Sun Microsystems, Inc. ( ) is a
multinational vendor of
computers, computer components,
computer software, and
information technology services,
founded on February 24, 1982.
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 server and
workstations based on its own SPARC processor
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,
MySQL and
NFS.Sun is a
proponent of open systems in general and
Unix
in particular, and a major contributor to
open source software.
On April 20, 2009, Sun and
Oracle
Corporation announced that they entered into a definitive
agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun for $7.4 billion. Sun
shareholders approved the acquisition on July 16, 2009. the
acquisition is pending regulatory approvals.
Sun's
manufacturing facilities are located in Hillsboro,
Oregon
, USA and Linlithgow
, Scotland.
History
Buildings 21 and 22 at Sun's
headquarters campus in Santa Clara
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. He built the first ones from spare parts
obtained from Stanford's
Department of Computer
Science and Silicon Valley supply houses.
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. 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). 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.
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 was orange and had the
sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was subsequently
redesigned so as to appear to stand on one corner and the color
changed to purple.
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 period 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.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 used
high-end Sun hardware was available very cheaply. This hurt Sun's
business as it relied a great deal on
hardware sales.
Multiple quarters of substantial losses and declining revenues have
led to repeated rounds of layoffs,executive departures, and
expense-reduction efforts. In December 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.In 2006 Sun closed the Newark campus completely and
moved 2,300 staff to its other campuses in the area.
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.
Sun responded to this in several ways, including introducing its
own lines of x86-based servers to compete directly in that market,
re-launching development of Solaris on the x86 platform and
releasing the open-source OpenSolaris to drive interest in using
Solaris, and coming out with lower cost horizontally-scaled SPARC
systems (see below).
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 April 17, 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.
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.
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
.
In 2007–2008, Sun posted revenue of $13.8 billion and has $2
billion in cash. First-quarter 2008 losses were $1.68 billion;
revenue fell 7% to $2.99 billion. Sun’s stock lost 80% of its value
November 2007 to November 2008, reducing the company’s market value
to $3 billion. With falling sales to large corporate clients, Sun
announced plans to lay off 5,000 to 6,000 workers, or 15-18% of its
work force. It expects to save $700 million to $800 million a year
as a result of the moves, while also taking up to $600 million in
charges in the next 12 months.
On August 31, 2009, while announcing the Q4 results, Sun
Microsystems reported net loss of $147m, compared to net profit of
$88m a year ago.
A weekly summary of news about Sun and its products is posted to
"System News for Sun Users",now in its 10th year.
Acquisition by Oracle
Early in 2009, according to unconfirmed press reports, Sun entered
into acquisition talks with
IBM. On April 20,
2009, Sun and
Oracle Corporation
announced that they entered into a definitive agreement under which
Oracle will acquire Sun for $9.50 a share in cash. Net of Sun's
cash and debt, this amounts to a $5.6 billion dollar offer from
Oracle. Sun's shareholders voted to approve the proposal on July
16, 2009, but the deal was still subject to regulatory
approvals.
On August 20, 2009, it was reported that the U.S. government,
pursuant to the
Clayton Antitrust
Act, approved Oracle's purchase of Sun.
On
September 3, 2009, the European Commission
announced that it will perform a second round of
investigation of the deal, focusing on the impact of the purchase
of MySQL (now owned by Sun) by Oracle.
The deadline is set to January 19, 2010, but some analysts hope
that the decision will be made much earlier.
In
addition, Sun has filed for antitrust clearance in a number of
countries, including Russia (temporarily withdrawn due to deadline
issues), China, Japan and India
.
On October 20, 2009, Sun announced filed with the
U.S. Securities and Exchange
Commission (SEC) its intention to cut 3,000 jobs globally over
next 12 months, citing losses caused by delays in the acquisition
process.
On November 6, in its 10-Q filing for the 1st quarter of the 2010
fiscal year, Sun announced 25% total
revenue decrease, compared to the 1st quarter of the previous year,
due to "economic downturn, the uncertainty associated with our
proposed acquisition by Oracle, increased competition and delays in
customer purchasing decisions".
Oracle maintains a public
FAQ about the
acquisition.
Sun acquisitions
- 1987 - Trancept Systems, a high performance graphics hardware
company
- 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
- 1991 - INTERACTIVE
Systems Corporation's Intel/Unix OS division, from Eastman Kodak Company
- 1992 - Praxsys Technologies, Inc., developers of the Windows
emulation technology that eventually became Wabi
- 1994 - Thinking Machines
Corporation hardware division
- 1996 - Lighthouse Design,
Ltd.
