Jump to content

Sun Microsystems: Difference between revisions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Browse history interactively
← Previous editNext edit →
Content deleted Content added
VisualWikitext
→Staff: logo is used for hardware only
The-verver (talk | contribs)
347 edits
Line 586: Line 586:
[[bn:সান মাইক্রোসিস্টেম্‌স]]
[[bn:সান মাইক্রোসিস্টেম্‌স]]
[[be:Sun Microsystems]]
[[be:Sun Microsystems]]
[[be-x-old:Sun Microsystems]]
[[bg:Sun Microsystems]]
[[bg:Sun Microsystems]]
[[ca:Sun Microsystems]]
[[ca:Sun Microsystems]]

Revision as of 13:24, 12 May 2012

Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Company typeSubsidiary
IndustryComputer systems
Computer software
Founded1982 (1982)
FounderVinod Khosla
Andy Bechtolsheim
Bill Joy
Scott McNealy
DefunctJanuary 27, 2010 (2010-01-27)
FateAcquired by Oracle
SuccessorOracle America, Inc.
Headquarters
Santa Clara, California
,
USA
ProductsServers
Workstations
Storage
Services
Number of employees
38,600 (near peak, 2006)[1]
ParentOracle Corporation
Websiteoracle.com/sun

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold computers, computer components, computer software, and information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982.[3] At its height, Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California (part of Silicon Valley), on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.

On January 27, 2010, Sun was acquired by Oracle Corporation for US$7.4 billion, based on an agreement signed on April 20, 2009.[4] The following month, Sun Microsystems, Inc. was merged with Oracle USA, Inc. to become Oracle America, Inc.[5]

Sun products included computer servers and workstations based on its own SPARC processors as well as AMD's Opteron and Intel's Xeon processors; storage systems; and, a suite of software products including the Solaris operating system, developer tools, Web infrastructure software, and identity management applications. Other technologies include the Java platform, MySQL, and NFS. Sun was a proponent of open systems in general and Unix in particular, and a major contributor to open source software.[6] Sun's main manufacturing facilities were located in Hillsboro, Oregon and Linlithgow, Scotland.

History

Sun Microsystems logo history
Logo Years
Original Sun Microsystems logo, as used on the nameplate of the Sun-1 workstation
Revised logo, used until early 1990s
From the 1990s until acquisition by Oracle Corporation

The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix workstation, the Sun-1, was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He originally designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation. It was designed around the Motorola 68000 processor with an advanced Memory management unit (MMU) to support the Unix operating system with virtual memory support.[7] He built the first ones from spare parts obtained from Stanford's Department of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses.[8]

On February 24, 1982, Vinod Khosla, Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy of Berkeley, a primary developer of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), joined soon after and is counted as one of the original founders.[9] The Sun name is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network.[10][11][12] Sun was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982.

Sun's initial public offering was in 1986 under the stock symbol SUNW, for Sun Workstations (later Sun Worldwide).[13][14] The symbol was changed in 2007 to JAVA; Sun stated that the brand awareness associated with its Java platform better represented the company's current strategy.[15]

Sun's logo, which features four interleaved copies of the word sun, was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt, also of Stanford. The initial version of the logo was orange and had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was subsequently redesigned so as to appear to stand on one corner and the color changed to purple.

The "Bubble" and its aftermath

In the dot-com bubble, Sun began making much more money, and its shares rose dramatically. It also began spending much more, hiring workers and building itself out. Some of this was because of genuine demand, but much was from web start-up companies anticipating business that would never happen. In 2000, the bubble burst.[16] Sales in Sun's important hardware division went into free-fall as customers closed shop and auctioned off high-end servers.

Several quarters of steep losses led to executive departures, rounds of layoffs,[17][18][19] and other cost cutting. In December 2001, the stock fell to the 1998, pre-bubble level of about $100. But it kept falling, faster than many other tech companies. A year later it had dipped below $10 (a tenth of what it was even in 1990) but bounced back to $20. In mid-2004, Sun closed their Newark, California, factory and consolidated all manufacturing to Hillsboro, Oregon.[20] That factory later closed, in 2006.[21]

Post-crash focus

Aerial photograph of the Sun headquarters campus in Santa Clara, California
Buildings 21 and 22 at Sun's headquarters campus in Santa Clara
Sun in Markham, Ontario, Canada

In 2004, Sun canceled two major processor projects which emphasized high instruction level parallelism and operating frequency. Instead, the company chose to concentrate on processors optimized for multi-threading and multiprocessing, such as the UltraSPARC T1 processor (codenamed "Niagara"). The company also announced a collaboration with Fujitsu to use the Japanese company's processor chips in mid-range and high-end Sun servers. These servers were announced on April 17, 2007 as the M-Series, part of the SPARC Enterprise series.

