,
weblink, Q4 FY 2007 Earnings Press Release
, 2007-01-23
,
Sun Microsystems, Inc., | operating_income = {{profit}}US$309 million (FY07)
| net_income = {{profit}}US$473 million (FY07)
| industry = Diversified computer systems
Server (computing)>servers, workstations, storage, software, and services| homepage = sun.com
}} | Sun Microsystems, Inc. ({{nasdaq|JAVA}})
(2) is a
multinational vendor of
computers, computer components,
computer software, and
information technology services, founded on
24 February 1982.
(3) The company is
headquartered in
Santa Clara, California (part of
Silicon Valley), on the former west campus of the
Agnews Developmental Center.Products include computer
servers and
workstations based on its own
SPARC processors as well as
AMD's
Opteron and
Intel's
Xeon processors;
storage systems; and, a suite of software products including the
Solaris Operating System, developer tools, Web infrastructure software, and
identity management applications. Other technologies of note include the
Java platform and
NFS.Sun is a proponent of open systems in general and
Unix in particular and a major contributor of
open source software.
(4) Sun's manufacturing facilities are located in
Hillsboro, Oregon and
Linlithgow,
Scotland.
History
missing image!
- SunCanada.jpg -
Sun Canada in Markham
The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix workstation, the
Sun 1, was conceived by
Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at
Stanford University in
Palo Alto,
California. He originally designed the
SUN workstation for the
Stanford University Network communications project as a personal
CAD workstation. It was designed as a
3M computer: 1 MIPS, 1 Megabyte and 1 Megapixel. It was designed around the
Motorola 68000 processor with an advanced
Memory management unit (MMU) to support the
Unix operating system with virtual memory support
(5), He built the first ones from spare parts obtained from Stanford's
Department of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses.
(6)On February 12, 1982
Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and
Scott McNealy, all Stanford graduate students, founded
Sun Microsystems.
Bill Joy of Berkeley (a primary developer of
BSD), joined soon after and is counted as one of the original founders
(7). The Sun name is derived from the initials of the
Stanford University Network. Sun was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982.Sun's initial public offering was in 1986 under the
stock symbol SUNW, for
Sun Workstations (later
Sun Worldwide).
(8)[WEB
],
weblink, Sun Microsystems - Investor Relations: FAQ
, 2007-01-23
, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
The symbol was changed in 2007 to
JAVA; Sun stated that the
brand awareness associated with its
Java platform better represented the company's current strategy.
(9)Sun's logo, which features
four interleaved copies of the word
sun, was designed by professor
Vaughan Pratt, also of Stanford University. The initial version of the logo had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was subsequently redesigned so as to appear to stand on one corner.The first Sun workstations ran a
Version 7 Unix System port by
UniSoft on
68000 processor-based machines.
The "Bubble" and its aftermath
During the
dot-com bubble, Sun experienced dramatic growth in revenue, profits, share price, and expenses. Some part of this was due to genuine expansion of demand for web-serving cycles, but another part was synthetic, fueled by
venture capital-funded startups building out large, expensive Sun-centric server presences in the expectation of high traffic levels that never materialized. The share price in particular increased to a level that even the company's executives were hard-pressed to defend. In response to this business growth, Sun expanded aggressively in all areas: head-count, infrastructure, and office space.The bursting of the bubble in 2001 was the start of a period of poor business performance for Sun.
(10) Sales dropped as the growth of online business failed to meet predictions. As online businesses closed and their assets were auctioned off, a large amount of high-end Sun hardware was available very cheaply. Much like
Apple, Sun relied a great deal on hardware sales.Multiple quarters of substantial losses and declining revenues have led to repeated rounds of layoffs,
(11)(12)(13)executive departures, and expense-reduction efforts. In December of 2001 the share price dropped to the 1998 pre-bubble level of about one hundred dollars or so and then kept going, a rapid fall even by the standards of the high tech sector at that time. The stock dipped below 10 dollars a year later, one-tenth of its 1990 value, then quickly bounced back to 20, where it has hovered ever since. In mid-2004, Sun ceased manufacturing operations at their
Newark, California facility and consolidated all of the company's US-based manufacturing operations to their
Hillsboro, Oregon facility, as part of continued cost-reduction efforts.
