we can remove some of the stigma by talking about the facts, and having people realize it's worse just to leave them lying around." Corporations need to admit "they are like everyone else" and try to reduce the number of idle machines to 3 percent or less, "which is three times better than the industry average," he says. The cost of running a server for three years exceeds its original acquisition cost, so keeping the ghost servers around has an easily measured effect in energy savings. Identifying and eliminating wasted resources are key components of green or "eco-computing," Monroe says. The good news: Advances in asset management and configuration software can help businesses find and shut down these useless machines. And more companies are being proactive when it comes to adopting policies in this area. A survey of more than 300 businesses in the U.S. and Europe conducted by Gartner in 2006 found that 74 percent of respondents said they have a formal software and hardware asset management program. More advanced autodiscovery capabilities and more efficient, effective and accurate search engines mean "there has recently been more focus on discovering the lost and unidentified equipment, especially in industries where security concerns are growing," says Richard Ptak, analyst at Ptak, Noel & Associates. "Every major company I've ever dealt with has had the problem to some level." When BlueCross BlueShield of Florida (BCBSF), which provides insurance services for nearly 9 million people, decided to build a new datacenter in 2005, the company also felt it was time to get a comprehensive look at its asset inventory, says Paul Stallings, senior manager for provisioning services. In addition to the new and existing datacenters, BCBSF also has about 10 smaller server rooms in various locations around the state. The server room equipment was being managed by different departments within the insurance provider, and each had a different way of tracking and documenting assets, Stallings says. Using Aperture Technologies' VISTA tool beginning in late 2005, BCBSF began documenting its IT resources under a single umbrella. "There were definitely undocumented assets," Stallings says. "When you have seven or eight teams managing the hardware, each using a different process, there was really no way to get a systemwide understanding of what we had in our various datacenters." By getting a complete view of its asset inventory, BCBSF has been able to create a formal decommissioning process. When a system needs to be retired, a workflow ticket is automatically generated. The IT department can then start to reclaim floor space, remove cabling and place old servers in pool of equipment that can be either redeployed or completely removed from the environment. As one of largest IT services providers in the world, Fujitsu Services operates seven Fujitsu-owned datacenters in the U.K. with more than 200,000 sq. ft. of floor space, and manages 11 customer-owned facilities. As a result of its outsourcing business, the company has acquired datacenter facilities and IT equipment from a variety of sources, and much of the equipment came with no asset or configuration management process in place, says Mark Scott, global datacenter delivery manager at Fujitsu Services. The company had previously used a configuration cataloging system that recorded only the location of equipment on the floor, but it did not provide any insight into specific use of the equipment. In attempt to get a comprehensive inventory and create an asset management strategy that would allow it to maximize existing datacenter space and continue to grow, Fujitsu Services began working with Aperture to deploy its VISTA datacenter resource management system in 2005, and the company began to see a variety of issues that were wasting resources. "We found we had IT equipment on the floor that people within the company had thought we had gotten rid of years ago," he says. "We looked deeper and found out we were also still paying lease and maintenance on the equipment. We even found that we were paying lease and maintenance on equipment that been removed from our datacenters." By extending the asset management systems across its entire U.K.-based datacenter operation, Fujitsu Services has reduced its operational costs and then passed the savings on to customers, Scott says. Since customers are generally charged for the floor space they use within the datacenters, the removal of unproductive equipment has allowed Fujitsu Services to reduce specific hosting charges for those customers. So, for example, if Fujitsu can reduce the footprint by 10 percent, Scott says that 10 percent savings can be passed along to the customer. The company is also developing the ability to invoice for the actual power required by individual customer installations, versus the current practice of invoicing for power based on the floor space used by the servers. "We also found lots of badly installed equipment," Scott says. The poor installation processes had led to what he characterized as vulnerabilities that meant his company had difficulties meeting customer uptime requirements. "The result was really that we had actually built vulnerabilities into the operation. It was a real wake-up call. We now have a complete vulnerability check and can control installations from the beginning to end." Alticor, the parent company for such businesses as Amway, Quixtar, and Access Business Group, handles IT demands for affiliates all over the world, says Randy Gast, supervisor of server technology at Alticor. The company uses a combination of management tools to keep track of its software and hardware assets, including BMC Software's Remedy service management and Hewlett-Packard's Systems Insight Manager. Using the software, Alticor early last year found that more than 200 servers, or about a third of its 650 x86 processor-based servers, were running at utilization rates of 10 percent or less, Gast says. Even scarier, these underused servers had accumulated without IT knowledge, over the previous three years as new equipment was bought to handle individual applications or affiliate requirements. Working with virtualization specialist VMware, Alticor has embarked on an effort to consolidate the unproductive system and increase overall utilization rates to between 60 percent and 70 percent, Gast says. To date, Alticor has consolidated 150 of the unproductive servers onto seven servers using virtualization software. Alticor has donated the majority of the servers it has taken out of operation during the consolidation effort to charitable organizations. Servers that were too old to be used by groups such as local schools and churches have been sold for scrap. "Using Remedy, we can track the lease agreements for our hardware, when they start and expire, and use it to have automatic triggers that let us know we need to consider replacing certain equipment," Gast says. That said, there is generally a great deal of inefficiency regarding how customers get rid of old gear. "A lot of businesses don't have a disposition strategy, primarily because it's easier to buy" new servers than dispose of the old ones, says Daniel Ransdell, general manager of IBM's Global Asset Recovery Solutions business unit. "Even if you've unplugged the equipment and stuck it in some closet or corner, the business is losing the opportunity to recoup value. Servers aren't like fine wine. They don't get better with age." Energy cost is the major issue that is changing attitudes inside corporations. In August, the Environmental Protection Agency published a report that documented datacenter power usage. According to the report, datacenters in the U.S. consumed about 60 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006, or about 1.5 percent of total electricity consumption in the country. The EPA points out that datacenter energy use has doubled in the past five years, and is expected to double again in the next five years to an annual cost of about $7.4 billion. The EPA says existing technologies and strategies could reduce typical sever energy use by 25 percent, and even greater savings are possible using more advanced technologies. Rockwell Bonecutter, head of datacenter technology and operations at Accenture, believes that a large percentage of the ghost server problem was alleviated when most businesses engaged in extensive Y2k efforts within their infrastructure. In the intervening years, however, there has been a significant growth of systems that operate at 5 percent utilization or less, often because of poor communication and asset management within the company. "When it comes to servers that nobody knows about that are sitting for years and nobody has touched, there are probably examples in every IT environment, but it's obviously impossible to measure what you don't know exists," Bonecutter says. "What we have found is that it is not unusual to find that 40 percent of all servers on a floor could be consolidated and virtualized out of the environment." Consolidation through virtualization has also led to the new phenomena of virtual ghost servers. The ease and quickness with which virtual servers can be created can often leave servers cluttered with numerous poorly documented virtual machines created for short-term or abandoned projects. With tools allowing businesses to get a more holistic view of their assets and policies in place to guide a formal decommissioning process, businesses can now reduce the risk and associated costs of ghost servers, without the need to call on the aid of another great Hollywood institution, Ghostbusters. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate. Darrell Dunn is a freelance reporter in Fort Worth, Texas, with 20 years of experience covering business technology and enterprise IT. Contact him at darrelldunn@sbcglobal.net.
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Passive-Aggressive behavior Network Appliance is suing Sun Microsystems in an intellectual property spat over - you guessed it - file systems.â¦