Sun Extends OEM Agreement
with Engenio
Milpitas, CA - October
26, 2004 - Engenio Information Technologies, Inc. today announced that
it has broadened its OEM agreement with Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Engenio
will provide Sun with new modular storage technology and will co-develop future
Sun storage products. The first Sun product to emerge through the new
arrangement, the Sun StorEdge 6130 array, was announced today at Storage
Networking World.
...Engenio profile,
...Sun profile,
SAN
Serial Attached SCSI Delivering Flexibility to the Data Center
Editor:- October 20, 2004 - a
new article is published today on STORAGEsearch, jointly written byLSI
Logic and Maxtor, it's called - Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) -
Delivering Flexibility to the Data Center.
A decade ago, in 1994, Sun
introduced a new disk interface technology to the server market when it launched
the SPARCstorageArray. That interface was Fibre-Channel and FC SANs have become
a $7 billion a year market.
Next year, Sun will start shipping
SPARC servers with the first major new disk interface technology to appear on
SPARC motherboards since 1994:- Serial Attached SCSI. It will increase server
performance and have a disruptive effect on the blade market.
STORAGEsearch
has been tracking the progress of SAS to market over the past several years
since the interface was first proposed, and LSI Logic and Maxtor have been at
the forefront of bringing that technology to reality with demonstrations at
events throughout this year. Written by Kevin Gray, business development
manager, Server Products Group at Maxtor and David So, product marketing
manager, Storage Standard Products Division at LSI Logic this article gives our
readers a unique definitive insight into what SAS will mean for server users.
If
you think you already know SAS because you know
SATA and traditional
SCSI then think again.
Sometimes disruptive technologies wear an unassuming disguise. In fiction, Clark
Kent, Frodo Baggins and Buffy Summers at first seem harmless, but we see them
change into Superman, the Ring Bearer and the Slayer. SAS too comes cloaked in
plain garb - with a physical layer which looks a lot like SATA. But like the
Incredible Hulk there are muscles rippling under that shirt - and you would be
wrong to dismiss SAS so lightly. There's a lot more inside this interface than
it says on the box as this informative article reveals. ...read the article,
...LSI Logic profile,
...Maxtor profile,
Serial Attached SCSI
EMC Reports 34% Revenue Growth
Hopkinton,
Mass. - October 19, 2004 -
EMC Corporation today reported financial results for the 3rd quarter of
2004, achieving its 5th consecutive quarter of double-digit year-over-year
revenue growth.
Total consolidated revenue for EMC's third quarter was $2.03 billion,
34% higher than the $1.51 billion reported for the third quarter of
2003. Net income for the quarter was $218 million or $.09 per diluted share.
Core EMC revenue, which excludes revenue related to EMC's Documentum, Legato and
VMware acquisitions, grew 19% compared with the third quarter of 2003. All of
EMC's major geographies recorded double-digit core revenue growth, with each of
EMC's international regions gaining more than 20%.
...EMC profile
Editor's
comments:- there was a time in 2000 / 2001 when it looked like the fortunes of
EMC and Sun were closely aligned because selling storage into Sun's customer
base was an important part of EMC's business. But EMC re-engineered itself as a
truly server independent storage company and did deals with Dell in the US and
Siemens in Europe to broaden its operating system base. The result has been that
EMC is now reaping the rewards of an operating system agnostic storage strategy.
That's important because the storage market at
$70 billion annual
revenue is bigger than the server market. Sun failed in the untied storage
market - and has pulled its revenue back up more slowly by the harder route
of bootstrapping new server sales.
Sun to Resell iSCSI Storage from EqualLogic
Nashua, N.H. - October
18, 2004 - EqualLogic, Inc. today announced an agreement with Sun
Microsystems to resell the PeerStorage Array 100E which successfully
completed Sun Blade Server Verification and achieved Solaris Ready
Certification last year.
Each PeerStorage Array 100E supports up to 3.5TB of storage capacity,
comes with fully redundant fault-tolerant hardware and includes full-featured
automatic storage-management software. Up to 32 arrays can be combined to form a
scalable enterprise storage grid of more than 100TB.
...EqualLogic
profile, iSCSI
Sun Announces 2nd Quarter of Year on Year
Revenue Growth
SANTA
CLARA, Calif. - October .14, 2004 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. reported
results today for its fiscal first quarter, which ended September 26, 2004.
