Unisys, the IT services company, today became the latest with a set of products aimed at helping customers create their own internal clouds. And in a month it will offer a true Infrastructure-as-a-Service product that will deliver computing and storage on demand and on a per-instance basis. Like many of the traditional IT vendors, Unisys […]
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Notable Observation:
“In the context of software, the word Enterprise has now officially come to mean software that sucks. Enterprise Software hit the nadir of suckitude at the launch of Enjoy SAP. This is like the American Dental Association launching Enjoy Root Canal. SAP is certainly an easy target, but let’s face it, ‘Enterprise Software’ is […]

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Oracle’s decision to buy Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion is not only going to shake up the database business — it’s likely to energize the Java community, too. And of course, the deal puts the insurgent MySQL database in the hands of incumbent Oracle. Whatever the long-term implications, in the short term expect massive layoffs as Oracle tries to squeeze profits out of Sun.

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Updated: Late last night, The New York Times reported that the IBM’s rumored $7 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems is off. The doubts about the deal were first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The Journal said thatSun’s board is divided on the wisdom of this deal.
A faction led by CEO Jonathan Schwartz wants to […]

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ParaScale, a Cupertino, Calif.-based storage software company that debuted in June 2008 today announced the availability of its ParaScale Cloud Storage (PCS) software that allows companies to turn commodity Linux servers into an Amazon S3-styled storage cloud. Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Stanford Genome Technology Center are two companies currently using PCS. A handful of hosting […]

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Microsoft’s Steve Martin, senior director of developer platform management at the Redmond giant, posted an inflammatory blog post last night about the creation of open standards for the cloud. In it, he touts Microsoft’s openness, proposes a wiki for the creation of open standards in the cloud, and points to a shadowy cabal of tech companies that are developing […]

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With IBM rumored to have made a $6.5 billion buyout offer for Sun Microsystems, it appears the company that coined the phrase “The Network is the Computer” is in play. But no one should allow IBM to walk away with Sun — which is still rich with talent, technology and engineering chops — at that […]

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This morning’s Wall Street Journal reports that IBM is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems for $6.5 billion in cash. The deal makes sense given Sun’s distressed share price, and because both companies appear to be pursuing cloud computing — the next big computing opportunity — in a similar manner. Let’s see how each plans […]

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Sun Microsystems, as has been widely expected in the technology world, has finally announced its own cloud computing platform. Sun will offer raw compute power as well as storage through its Sun Cloud Storage Service and Sun Cloud Compute Service. The services, while being announced today, will not be generally available until this summer.
Juan […]

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Cisco Systems today announced its new blade server, first reported by us in March 2008, along with a Unified Computing strategy that converges storage, compute and networking into a single layer (thanks to virtualization technologies) that is managed by a specialized piece of software. Stacey has captured the intricate details of the news, while […]

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Before I left for India, I asked folks at Glassdoor.com, a Sausalito, Calif.-based company that that tracks employee satisfaction, to run a custom query for me. I wanted to find out which 10 publicly traded companies had the best pay packages for their engineers. Whenever we have a slump here in Silicon Valley, there is […]

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Aster Data Systems, which makes software that allows companies to build massively scalable databases on commodity hardware, has raised an additional $5 million as part of its Series B round of funding from Institutional Venture Partners. Aster had originally closed $12 million back in January, but CEO Mayank Bawa says the company extended the round […]

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Marten Mickos, who was chief executive officer of MySQL prior to its billion-dollar sale to Sun Microsystems, has decided to leave the company, the second high-profile MySQL executive to do so in as many days. On Thursday, Michael “Monty” Widenius, MySQL co-founder and original developer, left Sun to set up a consulting firm, Monty Program […]

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On Friday I wrote about the rise of specialty computing clouds and AMD’s efforts to build a supercomputer that will essentially be a graphics rendering cloud. Today, insideHPC points me to a post from Josh Simons over at Sun Microsystems about his  trip to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (home of the Jaguar supercomputer) and the […]

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Yesterday AMD announced that it was building a specialty supercomputer to deliver gaming through a computing cloud. Aside from the coolness of being able to play your video games on an iPhone, pause them, and pick them up at home, the news bolsters the cloud business model — taking it beyond storage and run-of-the mill […]

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Apparently, disk drives are more sensitive to minor vibrations than previously thought. A blog post by Sun Microsystems engineer Brendan Gregg called “Unusual disk latency” discovered unusually high disk I/O latency during a streaming write test. He explains how disk drives latency can shoot up dramatically when someone shouts at them making them perform more slowly.

Yes, that’s right, he can make his hard drives slow down simply by screaming at them. We’ve all been there, screaming at our PCs or Macs, i.e. “Curses you for crashing in the middle of my email novel! Stupid PC!” Like an impetulant child that stubbornly refuses to do what it is told even when yelled at, apparently hard drives have feelings too. Or it could simply be explained by the fact that hard drives have safety mechanisms which stop the hard drive during vibrations to prevent damage. Me, I’m going with the impetulance thing.