(14)In 2006 Sun closed the Newark campus completely and moved 2,300 staff to its other campuses in the area.
(15)Many companies (like
E-Trade and
Google) chose to build Web applications based on large numbers of the less expensive PC-class x86-architecture servers running
Linux, rather than a smaller number of high-end Sun servers. They reported benefits including substantially lower expenses (both acquisition and maintenance) and greater flexibility based on the use of
open-source software. That trend is slowing and may be reversing,{{Fact|date=July 2007}} given (1) the throughput and efficiency of Sun's new horizontally-scaled systems (see below) and (2) the fact that both Sun's flagship Solaris operating system and its UltraSPARC T1 processor are now fully open-source.Higher level telecoms control systems such as NMAS and
OSS service predominantly use Sun equipment. This use is due mainly to the company basing its products around a mature and very stable version of the
Unix operating system and the support service that Sun provides.
Present focus
In 2004, Sun canceled two major processor projects which emphasized high
instruction level parallelism and operating frequency. Instead, the company chose to concentrate on processors optimized for
multi-threading and
multiprocessing, such as the
UltraSPARC T1 processor (codenamed "Niagara"). The company also announced a collaboration with
Fujitsu to use the
Japanese company's processor chips in mid-range and high-end Sun servers. These servers were announced on
17 April 2007 as the M-Series, part of the
SPARC Enterprise series.In February 2005, Sun announced the
Sun Grid, a
grid computing deployment on which it offers
utility computing services priced at $1 (US) per CPU/hour for processing and per GB/month for storage. This offering builds upon an existing 3,000-CPU server farm used for internal R&D for over 10 years, of which Sun markets as being able to achieve 97% utilization. In August 2005, the first commercial use of this grid was announced for financial risk simulations which was later launched as its first
Software as a Service product.
(16)In January 2005, Sun reported a net profit of $19 million for fiscal 2005 second quarter, for the first time in three years. This was followed by net loss of $9 million on
GAAP basis for the third quarter 2005, as reported on
April 14 2005. In January 2007, Sun reported a net GAAP profit of $126 million on revenue of $3.337 billion for its fiscal second quarter. Shortly following that news, it was announced that
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) would invest $700 million in the company.
(17)In recent years Sun's engineering work has become international, with substantial groups in
Bangalore,
Beijing,
Dublin,
Grenoble,
Hamburg,
Prague,
St. Petersburg,
Tel Aviv,
Tokyo, and
Trondheim.
(18)A weekly summary of news about Sun and its products is posted to "System News for Sun Users",
(19) now in its 10th year.
Acquisitions
missing image!
- SunRackMountServers.jpg -
Sun server racks
{{Expand list|date=August 2008}}
- 1987 - Trancept Systems, a high performance graphics hardware company
[WEB,weblink Trancept Systems, 2007-05-12]
,
- 1987 - Centram Systems West, maker of networking software for PCs, Macs and Sun systems
- 1988 - Folio, Inc., developer of intelligent font scaling technology and the F3 font format
[PRESS RELEASE]
,
, SUN MICROSYSTEMS ANNOUNCES INTENT TO PURCHASE CRAY BUSINESS SYSTEMS DIVISION, Sun Microsystems,
May 17 1996,
weblink 2007-03-10,
- 1996 - Integrated Micro Products, specializing in fault tolerant servers
- 1996 - Thinking Machines Corporation software division
- February 1997 - LongView Technologies, LLC (20)
- August 1997 - Diba, a technology supplier for the Information Appliance industry(21)
- September 1997 - Chorus Systems, creators of ChorusOS
[PRESS RELEASE]
, SUN EXPANDS NETWORK SOFTWARE BUSINESS INTO EMBEDDED SYSTEMS MARKET; AGREES TO ACQUIRE CHORUS SYSTEMS
, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
,
September 10 1997,
weblink, 2007-05-13
,
- November 1997 - Encore Computer Corporation's storage business (22)
- 1998 - i-Planet , a small software company that produced the "Pony Espresso" mobile email client—most notable product of this acquisition was the later use of its name (sans hyphen) for the Sun-Netscape software alliance
- July 1998 - NetDynamics - developers of the NetDynamics Application Server (23)
- 1999 - German software company StarDivision and with it StarOffice
- 1999 - MAXSTRAT Corporation, a network storage company located in Milpitas, CA specializing in Fibre Channel storage servers.