In February 2005, Sun announced the Sun Grid, a grid computing deployment on which it offers utility computing services priced at US$1 per CPU/hour for processing and per GB/month for storage. This offering builds upon an existing 3,000-CPU server farm used for internal R&D for over 10 years, which Sun markets as being able to achieve 97% utilization. In August 2005, the first commercial use of this grid was announced for financial risk simulations which was later launched as its first Software as a Service product.[22]

In January 2005, Sun reported a net profit of $19 million for fiscal 2005 second quarter, for the first time in three years. This was followed by net loss of $9 million on GAAP basis for the third quarter 2005, as reported on April 14, 2005. In January 2007, Sun reported a net GAAP profit of $126 million on revenue of $3.337 billion for its fiscal second quarter. Shortly following that news, it was announced that Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) would invest $700 million in the company.[23]

Sun had engineering groups in Bangalore, Beijing, Dublin, Grenoble, Hamburg, Prague, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, and Trondheim.[24]

In 2007–2008, Sun posted revenue of $13.8 billion and had $2 billion in cash. First-quarter 2008 losses were $1.68 billion; revenue fell 7% to $12.99 billion. Sun's stock lost 80% of its value November 2007 to November 2008, reducing the company's market value to $3 billion. With falling sales to large corporate clients, Sun announced plans to lay off 5,000 to 6,000 workers, or 15–18% of its work force. It expected to save $700 million to $800 million a year as a result of the moves, while also taking up to $600 million in charges.[25]

Sun acquisitions

Sun server racks at Seneca College (York Campus)
  • 1987 – Trancept Systems, a high performance graphics hardware company[26]
  • 1987 - Sitka Corp, networking systems linking the Macintosh with IBM PCs[27]
  • 1987 – Centram Systems West, maker of networking software for PCs, Macs and Sun systems
  • 1988 – Folio, Inc., developer of intelligent font scaling technology and the F3 font format[28]
  • 1991 – Interactive Systems Corporation's Intel/Unix OS division, from Eastman Kodak Company
  • 1992 – Praxsys Technologies, Inc., developers of the Windows emulation technology that eventually became Wabi[29]
  • 1994 – Thinking Machines Corporation hardware division
  • 1996 – Lighthouse Design, Ltd.[30]
  • 1996 – Cray Business Systems Division, from Silicon Graphics[31]
  • 1996 – Integrated Micro Products, specializing in fault tolerant servers
  • 1996 – Thinking Machines Corporation software division
  • February 1997 – LongView Technologies, LLC[32]
  • August 1997 – Diba, technology supplier for the Information Appliance industry[33]
  • September 1997 – Chorus Systems, creators of ChorusOS[34]
  • November 1997 – Encore Computer Corporation's storage business[35]
  • 1998 – RedCape Software
  • 1998 - i-Planet, a small software company that produced the "Pony Espresso" mobile email client—its name (sans hyphen) for the Sun-Netscape software alliance
  • July 1998 – NetDynamics[36] – developers of the NetDynamics Application Server[37]
  • October 1998 – Beduin,[38] small software company that produced the "Impact" small-footprint Java-based Web browser for mobile devices.
  • 1999 – StarDivision, German software company and with it StarOffice, which was later released as open source under the name OpenOffice.org
  • 1999 – MAXSTRAT Corporation, a company in Milpitas, California selling Fibre Channel storage servers.
  • 1999 – Forte, an enterprise software company specializing in integration solutions and developer of the Forte 4GL and TeamWare
  • 1999 – NetBeans, produced a modular IDE written in Java, based on a student project at Charles University in Prague
  • March 2000 – Innosoft International, Inc. a software company specializing in highly scalable MTAs (PMDF) and Directory Services.
  • July 2000 – Gridware, a software company whose products managed the distribution of computing jobs across multiple computers[39]
  • September 2000 – Cobalt Networks, an Internet appliance manufacturer[40]
  • December 2000 – HighGround, with a suite of Web-based management solutions[41]
  • 2001 – LSC, Inc., an Eagan, Minnesota company that developed Storage and Archive Management File System(SAM-FS) and Quick File System QFS file systems for backup and archive
  • March 2002 – Clustra Systems[42]
  • June 2002 – Afara Websystems, developed SPARC processor-based technology[43]
  • September 2002 – Pirus Networks, intelligent storage services[44]
  • November 2002 – Terraspring, infrastructure automation software[45]
  • June 2003 – Pixo, added to the Sun Content Delivery Server[46]
  • August 2003 – CenterRun, Inc.[47]
  • December 2003 – Waveset Technologies, identity management[48]
  • January 2004 – Nauticus Networks[49]
  • February 2004 – Kealia, founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, developed AMD-based 64-bit servers[50]
  • January 2005 – SevenSpace, a multi-platform managed services provider[51]
  • May 2005 – Tarantella, Inc. (formerly known as Santa Cruz Operation (SCO)), for $25,000,000[52]
  • June 2005 – SeeBeyond, a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) software company for $387m[53]
  • June 2005 – Procom Technology, Inc.'s NAS IP Assets[54]
  • August 2005 – StorageTek[55]
  • February 2006 – Aduva, software for Solaris and Linux patch management[56]
  • October 2006 – Neogent[57]
  • April 2007 – SavaJe, the SavaJe OS, a Java OS for mobile phones
  • September 2007 – Cluster File Systems, Inc.[58]
  • November 2007 – Vaau, Enterprise Role Management and identity compliance solutions[59]
  • February 2008 – MySQL AB, the company offering the open source database MySQL[60]
  • February 2008 – Innotek GmbH, developer of the VirtualBox virtualization product[61][62]
  • April 2008 – Montalvo Systems, x86 microprocessor startup acquired before first silicon
  • January 2009 – Q-layer, a software company with cloud computing solutions[63]

Major stockholders

As of May 11, 2009, the following shareholders held over 100,000 common shares of Sun:[64] and at $9.40 per share offered by Oracle they received the amounts indicated when the acquisition closed.

