Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

Check it out here Saw first at Alessandro's site

Silicon Valley has a new parlour game: what's going to happen to Sun after the cuts? Rumours suggest it will merge with EMC, that HP or IBM will take it over, that Fujitsu will buy its hardware business, or even that the StorageTek storage business unit will be spun off. Do Sun's leaders want to be redeemed or to retire? The company has bit the downsizing bullet and announced up to 6000 job losses following on from a $1.7bn quarterly loss. Its made its big open storage announcement and there are server announcements coming too. But investors have seemingly discounted these moves as the company's share price is at $3.17 with its market capitalisation at $2.34bn, about the same as its cash pile and so effectively rendering the company worthless. This is lower than the $3.62 stock price before the cuts were announced, and before a raft of technology and product announcements like the open storage one. The Register

Improving Cost Structure As part of today's actions, Sun's Board of Directors has approved a restructuring plan aimed at reducing costs by approximately $700 to $800 million annually. The plan includes a reduction of approximately 5,000 to 6,000 employees, representing approximately 15% to 18% of the Company's global workforce. Sun expects to incur total charges in the range of $500 to $600 million over the next twelve months in connection with the plan, of which it expects to incur approximately $375 to $450 million within its current fiscal year 2009. Sun expects to begin realizing cost savings in the third quarter of the Company's fiscal year 2009, and expects to realize a substantial portion of the run rate benefit by the first quarter of the next fiscal year. Streamlining for Growth Sun's new organizational alignment is a recognition of the comprehensive role software plays in the Company's growth strategy. Sun creates the best platforms on which to develop...

TechCrunch When Jonathan Schwartz took over the company, Sun was perceived as a major platform vendor with challenges in monetizing its resources. His strategy of marshalling the company’s assets and harnessing the viral nature of open source dynamics has maintained Sun’s relationships with developers, but nowhere has there been the kind of disruptive messaging around the cloud computing paradigm that Schwartz employed to such good effect in marketing Sun in the Web 2.0 phase. By contrast, even Apple jumped aggressively into the conversation with MobileMe; Google, Amazon, Rackspace, even Dell with a URL grab not only had a message but extended it with price cuts, acquisitions, and social media product announcements. Schwartz, who came to the job with a refreshing understanding of the power of blogging, Web services, and open source, projected confidence that these tools and communities could be intertwined with Sun’s leadership in disruptive hardware design and systems synergy. The ...

"What drives me crazy is that Jonathan spends a lot of time in the press talking about OpenSolaris and not about the architecture and density of Sun's x86 servers, or what continues to be the world-changing architecture of its Niagara boxes. As a partner I'd like to see him creating increased visibility and attention for those things at Sun that we partners can drive and make money on," said Rob Wolfe, CEO of AvcomEast , a Vienna, Va., Sun solution provider. and Whether or not the vendor is getting the desired traction from this strategy is an open question, however. Several partners said that out of 10 customers looking at OpenSolaris or Linux, maybe one or two end up running either on Sun hardware. But Sun-affiliated partners insist customers will pay for real value, as long as it is communicated clearly and emphatically. "If you look at the cell phone market, the model was historically to give away the handset and make money on the service or annual fees. The...

Sun on Wednesday also is releasing the second version of xVM Ops Center, a management system for both physical and virtual servers. The new version makes it easier to create virtual machines, manage storage and use xVM’s live migration feature, which makes it possible to move an application running on a virtual server from one physical device to another, Wilson says. Live migration is available in the open source version of xVM Server, but is easier to manage with Ops Center, he says. xVM Server is a software product with an embedded Web server, allowing management through a Web browser, according to Wilson. xVM Server is based on the open source Xen hypervisor, but includes technologies taken from Sun’s OpenSolaris operating system that make it more scalable, fault-resistant and easy to update, he says. Source

Sun is pretty serious about this business. Would Sun be shipping a ESX-like (ep, we all know that xVM is not really taking off) version soon out of all the development experience out of VirtualBox? I know, its a bit too late or that but you just never know! Cloud Computing is coming and whether you like your own hypervisor there or not, desktop is definitely what Sun is poised for! This now adds the ability to run 64-bit OSes on a virtual machine, an improved GUI on OS X and paid support subscription for its customers. This new release comes only a few days after the release of the maintenance release 1.6.6 which already included some important fixes, like improved stability and performance on AMD CPUs that support AMD-V virtualisation, plus better SATA drivers, shared folders performance, improved support for recent Linux kernels, and some fixes for OS-X users as well. A full "change log" detailing the bugs fixed can be found over here . Available in 32-bit and 64-bit e...