- 1999 - Forte, an enterprise software company specializing in integration solutions and developer of Forte 4GL and TeamWare
- 1999 - NetBeans, a newly formed business producing a modular IDE written in Java, based on a student project at Charles University in Prague.
- July 2000 - Gridware, a software company whose products managed the distribution of large computing jobs across multiple computers(24)
- September 2000 - Cobalt Networks, an Internet appliance manufacturer(25)
- December 2000 - HighGround, with a suite of Web-based management solutions support wide range of storage technologies and applications(26)
- March 2002 - Clustra Systems (27)
- June 2002 - Afara Websystems, a company that develops next-generation SPARC processor-based technology(28)
- September 2002 - Pirus Networks, specializing in intelligent storage services(29)
- November 2002 - Terraspring, a pioneer in infrastructure automation software(30)
- June 2003 - Pixo, adds to the capabilities of the Sun Content Delivery Server(31)
- December 2003 - Waveset Technologies, an identity management solutions company(32)
- January 2004 - Nauticus Networks (33)
- February 2004 - Kealia, a startup founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, which had been focusing on high-performance AMD-based 64-bit servers(34)
- January 2005 - SevenSpace, a multi-platform managed services provider(35)
- May 2005 - Tarantella, Inc. (formerly known as Santa Cruz Operation (SCO)), for $25,000,000(36)
- June 2005 - SeeBeyond, SOA software company for $387m(37)
- August 2005 - StorageTek (38)
- February 2006 - Aduva, producer of software for Solaris and Linux patch management
[PRESS RELEASE]
- October 2006 - Neogent
[PRESS RELEASE]
, Sun to Bolster Identity Management Leadership and Service Offerings With Acquisition of Neogent
, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
,
September 27 2006,
weblink, 2007-11-13
,
, Sun Microsystems Expands High Performance Computing Portfolio with Definitive Agreement to Acquire Assets of Cluster File Systems, Including the Lustre File System
, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
,
September 12 2007,
weblink, 2007-09-13
,
- November 2007 - Vaau, provider of Enterprise Role Management and identity compliance solutions
[PRESS RELEASE]
, Sun Microsystems Strengthens Market-Leading Identity Management Portfolio with Intent to Acquire Vaau
, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
,
November 13 2007,
weblink, 2007-11-13
,
- February 2008 - MySQL AB, the company offering the popular open source database MySQL
[PRESS RELEASE]
, Sun Microsystems Announces Completion of MySQL Acquisition; Paves Way for Secure, Open Source Platform to Power the Network Economy
, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
,
February 26 2008,
weblink, 2008-02-26
,
- February 2008 - Innotek GmbH, developer of the VirtualBox virtualization product
[PRESS RELEASE]
, Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire innotek, Expanding Sun xVM Reach to the Developer Desktop
, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
,
February 12 2008,
weblink, 2008-02-12
,
[WEB]
,weblink
, Sun Welcomes Innotek
, 2008-02-26
, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
, On February 20 Sun completed the acquisition of innotek
,
- April 2008 - Montalvo Systems, failed x86 microprocessor startup acquired before first silicon
Hardware
For the first decade of Sun's history, the company was predominantly a vendor of technical
workstations, competing successfully as a low-cost vendor during the Workstation Wars of the 1980s. It now has shifted its hardware product line to emphasize servers and storage.
Motorola-based systems
Sun originally used the Motorola
68k CPU family for the
Sun-1 through
Sun-3 computer series. The Sun-1 employed a
68000 CPU, the
Sun-2 series, a
68010. The Sun-3 series was based on the
68020, with the later Sun-3x variant using the
68030.