Revenues for the first quarter grew to $2.628 billion, an increase of
3.6% as compared with $2.536 billion for the first quarter of fiscal 2004. Net
loss for the first quarter of fiscal 2005 was $174 million or $0.05 per share as
compared with a net loss of $286 million or $0.09 per share for the first
quarter of fiscal 2004. This loss includes a charge of $108 million for
previously announced workforce and real estate restructuring, an $82 million
charge related to litigation settlement, a $4 million loss on equity
investments, and a $7 million benefit for related tax effects. Cash generated
from operating activities was $124 million for the quarter, and the balance of
cash and marketable debt securities was $7.433 billion.
"The first fiscal quarter is usually our toughest but the
management team executed well operationally," said Scott McNealy, chairman
and chief executive officer, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Following a solid June
quarter, we now have two quarters in a row of year over year revenue growth. And
we are on the offense again as a result of our newly revamped product line, a
result of our sometimes controversial but continued commitment to R&D
investments in the last three years. Stay tuned as we announce Solaris 10 OS in
November. We believe this is one of our best new products in maybe a decade. And
it runs on Opteron and SPARC."
...Sun profile
Sun UK to Resell Solid State Disks from Texas Memory Systems
London, UK - October
11, 2004 - Texas Memory Systems today announced a relationship that
allows Sun Microsystems UK to sell the TMS' RamSan solid state disk.
Texas Memory Systems' RamSan solid state storage products, paired with
Sun's servers, can accelerate enterprise applications like databases and data
warehouses up to 2,500%. Typical RamSan users include corporations in the
financial, telecom, and e-commerce sectors as well as government, military, and
research organizations.
"There is increasing scope for organizations to deploy solid
state disk technology to assist in the most mission critical business systems,"
said Tony Lock, chief analyst at Bloor Research. "The quality of the Texas
Memory Systems' products in combination with the enterprise data centre service
skills of Sun Microsystems holds the potential to bring solid state storage to a
much larger customer base."
"Sun requires a very high standard from their vendors because
their customers demand the highest levels of performance and reliability,"
said Woody Hutsell, Executive Vice President at Texas Memory Systems. "We
are delighted that Sun has chosen to represent the Texas Memory Systems' RamSan
to those customers in the UK."
...Texas Memory
Systems profile, Solid
state disks
Editor's comments:- I predicted that Sun would start
selling SSDs as a special supported solution in my August 2003 article
Solid State Disks - a $10
Billion Market in 2007?
It's ironic that Sun in Europe is ahead of
the curve on SSDs compared to in the US - where they haven't done this yet. But
maybe they have more flexibility about responding to customer needs compared to
their US counterparts.
Sun to Pay Kodak $92 Million as Part of Lawsuit Agreement
ROCHESTER,
N.Y. - October 7, 2004 - Eastman Kodak Company announced today that it
and Sun Microsystems Inc., with the assistance of the U.S. District
Court for the Western District of New York, have reached a tentative agreement
to settle a lawsuit filed by Kodak regarding a software architecture based on
the Java computer language.
On October 1, 2004, a federal jury
determined that Sun infringed three Kodak patents. Kodak filed suit in February
2002. Pending the signing of a final agreement, Sun will pay Kodak $92 million
cash in return for a license for the patents at issue. Additional details were
not disclosed.
"We achieved our goals in this case, which was to protect our
intellectual property rights," said Willy Shih, Kodak senior vice
president. "We are pleased that the Court has validated these fundamental
Kodak patents and we now look forward to building a more productive relationship
and continued collaboration with Sun, with whom we have enjoyed a close
partnership for nearly two decades."
...Kodak profile,
...Sun profile
Sun Reveals More Silver Bullets in SPARC IV Plus
SAN
JOSE, Calif - Fall Processor Forum - October 5, 2004 - Sun Microsystems, Inc.
today unveiled its next generation UltraSPARC IV+ processor at In-Stat
MDR's Fall Processor Forum.
UltraSPARC IV+, powered by Chip
Multithreading technology, continues Sun's momentum in delivering on its
Throughput Computing strategy by enabling a large number of operations, or
threads, to be executed simultaneously in order to increase system performance.
"Sun is showing the market that it is serious about delivering on
the promise of Throughput Computing," said Kevin Krewell, senior analyst
for Microprocessor Report. "The UltraSPARC IV+ is the second generation of
Sun's evolutionary dual-core design. We are impatiently awaiting the
revolutionary Niagara processor to hit the market in 2006. This will be a huge
departure from conventional processor design that will subsequently alter the
face of network computing infrastructure as we know it."
