Sun Microsystems

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Sun Microsystems
Type	Public (NASDAQ: SUNW)
Founded	1982
Headquarters	Santa Clara, California, United States
Key people	Scott McNealy, Chairman Jonathan I. Schwartz, President and CEO William MacGowan, Executive Vice President, People and Places, and CHRO Greg Papadopoulos, Executive Vice President and CTO
Industry	Diversified computer systems
Products	Computer servers, workstations, storage, software, and services
Revenue	US$3.566 billion (Q2 FY2007) (+6.86%)[2]
Operating income	US$102.0 million (Q2 FY2007)[2] (+154.84% operating margin)
Net income	US$133.0 million (Q2 FY2007)[2] (+156.50% profit margin)
Employees	38,600 (2006)[1]
Slogan	The Network Is The Computer
Website	http://sun.com/

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) is an American vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information-technology services, founded February 24, 1982^[3]. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California (part of Silicon Valley), on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.

Sun is known as the developer of innovative technologies such as the Java platform and NFS, and as a champion of open systems in general and UNIX in particular; it has recently emerged as one of the leading proponents and contributors of open source software.^[4] Its products include computer servers and workstations based on its own SPARC and AMD's Opteron processors, storage systems, and a suite of software products including the Solaris Operating System, developer tools, Web infrastructure software, and identity management applications. Sun's manufacturing facilities are located in Hillsboro, Oregon and Linlithgow, Scotland.

Contents 1 History 1.1 Logo 1.2 Acquisitions 2 Hardware 2.1 Motorola 2.2 x86 (part 1) 2.3 SPARC 2.4 x86 (part 2) 2.4.1 AMD 2.4.2 Intel 2.5 Storage 3 Software 3.1 Operating systems 3.1.1 Support for other operating systems 3.2 Java platform 3.3 Office suite 3.4 Other software 3.5 Open source 4 The "Bubble" and its aftermath 5 Present focus 6 Blogs 7 References 8 See also 9 External links

[edit] History

The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix workstation was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He originally designed this "68000 Unix system" for the communications project Stanford University Network, building it from spare parts resourced from the Department of Computer Science^[5] and Silicon Valley supply houses.^[6] The first Sun workstations ran a Version 7 Unix System port by UniSoft on 68000 processor-based machines.

In February 1982 Bechtolsheim, fellow Stanford graduate students Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy, plus Bill Joy (a primary developer of BSD), founded the company now known as Sun Microsystems.

The company name is derived from the initials for Stanford University Network, also reflected in the company's stock symbol, SUNW, which now stands for Sun Worldwide,^[7] although the "W" originally stood for workstation.^[8]

Other Sun luminaries include early employees John Gilmore and James Gosling. 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". James Gosling led the team which developed the Java programming language. Most recently, Jon Bosak led the creation of the Extensible Markup Language specification at W3C.

[edit] Logo

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

[edit] Acquisitions

• 1992 - INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation, from Eastman Kodak Company
• 1996 - Cray Business Systems Division, from Silicon Graphics.^[9]
• 1996 - Integrated Micro Products, specializing in fault tolerant servers.
• February 1997 - LongView Technologies, LLC ^[10]
• August 1997 - Diba, a technology supplier for the Information Appliance industry^[11]
• November 1997 - Encore Computer Corporation's storage business ^[12]
• July 1998 - NetDynamics - developers of the NetDynamics Application Server ^[13]
• 1999 - German software company StarDivision and with it StarOffice
• 1999 - Forte, an enterprise software company specializing in integration solutions
• 2000 - Cobalt Networks
• 2001 - HighGround, with a suite of Web-based management solutions support wide range of storage technologies and applications.
• March 2002 - Clustra Systems ^[14]
• 2002 - Pirus Networks, specializing in intelligent storage services.
• 2002 - Terraspring, a pioneer in infrastructure automation software
• 2002 - Afara Websystems, a company that develops next-generation SPARC processor-based technology.
• 2003 - Pixo, adds to the capabilities of the Sun Content Delivery Server.
• 2003 - Kealia, a startup founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, which had been focusing on high-performance AMD-based 64-bit servers.
• December 2003 - Waveset Technologies,^[15]
• January 2004 - Nauticus Networks^[16]
• January 2005 - SevenSpace, a multi-platform managed services provider^[17]
• June 2005 - SeeBeyond, for $387m
• July 2005 - Tarantella, Inc. (formerly known as Santa Cruz Operation (SCO)), for $25,000,000
• August 2005 - StorageTek ^[18]