SPARC-based systems
missing image!
- SPARCstation 1.jpg -
SPARCstation 1+
Starting with the
Sun-4 line, the company used its own processor architecture,
SPARC. A
64-bit extension of the SPARC architecture (SPARC V9) was later introduced.Sun has implemented multiple high-end generations of the SPARC architecture:
- SPARC
- SuperSPARC
- UltraSPARC I
- UltraSPARC II
- UltraSPARC III
- UltraSPARC IV
Currently UltraSPARC IV+ and
UltraSPARC T1/
UltraSPARC T2 are the most recent CPUs. Sun has developed several generations of workstations and servers, including the
SPARCstation series,
Sun Ultra series,
Sun Fire and
Sun Enterprise (originally
Ultra Enterprise) servers and the
Sun Blade workstations. There is also a line of lower cost processors meant for low-end systems which include the microSPARC I, microSPARC II, UltraSPARC IIe, UltraSPARC IIi, and UltraSPARC IIIi.In the mid 1990s the company started to transform itself into a vendor of large-scale
Symmetric multiprocessing servers. Sun manufactured and marketed the 8-processor SPARCserver 1000 and 20-processor SPARCcenter 2000, which were based on work done in conjunction with
Xerox PARC. In the late 1990s this transition was accelerated by the acquisition of
Cray Business Systems Division from
Silicon Graphics.
(39) These were designed from scratch by the team led by Bechtolsheim to address heat and power consumption issues commonly faced in data centers. In July 2006, the
Sun Fire X4500 and X4600 systems were introduced, extending what is now a line of x64 systems that support not only Solaris, but Linux and
Microsoft Windows as well.On
January 22 2007, Sun announced a broad strategic alliance with
Intel.
[PRESS RELEASE
, ] Intel now endorses Solaris as a mainstream operating system and as its mission critical UNIX OS for its
Xeon processor-based systems, and also contributes engineering resources to
OpenSolaris.
[PRESS RELEASE
, ] Sun began using the Intel Xeon processor in its x64 server line, starting with the
Sun Blade X6250 server module introduced in June 2007.On
May 05 2008, AMD announced
[PRESS RELEASE
], AMD Expands Charter for the OpenSolaris OS and Sun xVM at the AMD Operating System Research Center
, AMD
,
May 05 2008,
weblink
that its Operating System Research Center (OSRC) expanded its focus to include optimization to Sun's
OpenSolaris and
xVM virtualization products for AMD based processors.
Software
Although Sun was initially known as a hardware company, its software history began with its founding in 1982; co-founder Bill Joy was one of the leading
Unix developers of the time, having already contributed the
vi editor, the
C shell, and significant work on the
TCP/IP stack to the
BSD Unix OS. Since then, Sun has developed and acquired other software, and become widely known for the
Java programming language.Sun is known for community-based and open-source licensing of its major technologies, and for its support of its products with other open source technologies. Sun offers
GNOME-based desktop software called
Java Desktop System (originally code-named "
Madhatter"), first distributed as a Linux implementation but now offered as part of the Solaris operating system. It supports its
Java Enterprise System (a middleware stack) on Linux. It has released the source code for Solaris under the
open-source Common Development and Distribution License, via the
OpenSolaris community. Sun's positioning includes a commitment to indemnify users of some software from intellectual property disputes concerning that software. It offers support services on a variety of pricing bases, including per-employee and per-socket.A report prepared for the
EU by
UNU-MERIT stated that Sun is the largest corporate contributor to open source movements in the world.
(40) According to this report, Sun's open source contributions exceed the combined total of the next five largest commercial contributors.
Operating systems
Sun is most well known for its
Unix systems, which have a reputation for system stability and a consistent design philosophy.Sun's first workstation shipped with
UniSoft V7 Unix. Later in 1982 Sun began providing
SunOS, a customized
4.1BSD Unix, as the operating system for its workstations.In the late 1980s, AT&T tapped Sun to help them develop the next release of their branded UNIX, and in 1988 announced they would purchase up to a 20% stake in Sun.
