Sun looks for props with new server, storage hardware
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Sun Microsystems will hold its quarterly product launch this week, unleashing a raft of new hardware offerings spanning servers to storage.
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In case you missed it, Scott McNealy&#39;s big on the subscription model. And, Sun Microsystems is weighing a new desktop hosting initiative to go along with already-announced hosting options.
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(InfoWorld) - With an incremental update to its Solaris 10 OS, Sun is extending the platform's virtualization capabilities to accommodate Linux and Solaris on the same computer. Sun will add to the Solaris Containers capability, which has bolstered server usage by allowing for multiple instances of Solaris on the same server, said Dan Roberts, Sun director of marketing for Solaris. With Solaris 10 8/07, being announced Tuesday, users can run Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS Linux, and Linux applications via Solaris Containers for Linux Applications. "You can now consolidate your Solaris and Linux apps onto one chassis," Roberts said. Solaris Containers debuted in Solaris 10 two-and a half years ago. Virtualization, Roberts noted, has become a popular way to get more out of servers that had been running commonly at only a 10- to 15-percent utilization rate. Because Red Hat and CentOS are only supported on Intel x86 systems, the new Solaris Containers for Linux capability is only supported on that hardware. Customer demand will dictate whether this functionality is extended to other Linux distributions. Sun's accommodation for Linux helps Solaris in its battle for users with Linux, said analyst Richard Jones, vice president at Burton Group. "I see this as a way for [Solaris] to definitely continue to survive in the market because they're now allowing for a greater level of interoperability with Linux," Jones said. The move expands the number of applications and services that could run in a Solaris environment, said Jones.Â  Sun, naturally, sees Solaris as superior to Linux. "You would want to go with this over Linux because you want the most reliable, most secure operating system," as well as features like Solaris Containers, said Roberts. Sun views the upgrade as making it easier to migrate to Solaris. Also with version 8/07, Solaris can be used to manage resources within a container at a finer grain level. "For example, you can now define how much memory or CPU you want a particular app or container to use," said Roberts. This prevents one container from overwhelming an entire system. Users can assure that high-priority applications get the CPU cycles needed. Sun will include separate IP stacks for each container with Solaris 10 8/07 to enable administrators to know how much network bandwidth is being consumed by a container. Determinations could be made on whether to move an application to another server. A Large Send Offload feature reduces CPU workload by offloading networking processing operations to a network interface card. Jumbo Frames support in the 8/07 release means the OS supports very large network packages beyond the 1,500 bytes limit specified in Ethernet. This is useful for applications shipping high volumes of data. Version 8/07 will include a copy of the open-source PostgreSQL 8.2 database, a high-capacity transactional system with performance enhancements for Solaris and support for DTrace probes. These probes provide the ability to observe application performance. Users theoretically could replace an Oracle database with PostgreSQL 8.2 "We fundamentally believe Solaris is the best OS for running databases," Roberts said. Solaris 10 8/07 does not include any technologies from Project Indiana, which is Sun's project to make Solaris more palatable to Linux users by adding capabilities like distribution of Solaris binaries. The project is part of the OpenSolaris effort, which offers Solaris in an open source format. Sun's Solaris is a commercial distribution of the platform.
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Sun Microsystems Inc. SUNW.O  and the University of Texas at Austin are set to flip the  switch on Friday on a unique supercomputer that will vastly  speed up massive data analysis and visualization to tackle  time-critical problems such as weather prediction.
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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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Sun Microsystems launched a new blade server system today that is capable, it says, of providing up to twice the memory and input/output capacity of rival systems. The powerful new server is part of Sun&#39;s attempt to increase its share of the fast-growing blade market, which has been dominated until now by IBM and HP.
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Sun Microsystems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. are both building storage virtualization tools and storage grid technology to help customers drive adaptable intelligence and unified management deeper into multivendor storage environments.
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InfoWorld - As Sun Microsystems prepares to demonstrate a new high-performance computer Tuesday at a technology conference in Germany, it hopes that quad-core processors from Advanced Micro Devices&#160;that will power the computer arrive on time to deliver one of the machines to its first customer.
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A forthcoming version of Windows Server is designed for building supercomputers from clusters of PCs.
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New initiatives aim to help businesses create server clusters for high-performance computing tasks.
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Unisys announced new servers and a suite of infrastructure management software Tuesday that are aimed at giving it a bigger role to play in customers' datacenters, where it will compete more directly with Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems.
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Sun is working on technology to make it easier to run different languages on the Java Virtual Machine.
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Sun Microsystems&#39; latest edition of its Java platform offers improved performance and scalability, better system monitoring and management, and an updated look and feel for the desktop client
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Sun Microsystems Inc.  late on Monday rolled out pay-per-use computing power and data storage and new software packages tailored for specific projects, the latest move in the network computer makers turnaround strategy.
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SEPTEMBER 20, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Sun Microsystems Inc. will hold its quarterly product launch this week, unleashing a raft of new hardware offerings spanning servers to storage.
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Sun Microsystems and the University of Texas at Austin are set to flip the switch on a unique supercomputer that will vastly speed up massive data analysis and visualisation to tackle time-critical problems such as weather
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Sun is upgrading its lower-end UltraSparc-based servers--but the systems will arrive with chips introduced three years ago.