All the three news are here , here and here .

The message from HP is that it wants to deliver more efficiently used assets. "Everything has to be saved now," says Phil Dodsworth, director of HP Datacentre Solutions. That means energy efficiency, power and cooling and lowering operating costs, he adds. "Our strategy is all about managing risk for our clients, and we manage risks through these processes. It's not a silver bullet." HP sees virtualisation as an important strand in what it wants to deliver - but that is a long way from the full story. "Every other supplier seems to imagine that virtualisation is a cure all for everything," says Dodsworth, "but some applications don't lend themselves to virtualisation at all." HP's strategy is very much cost-driven rather than technology-led. "That's what our customers have been telling us," says Dodsworth. "It's the cost of the datacentre that is crippling companies, not the strategic advantages that technolo...

While people are watching Parallels and VMware go after the desktop virtualization market on Apple, Sun has a very strong message to the world. The "new-order" is about freedom and open minds. SUN MICROSYSTEMS has unveiled a useful little update to its xVM VirtualBox, open sauce desktop virtualisation, which now has support for both Solaris and Mac OS X. The update means that Sun is now officially the first firm to have launched open source virtualisation for those particular two operating systems. Sun is seeking a niche in the big-business virtualisation market. Its Virtual Box, which was developed by German company Innotek, bought by Sun this February, can run as an application on a host operating system, allowing several guest OSs to run on top of it. L'inq here You can download as many flavors as you want, including Mac OS X intel

I got a lot of calls and wanted to clear it that: Neither Sun , nor Parallels were involved in this joke Parallels worth is definitely not $205, so acquirers, don't get any ideas ;-) We're glad that you guys fell for it. Hope you had a good April Fool's day yourselves

Looks like that Parallels IPO won’t be happening after all. Sun Microsystems has today announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Parallels (formerly SWsoft) and all of its assets for a whopping $ 205 million. The major acquisition had been rumoured to be imminent throughout the course of 2007, but never actually went through, which led mosts analysts to believe the Herndon, VA-based company was heading towards an IPO following in VMware’s footsteps rather than being picked up by one of the big boys. Needless to say, the acquisition is a pretty bold one, which is bound to serve as wake-up call for the entire virtualization industry. Both companies had been on a buying spree the past few months: Sun picked up innotek / VirtualBox , while Parallels recently acknowledged its January acquisition of ModernGigabyte . The acquisition is expected to be finalized by June, around the time Sun also plans to ship xVM Server. See the rest at Virtualization.com

VDI 2.0 features the new Sun Virtual Desktop Connector, which supports Windows XP and Vista, Mac OS, Linux and Sun's Solaris operating systems. The software allows organizations to "provide their users with secure access to a centralized desktop environment that can be accessed from practically any location, at any time, via the corporate network," said Jim McHugh, vice president of Solaris marketing. Works with VMWare The software offers improved information security Relevant Products/Services, more effective control of access to critical data Relevant Products/Services, reduced operational costs and increased employee mobility, McHugh added. VDI 2.0 is the result of a deal with VMWare, announced last month, to offer and support VMWare infrastructure Relevant Products/Services virtualization software on Sun hardware. Sun demonstrated VMI 2.0 in announcing that deal. The software seems to build on years of Sun's work on thin clients, said Charles King, principal analy...

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the launch of Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Software 2.0, its end-to-end solution that helps organizations to easily and efficiently establish and manage virtual desktop sessions on any operating system, including Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris Operating System ( http://www.sun.com/software/solaris ) and even Windows Mobile. Sun VDI Software 2.0 is available for purchase immediately and a free trial of the software can be downloaded at: http://www.sun.com/software/vdi/get.jsp . Sun VDI Software 2.0 is part of Sun's broader virtualization software portfolio, Sun xVM software, which includes Sun xVM Ops Center, the soon to be released Sun xVM Server and the newly acquired Sun xVM VirtualBox software. Sun VDI Software 2.0 is designed to deliver a secure, centralized desktop environment, enables IT managed data backup and security and allows users to access their full desktop environment fr...

