Oracle and SUN Archive

As part of a painfully slow and vague striptease, Sun has started to describe a couple of techniques it will use to improve processor performance in its soon to be released Niagara chip and future Rock processor line. Despite hinting a couple of years back that Niagara would have special technology for handling TCP/IP and SSL loads, Sun has stayed largely quiet on the subject. Recently, however, Sun confirmed that its Niagara processors and Solaris 10 operating system have been tweaked to handle these specialized tasks.

Sun Tuesday launched the latest assault on the proprietary Microsoft Word document format by offering a new Sun Grid utility service that will convert Word files into ODF. Another Sun Grid utility will convert text files into audio files for podcasts or for playback on Web sites, said Tom Goguen, vice president with Sun's software group.

Sun has big plans for its Java Desktop System and on Tuesday announced a new program that will allow its desktop Linux variant to run on all major Linux distributions. While Sun remains fully committed to the JDS on both the Solaris and Sun Ray environments, it seeks to address the Linux space going forward and offer customers choice in this regard. In addition, Sun on Wednesday is expected to announce that its Java Enterprise System server software now supports Microsoft's Windows and Hewlett-Packard's UX operating systems.

Actually, there's more on processors today, but the processor in this article is so out-of-the-ordinary, that it deserves its own item. "Niagara has eight processing engines - called cores - each able to simultaneously execute four instruction sequences called threads. It's neither the first multicore processor nor the first to employ multithreading, but it embraces both ideas more aggressively than competing chips from IBM, Intel and AMD."

"Despite its recent announcement of servers based on AMD64 CPUs, Sun Microsystems is still gung-ho about its 64-bit UltraSPARC computers. The newest addition to Sun's workstation array is the portable Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation. At first glance you might think it's a fancy-looking notebook system, but on closer inspection you'll discover that it's got all the power of a Sun Blade workstation in a fraction of the size."

HP seems on its way out, or so claims Sun. Sun's Global information systems strategy office, Larry Singer, says Sun hears a consistent message from HP customers: "They have no idea where HP is going. If you chase the decision up the stack to the OS, you realise HP’s OS has had no major release since Fiorina took over," he says. "People only have three legitimate OSes: Windows, Red Hat or Solaris. As soon as HP talks to 9900 or Alpha customers they have to say HP does not have an OS."

Sun on Monday began selling its highest-end Unix servers with new 1.5GHz UltraSPARC IV+ chips. Sun used its milestones and monster servers as fodder for bashing IBM, which recently began a Unix server upgrade. IBM has slotted the Power5+ chips into low-end systems but won't give higher-end servers the same boost until 2006. Even then, IBM isn't expected to have a system comparable in size to the E25K.

While it's way too soon to say Sun is back on track, the return of Bechtolsheim, aggressive improvements in products and a healthy dose of humility among Sun's executives mean the troubled company and its investors have more cause for optimism than they've had in years.

"Sun Microsystems must have figured digital rights management never sounded so good when it recently announced a call for partners in its quest to use open source DRM to "compensate rights holders and stimulate innovation," but Sun's open DReaM (DRM everywhere available) Project is as scary as any other content control nightmare to open source and digital freedom proponents."

"StarOffice 8, the latest version of Sun's inexpensive, cross-platform office productivity suite, stands up better than ever next to Microsoft's market-leading Office in terms of features, extensibility and compatibility. In eWeek's tests of StarOffice 8, we were pleased with the suite's word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database functions. In addition, we experienced generally good results opening and creating Microsoft Office-formatted documents with StarOffice."

A senior Sun executive has indicated versions of his firm's latest server chip that aren't fully functional could find their way into commodity servers as a cheap option. Sun's forthcoming Niagara chip has eight cores, but the company will sell versions with six or possibly even four, the company's top Sparc server executive said Tuesday.

Sun CEO Scott McNealy likened himself to Steve Jobs and his company to Apple Computer on the brink of launching the iPod at a convention Tuesday, suggesting the server maker is poised for take-off. Sun has been on a five-year stock slide, having lost about 90 percent of its share price since January 2000. It has not had a year of positive net income since its fiscal year 2001. In the meantime, shareholder activists are calling for Sun to do away with its "poison pill" takeover defense and realign its executives' stock option plan to be more performance-based, according to a Sun proxy filed Tuesday.

Sun Microsystems is expected to revamp its core Unix server line on Tuesday with the debut of its high-end UltraSparc IV+ processor. The big UltraSparc IV+ improvement is the inclusion of 2MB of built-in high-speed cache memory where UltraSparc IV had none. The initial clock speed of the dual-core chip is expected to be 1.5GHz.

Sun Microsystems initiated a warmer stage in its relationship with Red Hat on Monday, making conspicuous room onstage for the rival at a major server product launch. Sun prefers customers to use its Solaris operating system, which chiefly runs on Sun servers using UltraSparc processors. And as Sun launches its "Galaxy" line of x86 servers, the company is aggressively trying to build support for the Unix variant on computers with Intel and Advanced Micro Devices processors as well.