- 1996 - Cray Business Systems
Division, from Silicon
Graphics
- 1996 - Integrated Micro Products, specializing in fault tolerant servers
- 1996 - Thinking Machines
Corporation software division
- February 1997 - LongView Technologies, LLC
- August 1997 - Diba, a technology supplier for the Information
Appliance industry
- September 1997 - Chorus Systems, creators of ChorusOS
- November 1997 - Encore Computer
Corporation's storage business
- 1998 - RedCape Software
- 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
- 1999 - German software company StarDivision and with it
StarOffice, which was later released as
open source under the name OpenOffice.org
- 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 the 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.
- March 2000 - Innosoft International, Inc. a software company
specializing in highly scalable MTAs (PMDF) and Directory
Services.
- July 2000 - Gridware, a
software company whose products managed the distribution of large
computing jobs across multiple computers
- September 2000 - Cobalt
Networks, an Internet appliance manufacturer
- December 2000 - HighGround, with a suite of Web-based
management solutions support wide range of storage technologies and
applications
- 2001 - LSC, Inc., an Eagan, Minnesota company that developed
Storage and Archive Management File System(SAM-FS) and Quick File
System QFS high performance file systems for
backup and archive
- March 2002 - Clustra Systems
- June 2002 - Afara Websystems, a
company that develops next-generation SPARC processor-based
technology
- September 2002 - Pirus Networks, specializing in intelligent
storage services
- November 2002 - Terraspring, a pioneer in infrastructure
automation software
- June 2003 - Pixo, adds to the capabilities
of the Sun Content Delivery Server
- August 2003 - CenterRun, Inc.
- December 2003 - Waveset Technologies, an identity management
solutions company
- January 2004 - Nauticus Networks
- February 2004 - Kealia, a startup founded by original Sun
founder Andy Bechtolsheim, which had been focusing on
high-performance AMD-based 64-bit servers
- January 2005 - SevenSpace, a multi-platform managed services
provider
- May 2005 - Tarantella, Inc.
(formerly known as Santa Cruz Operation (SCO)), for
$25,000,000
- June 2005 - SeeBeyond, SOA software
company for $387m
- June 2005 - Procom Technology, Inc.'s NAS IP Assets
- August 2005 - StorageTek
- February 2006 - Aduva, producer of software for Solaris and
Linux patch management
- October 2006 - Neogent
- April 2007 - SavaJe, developer of the
SavaJe OS, a Java OS for mobile phones
- September 2007 - Cluster File
Systems, Inc.
- November 2007 - Vaau, provider of Enterprise Role Management
and identity compliance solutions
- February 2008 - MySQL AB, the company
offering the popular open source database MySQL
- February 2008 - Innotek GmbH, developer of the VirtualBox virtualization product
- April 2008 - Montalvo Systems,
failed x86 microprocessor startup acquired before first
silicon
- January 2009 - Q-layer, a software company with cloud computing
solutions
Major stockholders
As of May 11, 2009, the following shareholders held over 100,000
common shares of Sun:
- Barclays Global
Investors, 37,606,402
- Scott G. McNealy, 14,566,433
- Kenneth M. Oshman, 584,985
- Jonathan I. Schwartz, 536,109
- James L. Barksdale, 231,785
- Michael E. Lehman, 106,684
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
In 1987, the company began using
SPARC, a processor
architecture of its own design, in its computer systems, starting
with the
Sun-4 line. SPARC was initially a
32-bit architecture until the introduction of
the SPARC V9 architecture in 1995, which added
64-bit extensions.
Sun has developed several generations of SPARC-based computer
systems, including the
SPARCstation,
Ultra and
Sun
Blade series of workstations, and the SPARCserver,
Netra,
Enterprise
and
Sun Fire line of servers.
In the early 1990s the company began to extend its product line to
include large-scale
symmetric
multiprocessing servers, starting with the four-processor
SPARCserver 600MP.
This was followed by 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 transformation was
accelerated by the acquisition of
Cray
Business Systems Division from
Silicon Graphics. Their 32-bit,
64-processor
Cray Superserver 6400,
related to the SPARCcenter, led to the 64-bit
Sun Enterprise 10000 high-end server
(otherwise known as
Starfire). More recently, Sun has also
ventured into the
blade server
(high density rack-mounted systems) market.