(41) UNIX
System V Release 4 (SVR4) was jointly developed by AT&T and Sun; this partnership triggered concern among Sun's competitors, many of whom banded together to form the
Open Software Foundation (OSF). By the mid-1990s, the ensuing
Unix wars had largely subsided, AT&T had sold off their Unix interests, and the relationship between the two companies was significantly reduced.Sun used SVR4 as the foundation for Solaris 2, which became the successor to SunOS.From 1992 Sun also sold
INTERACTIVE UNIX, an operating system it acquired when it bought
INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation from
Eastman Kodak Company. This was a popular UNIX variant for the PC platform and a major competitor to market leader
SCO UNIX. Sun's focus on INTERACTIVE UNIX diminished in favor of Solaris on both SPARC and x86 systems; it was dropped as a product in 2001.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}In the past, Sun has offered a separate variant of Solaris called
Trusted Solaris, which included augmented security features such as
multilevel security and a
least privilege access model. Solaris 10 included many of the same capabilities as Trusted Solaris when it was released in 2005; the Solaris 10 11/06 update included Solaris Trusted Extensions, which give it the remaining capabilities needed to make it the functional successor to Trusted Solaris.Following several years of difficult competition and loss of server market share to competitors'
Linux-based systems, Sun began to include Linux as part of its strategy in 2002. Sun supports both
Red Hat Enterprise Linux and
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on its x64 systems; companies such as
Canonical Ltd.,
Wind River Systems and
MontaVista also support their versions of Linux on Sun's SPARC-based systems.In 2004, Sun surprised the industry when, after having cultivated a reputation as one of
Microsoft's most vocal antagonists, it entered into a joint relationship with them, resolving various legal entanglements between the two companies and receiving US$1.95 billion in settlement payments from them.
[PRESS RELEASE
],
weblink, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems Enter Broad Cooperation Agreement; Settle Outstanding Litigation
, 2008-06-16
, April 2, 2004
, Microsoft Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Sun now supports Microsoft Windows on its x64 systems, and has announced other collaborative agreements with Microsoft, including plans to support each others' virtualization environments.
[NEWS
],
, Mary Jo Foley
, Microsoft and Sun agree to support each other in virtualized environments
,
weblink,
ZDNet,
, September 12, 2007
, 2008-02-06
Java platform
The
Java platform was developed at Sun in the early 1990s with the objective of allowing programs to function regardless of the device they were used on, sparking the slogan "
Write once, run anywhere" (WORA). While this objective has not been entirely achieved (prompting the riposte "Write once, debug everywhere"), Java is regarded as being largely hardware- and operating system-independent.Java was initially promoted as a platform for client-side
applets running inside web browsers, but has been more successful on the
server side of the Internet.The platform consists of three major parts, the
Java programming language, the
Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and several
Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The design of the Java platform is controlled by the vendor and user community through the
Java Community Process (JCP).Java is an
object-oriented programming language. Since its introduction in late 1995, it has become one of the world's most popular programming languages.
[WEB
],
weblink, TIOBE Programming Community Index
, 2007-07-05
, 2007
, 6
, TIOBE Software
In order to allow programs written in the Java language to be run on virtually any device, Java programs are compiled to
byte code, which can be executed by any JVM, regardless of the environment.The Java APIs provide an extensive set of library routines. The
Standard Edition (
Java SE) of the
API provides basic infrastructure and GUI functionality, while the
Enterprise Edition (Java EE) is aimed at large software companies implementing enterprise-class application servers. The
Micro Edition (Java ME) is used to build software for devices with limited resources, such as mobile devices.On
November 13 2006, Sun announced that it would be licensing its Java implementation under the
GNU General Public License; they released their
Java compiler and JVM at that time.