Major Investors in Sun
Investor Common Shares Value at Merger
Barclays Global Investors 37,606,402 $353,500,180
Scott G. McNealy 14,566,433 $136,924,470
M. Kenneth Oshman 584,985 $5,498,860
Jonathan I. Schwartz 536,109 $5,039,425
James L. Barksdale 231,785 $2,178,780
Michael E. Lehman 106,684 $1,002,830

Hardware

For the first decade of Sun's history, the company positioned its products as technical workstations, competing successfully as a low-cost vendor during the Workstation Wars of the 1980s. It then shifted its hardware product line to emphasize servers and storage. High-level telecom control systems such as Operational Support Systems service predominantly used Sun equipment. This use is due mainly to the company basing its products around a mature and very stable version of the Unix operating system and the support service that Sun provides.[citation needed]

Motorola-based systems

Sun originally used Motorola 68000 family Central processing units for the Sun-1 through Sun-3 computer series. The Sun-1 employed a 68000 CPU, the Sun-2 series, a 68010. The Sun-3 series was based on the 68020, with the later Sun-3x variant using the 68030.

SPARC-based systems

See also: SPARC
SPARCstation 1+

In 1987, the company began using SPARC, a processor architecture of its own design, in its computer systems, starting with the Sun-4 line. SPARC was initially a 32-bit architecture until the introduction of the SPARC V9 architecture in 1995, which added 64-bit extensions.

Sun has developed several generations of SPARC-based computer systems, including the SPARCstation, Ultra and Sun Blade series of workstations, and the SPARCserver, Netra, Enterprise and Sun Fire line of servers.

In the early 1990s the company began to extend its product line to include large-scale symmetric multiprocessing servers, starting with the four-processor SPARCserver 600MP. This was followed by the 8-processor SPARCserver 1000 and 20-processor SPARCcenter 2000, which were based on work done in conjunction with Xerox PARC. In the late 1990s this transformation was accelerated by the acquisition of Cray Business Systems Division from Silicon Graphics.[31] Their 32-bit, 64-processor Cray Superserver 6400, related to the SPARCcenter, led to the 64-bit Sun Enterprise 10000 high-end server (otherwise known as Starfire). In 2006, Sun has also ventured into the blade server (high density rack-mounted systems) market with the Sun Blade (distinct from the Sun Blade workstation).

In November 2005 Sun launched the UltraSPARC T1, notable for its ability to concurrently run 32 threads of execution on 8 processor cores. Its intent was to drive more efficient use of CPU resources, which is of particular importance in data centers, where there is an increasing need to reduce power and air conditioning demands, much of which comes from the heat generated by CPUs. The T1 was followed by the UltraSPARC T2, which extended the number of threads per core from 4 to 8, and T2 Plus, which added the ability to have multiple T2 processors in one system. Sun has open sourced the design specifications of both the T1 and T2 processors via the OpenSPARC project.

In April 2007, Sun released the SPARC Enterprise server products, jointly designed by Sun and Fujitsu and based on Fujitsu SPARC64 VI and later processors. The M-class SPARC Enterprise systems include high-end reliability and availability features.

x86-based systems

In the late 1980s, Sun also marketed an Intel 80386-based machine, the Sun386i; this was designed to be a hybrid system, running SunOS but at the same time supporting DOS applications. This only remained on the market for a brief time. A follow-up "486i" upgrade was announced but only a few prototype units were ever manufactured.

Sun's brief first foray into x86 systems ended in the early 1990s, as it decided to concentrate on SPARC and retire the last Motorola systems and 386i products, a move dubbed by McNealy as "all the wood behind one arrowhead". Even so, Sun kept its hand in the x86 world, as a release of Solaris for PC compatibles began shipping in 1993.

In 1997 Sun acquired Diba, Inc., followed later by the acquisition of Cobalt Networks in 2000, with the aim of building network appliances (single function computers meant for consumers). Sun also marketed a network computer (a term popularized and eventually trademarked by Oracle); the JavaStation was a diskless system designed to run Java applications.

Although none of these business initiatives were particularly successful, the Cobalt purchase gave Sun a toehold for its return to the x86 hardware market. In 2002, Sun introduced its first general purpose x86 system, the LX50, based in part on previous Cobalt system expertise. This was also Sun's first system announced to support Linux as well as Solaris.

In 2003, Sun announced a strategic alliance with AMD to produce x86/x64 servers based on AMD's Opteron processor; this was followed shortly by Sun's acquisition of Kealia, a startup founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, which had been focusing on high-performance AMD-based servers.

The following year, Sun launched the Opteron-based Sun Fire V20z and V40z servers, and the Java Workstation W1100z and W2100z workstations.

On September 12, 2005, Sun unveiled a new range of Opteron-based servers: the Sun Fire X2100, X4100 and X4200 servers.[65] These were designed from scratch by a team led by Bechtolsheim to address heat and power consumption issues commonly faced in data centers. In July 2006, the Sun Fire X4500 and X4600 systems were introduced, extending a line of x64 systems that support not only Solaris, but also Linux and Microsoft Windows.