[edit] Hardware

For the first decade of Sun's history, the company was predominantly a vendor of technical workstations, competing successfully as a low-cost vendor during the Workstation Wars of the 1980s.

[edit] Motorola

Sun originally used the Motorola 68k CPU family 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.

[edit] x86 (part 1)

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 period of time. A follow-up "486i" upgrade was announced but only a few prototype units were ever manufactured.

[edit] SPARC

Starting with the Sun-4 line, the company used its own processor architecture, SPARC. A 64-bit extension of the SPARC architecture (SPARC V9) was later introduced.

Sun has implemented multiple high-end generations of the SPARC architecture, including SPARC, SuperSPARC, UltraSPARC I, UltraSPARC II, UltraSPARC III, UltraSPARC IV and currently UltraSPARC IV+ & UltraSPARC T1. Sun has developed several generations of workstations and servers, including the SPARCstation series, Sun Ultra series, Sun Fire and Sun Enterprise (originally Ultra Enterprise) servers and the Sun Blade workstations. There is also a line of lower cost processors meant for low-end systems which include the microSPARC I, microSPARC II, UltraSPARC IIe, UltraSPARC IIi, and UltraSPARC IIIi.

In the late 1990s the company transformed itself into a vendor of large-scale Symmetric multiprocessing servers. Sun had designed and built its own 20-processor system, the SPARCcenter 2000; this transition was accelerated by the acquisition of Cray Business Systems Division from Silicon Graphics.^[9] The follow on to the Cray CS6400 server line, which had been jointly designed by Cray and Sun, was transformed into the very successful Sun Enterprise 10000 large-scale servers. Driven by the increased prominence of web-serving database-searching applications, blade servers (high density rack-mounted systems) were also emphasized.

The UltraSPARC T1 is notable for its use of eight cores (with four threads per core). This is part of an industry move toward horizontal rather than vertical scaling, i.e. the use of more CPUs with lower clock rates. This is of particular importance in data centers where hard disks and processors make the largest demands on power and, consequently, generate the most heat.

In December 2005, Sun announced the OpenSPARC T1, an open source hardware design of UltraSPARC T1.

The SPARC processors designed by Sun are manufactured by Texas Instruments.

[edit] x86 (part 2)

Sun's brief first foray into x86 systems ended in the early 1990s, when it was decided to concentrate on SPARC and retire the last Motorola systems and 386i products (this move was dubbed by McNealy as "all the wood behind one arrowhead"). Even then, 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 (diskless workstation, as popularized by Oracle Corporation CEO Larry Ellison). 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.

[edit] AMD

In 2003, Sun announced a strategic alliance with AMD to produce market-leading 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.

On September 12, 2005, Sun unveiled a new range of Opteron based servers: the Sun Fire X2100, X4100 and X4200 servers.^[19] These were designed from scratch by the team led by Bechtolsheim to address heat and power consumption issues commonly faced in data centers and were the first servers to display Sun's new brushed aluminum design. In July 2006, the Sun Fire X4500 and X4600 systems were introduced, extending what is now a line of x64 systems that support not only Solaris, but Linux and Microsoft Windows as well.

[edit] Intel

On January 22, 2007, Sun announced a broad strategic alliance with Intel.^[20] Intel now endorses Solaris as a mainstream operating system and as its mission critical UNIX OS for its Xeon processor-based systems. In return Sun will use Intel Xeon processors in a new line of its servers, due out in the first half of 2007. The Intel Xeon processors will boost Sun's x64 lineup.

[edit] Storage

Sun has long 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 the following August.

