Sun reports a profit for 2Q FY 2007

Posted by Bill Bradford on Jan 23, 2007

Sun today reported financial results for the second quarter fiscal year 2007. In short, the company is back to making a profit.

“Revenues for the second quarter of fiscal 2007 were $3.566 billion, an increase of 7 percent as compared with $3.337 billion for the second quarter of fiscal 2006. The year-over-year revenue increase was due to sales of SPARCĀ® chip multithreading (CMT) servers and x64-based servers as well as the increased acceptance of the SolarisTM 10 Operating System. Computer Systems products revenues increased 14 percent year-over-year, the fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth.

Net income for the second quarter of fiscal 2007 on a GAAP basis was $126 million or $0.03 per share on a diluted basis, as compared with a net loss of $223 million, or ($0.07) per share, for the second quarter of fiscal 2006.”

Sun and Intel announce strategic alliance

Posted by Bill Bradford on Jan 23, 2007

Sun and Intel have announced a strategic alliance where Intel will endorse Solaris “as a mainstream OS and the enterprise-class, mission critical UNIX OS for Intel Xeon processor-based servers”, while Sun plans to add Intel Xeon-based x86 servers to its current lineup of AMD Opteron-based machines in 2007.

I’m alive! Sorry about that.

Posted by Bill Bradford on Jan 20, 2007

just a quick note – i just got home yesterday from a week in the hospital including four days in ICU. I’m alive, but am on bed rest and oxygen for the next week on doctors orders.

Thanks everyone for all of your emails and well wishes – I’ll resume updating SunHELP sometime in the coming week.

Ask the Experts: Open Source Java Project

Posted by Bill Bradford on Jan 10, 2007

Sun is having another Ask the Experts session, this time about the open-sourcing of its Java software products.

Got a question about Sun’s open-sourcing of its Java platform implementations? Read the FAQ. Then post any follow-up questions from January 16-19 during this Ask the Experts session and get answers from representatives of Sun’s Java platform implementations.

Solaris Cluster now available at no cost

Posted by Bill Bradford on Jan 9, 2007

Sun has made their latest release of the Solaris Cluster product available for download at no charge – you only have to pay if you want support for the software. They’ve also put a nice “How To Install and Configure a Two-Node Cluster” tutorial online in addition to FAQs and the Sun Cluster Blog (check it out for some funny videos).

Sun wins big at InfoWorld 2007 Technology of the Year Awards

Posted by Bill Bradford on Jan 5, 2007

InfoWorld has announced its 2007 Technology of the Year Awards, and Sun was named in multiple categories:

“InfoWorld’s Test Center reviewed the Sun Fire X4200 in February, giving it an 8.7 out of 10 — an excellent rating. The review found that the Sun Fire X4200 “is a serious server in a seriously well-designed package.” In December InfoWorld published its review of the Sun Fire X4600 scoring an 8.9 out of 10 — another excellent rating. The review calls the Sun Fire X4600 “an extraordinarily well- engineered server.” Under the Best Hardware category the Sun Fire X4200 and X4600 have been awarded with respective titles “Best Server” and “Best High-Performance Server” of the Year — for 2007.”

“Sun also takes a prestigious title from this year’s InfoWorld Technology Awards in the Application Development category. Securing the Java IDE Innovator Award — Sun’s NetBeans 5.5 is called out in InfoWorld’s 2007 report as “an intuitive, well-designed IDE with superb collaboration and remarkable features.” The review on Sun’s NetBeans 5.5 notes, “NetBeans already had the most complete collaboration features among IDE platforms. This year it added important new modules such as Matisse, the most advanced Java software GUI designer available today, and complete support for Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 5. NetBeans is likely all that developers of enterprise Java applications will need.”

Sun’s ZFS compared to Veritas’ VxFS

Posted by Bill Bradford on Jan 5, 2007

Dominic Kay has a couple of blog entries comparing ZFS to VxFS: Setup Complexity and Time and I/O Benchmarks

(thanks to JamesD for the pointer)