On January 22, 2007, Sun announced a broad strategic alliance with Intel.[66] Intel endorsed Solaris as a mainstream operating system and as its mission critical Unix for its Xeon processor-based systems, and contributed engineering resources to OpenSolaris.[67] Sun began using the Intel Xeon processor in its x64 server line, starting with the Sun Blade X6250 server module introduced in June 2007.

On May 5, 2008, AMD announced its Operating System Research Center (OSRC) expanded its focus to include optimization to Sun's OpenSolaris and xVM virtualization products for AMD based processors.[68]

Software

Although Sun was initially known as a hardware company, its software history began with its founding in 1982; co-founder Bill Joy was one of the leading Unix developers of the time, having contributed the vi editor, the C shell, and significant work on the TCP/IP stack to the BSD Unix OS. Sun has since developed software such as the Java programming language and acquired software such as StarOffice, VirtualBox and MySQL.

Sun used community-based and open-source licensing of its major technologies, and for its support of its products with other open source technologies. GNOME-based desktop software called Java Desktop System (originally code-named "Madhatter") was first distributed as a Linux implementation then offered as part of the Solaris operating system. Sun supported its Java Enterprise System (a middleware stack) on Linux. It released the source code for Solaris under the open-source Common Development and Distribution License, via the OpenSolaris community. Sun's positioning includes a commitment to indemnify users of some software from intellectual property disputes concerning that software. It offers support services on a variety of pricing bases, including per-employee and per-socket.

A 2006 report prepared for the EU by UNU-MERIT stated that Sun was the largest corporate contributor to open source movements in the world.[69] According to this report, Sun's open source contributions exceed the combined total of the next five largest commercial contributors.

Operating systems

Main article: Solaris (operating system)

Sun is best known for its Unix systems, which have a reputation for system stability and a consistent design philosophy.[citation needed]

Sun's first workstation shipped with UniSoft V7 Unix. Later in 1982 Sun began providing SunOS, a customized 4.1BSD Unix, as the operating system for its workstations.[citation needed]

In the late 1980s, AT&T tapped Sun to help them develop the next release of their branded UNIX, and in 1988 announced they would purchase up to a 20% stake in Sun.[70] UNIX System V Release 4 (SVR4) was jointly developed by AT&T and Sun; this partnership triggered concern among Sun's competitors, many of whom banded together to form the Open Software Foundation (OSF). By the mid-1990s, the ensuing Unix wars had largely subsided, AT&T had sold off their Unix interests, and the relationship between the two companies was significantly reduced.

Sun used SVR4 as the foundation for Solaris 2, which became the successor to SunOS.

From 1992 Sun also sold Interactive Unix, an operating system it acquired when it bought Interactive Systems Corporation from Eastman Kodak Company. This was a popular Unix variant for the PC platform and a major competitor to market leader SCO UNIX. Sun's focus on Interactive Unix diminished in favor of Solaris on both SPARC and x86 systems; it was dropped as a product in 2001.[citation needed]

Sun offered a separate variant of Solaris called Trusted Solaris, which included augmented security features such as multilevel security and a least privilege access model. Solaris 10 included many of the same capabilities as Trusted Solaris when it was released in 2005; the Solaris November 10, 2006 update included Solaris Trusted Extensions, which give it the remaining capabilities needed to make it the functional successor to Trusted Solaris.

Following several years of difficult competition and loss of server market share to competitors' Linux-based systems, Sun began to include Linux as part of its strategy in 2002. Sun supported both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on its x64 systems; companies such as Canonical Ltd., Wind River Systems and MontaVista also supported their versions of Linux on Sun's SPARC-based systems.

In 2004, after having cultivated a reputation as one of Microsoft's most vocal antagonists, Sun entered into a joint relationship with them, resolving various legal entanglements between the two companies and receiving US$1.95 billion in settlement payments from them.[71] Sun supported Microsoft Windows on its x64 systems, and announced other collaborative agreements with Microsoft, including plans to support each others' virtualization environments.[72]

Java platform

Main article: Java platform

The Java platform was developed at Sun in the early 1990s with the objective of allowing programs to function regardless of the device they were used on, sparking the slogan "Write once, run anywhere" (WORA). While this objective was not entirely achieved (prompting the riposte "Write once, debug everywhere"), Java is regarded as being largely hardware- and operating system-independent.

Java was initially promoted as a platform for client-side applets running inside web browsers. Early examples of Java applications were the HotJava web browser and the HotJava Views suite. However, since then Java has been more successful on the server side of the Internet.

The platform consists of three major parts: the Java programming language, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and several Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The design of the Java platform is controlled by the vendor and user community through the Java Community Process (JCP).

Java is an object-oriented programming language. Since its introduction in late 1995, it became one of the world's most popular programming languages.[73]

Java programs are compiled to byte code, which can be executed by any JVM, regardless of the environment.

The Java APIs provide an extensive set of library routines. These APIs evolved into the Standard Edition (Java SE), which provides basic infrastructure and GUI functionality; the Enterprise Edition (Java EE), aimed at large software companies implementing enterprise-class application servers; and the Micro Edition (Java ME), used to build software for devices with limited resources, such as mobile devices.