[edit] Software

Although initially known as a hardware company, Sun's software history began with its founding in 1982; co-founder Bill Joy was one of the leading Unix developers of the time, having already contributed the vi editor, the C shell, and significant work on the TCP/IP stack to the BSD Unix OS. Since then, Sun has developed and acquired other software, and become widely known for the Java programming language. In recent times it has become recognized as the leading active contributor to the open source community.

[edit] Operating systems

Main article: Solaris Operating System

Sun is most well known for its Unix systems, which have a reputation for system stability and a consistent design philosophy.

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.

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.^[21] 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 offers a secure variant of Solaris called Trusted Solaris. Solaris 10 included many of the same capabilities as Trusted Solaris when it was released in 2005 (Trusted Solaris 8); the Solaris 10 11/06 update included Solaris Trusted Extensions, which give it the remaining capabilities needed to make it the functional successor to Trusted Solaris. In short, "Trusted Solaris" is now included with Sun's free Solaris 10 software and the operating system is by default configured for the highest level of security.

[edit] Support for other operating systems

Though a late adopter, Sun has included Linux as part of its strategy since 2002, following several years of difficult competition and loss of server market share to competitors' Linux-based systems. Sun supports 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 support their versions of Linux on Sun systems.

Sun also surprised the industry when in 2004, after cultivating a reputation as one of Microsoft's most vocal antagonists, it entered into a joint relationship with them, resolving various legal entanglements between the two companies and receiving a US$1 billion settlement payment from them. As one of the results of this relationship, Sun now supports Microsoft Windows on its x64 systems.

[edit] Java platform

The Java programming language took the best features from the industry standard language C++ and removed nearly all of its more difficult or unsafe features, such as pointers and operator overloading. Backed with a massive class library, Java programs can call upon a large set of GUI, mathematical and Internet access code that is tried and proven.

The Java platform, developed at Sun in the early-1990s, was developed 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 has not been 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. This positioning was never very successful. While browser-based applications have had considerable success in displacing standalone applications on the desktop, in 2006 they were not often implemented as Java applets. The platform 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).

The Java programming language is an object-oriented programming language. Since its introduction in late 1995, it has become one of the world's most popular programming languages.

In order to allow programs written in the Java language to be run on (virtually) any device, 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. The Standard Edition (Java SE) of the API provides basic infrastructure and GUI functionality, while the Enterprise Edition (Java EE) is aimed at large software companies implementing enterprise-class application servers. The Micro Edition (Java ME) is used to build software for devices with limited resources, such as mobile devices.

[edit] 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 supports Microsoft Office file formats (with a few flaws), is available on many platforms and is widely used in the open source community.

The current StarOffice product is a closed-source product based on OpenOffice.org. The principal differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org are that StarOffice is supported by Sun, is available as either a single-user retail box kit or as per-user blocks of licensing for the enterprise, and includes a wider range of fonts and document templates and what Sun claims to be an improved dictionary and thesaurus. StarOffice also contains commercially licensed functions and add-ons; in OpenOffice.org these are either replaced by open-source or free variants, or are not present at all. Whilst new releases of OpenOffice.org are relatively frequent, StarOffice follows a more conservative release schedule supposedly more suited to enterprise deployments.

[edit] Other software

Sun offers a range of other software products for software development and infrastructure services. Many of these products were developed in house; others have come from a series of acquisitions, including Tarantella, Waveset Technologies,^[22] and SeeBeyond. Sun also acquired many of the Netscape non-browser software products as part a deal involving Netscape's merger with AOL.^[23]

Today, Sun's middleware stack is branded as the Java Enterprise System (or JES), and fulfills web and application serving, as well as communication, calendaring, directory, and identity roles. The software, when run on Solaris, is also referred to as the Solaris Enterprise System (or SES), although versions of JES are also supported on Red Hat Linux, HP-UX, and Windows.