(42)Office suite
In 1999, Sun acquired the German software company StarDivision and with it
StarOffice, which it released as the
office suite OpenOffice.org under both
GNU LGPL and the SISSL (
Sun Industry Standards Source License). OpenOffice.org supports
Microsoft Office file formats (with a few flaws), is available on many platforms (primarily
Linux,
Microsoft Windows,
Mac OS X, and
Solaris) and is widely used in the
open source community.The current StarOffice product is a closed-source product based on OpenOffice.org. The principal differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org are that StarOffice is supported by Sun, is available as either a single-user retail box kit or as per-user blocks of licensing for the enterprise, and includes a wider range of fonts and document templates and a commercial quality spellchecker
(43). StarOffice also contains commercially licensed functions and add-ons; in OpenOffice.org these are either replaced by open-source or free variants, or are not present at all. Both packages have native support for the
OpenDocument format.
Virtualization and datacenter automation software
missing image!
- VirtualBox.png -
VirtualBox now belongs to Sun Microsystems
In 2007, Sun announced the
Sun xVM virtualization and datacenter automation product suite for commodity hardware. Sun also acquired
VirtualBox in 2008. Earlier virtualization technologies from Sun like
Dynamic System Domains and
Dynamic Reconfiguration were specifically designed for high-end SPARC servers, and
Logical Domains only supports the UltraSPARC T1/T2 server platforms. Sun also has the
N1 provisioning software
(44) for datacenter automation.On the client side, Sun offers
virtual desktop solutions. Complete desktop environments and applications can be hosted in the datacenter, with users accessing these environments from a wide range of client devices, including
Microsoft Windows PCs,
Sun Ray virtual display clients,
Apple Macintoshes, PDAs or any combination of supported devices. A variety of networks are supported, from LAN to WAN or the public Internet. A virtual desktop solution can be provided through
Sun Ray Software,
Sun Secure Global Desktop and
Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.
Database management systems
Sun acquired
MySQL AB, the developer of the
MySQL database in 2008. CEO Jonathan Schwartz mentioned in his blog that optimizing the performance of MySQL is one of the priorities of the acquisition.
[WEB
, ] In February 2008, Sun began to publish results of the MySQL performance optimization work.
[WEB
],
weblink, Optimize MySQL Server on Sun x64 Servers and Storage
, 2008-02-28
, February
2008, Sun Microsystems
Sun is also a contributor to the
PostgreSQL project. On the Java platform, Sun contributes to, ships, and offers support for
JavaDB.
Other software
Sun offers a range of other software products for software development and infrastructure services. Many of these products were developed in house; others have come from a series of acquisitions, including
Tarantella, Waveset Technologies,
(45). These software products were initially offered under the
iPlanet brand; once the Sun-Netscape alliance ended, they were re-branded as
Sun ONE (Sun Open Network Environment), and more recently as the
Sun Java System.Today, Sun's
middleware stack is branded as the
Java Enterprise System (or JES), and fulfills web and application serving, as well as communication, calendaring, directory, identity management and
SOA/business integration roles. The software is available for download and use free of charge on systems running Solaris,
Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
HP-UX, and
Windows, with support available optionally.Sun has developed data center management software products, which include the
Solaris Cluster high availability software, and a
grid management package called
Sun Grid Engine.Sun also produces a suite of compilers and development tools under the
Sun Studio brand, for building and developing Solaris and Linux applications.
Storage
Sun has long sold its own storage systems to complement its system offerings; it has also made several storage-related acquisitions.On
June 2 2005, Sun announced it would purchase
Storage Technology Corporation (StorageTek) for US$4.1 billion in cash, or $37.00 per share, a deal completed the following August.In 2006, Sun introduced the
Sun StorageTek 5800 System, the world's first application-aware programmable storage solution. In 2008, Sun contributed the source code of the StorageTek 5800 System under the BSD license.
[WEB
],
weblink, OpenSolaris Project: HoneyComb Fixed Content Storage
, 2008-02-28
, February
2008, Sun Microsystems
Sun announced the
Sun Open Storage platform in 2008. Built with open and open source technologies, Sun hopes to remove
vendor lock-in in the storage market.Other well-known storage products include
Sun Fire X4500 storage server and SAM-
QFS filesystem and storage management software.