Implemented using Texas Instruments' 90 nanometer process technology,
UltraSPARC IV+ will double the application throughput of the existing
UltraSPARC IV through expanded caches and buffers, a better branch prediction
mechanism, augmented prefetching capabilities and new computational abilities.
In addition, UltraSPARC IV+ incorporates a new 3-level cache hierarchy, with a
fast on-chip 2MB second level cache and a large 32MB off-chip third level cache.
These new performance features combine with much higher operating
frequencies (1.8 Ghz initially) to make UltraSPARC IV+ the highest throughput
UltraSPARC processor ever built, with roughly twice the per-thread performance
of the original UltraSPARC IV processor. At the same time, an array of new RAS
features cooperate to make this design the most reliable UltraSPARC processor
ever.
As with the UltraSPARC IV processor, this new second generation
UltraSPARC IV+ processor maintains Sun's tradition of binary compatibility,
preserving the investment customers have made in development tools and
application software. It provides Sun customers with an easy upgrade path that
effectively raises both the performance and reliability of their system with no
change in its footprint, and relatively little change in either its power or
thermal envelope.
...Sun profile
Editor's
comments:- In the book "DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC" by Edgar Schein -
we learn that DEC's founder - Ken Olsen - failed to graps in time how
semiconductor chips could replace whole boards and cabinets of other stuff in
the early VAXes and yet still run faster.
It doesn't take a great
leap of imagination to see how the SPARC IV plus chip will reduce the cabinetry
and other expenses in its own servers. Although Sun's SPARC semiconductor
technology is no better, and often inferior to that deployed by its rivals
Sun does have the advantage that it controls the operating system and can use
its knowledge of popular applications to tune the critical bits - to business
applications.
In the past Intel has added new features to its chips
only to have them ignored by Microsoft - or adopted much later. Intel's best
selling processors also have their performance optimised for desktop multimedia
applications - a trade-off in chip real-estate which costs performance in other
areas.
Sybase / Sun Data Warehouse Compresses 155 Terabytes of Input Data
By 65%
SANTA
CLARA and DUBLIN, Calif. - October 4, 2004 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. and
Sybase, Inc. today announced that they have created the largest,
verified data warehouse in the world, according to an independent audit
conducted by InfoSizing, Inc.
Larger data warehouses are
becoming critical to enterprises that must store, track, and manage a growing
volume of data to meet government compliance regulations. The Sun and Sybase
iForce Enterprise Data Warehouse enables customers to set up such highly
scalable data warehouses in days instead of months, while also minimizing
storage costs.
Using its patented data compression, Sybase IQ needed
less than 55 terabytes on the Sun StorEdge storage sub-systems to store the 155
terabytes of input data, providing proof that Sybase IQ can dramatically reduce
storage costs by up to 90% over competitors. Additionally, support costs and
data center footprint were lower when compared to conventional databases, which
would require up to one petabyte (1,000 terabytes) of storage for this example.
With one trillion rows of data, the Sun and Sybase data warehouse can
hold enough data to track the history of all world financial trades on all stock
exchanges or hold enough data to track all credit (and debit) card transactions
in the entire world over the last seven years.
...Sun profile | |
Sun Extends OEM
Agreement with Engenio
SAS Delivering Flexibility to the Data Center
EMC
Reports 34% Revenue Growth
Sun to Resell iSCSI Storage from EqualLogic
Sun
Announces 2nd Quarter of Revenue Growth
Sun to Resell Solid State
Disks from TMS
Sun to Pay Kodak $92 Million
Sun Reveals More
Silver Bullets in SPARC IV Plus
Sybase and Sun Compress Data
Warehouses
earlier news -
archive |
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SPARC
Trivia Quiz - Test your knowledge of Sun's technologies and marketing
strategies.
Sun has had an impressive track record of promoting
innovation and inventing new computer technology, especially in its younger
more creative days. Which of the following statements is true?
(a)
- Sun invented the microprocessor.
(b) - Sun invented Unix.
(c)
- the first C compiler was written on a Sun-1 workstation.
(d) - Sun
was the co-inventor of Ethernet (along with Xerox and DEC).
(e) - Sun
invented RAID.
(f) - Sun invented RISC.
(g) - all of the
above.
(h) - none of the above.
This is just one of many
similar questions you'll find in our entertaining
Sun SPARC
Trivia Quiz | |
 |
Epoka Group
with sales offices in Denmark,
Germany and Russia is a leading European
supplier of Sun and Fujitsu SPARC solutions. | |
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