SUNW becomes JAVA
SANTA
CLARA, Calif - August 23, 2007 - Sun Microsystems today announced that
it will change its Nasdaq stock ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA, the ubiquitous
technology and brand it created in 1995.
The stock ticker change
will go into effect for the trading community on Monday, August 27, 2007.
"The Java brand and technology have evolved to be among the most
pervasive on the internet, yielding extraordinary awareness for Sun and
opportunity for the community that leverages it," said Jonathan Schwartz,
president and CEO of Sun. "More than a billion people across the globe,
representing nearly every demographic, market and industry, rely upon Java's
security, innovation and value to connect them with opportunity. That awareness
positions Sun, and now our investor base, for the future."
Editor's
comments:- this gets the prize for being the stupidest thing I have heard
from Sun in recent years.
If Sun hadn't weakened the SPARC brand for
the past decade and lost most of its shareholder value than SUNW would still be
worth something more than it is today. Are they hoping that some investors
won't notice that it's the same old company - and accidentally buy some shares?
See
also:- article:-
Marketing Nomenclature, and the Naming of Names
RAM versus Flash SSDs - War for the Datacenter Core
Editor:-
August 20, 2007 - STORAGEsearch.com today published a major new
article on the SSD market called - "RAM versus Flash SSDs - which is
Best?"
We've been writing for years about the subject of
hard disks vs
flash SSDs.
There's a lot of consensus now about which technology will prevail in the
disputed application slots for a single drive.
The next multibillion
dollar war in the SSD market will be for domination in the high performance
rackmount server acceleration space.
Hard disks will retain no
finger holds in this war -
even if the
price of a hard disk drops to zero. Sorry guys. Hanging onto the hard disks
in your hot server core will kill your company - because they will make your
business applications too slow, too expensive and too unreliable. Outside the
core... as bulk content storage or
disk to disk backup is
another matter, for another article.
The SSD server core war will be
internecine - one type of solid state storage versus another. The title of this
article " "RAM versus Flash SSDs" is misleading because there
are many distinctly different products fighting under each similar looking
flag. With specially written features from the world's leading SSD companies
- this article will change the way that you think about SSDs in enterprise
server applications. 2007 will be seen as the Year of SSD Revolution. ...read the article,
...75 more articles
about Solid State Disks
HP's Solaris X86 Business (article)
Editor:- August
17, 2007 - HP's success in running native SPARC applications on Solaris
X86 servers are detailed in an article on internetnews.com
See
also:- Solaris
Migration
Intel Launches New Quad Processors
SANTA
CLARA, Calif - August 13, 2007 – Intel Corp today launched 2 new
quad-core Intel Xeon processors.
The new processors boast
unprecedented combinations of performance and energy efficiency, along with a
pricing strategy to move the enterprise industry to multi-core systems. They
also contain new virtualization capabilities.
The Intel Xeon Processor X5365 is the industry's first 3.0 GHz
quad-core processor to fit inside a standard 120 watt power envelope. The X5365
also features front-side bus (FSB) speed of 1333MHz.
For energy saving applications which still need high performance the
new L5335 has a 2.0 GHz clock speed and 1333MHz FSB within a 50 watt power
envelope – or just 12.5 watts per processing core.
Both processors are easily "drop-in" compatible with select
existing Intel server platforms and have set new performance records on some
vendor selected benchmarks.
...Intel profile
See
also:- Green
Storage , storage chips,
Solid State Disks
Sun Offers UltraSPARC T2 as "Fastest Commodity Microprocessor"
SANTA
CLARA, Calif - August 7, 2007 - Sun Microsystems today announced it is
shipping the new UltraSPARC T2 processor this quarter.
The T2
has 8 cores and 8 threads per core. With each thread capable of running its
own operating system, the chip delivers a 64-way system on a single chip.
Sun's highest performance SPARC chip has more than 50 Gigabytes / second
memory bandwidth. The UltraSPARC T2 processor is available in production
quantities this quarter, with prices starting well below $1,000.
...Sun
Microsystems profile
Editor's comments:- There are some
fantastic opportunities in the market today for new server companies who can
combine the best of breed processors with best of breed storage. And because Sun
is a big slow reacting systems company - there are big gaps in the market for
swift of foot oems - even using Sun's own chips and OS. But here's a warning
for wouldbe SPARC oems from
SPARC history.
At one time there over 50 concurrent manufacturers of computers using
SPARC processors listed in this
directory.