HPC solutions
With
Sun Constellation System, Sun is increasing its focus in
High-Performance Computing (HPC). Even before the introduction of the Sun Constellation System in 2007, Sun's products were already in use in many of the
TOP500 systems and supercomputing centers:
,
weblink, Lustre File System presentation
, 2008-01-28
, Google Video
,
The
Sun HPC ClusterTools product is a set of
MPI libraries and tools for running parallel jobs on Solaris HPC clusters. Beginning with version 7.0, Sun switched from its own implementation of MPI to
Open MPI, and has started donating engineering resources to the Open MPI project.
Sun Studio compilers and tools natively implement the
OpenMP API for shared memory parallelization. Sun is a participant in the OpenMP language committee.In 2006, Sun built the
TSUBAME supercomputer, which was until
June 2008 the fastest supercomputer in Asia. Sun built
Ranger at the
Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in 2007. Ranger has a peak performance of over 500 TFLOPS, and is currently the 4th most powerful supercomputer on the
TOP500 list.Sun also has an
OpenSolaris distribution that is optimized for HPC workloads. The distribution integrates many of Sun's HPC products and other commonly used 3rd-party solutions.
[WEB
],
weblink, OpenSolaris Project: HPC Stack
, 2008-08-07
, Sun Microsystems
Staff
{{see also|List of notable Sun Microsystems employees}}Notable Sun employees include
John Gilmore,
Whitfield Diffie,
Radia Perlman,
Marc Tremblay, and
Ned Freed. Sun was an early advocate of
Unix-based networked computing, promoting
TCP/IP and especially
NFS, as reflected in the company's motto "The Network Is The Computer", coined by
John Gage.
James Gosling led the team which developed the
Java programming language. Most recently,
Jon Bosak led the creation of the
XML specification at
W3C.Many Sun staff publish articles on the company's blog site,
blogs.sun.com. Staff are encouraged to use the site to blog on any aspect of their work or personal life. There are few restrictions placed on staff, other than commercially confidential material. Sun staff are inspired to blog by CEO
Jonathan I. Schwartz, whose own blog is widely read, is translated into other languages, and is frequently quoted and analyzed in the press.
(46)(47)(48) See also
References
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[JAVA: Summary for Sun Microsystems Inc. - Yahoo! Finance]
-
[WEB,weblink The Rise of JAVA - The Retirement of SUNW, 2007-09-02, Jonathan Schwartz, Jonathan I. Schwartz, August 23 2007, Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog, ]
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[WEB, The Glamor in Mass Transit,weblink 24 February 2007, 2007-02-25, Sun Microsystems, Inc., ]
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[WEB,weblink Sun begins releasing Java under the GPL, 2007-09-23, November 15, 2006, Free Software Foundation, FSF president and founder Richard Stallman said, 'I think Sun has contributed more than any other company to the free software community in the form of software. It shows leadership. It's an example I hope others will follow.', ]
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[The SUN Workstation Architecture, Andreas Bechtolsheim, Forest Baskett, Vaughan Pratt, Stanford University Computer systems Laboratory Technical Report No. 229, March 1982]
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[Wellspring of Innovation: Sun Microsystems Spotlight]
- weblink VINOD KHOSLA AND SUN MICROSYSTEMS, Amar Bhide, Harvard Business School, 12/14/89
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[Sun to Switch Symbol to JAVA]
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[NASDAQ]
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[WEB, Sun to lay off 1,000,weblink 2007-07-13, 18 September 2003, CNET, CNet News.com, Stephen, Shankland, ]
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[WEB, 2007-07-13, 24 June 2005,weblink Sun layoffs hit hundreds in US, Ashlee, Vance, The Register, ]
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[WEB,weblink 7 April 2006, 2007-07-13, Sun layoffs hit high-end server group, ZDNet, Stephen, Shankland, ]
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[WEB,weblink 16 January 2004, 2007-07-14, Sun to add jobs in Hillsboro, Portland Business Journal, ]
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[WEB,weblink 11 May 2006, 2007-07-14, Sun to sell Newark campus, move 2,300 workers, Silicon Valley, San Jose Business Journal, ]
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[WEB,weblink 23 January 2007, Sun Microsystems Welcomes Endorsement and Investment From KKR, ]