Sun also has developed data center management software products, which include the Solaris Cluster management software,^[24] the N1 provisioning software,^[25] and a grid management package called Gridware.^[26]

[edit] Open source

Sun is also known for community-based and open-source licensing of its major technologies, and for its support of its products with other open source technologies. Sun has offered Linux-based desktop software called Java Desktop System (originally code-named "Madhatter") for use both on x86 hardware and on Sun's Sun Ray thin-client systems. It supports its Java Enterprise System (a middleware stack) on Linux. It has already 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. The announced business model is the sale of support services on a variety of bases including per-employee and per-socket.

On November 13, 2006, Sun announced that it would be licensing its Java implementation under the GNU GPL; they released their Java compiler and virtual machine at that time.^[27]

That same month, a report prepared for the EU by UNU-MERIT stated that Sun is the largest corporate contributor to open source movements in the world.^[4] According to this report, Sun's open source contributions exceed the combined total of the next five largest commercial contributors.

[edit] The "Bubble" and its aftermath

During the dot-com bubble, Sun experienced dramatic growth in revenue, profits, share price, and expenses. Some part of this was due to genuine expansion of demand for web-serving cycles, but another part was synthetic, fueled by venture capital-funded startups building out large, expensive Sun-centric server presences in the expectation of high traffic levels that never materialized. The share price in particular increased to a level that even the company's executives were hard-pressed to defend. In response to this business growth, Sun expanded aggressively in all areas: head-count, infrastructure, and office space.

The bursting of the bubble in 2001 was the start of a period of poor business performance for Sun. ^[28] Sales dropped as the growth of online business failed to meet predictions. As online businesses closed and assets auctioned off, a large amount of high-end Sun hardware was available very cheaply. Much like Apple, Sun relied a great deal on hardware sales.

Multiple quarters of substantial losses and declining revenues have led to repeated rounds of layoffs^{[citation needed]}, executive departures, and expense-reduction efforts. In 2002 the share price returned to the 1998 pre-bubble level, a pattern of escalation and decline comparable to other companies in the sector, and has hovered in the single digits since then. In mid-2004, Sun ceased manufacturing operations at their Newark, California facility and consolidated all of the company's US-based manufacturing operations to their Hillsboro, Oregon facility, as part of continued cost-reduction efforts.

Many companies (like E*Trade and Google) chose to build Web applications based on large numbers of the less expensive PC-class Intel-architecture servers running Linux, rather than a smaller number of high-end Sun servers. They reported benefits including substantially lower expenses (both acquisition and maintenance) and greater flexibility based on the use of open-source software.

Higher level telecom control systems such as NMAS and OSS service predominantly use 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.

[edit] Present focus

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 (formerly known as "Niagara"). The company also announced a collaboration with Fujitsu to use the Japanese company's processor chips in some future Sun computers.

In February of 2005, Sun announced the Sun Grid, a grid computing deployment on which it offers utility computing services priced at $1 (US) 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, of which Sun claims to be 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.^[29]

In January of 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 of 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.^[30]

In recent years Sun's engineering work has become international, with substantial groups in Bangalore, Beijing, Hamburg, Prague and St. Petersburg.

A weekly summary of news about Sun and its products is posted to "System News for Sun Users"^[31], now in its 10th year.

[edit] Blogs

Many Sun staff publish articles on the company's blog site.^[32] Staff are encouraged to use the site to blog on any aspect of their work or personal life. There are few restrictions placed on staff, other than commercially confidential material. Sun staff are inspired to blog by CEO Jonathan Schwartz whose own blog^[33] is widely read, translated into other languages and frequently featured in the press.

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Callan Data Systems, an early competitor.
• Global Education Learning Community
• Interactive Systems Corporation
• Liberty Alliance
• List of notable Sun Microsystems employees
• NetBeans
• Sun Certified Professional
• Sun Grid Engine
• Project Blackbox
• List of Computer System Manufacturers

[edit] External links

• Official website
• blogs.sun.com - Sun employees openly blogging about work and non-work

Java (Sun)
Major Technologies:	Java (programming language) | Java Platform | Java Development Kit | Java Virtual Machine | Java Runtime Environment
History:	Java version history | Criticism of Java | Java Community Process | Sun Microsystems
Language Features:	Bytecode | Syntax | Applets | Servlets | JavaServer Pages