According to this Reuters article, Sun has released new service, software, and hardware offerings as part of a plan to move to selling “services” rather than discrete hardware and software components.

“In our world, you will subscribe to the software and the hardware is free,” said Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO. “Directionally, our expectation is that in fiscal 2005 you’re going to see a rapid departure from selling hardware, software and services apart.”

Sun rolled out a pay-for-use storage service, with prices starting at 2 cents per megabyte per month. Also announced is the quad-CPU Netra 440 server, the next version of the Java Enterprise System, and the second release of the Java Desktop System.

According to this Ziff Davis article, Sun is using Linux to get its foot in the door to sell Solaris x86. With Sun’s irresolute track record with Solaris x86 some companies are hesitant to deploy it.

In order for wider acceptance of Solaris x86, perhaps Sun should offer a guarantee to cover 100% of reverse migration costs (back to alternative OS/es) should Solaris x86 be discontinued or “postponed” again.

According to this Register article, Sun will be releasing a developer kit for its “Looking Glass” 3-D software environment at the JavaOne conference in June. Also detailed are AOL’s plans for an AOL-branded low-end PC running the Java Desktop System.

NextCom LLC has announced the availability of a new product line, FlexSPARCIII, which is targeted at deployable military-aerospace, homeland security, imagery, and EDA applications. This system packs Dual 64 bit UltraSPARCIIIi processor technology with up to 16GB of memory, Ultra160 SCSI, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and the highest performance 2D and 3D graphics in an all-in-one aluminum alloy rugged briefcase-style Mobile Graphics Workstation and Mobile Server.

This SysAdmin article gives an in-depth look at dtrace and Q&A with the dtrace team. DTrace, dynamic tracing, is a tool to track, tune, and troubleshoot your systems in real time. DTrace is part of Solaris 10 OS.

According to this InternetNews article, Sun is making headway with retail merchants such as Kelly-Moore Paints, Guitar Center, and Air Terminal Gifts, who are using the Java Desktop System. Meanwhile, Benjamin Moore Paints and Ultimate Electronics are converting to Solaris for back-end applications.

Sun’s BigAdmin has a nice feature on Solaris10 Zones entitled Spotlight on Solaris Zones by Amy Rich. This is a great read for anyone who hasn’t already migrated all non-production systems into Zones already.

This News.Com article briefs the services partnership between Sun and SunGard. SunGard will provides disaster recovery services to small businesses in case of outages due to fires or natural disasters.

As part of the landmark agreement announced last month, Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Microsoft are focusing new attention on deeply integrating products and technologies, so customers will have less work to do to support heterogeneous IT environments. Three things happened on April 2, 2004 to further that goal.

Find out how this can help you: http://www.sun.com/2004-0511/feature/

As another indication of Sun’s commitment towards x86 platform, Sun introduces Cluster 3.1 for Solaris x86. In addition to Cluster 3.1, Veritas has pledged support to introduce storage management tools for Solaris x86. With the flurries of announcements, partnerships, and enterprise applications support for x86 platform, all evidence indicates that Sun is not abandoning Solaris x86 but rather escalating support for it.

According to this News.Com article, Sun has completed the Niagara chip design and has sent it to the chip fabrication facility to be built and tested. Usually, it takes a year to fix manufacturing and other issues before the chip can be used in a server, ie. Niagara should be ready in 2005.

It’s here! Solaris10 5/04 (aka: B55, aka: Beta 3) has been released. This release includes ehancements to the vacation utility (it’s smart now), USB end-user device support enhancements, and the Common Solaris Target Disk Driver which combines the 3 drivers sd (sparc), sd (x86), and ssd (fibre channel) into a single driver. There have also been revisions made to Dtrace (user-proccess tracing on x86), Kerberos (AES crypto), and the Solaris Linker and Libraries. The updates to the linker and libraries is a biggy which all developers need to immediately look into and report back to Sun; they have restructured and moved several libs from /usr/lib to /lib, they have added more flexablity in dependency tracking to crle (-A argument), and mostly notably have stopped providing system archive libraries which impacts the creation of static binaries. Read the “Whats New” for Beta3 on docs.sun.com and get your hot and toasty ISOs here.

This internetnews.com article highlights an alliance between Sun and SAP to provide grid computing infrastructure.

View this Q & A between Jonathan Schwartz and developer.sun.com. Jonathan answers a number of questions that are important to the developer community and reiterates his commitment to developers in his new role as Sun’s President and COO.

Learn more: http://developer.sun.com/foryourbusiness/askjonathan

The HCTS is used to test hardware to verify its compatibility with the Solaris [tm] Operating System, x86 Platform Edition. Sun has released HCTS 2.3, which replaces HCTS 2.0.

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/hcts