Sun announces 2006 Fiscal Q3 Results

Posted by Bill Bradford on Apr 24, 2006

Sun reported results today for the fiscal third quarter ending March 26, 2006:

Revenues for the third quarter of fiscal 2006 were $3.177 billion, an increase of 21 percent as compared with $2.627 billion for the third quarter of fiscal 2005. The year over year revenue increase was driven by recent acquisitions and by growth in traditional products. Total gross margin as a percent of revenues was 43.0 percent, an increase of 1.6 percentage points, as compared with the third quarter of fiscal 2005.

Net loss for the third quarter of fiscal 2006 on a GAAP basis was $217 million or a net loss of ($0.06) per share, as compared with a net loss of $28 million, or a net loss per share of ($0.01), for the third quarter of fiscal 2005.

GAAP net loss for the third quarter of fiscal 2006 includes: $87 million principally related to intangible asset amortization associated with our recent acquisitions, $57 million of stock-based compensation charges relating to the implementation of SFAS 123R, $36 million of restructuring charges, a $4 million gain on equity investments, and a $4 million benefit for related tax effects. The net impact of these five items is approximately ($0.05) per share.

Cash generated from operations for the third quarter was $197 million and cash and marketable debt securities balance at the end of the quarter was $4.429 billion.

Jonathan Schwartz appointed CEO of Sun Microsystems

Posted by Bill Bradford on Apr 24, 2006

Sun announced today that current President/COO Jonathan Schwartz has been named Chief Executive Officer.

Former CEO and Sun co-founder Scott McNealy will continue with the company as Chairman of Sun as well as the chairman of Sun Federal, Inc..

MySQL Faster on Solaris 10 than on RHEL AS 4

Posted by Bill Bradford on Apr 21, 2006

Sun today announced new benchmark results involving the performance of the open source MySQL database running an online transaction processing workload on 8-way Sun Fire(TM) V40z servers. The testing, which measured the performance of both read/write and read-only operations, showed that MySQL 5.0.18 running on Solaris 10 executed the same functions up to 64 percent faster in read/write mode and up to 91 percent faster in read-only mode than when it ran on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Advanced Server Edition OS.

More information on the benchmark results can be found at: http://www.sun.com/x64/docs/MySQL-sysbench-benchmark.pdf

Galaxy Servers added to “Try and Buy” promotion

Posted by Bill Bradford on Apr 20, 2006

According to this CNET News.com article Sun will be adding the SunFire x4100 and x4200 “Galaxy” servers, based around the AMD Opteron CPU to its 60-day “Try and Buy”promotion on Friday the 21st.

Sun Secure Global Desktop 4.2 Released

Posted by Bill Bradford on Apr 18, 2006

Sun has released version 4.2 of its Secure Global Desktop software, enabling secure access to server-based applications from a variety of client platforms and devices.

An online demonstration of the software is available.

Migrating Java Applications to Sun Java Application Server

Posted by Bill Bradford on Apr 18, 2006

Migrating Java Applications to the Sun Java System Application Server – Webinar & Ask The Experts session

View the webinar, and learn how to migrate Java applications to Sun Java System Application Server 8.2.  After the webinar, if you have questions about migrating Java applications to SJSAS, you’ll be able to post them in an Ask the Experts session during the week of April 24. You’ll get answers from members of the SJSAS team and other Sun experts.

New Sun Ray thin clients announced

Posted by Bill Bradford on Apr 12, 2006

Sun today officially announced the new Sun Ray thin clients, the Sun Ray 2 and the Sun Ray 2FS.

Both new models use less than four watts of power, and the new 2FS features a 100Base-FX fiber-optic network port in addition to 100Base-T Ethernet, as well as supporting dual-head monitor configurations with Xinerama.

The Sun Ray 2 is priced at $249 and the 2FS at $499.

Sun ships faster Opteron CPUs

Posted by Bill Bradford on Apr 11, 2006

Sun has announced the availability of faster Opteron 156 and 256 CPUs in the SunFire X2100/4100/4200 servers and Ultra 20/40 workstations.

New Sun Ray systems

Posted by Bill Bradford on Apr 10, 2006

According to James Dickens, Sun will shortly be releasing the Sun Ray 2 and Sun Ray 2FS. Video output is a single DVI port (dual on the 2FS), USB ports have been moved to the front, and an integrated stand is now standard.

CoolThreads Tuning Tips

Posted by Bill Bradford on Apr 5, 2006

Sun has posted a page with tips on tuning and optimizing application and server settings for the Niagara-based CoolThreads systems.

More T2000 Benchmarks

Posted by Bill Bradford on Apr 5, 2006

Colm MacCarthaigh has posted his benchmark results comparing the T2000 to the Dell servers currently running ftp.heanet.ie.

“Bottom line, the T2000 was able to handle over 3 times the number of transactions per-second and about 60% more concurrent downloads than the current ftp.heanet.ie machine can (a dual Itanium with 32Gb of memory) running identical software.”

“Solaris Internals” Updated

Posted by Bill Bradford on Apr 4, 2006

Richard McDougall, Jim Mauro, and Brendan Gregg have finished the second edition of their excellent Solaris Internals title, with the updated book covering Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris and all the new changes and additions to the new version of the Solaris Operating Environment.

Along with that book, they also have a second title out that covers DTrace and the Solaris Performance Tools and their use for debugging problems.

They’re looking for suggestions for the final titles of both books.