In November 2005 Sun launched the
UltraSPARC T1, notable for its ability to
concurrently run 32 threads of execution on 8 processor cores. Its
intent was to drive more efficient use of CPU resources, which is
of particular importance in
data
centers, where there is an increasing need to reduce power and
air conditioning demands, much of which comes from the heat
generated by CPUs. The T1 was followed by the
UltraSPARC T2, which extended the number of
threads per core from 4 to 8, and T2 Plus, which added the ability
to have multiple T2 processors in one system. Sun has open sourced
the design specifications of both the T1 and T2 processors via the
OpenSPARC project.
In April 2007, Sun released the
SPARC
Enterprise server products, jointly designed by Sun and
Fujitsu and based on Fujitsu
SPARC64 VI and later processors. The
M-class SPARC Enterprise systems include high-end
reliability and availability features.
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.
The following year, Sun launched the Opteron-based Sun Fire V20z
and V40z servers, and the
Java
Workstation W1100z and W2100z workstations.
On September 12, 2005, Sun unveiled a new range of Opteron-based
servers: the Sun Fire X2100, X4100 and X4200 servers. 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. 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. 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 5, 2008, AMD announced 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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
Early examples of Java applications were the
HotJava web browser and
the
HotJava Views suite. However,
since then Java 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 . 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.
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
API
provide an extensive set of library routines. These APIs have
evolved into the
Standard Edition ,
which provides basic infrastructure and GUI functionality; the
Enterprise Edition , aimed at large
software companies implementing enterprise-class application
servers; and the
Micro Edition ,
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;it
released its
Java compiler and JVM at
that time.
In February 2009 Sun entered a battle with Microsoft and Adobe
Systems, which are promoting rival platforms to build software
applications for the Internet.
JavaFX is a
development platform for music, video and other applications that
builds on the Java programming language.
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 (though not
perfectly), 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. 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
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/T2 Plus server
platforms. Sun also has the
N1 provisioning software 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 for US$ 1 billion. CEO
Jonathan Schwartz mentioned in his
blog that optimizing the performance of MySQL is one of the
priorities of the acquisition. In February 2008, Sun began to
publish results of the MySQL performance optimization work. Sun is
also a contributor to the
PostgreSQL
project. On the Java platform, Sun contributes to, ships, and
offers support for
Java DB.
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,
SeeBeyond, and
Vaau. Sun also acquired many of the
Netscape non-browser software products as
part a deal involving Netscape's merger with
AOL. 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. Sun's
Open ESB and
other software suites are 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 and firewall software
such as
SunScreen.
Sun also produces a suite of compilers and development tools under
the
Sun Studio brand,
for building and developing Solaris and Linux applications.
Sun has recently entered the
Software as a Service (SaaS) market
with
zembly, a social cloud-based computing
platform and
Project Kenai, an
open-source project hosting service.
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 in August 2005.
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.
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.
In late 2008 Sun announced the
Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage
Systems (codenamed Amber Road). Transparent placement of data
in the systems'
solid-state drives
(SSD) and conventional hard drives is managed by
ZFS in a way to take advantage of the speed of SSDs and
the economy of conventional hard disks.
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:
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 is a participant in the
OpenMP language
committee.
Sun Studio
compilers and tools natively implement the OpenMP specification for
shared memory parallelization.
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 6th most powerful supercomputer on
the
TOP500 list (November 2008).
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.
Staff
Notable current and former 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. 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.
See also
References
- Harvard.edu, Vinod Khosla and Sun Microsystems,
Amar Bhide, Harvard Business School,
12/14/89
- Ashlee Vance, "Crisis Hits Tech Sector With Layoffs as Sales
Slump," New York Times, Nov. 14, 2008
- "Oracle Faces In-Depth EU Probe Over $7.4 Billion
Sun Purchase"
- "Oracle Withdraws Sun Buyout Petition to Russian
Antitrust Regulators", eWeek, October 30, 2009
- Sun Microsystems slashing up to 3,000 jobs, 10
pct", Associated Press, October 20,
2009
- Form 10-Q for SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC.
- Oracle's FAQ about the acquisition
- "Prelimitary merger proxy statement" By Sun
Micro
- Sun Microsystems
- Java is ranked 1st as of June 2007, and has ranked 1st or 2nd
in this index since its inception in 2001.
Further reading
External links
and Sony), and the
movie-industry (including Harry
Potter and Spider-Man).
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