That was helpful in transitioning Sun from being an
unknown workstation company in the 1980s to being the "dot in dotcom"
by the end of the 1990s. Although many SPARC oems would have faded due to
natural market shakeouts - I was told by some that when times got tough for
Sun's systems sales - the price of SPARC chips got levitated to an artificially
high level to ease them out of the way of Sun's competing systems sales people.
As with any single sourced chip from a potential competitor there is a strong
risk of getting screwed - unless you have a very well written supply contract.
Linux Servers First to Get 100x Faster Flash SSD Storage
Wallingford, PA - August 6, 2007 -
EasyCo announces the release of its "Managed Flash Technology"
storage solution for Linux servers.
Dubbed "The 300,000 RPM
Disk Drive", MFT combines
Flash SSDs with a
patent pending drive management layer which delivers sustained random write
performance that is more than 100x faster than the bare solid state
flash drive.
Flash SSDs only solve the "read half" of the
enterprise performance equation. By delivering 2,000 to 7,000 4K read IOPS
(IOs Per Second), Flash SSDs randomly read 10 to 30 times faster than 15K SCSI
drives. Unfortunately, the random write performance of Flash SSDs is terrible.
With random write rates of only 13 to 50 IOPS, even applications that do as few
as 5% writes will spend 95% of their time writing. This renders existing,
unmanaged Flash SSDs as unsuitable for most enterprise applications.
This
is what SSD manufacturers refer to as "the random write problem" of
flash technology. EasyCo's Managed Flash Technology solves the Flash SSD random
write problem. As a result, random write speeds are in the range to 3,000 to
10,000 IOPS. Without MFT, Flash SSDs are only marginally faster than desktop
hard disk drives. With MFT, Flash SSDs are accelerated into a class by
themselves.
EasyCo's president, Sam Anderson, laughs about the first production
data tests. "In our first live test, a prospect copied 218,000 of their
own records, deliberately sorted out of sequential order, from one database
file to another. Running on a 15K SCSI drive, the file to file copy took over
45 minutes. In fact, at one point, the client called to ask if the server had
hung (they were testing remotely). The same job on an MFT Flash drive took
only 2 minutes and 45 seconds, or 3,963 IOPS."
End-user pricing for the Linux supported product starts at under
$2,500 and extends upwards to over $50,000 depending on the configuration.
Windows solutions and storage appliance solutions should be available by Q407.
EasyCo is also seeking qualified Linux system integrators, as well as server
and storage appliance manufacturers who wish to distribute the MFT solution
with their hardware.
...EasyCo profile
Editor's
comments:- last year when I dismissed the relevance of hybrid hard disks for
enterprise applications it was because I forsaw that with clever systems
integration arrays of inexpensive flash SSDs could be harnassed to do a superior
job with respect to capacity and performance. EasyCo says it's getting the high
system write performance using commodity
Samsung 32G PATA
drives which are "far from "leading edge".
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SUNW becomes
JAVA
RAM versus Flash SSDs
HP's Solaris X86 Business (article)
Intel
Launches New Quad Processors
Sun Offers "Fastest Commodity
Microprocessor"
Linux Servers First to Get 100x Faster Flash SSD
Storage
earlier
news - archive |
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| Popular
PDFs on STORAGEsearch.com? |
Editor:-
September 13, 2007 - Here's a list of the most popular recently published
articles in pdf format which readers have been viewing in September.
Personally
I'm not a great fan of pdfs on the web. And I'm
not alone.
That
explains why HTML format articles are typically 10x more popular with
our readers than those in pdf format.
Maybe that's due to the past
buggy nature of pdf browsing (slow to start but quick to crash). And it's one
of the reasons I've always signaled a clear warning in the link like this...
(pdf)
But don't let a bad format (pdf) hide a great message. Some of
these articles are real gems. Otherwise I wouldn't have published them.
When
a publisher needs to get a lot of new articles out fast - pdfs are a convenient
way to shorten the lead-time. And if any of them get really popular - I go
back and convert them to make them more accessible to future readers.
BTW
when I link to a pdf the link means what it says.
It goes directly to
the article. Not to some "registration page". I never sign up
to read articles. If someone doesn't want me to read their article (maybe it's
got their credit card details in it) that's the ideal barrier to protect it. I
can take a hint and read something else (usually better) somewhere else. Like
you - I get enough junk email already - and I don't like wasting time. (I can
do that so much better offline.) | | |