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[WEB,weblink "Offshoring Software Development presentation by Sun to the OECD", ]
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[WEB,weblink "System news for Sun Users", ]
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-
-
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-
-
-
-
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[PRESS RELEASE, SUN COMPLETES ACQUISITION OF WAVESET TECHNOLOGIES, INC., Sun Microsystems, December 10 2003,weblink 2007-01-01, ]
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[WEB, SUN MICROSYSTEMS ENHANCES NETWORK SERVICES INTEGRATION INTO BLADES PLATFORM; SIGNS AGREEMENT TO ACQUIRE NAUTICUS NETWORKS,weblink 2 January 2004, ]
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[PRESS RELEASE, Sun Completes Acquisition Of Sevenspace, Sun Microsystems, 11 January 2005,weblink 2007-10-03, ]
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x86-based systems
In the late 1980s, Sun also marketed an Intel 80386-based machine, the Sun386i; this was designed to be a hybrid system, running SunOS but at the same time supporting DOS applications. This only remained on the market for a brief period of time. A follow-up "486i" upgrade was announced but only a few prototype units were ever manufactured.Sun's brief first foray into x86 systems ended in the early 1990s, as it decided to concentrate on SPARC and retire the last Motorola systems and 386i products, a move dubbed by McNealy as "all the wood behind one arrowhead". Even so, Sun kept its hand in the x86 world, as a release of Solaris for PC compatibles began shipping in 1993.In 1997 Sun acquired Diba, Inc., followed later by the acquisition of Cobalt Networks in 2000, with the aim of building network appliances (single function computers meant for consumers). Sun also marketed a network computer (a term popularized and eventually trademarked by Oracle); the JavaStation was a diskless system designed to run Java applications.Although none of these business initiatives were particularly successful, the Cobalt purchase gave Sun a toehold for its return to the x86 hardware market. In 2002, Sun introduced its first general purpose x86 system, the LX50, based in part on previous Cobalt system expertise. This was also Sun's first system announced to support Linux as well as Solaris.In 2003, Sun announced a strategic alliance with AMD to produce x86/x64 servers based on AMD's Opteron processor; this was followed shortly by Sun's acquisition of Kealia, a startup founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, which had been focusing on high-performance AMD-based servers.On September 12 2005, Sun unveiled a new range of Opteron based servers: the Sun Fire X2100, X4100 and X4200 servers.[Sun Microsystems]
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[WEB, Study on the: Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU,weblink 2007-01-25, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, November 20 2006, PDF, the European Communities, p. 51, ]
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[NEWS, Burgess, John, AT&T to Buy Stake In Sun Microsystems,weblink The Washington Post, January 7 1988, 2007-01-23, American Telephone & Telegraph Co. announced yesterday that it will buy up to a 20 percent stake in Sun Microsystems Inc., a Silicon Valley-based maker of powerful small computers known as workstations., ]
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[WEB,weblink Sun Opens Java, 2007-01-25, 13 November 2006, Sun Microsystems Web site, ]
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[OpenOffice.org]
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[Systems Management]
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[PRESS RELEASE, SUN-NETSCAPE ALLIANCE TARGETS E-COMMERCE WITH NEW BRAND IDENTITY, Sun Microsystems, January 25 2000,weblink 2007-01-01, ]
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[WEB,weblink Sun CEO Among the Few Chiefs Who Blog, The Washington Post, 16 September 2006, 2007-07-04, ]
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[WEB,weblink Sun CEO sees competitive advantage in blogging, USA Today, 26 June 2006, 2007-07-04, ]
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[WEB,weblink Jason Stamper's Blog: The ROI of blogging, and whether Jonathan Schwartz's blog pays for itself, Computer Business Review Online, 4 April 2006, 2007-07-04, ]
External links
{{Sun Microsystems}}{{Java (Sun)}}{{Solaris}}{{IT giants}}{{NASDAQ-100}}
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