According to the IDC Q206 Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, Sun’s year-to-year server market revenue share has grown 1.7 points and server factory revenue has grown 15.5%. Sun has now surpassed Dell to become the number three vendor in total server revenue.

Sun has sold its Mainframe Transaction Processing/Mainframe Batch Manager business and products involved in mainframe rehosting to Clerity, who also hired the Sun employees directly involved with these products.

Ben Rockwood has a great writeup about BrandZ, an environment that lets Linux binaries run on OpenSolaris in a special “branded zone“.

CoolThreads Optimized Open Source Software Stack (Cool Stack) is a collection of some of the most commonly used open source applications optimized for the Sun Solaris OS / UltraSPARC platform.

The applications include Apache, MySQL, and PHP (available as an AMP package), and MySQL, Perl, PHP, Squid, and Tomcat, available individually.

SunHELP contributor Ben Rockwood has a quick report on the state of OpenSolaris at LinuxWorld SF 2006.

Sun will be releasing the Java Platform, Micro Edition as Open Source by the end of 2006. Plans are also underway to have the Java Compiler and HotSpot VM from Java SE available by the end of the year as well, with the rest to follow in early 2007.

Mark Reinhold has more details on what’s going to happen here.

Smugmug‘s Don McCaskill has a good review of Ubuntu Linux on the “CoolThreads” T1000 server.

Sun released ten new UltraSPARC and x64-based products and systems today:

The Sun Fire V490, E2900, E4900, E6900, E20K, V890, and E25K servers are now powered by the new UltraSPARC IV+ processor at speeds of up to 1.8Ghz.

The redesigned Sun Fire x2100 M2 server upgrades the x2100 to a dual-core Opteron CPU, while the new Sun Fire x2200 M2 is a two-socket (up to 4-way, with dual dual-core Opteron CPUs) version of the x2100 M2.

The Ultra 20 M2 upgrades the existing Ultra 20 workstation to a dual-core Opteron CPU.

Today’s releases also mentioned the Sun Blade 800 Modular System and Sun Fire x4500 and x4600 servers, which were released back on July 11th.

With its flexible and enhanceable component model, JavaServer Faces Technology simplifies building user interfaces for Java-based web applications.

Got a question about JavaServer Faces technology? Post it on the Ask the Experts page during the week of August 14, and get answers from Ed Burns and Roger Kitain, the co-leads of the JavaServer Faces 1.2 Specification (the version of JavaServer Faces technology in Java EE 5).

Robert Milkowski compares ZFS’ software RAID-Z to hardware RAID in a great series of articles: Part 1, Part 2.

These tests show that software RAID-5 in ZFS can not only be as fast as hardware RAID-5 it can even be faster. The same is with RAID-10 – ZFS software RAID-10 was faster than hardware RAID-10.

Apple’s new XCode 3.0 development environment for Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” includes Sun’s DTrace technology.

When you need a bit more help in debugging, Xcode 3.0 offers an extraordinary new program, Xray. … Truly track read/write actions, UI events, and CPU load at the same time, so you can more easily determine relationships between them. Many such Xray instruments leverage the open source DTrace, now built into Mac OS X Leopard.

Update: Bryan Cantrill lets the cat out of the bag, Mike Shapiro has more technical details, and Adam Leventhal has pictures of Apple’s DTrace team.

Sun has laid off 1900 employees in the US and worldwide as the second phase of its effort to trim almost 5,000 workers.

Update: Approximately 311 of the 950 US positions cut were in Colorado.

Second update: “About 430” of the 950 US positions cut are located in the Bay Area.