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| Sun Enters
the Disk Sanitizer Market |
Santa
Clara, Calif - November 25, 2008 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. today
entered the Disk Sanitizer market.
Sun Data Protection
Services, Data Erasure, is a new on-site service to help enable customers to
remain compliant with
internal corporate data erasure policies during the removal, redeployment or
relocation of equipment containing sensitive data. ...Sun profile,
Disk Sanitizers
Sun Sources SSDs from STEC
SANTA
ANA, Calif. - November 24, 2008 - STEC, Inc. today announced that its
ZeusIOPS and MACH8/IOPS SSDs have been qualified for use in Sun
Microsystems' recently lainched 7000 storage family.
"Sun
prides itself on working with partners that support our drive for innovation in
Open Storage. STEC has provided the high performance SSDs used in the Sun
Storage 7000 family, which provides radical simplicity, performance and cost
savings," said Victor Walker, VP, storage development, Sun Microsystems.
...STEC profile
Editor's
comments:- Sun already had experience selling STEC's SSDs which were
integrated in the
SpeedStor
a rackmount SSD
made for Sun by Superior
Data Solutions .
Themis Rugged Servers get NATO TEMPEST Certification
Fremont,
California - November 13, 2008 - Themis Computer announced that its
RES-22DCX and RES-32DCX servers were successfully tested for NATO TEMPEST
certification without the use of an external enclosure.
Themis'
Rugged Enterprise Servers (RES) 2RU and 3RU systems were selected for use in a
surveillance program that requires TEMPEST Zone 2 certification. As a result of
the successful testing and certification for compromising emanations
conformity, these servers are qualified in for use within Facility Zone 2
deployments by the Federal Office for Information Security.
"We
work closely with our customers and partners to design and build rugged
computing systems that provide high quality, superior scalability, and
reliability. Our servers are notably designed to run mission-critical
applications in hostile operating environments," said William Kehret,
president of Themis Computer. "It should be reassuring to our OEM's and
system integrators, that in standard configurations our Rugged Enterprise
Servers are able to meet the system level emission require-ments for Zone-2
TEMPEST, without recourse to an external rack enclosure." ...Themis Computer
profile, military
SPARC systems, Military
Storage
Editor's comments:- even those of you not in the
defense or intelligence community may be interested in knowing some aspects of
TEMPEST.
Ever
since computers became used for sensitive purposes it was known that enemies
could learn some of the data in them - by detecting electromagnetic emissions
from those systems. TEMPEST has been a multi-decades long evolving set of
design standards and tests aimed at reducing the risks of such leaks
occurring.
Even before the widespread use of computers - spooks
designed ingenious ways to learn what was being typed into target documents. 20
years ago - the book Spy
Catcher was banned in the UK. Among other things it described how British
Intelligence could read what was being typed on a manual typewriter from audio
intercepts. And in another part of the book how they could get audio data by
detecting sound vibrations off a room's window using light beams.
In
more recent decades the books (and films) of
Tom Clancy and the tv series
24 have educated
millions to the intelligence possibilities posed by electronic systems. But
remember - the bad guys are always improving their technology too. So it never
stops.
And going back to today's press release... the reference to "without
recourse to an external rack enclosure" is significant - because if you put
a leaky system into a big shielded box - that achieves the same purpose. But
it also limits the deployment options - by adding considerably to the space
required, weight, thermal management and cost. Being intrinsically qualified -
without an external box - makes the servers much more useful.
Sun Sows OpenSPARC Education Seeds in Europe
Santa
Clara, Calif. - November 5, 2008 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. today
announced a 3 year collaboration to promote OpenSPARC CMT among universities
and research institutions across 38 countries in Europe.
Sun's
partner in this endeavour is
Europractice
- an EU backed non-profit microelectronics design stimulation project.
Sun and Europractice will hold the first in a series of OpenSPARC
technology workshops this autumn. Professors from participating universities
will join Sun experts to learn first-hand about the latest processor
innovations, including CMT and software programming that maximizes the
advantages of multithreading. These professors will then incorporate OpenSPARC
in their curriculum, research and lab work. Today's announcement builds on
similar efforts by Sun and universities in China, Taiwan, New Zealand and the
US.
Since the launch of the OpenSPARC T1 processor in March 2006, over
9,000 OpenSPARC T1 / T2 processor RTL files have been downloaded.
Also today Sun announced the launch of the
OpenSPARC
Internals book, a resource dedicated entirely to supporting the broad
community of students, developers and programmers using CMT technology across
the globe. |
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| From Ye
Olde DotCom Marketers - New Trusty Benchmarques to Woo and Amaze You |
Editor:-
October 13, 2008 - Sun has published benchmark results for its
recently launched SPARC Enterprise T5440 Server.
Benchmarks were a
popular way of getting customer interest about 20 years ago - when Sun was
starting to develop its SPARC business. In those days there were more viable
competing server processors and operating systems than in the market today.
Users genuinely got interested in the latest benchmarks.
I don't
believe this quaint form of marketing is so effective today. My guess
is this type of communication is mostly aimed at captive SPARC/Solaris
customers who might be looking at upgrade options. It takes a huge leap of
imagination to think that an IBM or HP user will look at such a press release
and say - I really must look at SPARC for my next system.
Experienced
users are cautiously cynical about such vendor benchmarks - and they are all
going to be obsolete soon anyway - because
SSD acceleration -
if correctly applied - can make more difference to application performance than
a new generation of processor chip.
What is more interesting to me is
that last week Sun announced the appointment of a new
Senior
VP of Corporate Strategic Planning, who was previously COO at
Internet Brands - a web publisher
with over 600 million pageviews / month.
Probably like many of you
I'd never heard of Internet Brands before (which shows just how big the web
is). But buying in web marketing IP for Sun (with the appointment of Christine
Bucklin) could be as significant to its business as buying in Intel
Architecture CPUs, or RAID
systems was - a tacit admission that others might do things better.
Sun
was a pioneer in internet marketing - and in the mid 1990s was years ahead of
its server rivals in this respect. But home-spun doesn't always make the best
fabric.
See also:- Marketing
Views | |
other
SPARC news on
this page
Sun Enters Disk Sanitizer Market
Sun's flash
SSD Sources
Themis Rugged Servers get NATO TEMPEST Certification
Sun
Sows OpenSPARC Education Seeds in Europe
New Trusty Benchmarks to Woo
and Amaze You |
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