On November 13, 2006, Sun announced it would be licensing its Java implementation under the GNU General Public License; it released its Java compiler and JVM at that time.[74]

In February 2009 Sun entered a battle with Microsoft and Adobe Systems, which promoted rival platforms to build software applications for the Internet.[75] JavaFX was a development platform for music, video and other applications that builds on the Java programming language.[75]

Office suite

In 1999, Sun acquired the German software company StarDivision and with it StarOffice, which it released as the office suite OpenOffice.org under both GNU LGPL and the SISSL (Sun Industry Standards Source License). OpenOffice.org supported Microsoft Office file formats (though not perfectly), was available on many platforms (primarily Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Solaris) and was used in the open source community.

The StarOffice product was a closed-source product based on OpenOffice.org. The principal differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org were that StarOffice was supported by Sun, was available as either a single-user retail box kit or as per-user blocks of licensing for the enterprise, and included a wider range of fonts and document templates and a commercial quality spellchecker.[76] StarOffice also contained commercially licensed functions and add-ons; in OpenOffice.org these were either replaced by open-source or free variants, or are not present at all. Both packages had native support for the OpenDocument format.

Virtualization and datacenter automation software

VirtualBox, purchased by Sun

In 2007, Sun announced the Sun xVM virtualization and datacenter automation product suite for commodity hardware. Sun also acquired VirtualBox in 2008. Earlier virtualization technologies from Sun like Dynamic System Domains and Dynamic Reconfiguration were specifically designed for high-end SPARC servers, and Logical Domains only supports the UltraSPARC T1/T2/T2 Plus server platforms. Sun marketed Sun Ops Center provisioning software for datacenter automation.

On the client side, Sun offered virtual desktop solutions. Desktop environments and applications could be hosted in a datacenter, with users accessing these environments from a wide range of client devices, including Microsoft Windows PCs, Sun Ray virtual display clients, Apple Macintoshes, PDAs or any combination of supported devices. A variety of networks were supported, from LAN to WAN or the public Internet. Virtual desktop products included Sun Ray Server Software, Sun Secure Global Desktop and Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

Database management systems

Sun acquired MySQL AB, the developer of the MySQL database in 2008 for US$ 1 billion.[77] CEO Jonathan Schwartz mentioned in his blog that optimizing the performance of MySQL was one of the priorities of the acquisition.[78] In February 2008, Sun began to publish results of the MySQL performance optimization work.[79] Sun contributed to the PostgreSQL project. On the Java platform, Sun contributed to and supported Java DB.

Other software

Sun offered other software products for software development and infrastructure services. Many were developed in house; others came from acquisitions, including Tarantella, Waveset Technologies,[48] SeeBeyond, and Vaau. Sun acquired many of the Netscape non-browser software products as part a deal involving Netscape's merger with AOL.[80] These software products were initially offered under the iPlanet brand; once the Sun-Netscape alliance ended, they were re-branded as Sun ONE (Sun Open Network Environment), and then the Sun Java System.

Sun's middleware solution stack was branded as the Java Enterprise System (or JES), and marketed for web and application serving, communication, calendaring, directory, identity management and service-oriented architecture. Sun's Open ESB and other software suites were available free of charge on systems running Solaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, HP-UX, and Windows, with support available optionally.

Sun developed data center management software products, which included the Solaris Cluster high availability software, and a grid management package called Sun Grid Engine and firewall software such as SunScreen. For Network Equipment Providers and telecommunications customers, Sun developed the Sun Netra High-Availability Suite.

Sun produced compilers and development tools under the Sun Studio brand, for building and developing Solaris and Linux applications. Sun entered the Software as a Service (SaaS) market with zembly, a social cloud-based computing platform and Project Kenai, an open-source project hosting service.

Storage

Sun sold its own storage systems to complement its system offerings; it has also made several storage-related acquisitions. On June 2, 2005, Sun announced it would purchase Storage Technology Corporation (StorageTek) for US$4.1 billion in cash, or $37.00 per share, a deal completed in August 2005.

In 2006, Sun introduced the Sun StorageTek 5800 System, the first application-aware programmable storage solution. In 2008, Sun contributed the source code of the StorageTek 5800 System under the BSD license.[81]

Sun announced the Sun Open Storage platform in 2008 built with open source technologies. In late 2008 Sun announced the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems (codenamed Amber Road). Transparent placement of data in the systems' solid-state drives (SSD) and conventional hard drives was managed by ZFS to take advantage of the speed of SSDs and the economy of conventional hard disks.[82]

Other storage products included Sun Fire X4500 storage server and SAM-QFS filesystem and storage management software.

HPC solutions

Sun marketed the Sun Constellation System for High-Performance Computing (HPC). Even before the introduction of the Sun Constellation System in 2007, Sun's products were in use in many of the TOP500 systems and supercomputing centers:

The Sun HPC ClusterTools product was a set of Message Passing Interface (MPI) libraries and tools for running parallel jobs on Solaris HPC clusters. Beginning with version 7.0, Sun switched from its own implementation of MPI to Open MPI, and donated engineering resources to the Open MPI project.

Sun was a participant in the OpenMP language committee. Sun Studio compilers and tools implemented the OpenMP specification for shared memory parallelization.