Play the video for all his screaming glory.

Tags: Brendan Gregg, hard drive, Sun Microsystems

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Dave Douglas, SVP Cloud Computing
In a call today outlining Sun Microsystem’s cloud computing efforts, David Douglas, SVP of Sun’s cloud computing business  and Lew Tucker, Sun’s CTO, said the server and software vendor believes that there will be multiple clouds tailored to specific industries, and that more than one or two vendors will provide the […]

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For the first time ever, a supercomputer using Nvidia chips has achieved a spot on the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The Nvidia-containing machine is ranked No. 29 on the list that was released late Friday; it’s a cluster built by NEC and Sun Microsystems that uses chips from Nvidia, Intel and AMD. As Nvidia and AMD, which bought graphics chipmaker ATI in 2005, push graphics processors for scientific computing, this is a big milestone. The rest of the list was pretty anticlimactic, with IBM’s Roadrunner computer narrowly beating Cray’s Jaguar computer to stay on top of the twice-annual Top 500 list. Both machines are petaflop computers, meaning they can achieve a quadrillion floating point operations a second — a record that was broken by Roadrunner back in June.

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Sun Microsystems today announced that it is going to cut between 15-to-18 percent of its work force. That’s somewhere between 5,000-to-6,000 jobs. The company plans to cut its annual costs by between $600-to-$800 million.
The company blamed the cuts on the global economic downturn. I think like many other companies, Sun is using the downturn as an excuse for what have been pre-existing problems, foretold by a slumping stock price. The cuts also come with the rearranging of the executive responsibilities prompting Larry Dignan to write: “Sun is a company mired in what seems like a never-ending transition.”

Here are some of the changes:

* Anil Gadre, currently Chief Marketing Officer will now head Application Platform Software business which would include Java, MySQL and other such stuff.
* John Fowler will now lead Systems Platforms that include some of its new storage and analytics products.
* Dave Douglas, will head company’s Cloud Computing & Developer Platforms including the Network.com efforts.

Will these help? I am sure they can’t hurt. Or as someone recently said — leaky oil tankers take a long time to sink, so there is enough time to patch stuff up.

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Sun Microsystems plans to lay off about 350 employees at the start of next year, according to a letter filed under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. The computer systems maker said in its letter that it would lay off 352 people across the U.S between Jan. 5 and Jan. 25, citing a “need to reduce overall spending” in fiscal 2009. Late last month, Sun reported a $1.7 billion loss for the first quarter of its fiscal 2009 year.

Since May, Sun has laid off about 1,500 employees, according to its filings with the SEC. As of the end of June, the company employed about 34,900 people. In addition to Sun, Freescale Semiconductor also filed a WARN letter saying it plans to lay off 138 employees in Austin, Texas, while hosting provider Verio said it plans to lay off 71 people in Dallas.

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I traveled down to Houston today to check out a data center geek’s version of paradise — the inside of the factory where HP builds their rack-mounted servers and high-value blade systems. I shot plenty of photos that show how a bunch of chips and boards gets assembled into a blade that I will put […]

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VMware, which single-handedly created a market for virtualization, is currently faced with the threat of commoditization of its core product, increased competition and fiscal uncertainty. The question is, did EMC Corp. kill this golden goose? Continue Reading.

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I have to hand it to Intel. The company that brought us the brilliant marketing of Intel Inside (remember the stuffed guy in a bunny suit?) says Facebook has chosen its Xeon chips to power the social network. But because Intel is aware that server chips are commodities, the chip maker is also working directly […]

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GigaOM???s Structure 08 event offered a terrific opportunity to survey the changing landscape of computing infrastructure. But as with all technology shifts, innovation won???t just belong to the big established players like VMWare, Amazon, Google, Sun Microsystems, Salesforce.com and NetSuite. With that in mind, Found|READ asked a panel of conference participants to share their thoughts […]

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From the company that spent $4.1 billion buying a tape company comes some cutting-edge storage news: Sun Microsystems said today that it will put solid-state Flash drives into a line of servers and other storage products, making access to stored data faster and more energy efficient. EMC made a similar announcement earlier this year.
The big […]

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Desktop virtualization is far from a new topic, in fact it dates back to the inception of the client-server model. But there are still virtualization startups out there, among them Redwood City, Calif.-based MokaFive, which is gunning for a chance to go up against Microsoft, IBM and Citrix with its own desktop-in-the-cloud model, whose public […]

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These days, thanks to a visually intensive style of computing, a good GPU can improve the user experience much better than a fast CPU. In the data center certain tasks are moving from commodity CPU boxes to GPUs, meaning that over the next year or two, more of them will be sold for corporate computing use.

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