Sun is number 13 in Computerworld’s list of the “100 Best Places to Work in IT 2009.” Computerworld reports that Sun’s Open Work Program “takes advantage of the company's own technology to make the workforce mobile.” Under the program, approximately 56% of employees can work in a place other than a specific office, cutting commuting costs for employees and reducing Sun's carbon footprint. The report states, “The IT team is also focused on green initiatives,” and describes how consolidating two datacenters into one facility, cut space requirements from 202,000 to just 72,000 square feet and reduced power consumption by 50%.
eWEEK reports on Sun’s announcements at the International Supercomputing Conference,
including “new and enhanced additions to its Sun Constellation supercomputer” and Sun’s preview of new Sun Blade™ systems that will be powered by AMD’s new Opteron™ processors, which complement Sun’s recently launched servers based on Intel’s new Nehalem chips.
The Register states that Forschungszentrum Jülich
― the third largest supercomputer center in Germany ― has switched on the Juropa2 machine, which uses Sun Blade X6275 server modules. Each blade includes “two whole two-socket Xeon 5500 servers onto a single blade, with each node on the blade getting two quad-data rate (40 Gb/sec) InfiniBand ports.”
Internetnews.com discusses Sun’s release of NetBeans™ 6.7 software and its support for Project Kenai, “Sun’s collaborative hosting site for free and open-source projects.”
ZDNet Australia looks at virtualization for workstations:
“Type 2 virtualization ― where one operating system needs to be running to host another operating system.” Comparing five different offerings, the article includes a recommendation for Sun VirtualBox™ software and comments that: “It’s fast, easy to use, and has that sweet price point: free.”
A digital.blogsite.org blog reports on VirtualBox 3.0 beta 2 software.
Installation is described as “straightforward” and there are numerous positive comments about performance. The blogger notes, “VirtualBox is a better than VMWare. I have migrated all my virtual machines to VirtualBox.”
A ZDNet blog entitled “OpenSolaris 2009.06:
Getting Better All The Time states, “OpenSolaris 2009.06 is indeed a significant release for the project and is an excellent enterprise workstation and server OS.”
A blogger at The JavaFX Journey
considers the benefits of using JavaFX™ software as a gaming framework/engine and notes, “JavaFX gives you the tools to create a truly unique experience, and will let you re-use your existing Java code.”
In this video, Symantec personnel discuss the company’s 15-year partnership with Sun and explain why Symantec chose MySQL™ software for a Web-based management system project. Paul Stephens, senior development manager at Symantec, states that having evaluated commercial and open-source products “we found that MySQL was the best in terms of the price point and also the functionality it offered us.”
France’s Planet-Work is a leader in Web hosting,
and its customers include BMW and the French Ministry of Justice. When the company wanted to improve performance while also reducing energy and space requirements, it chose Sun servers, storage, and software. The solution has cut the number of servers from 120 to 11 and reduced energy consumption by 70%. “Sun virtualization combines industrial-strength technology with the scalability and cost benefits of open-source software. By reducing energy consumption, it is good for our business and good for the environment,” comments Frédéric Vannière, technology director at Planet-Work.
TravelMuse.com provides tools for planning vacations and booking reservations, with collaboration features that enable users to make plans with friends and family. To implement a Web site based on open-source software, TravelMuse chose Sun technologies. “If we didn't go with open-source software, each year we would probably have paid about $100,000 for application servers and another $100,000 for the database ― so we've saved $200,000 annually just in licensing. We've also been able to cut our hosting costs in half by using Solaris Containers," comments Cyril Bouteille, vice president of engineering at TravelMuse.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a leader in biomedical research, has implemented a high-performance grid computing system based on Sun servers, workstations, storage, and management tools. “Implementing a high-performance computing solution from Sun Microsystems gave us the ability to move biomedical research forward at a faster pace,” comments Russell M. Taylor II, research professor with a joint appointment in the departments of Computer Science, Physics and Astronomy, and Applied and Materials Sciences at the University of North Carolina.
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