In 2006, Sun built the TSUBAME supercomputer, which was until June 2008 the fastest supercomputer in Asia. Sun built Ranger at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in 2007. Ranger had a peak performance of over 500 TFLOPS, and was the 6th most powerful supercomputer on the TOP500 list in November 2008. Sun announced an OpenSolaris distribution that integrated many of Sun's HPC products and other 3rd-party solutions.[84]

Staff

See also: List of notable Sun Microsystems employees

Notable Sun employees included John Gilmore, Josh Weiss, Whitfield Diffie, Radia Perlman, Marc Tremblay, and Ned Freed. Sun was an early advocate of Unix-based networked computing, promoting TCP/IP and especially NFS, as reflected in the company's motto "The Network Is The Computer", coined by John Gage. James Gosling led the team which developed the Java programming language. Jon Bosak led the creation of the XML specification at W3C.

Sun staff published articles on the company's blog site.[85] Staff were encouraged to use the site to blog on any aspect of their work or personal life, with few restrictions placed on staff, other than commercially confidential material. Jonathan I. Schwartz was one of the first CEOs of large companies to regularly blog; his postings were frequently quoted and analyzed in the press.[86][87]

Logo used on hardware products by Oracle

Sale

Main article: Sun acquisition by Oracle

Sun was sold to Oracle Corporation in 2009.[64] Sun's staff were asked to share anecdotes about their experiences at Sun. A web site containing videos, stories, and photographs from 27 years at Sun was made available on September 2, 2009.[88] In October, Sun announced a second round of thousands of employees to be laid off, blamed partially on delays in approval of the merger.[89] The transaction completed in early 2010.[4] In January 2011 Oracle agreed to pay $46 million to settle charges that it submitted false claims to US federal government agencies and paid "kickbacks" to systems integrators.[90] In February 2011 Sun's former Menlo Park, California campus of about 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m2) was sold, and it was announced that it would become headquarters for Facebook.[91][92] The sprawling facility built around an enclosed courtyard had been nicknamed "Sun Quentin".[93] On September 1, 2011, Sun India legally became part of Oracle. It had been delayed due to legal issues in Indian court.[citation needed]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Company Info". Sun Microsystems. Retrieved December 4, 2006.
  2. ^ "The Network is the Computer (YouTube video uploaded by Sun Microsystems)". YouTube. Retrieved December 23, 2007.
  3. ^ "Churchill Club Presents: Scott McNealy in Conversation With Ed Zander". news release. Market Wire. February 17, 2011. Retrieved June 14, 2011.
  4. ^ a b Stephen Shankland (January 27, 2010). "Oracle buys Sun, becomes hardware company". CNET News. Retrieved June 14, 2011.
  5. ^ "Oracle has been renamed "Oracle America, Inc."". Oracle Corporation. February 15, 2010. Retrieved June 14, 20011. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
  6. ^ Matt Lee (November 30, 2006). "Sun begins releasing Java under the GPL". Free Software Foundation. Retrieved June 14, 20011. FSF president and founder Richard Stallman said, "I think Sun has contributed more than any other company to the free software community in the form of software. It shows leadership. It's an example I hope others will follow." {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
  7. ^ Andreas Bechtolsheim, Forest Baskett, Vaughan Pratt (March 1982). "The SUN Workstation Architecture" (PDF). Stanford University Computer systems Laboratory Technical Report No. 229. Retrieved July 28, 2009.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  8. ^ "Wellspring of Innovation: Sun Microsystems Spotlight". Stanford.edu. Retrieved July 28, 2009.
  9. ^ Amar Bhide (September 28, 1989). "Vinod Khosla and Sun Microsystems". Case study. Harvard Business School. Retrieved June 11, 2011.
  10. ^ Vance, Ashlee (2007). Silicon Valley. Goulford, CT, USA: Globe Pequot Press. p. 117. ISBN 978-0-7627-4239-4.
  11. ^ "Mr. Scott McNealy". Sun Microsystems, Inc. April 24, 2005. Retrieved September 17, 2009.
  12. ^ Jim McGuinness (August 27, 2007). "Jim McGuinness's Weblog". Retrieved February 22, 2009.
  13. ^ "Sun goes back to the future with Metropolis". The Register. June 2, 2004. Retrieved January 31, 2007.
  14. ^ "Sun Microsystems — Investor Relations: FAQ". Sun Microsystems, Inc. Retrieved January 23, 2007.
  15. ^ By Alexei Oreskovic (August 23, 2007). "Sun to Switch Symbol to JAVA". Thestreet.com. Retrieved July 28, 2009.
  16. ^ "NASDAQ". Quotes.nasdaq.com. Retrieved July 28, 2009.[dead link‍]
  17. ^ Shankland, Stephen (September 18, 2003). "Sun to lay off 1,000". CNet News.com. Retrieved July 13, 2007.
  18. ^ Vance, Ashlee (June 24, 2005). "Sun layoffs hit hundreds in US". The Register. Retrieved July 13, 2007.
  19. ^ Shankland, Stephen (April 7, 2006). "Sun layoffs hit high-end server group". ZDNet. Archived from the original on February 10, 2007. Retrieved July 13, 2007.