Check out those cool specs! At A Glance Intel Xeon Quad-Core processors Four sockets, up to 16 cores per module 32 DIMM memory slots, industry leading 2 DIMMs/core Hardware-level virtualization, VMware and Xen support, cross-platform virtualization between Solaris 10 and Windows Front-accessible SAS and SATA hard drives 160Gbps I/O Manage with ILOM 2.0

Well if not the heavens then I'd say it certainly is going to promise you the clouds. Loads of clouds! Ashlee covering Sun doing the Amazon EC2 with Caroline: The concept of utility computing has technically been around since the mainframe days. You fire up a large machine and then rent out time to different users. The utility model, however, gave way to client-server computing during the major data center build out that has been underway for decades. Companies became accustomed to running their own infrastructures and largely relied on placing one or a limited number of applications on each physical server. Thanks to massive increases in compute power, storage and bandwidth and more attention to virtualization software a revitalized form of utility computing is taking hold. Some companies like Salesforce.com rent out a specific software utility – customer relationship management software. Others like Amazon.com and more recently IBM – the time-sharing king – look to offer up t...

Suddenly with the Open Sauce Chief, Jonathan at the helm, a lot is changing at Sun. I am very confident that Sun, with its innovation engine, will eventually go for the data center like never before. Jonathan's team is on good track. Here's a snippet of the news: "VirtualBox provides Sun with the perfect complement to our recently announced Sun xVM Server product," said Rich Green, executive vice president, Sun Software. “Where Sun xVM Server is designed to enable dynamic IT at the heart of the datacenter, VirtualBox is ideal for any laptop or desktop environment and will align perfectly with Sun’s other developer focused assets such as GlassFish, OpenSolaris, OpenJDK and soon MySQL as well as a wide range of community open source projects, enabling developers to quickly develop, test and deploy the next generation of applications." VirtualBox is open source, and can be freely downloaded without the hassle of payment or frustrating license keys at virtualbox.org ...

That is what I see from this post: Thus far, USi is offering only virtualized servers running VMware, but according to Christina Schriver, director of advanced engineering for USi, the company will offer Sun Microsystems Solaris Containers and Citrix Systems Xen products this year. Why the expansion? Because it's what customers clamor for. "We're not getting requests from customers for a particular virtualization platform," Schriver said, explaining that customers don't even see the virtualization layer when hosting their apps with USi. They just see applications running as they should. "But we are getting requests from clients that can best be supported by other [virtualization] vendors." Some of USi's customers, for example, have asked USi to host Solaris running on Sparc processors, whereas VMware can handle Solaris on only x86 processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) and Intel Corp.. Schriver explained that in many cases, customers w...

With millions of global deployments including Facebook, Google, Nokia, Baidu and China Mobile, MySQL will bring synergies to Sun that will change the landscape of the software industry by driving new adoption of MySQL's open source database in more traditional applications and enterprises. The integration with Sun will greatly extend the commercial appeal of MySQL's offerings and improve its value proposition with the addition of Sun's global services organization. MySQL will also gain new distribution through Sun's channels including its OEM relationships with Intel, IBM and Dell. "Today's acquisition reaffirms Sun's position at the center of the global Web economy. Supporting our overall growth plan, acquiring MySQL amplifies our investments in the technologies demanded by those driving extreme growth and efficiency, from Internet media titans to the world's largest traditional enterprises," said Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and president, Sun Microsys...

So what will VMware release to get this up again? Q4 results coming soon and should they be any less than expected (I'm sure the investors are expecting more than ever) may be yet another blow to the NYSE run. But do also note the markets are terribly volatile and not to forget that competition from Microsoft's Hyper-V, Citrix's XenServer, Sun's xVM, Oracle's VM, Virtual Iron etc is getting hotter in 2008. Microsoft has 8 Million customers and they all will get the Hyper-V in their shops on CD/DVDs. Here the live coverage at Google Finance. , Link Graph here