solaris

During an employee Webcast earlier this week to discuss Intel's stock options program, the chip giant's CEO, Paul Otellini, shed a little background on Sun Microsystems' pursuit to find a buyer.

When queried by an employee about his thoughts regarding an IBM-Sun merger and whether Cisco's recent announcement about entering the storage market drove Sun to find a buyer, Otellini said:

Oh, I don't know if the Cisco entry spurred IBM. I think (a) cheap Sun price--a low price--spurred a lot of interest. I can tell you that Sun was shopped around the valley and around … Read more

NetApp's IP patent infringement lawsuit against rival Sun Microsystems may throw a wrench in Sun's reported merger talks with IBM, according to a report on American Lawyer's AM Law.com site.

Two years ago, NetApp filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Sun, alleging its rival violated seven of its patents with its ZFS file system--a key element to its Solaris operating system. NetApp demanded Sun remove its ZFS file system from the open-source community and storage products, and limit its use to computing devices.

Sun, in response, filed a countersuit, alleging NetApp violated a dozen of its … Read more

Shares of Sun Microsystems took a hit in Monday morning trading, falling at least 7 percent while the broader markets advance.

Sun fell as low as $7.53 a share, following reports Friday in The Wall Street Journal that IBM is currently engaged in combing through Sun's contracts, as part of the evaluation process on whether to move forward with an acquisition.

Sun's shares had been on a rocket ride, after reports surfaced last week in the Journal that IBM was in negotiations to acquire the company for roughly $6.5 billion.

After the reports surfaced, Sun's … Read more

IBM is reportedly wading through Sun Microsystems' contracts and documents for potential conflicts or problems, as it works its way through the due diligence process toward a merger, according to a report Friday in The Wall Street Journal.

IBM's attorneys have been poring over Sun's documents for at least the past several days, if not longer, according to the Journal.

And while the due diligence process is not anticipated to lead to any nixing of a deal, IBM is seeking a clear understanding of where Sun stands with its complex cross-licensing agreements and other contracts, according to sources … Read more

Hewlett Packard and Sun did their best to put everyone on Wednesday's conference call to sleep. (Do these guys try to sound like Lurch from the Addams Family when they run through their prepared remarks? Just asking.) Still, the news will be of especial interest if you are either a Solaris or ProLiant customer.

The deal gives HP the right to distribute software for Sun's Solaris 10 Operating System on the HP ProLiant server and blade system platforms. HP also will shoulder responsibility for technical support. It's a one-stop shop arrangement that the companies hope will help … Read more

As the chief open-source officer at Sun Microsystems, Simon Phipps spoke to ZDNet Australia about the MySQL acquisition and community engagement on OpenOffice.org and OpenSolaris.

Q: In the beginning of 2008, Sun spent $1 billion on the acquisition of MySQL. Given Sun's huge reduction in Australian revenue, and the global shedding of jobs, was this a prudent acquisition? Phipps: It's a bit soon to be making that sort of judgment. Asking that question now is a bit like asking a company to change its product strategy on the basis of the share price.

MySQL is a long-term … Read more

It should be obvious, but the more I talk to people about open source, and where and how it's useful, the more I'm surprised by how overinflated (or underinflated) expectations often are for open source.

One case in point is with the utility of source code as a way to save time and money, rather than reinventing the wheel. For example, Alfresco, my employer, was able to get its initial content management product to a 1.0 state in less than six months because it heavily borrowed from successful open-source projects such as Hibernate, Spring, PDFbox, and others.… Read more

I just ran across this video from Sun Microsystems that demonstrates a source of disk latency that we usually don't think about. It's short and quite amusing. Take a look.

But being the analyst that I am, I also wanted to highlight some of the pieces that make the demonstration possible.

The technology that's under the covers, measuring the disk latency and so forth, is DTrace, a component of Solaris, originally developed by Bryan Cantrill. By way of background, here's what I wrote upon its introduction in Solaris 10:

DTrace stands for "Dynamic Tracing" … Read more

Sun Microsystems unveiled Monday its Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems line, as it seeks to turn around its ailing business by once again turning to open source.

The Sun Storage 7000 line, formerly known as "Amber Road," is intended to bolster the company's storage business by adding open source to its hardware, in a move to make it easier for customers to install and configure the systems and reduce costs. The line will be part of the company's Unified Storage Systems.

Sun's three open-source storage are designed to increase the performance while lower cooling … Read more