  20. ^ "Sun to add jobs in Hillsboro". Portland Business Journal. January 16, 2004. Retrieved July 14, 2007.
  21. ^ Sharon Simonson (May 11, 2006). "Sun to sell Newark campus, move 2,300 workers". Silicon Valley, San Jose Business Journal. Retrieved June 14, 2011.
  22. ^ "CDO2 Unlocks The Power of Sun Grid for Faster Financial Risk Simulation". August 24, 2005.
  23. ^ "Sun Microsystems Welcomes Endorsement and Investment From KKR". January 23, 2007.
  24. ^ "Offshoring Software Development presentation by Sun to the aECD" (PDF).
  25. ^ Ashlee Vance, "Crisis Hits Tech Sector With Layoffs as Sales Slump", New York Times, Nov. 14, 2008
  26. ^ "Trancept Systems". Retrieved May 12, 2007.
  27. ^ "Sitka Corp". {{cite web}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Missing or empty |url= (help); Text "url http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0SMG/is_n3_v12/ai_12008406/" ignored (help)
  28. ^ "Sun Microsystems Acquires Folio, Inc" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. September 6, 1988. Retrieved November 12, 2007.
  29. ^ "Sun's SunSelect Acquires Windows-Under-Unix Emulation Firm Praxsys". Computergram. September 18, 1992. {{cite news}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)
  30. ^ "Sun pitches software savvy as it pushes past server identity". San Jose Business Journal. May 31, 2002.
  31. ^ a b "Sun Microsystems announces intent to purchase Cray Business Systems Division" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. May 17, 1996. Retrieved March 20, 2011.
  32. ^ "Sun Microsystems, Inc. acquires Longview Technologies LLC". February 18, 1997.
  33. ^ "Sun Microsystems completes acquisition of DIBA, pioneer in information appliance industry". August 25, 1997.
  34. ^ "Sun expands network software business to embedded systems market; agrees to acquire Chorus Systems" (Press release). Sun Microsystems, Inc. September 10, 1997. Retrieved May 13, 2007.
  35. ^ "Sun Microsystems signs definitive agreement to acquire Encore Computer's storage business". July 17, 1997.
  36. ^ "Will a big company buy your startup?". San Francisco Business Times. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help) [dead link‍]
  37. ^ "Sun buys NetDynamics". CNET. July 1, 1998.
  38. ^ "Sun buys Canadian firm Beduin". October 20, 1998.
  39. ^ "Sun snaps up software company Gridware". CNET. July 24, 2000. Retrieved May 18, 2007.
  40. ^ "Sun Takes a Shine to Cobalt". Internetnews.com. September 19, 2000. Retrieved May 18, 2007.
  41. ^ "Sun snags storage company, software maker". CNET News.com. December 4, 2000. Retrieved July 4, 2007.
  42. ^ "Sun buys Clustra for iPlanet". InformationAge. March 19, 2002. Retrieved July 4, 2007.
  43. ^ "Sun buys start-up to boost UltraSparc". CNET News.com. June 25, 2002. Retrieved July 4, 2007.
  44. ^ "Sun to buy start-up to boost "N1" plan". CNET News.com. September 19, 2002. Retrieved July 4, 2007.
  45. ^ "Sun springs for software maker". CNET News.com. November 15, 2002. Retrieved July 4, 2007.
  46. ^ "Sun Microsystems To Acquire Pixo". TechWeb. June 26, 2003. Retrieved July 4, 2007.
  47. ^ "Sun Facts Acquisitions History". Sun Microsystems Inc. August 2003.
  48. ^ a b "Sun completes acquisition of Waveset Technologies, Inc" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. December 10, 2003. Retrieved January 1, 2007.
  49. ^ "Sun Microsystems enhances network services integration into blades platform; Signs agreement to acquire Nauticus Networks". January 2, 2004.
  50. ^ "Sun to buy Opteron server maker, reclaim co-founder". CNET. February 10, 2004. Retrieved July 4, 2007.
  51. ^ "Sun Completes Acquisition Of Sevenspace" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. January 11, 2005. Retrieved October 3, 2007.
  52. ^ "Sun to buy Tarantella". CNET. May 10, 2005. Retrieved July 4, 2007.
  53. ^ "Sun to buy integration outfit SeeBeyond". CNET. June 28, 2005. Retrieved July 4, 2007.
  54. ^ "Sun Facts Acquisitions History". Sun Microsystems Inc. June 2005.
  55. ^ "Sun Microsystems Completes Acquisition of StorageTek". August 31, 2005.
  56. ^ "Sun to Acquire Aduva" (Press release). Sun Microsystems, Inc. February 22, 2006. Retrieved May 17, 2007.
  57. ^ "Sun to Bolster Identity Management Leadership and Service Offerings With Acquisition of Neogent" (Press release). Sun Microsystems, Inc. September 27, 2006. Retrieved November 13, 2007.
  58. ^ "Sun Microsystems Expands High Performance Computing Portfolio with Definitive Agreement to Acquire Assets of Cluster File Systems, Including the Lustre File System" (Press release). Sun Microsystems, Inc. September 12, 2007. Retrieved September 13, 2007.
  59. ^ "Sun Microsystems Strengthens Market-Leading Identity Management Portfolio with Intent to Acquire Vaau". News release. Information Week. November 13, 2007. Retrieved November 13, 2007.
  60. ^ "Sun Microsystems Announces Completion of MySQL Acquisition; Paves Way for Secure, Open Source Platform to Power the Network Economy" (Press release). Sun Microsystems, Inc. February 26, 2008. Retrieved February 26, 2008.
  61. ^ "Sun Microsystems Announces Agreement to Acquire innotek, Expanding Sun xVM Reach to the Developer Desktop" (Press release). Sun Microsystems, Inc. February 12, 2008. Retrieved February 12, 2008.
  62. ^ "Sun Welcomes Innotek". Sun Microsystems, Inc. Retrieved February 26, 2008. On February 20 Sun completed the acquisition of innotek
  63. ^ "Sun Microsystems Expands Cloud Computing Offerings with Acquisition of Q-layer" (Press release). Sun Microsystems, Inc. January 6, 2009. Retrieved January 6, 2009.
  64. ^ a b Sun Microsystems (June 8, 2009). "Definitive Merger Proxy". EDGAR. United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Retrieved June 4, 2011.
  65. ^ Sun Microsystems[dead link‍]
  66. ^ "Sun And Intel Announce Landmark Agreement" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. January 22, 2007. Retrieved January 23, 2007.
  67. ^ "OpenSolaris & Intel Xeon Processors" (Press release). YouTube. April 30, 2008. Retrieved May 12, 2008.
  68. ^ "AMD Expands Charter for the OpenSolaris OS and Sun xVM at the AMD Operating System Research Center" (Press release). AMD. May 5, 2008.
  69. ^ Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (November 20, 2006). "Study on the: Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU" (PDF). European Union. p. 51. Retrieved January 25, 2007.
  70. ^ John, Burgess (January 7, 1988). "AT&T to Buy Stake In Sun Microsystems". The Washington Post. Retrieved January 23, 2007. American Telephone & Telegraph Co. announced yesterday that it will buy up to a 20 percent stake in Sun Microsystems Inc., a Silicon Valley-based maker of powerful small computers known as workstations.
  71. ^ "Microsoft and Sun Microsystems Enter Broad Cooperation Agreement; Settle Outstanding Litigation" (Press release). Microsoft Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Inc. April 2, 2004. Archived from the original on March 22, 2006. Retrieved June 16, 2008.
  72. ^ Mary Jo Foley (September 12, 2007). "Microsoft and Sun agree to support each other in virtualized environments". ZDNet. Retrieved February 6, 2008.
  73. ^ "[[TIOBE Programming Community Index]]". TIOBE Software. 2007. Retrieved July 5, 2007. {{cite web}}: URL–wikilink conflict (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help) Java was ranked 1st as of June 2007, and has ranked 1st or 2nd in this index since its inception in 2001.
  74. ^ "Sun Opens Java". Sun Microsystems Web site. November 13, 2006. Archived from the original on January 24, 2007. Retrieved January 25, 2007.
  75. ^ a b Brandon Bailey (February 20, 2009). "Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Microsoft will battle for dominance in Internet software". San Jose Mercury News. Retrieved March 2, 2009.
  76. ^ "Product Comparison". Sun Microsystems. Retrieved September 18, 2008.
  77. ^ "Sun Microsystems to acquire Innotek". Forbes. February 12, 2008. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help) [dead link‍]
  78. ^ "Helping Dolphins Fly". Sun Microsystems. January 16, 2008. Retrieved February 28, 2008.
  79. ^ "Optimize MySQL Server on Sun x64 Servers and Storage". Sun Microsystems. 2008. Retrieved February 28, 2008. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  80. ^ "Sun-Netscape alliance targets e-commerce with new brand identity" (Press release). Sun Microsystems. January 25, 2000. Retrieved January 1, 2007.
  81. ^ "OpenSolaris Project: HoneyComb Fixed Content Storage". Sun Microsystems. 2008. Retrieved February 28, 2008. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  82. ^ "Solaris ZFS Enables Hybrid Storage Pools: Shatters Economic and Performance Barriers" (PDF). Sun Microsystems. Retrieved April 9, 2009.
  83. ^ "Lustre File System presentation". Google Video. Retrieved January 28, 2008.
  84. ^ "OpenSolaris Project: HPC Stack". OpenSolaris Community. 2009. Retrieved June 4, 2011.
  85. ^ "Blogs.sun.com". web site. Sun Microsystems. Archived from the original on January 5, 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  86. ^ Konrad, Rachel (September 16, 2006). "Sun CEO Among the Few Chiefs Who Blog". The Washington Post. Retrieved June 4, 2011.
  87. ^ Jones, Del (June 26, 2006). "Sun CEO sees competitive advantage in blogging". USA Today. Retrieved June 4, 2011.
  88. ^ "A Tribute to Sun Microsystems". thenetworkisthecomputer.com. 2009. Retrieved June 4, 2011.
  89. ^ Steven Musil (October 20, 2009). "Sun to lay off another 3,000 employees". CNETNews. Retrieved June 14, 2011.
  90. ^ "Oracle to pay $46 million in false claims case". Reuters. January 31, 2011. Retrieved June 4, 2011. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help) [dead link‍]
  91. ^ Tom Kraz (February 8, 2011). "It's official: Facebook moving to Menlo Park". CNETNews. Retrieved June 14, 2011.
  92. ^ Benny Evangelista (February 9, 2011). "Facebook updates info: Menlo Park welcomes move Menlo Park opens arms to Facebook". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved June 14, 2011.
  93. ^ Eric Savitz (January 2, 2011). "Facebook Staffers: Sentenced To Sun Quentin?". Forbes. Retrieved June 14, 2011.

Further reading

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Sun Microsystems.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Sun_Microsystems&oldid=492198607"