Information about Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems logo
	Public (NASDAQ: JAVA)
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$13.873 billion (FY07)[1]
Operating income	US$309 million (FY07)[1]
Net income	US$473 million (FY07)[1]
Employees	34,600 (2007)[2]
Website	[1]

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA^[3]) is an American vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information-technology services, founded on 24 February 1982.^[4] 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 technologies such as the Java platform and NFS, and as a key promoter 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.^[5] Its products include 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. Sun's manufacturing facilities are located in Hillsboro, Oregon and Linlithgow, Scotland.

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 Stanford University Network communications project, building it from spare parts resourced from the Department of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses.^[6]

In February 1982 Bechtolsheim, fellow Stanford graduate students Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy, plus Bill Joy (a primary developer of BSD), founded Sun Microsystems, the name being derived from the initials of the Stanford project. The company's original stock symbol was SUNW, for Sun Workstations (later Sun Worldwide).^[7][8] That symbol was replaced in August 2007 by JAVA, after the Java programming language created by Sun.^[3]

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.

The first Sun workstations ran a Version 7 Unix System port by UniSoft on 68000 processor-based machines.

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. ^[9] Sales dropped as the growth of online business failed to meet predictions. As online businesses closed and their assets were 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,^[10][11][12] 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.^[13] In 2006 Sun closed the Newark campus completely and moved 2,300 staff to its other campuses in the area.^[14]

Many companies (like E*Trade and Google) chose to build Web applications based on large numbers of the less expensive PC-class x86-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. That trend is slowing and may be reversing, given (1) the throughput and efficiency of Sun's new horizontally-scaled systems (see below) and (2) the fact that both Sun's flagship Solaris operating system and its UltraSPARC T1 processor are now fully open-sourced.

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.

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 mid-range and high-end Sun servers. These servers were announced on 17 April 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 $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.^[15]

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.^[16]

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

A weekly summary of news about Sun and its products is posted to "System News for Sun Users",^[17] now in its 10th year.

Acquisitions

• 1987 - Trancept Systems, a high performance graphics hardware company^[18]
• 1987 - Centram Systems West, maker of networking software for PCs, Macs and Sun systems
• 1992 - INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation, from Eastman Kodak Company
• 1994 - Thinking Machines Corporation hardware division
• 1996 - Cray Business Systems Division, from Silicon Graphics^[19]
• 1996 - Integrated Micro Products, specializing in fault tolerant servers
• 1996 - Thinking Machines Corporation software division
• February 1997 - LongView Technologies, LLC ^[20]
• August 1997 - Diba, a technology supplier for the Information Appliance industry^[21]
• September 1997 - Chorus Systems, creators of ChorusOS^[22]
• November 1997 - Encore Computer Corporation's storage business ^[23]
• 1998 - i-Planet , a small software company that produced the "Pony Espresso" mobile email client—most notable product of this acquisition was the later use of its name (sans hyphen) for the Sun-Netscape software alliance
• July 1998 - NetDynamics - developers of the NetDynamics Application Server ^[24]
• 1999 - German software company StarDivision and with it StarOffice
• 1999 - Forte, an enterprise software company specializing in integration solutions and developer of Forte 4GL and TeamWare
• July 2000 - Gridware, a software company whose products managed the distribution of large computing jobs across multiple computers^[25]
• September 2000 - Cobalt Networks, an Internet appliance manufacturer^[26]
• December 2000 - HighGround, with a suite of Web-based management solutions support wide range of storage technologies and applications^[27]
• March 2002 - Clustra Systems ^[28]
• June 2002 - Afara Websystems, a company that develops next-generation SPARC processor-based technology^[29]
• September 2002 - Pirus Networks, specializing in intelligent storage services^[30]
• November 2002 - Terraspring, a pioneer in infrastructure automation software^[31]
• June 2003 - Pixo, adds to the capabilities of the Sun Content Delivery Server^[32]
• December 2003 - Waveset Technologies, an identity management solutions company^[33]
• January 2004 - Nauticus Networks^[34]
• February 2004 - Kealia, a startup founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, which had been focusing on high-performance AMD-based 64-bit servers^[35]
• January 2005 - SevenSpace, a multi-platform managed services provider^[36]
• May 2005 - Tarantella, Inc. (formerly known as Santa Cruz Operation (SCO)), for $25,000,000^[37]
• June 2005 - SeeBeyond, SOA software company for $387m^[38]
• August 2005 - StorageTek ^[39]
• February 2006 - Aduva, producer of software for Solaris and Linux patch management^[40]
• April 2007 - SavaJe
• September 2007 - Cluster File Systems ^[41]

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. Now, the company is taking a holistic approach to unleashing the power of the network by leveraging the technical expertise of its Systems, Software, Storage, and Services, also known as the “4Ss” - as well as its Microelectronics group.

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.

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/UltraSPARC T2. 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 mid 1990s the company started to transform itself into a vendor of large-scale Symmetric multiprocessing servers. Sun manufactured and marketed the 8-processor SPARCserver 1000 and 20-processor SPARCcenter 2000 both of which built on work done in conjunction with Xerox PARC; in the late 1990s this transition was accelerated by the acquisition of Cray Business Systems Division from Silicon Graphics.^[19] Cray's 32-bit CS6400 "Superserver", related to the SPARCcenter, was superseded by a 64-bit joint design by Cray and Sun which was transformed into the very successful Sun Enterprise 10000 large-scale server. 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.

x86

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.

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.

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.^[42] 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.

On January 22 2007, Sun announced a broad strategic alliance with Intel.^[43] 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 has begun using the Intel Xeon processor in its x64 server line, starting with the Sun Blade X6250 server module, introduced in June 2007.

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.

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.

Sun is 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 offers GNOME-based desktop software called Java Desktop System (originally code-named "Madhatter"), first distributed as a Linux implementation but now offered as part of the Solaris operating system. It supports its Java Enterprise System (a middleware stack) on Linux. It has 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.

A report prepared for the EU by UNU-MERIT stated that Sun is the largest corporate contributor to open source movements in the world.^[44] 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 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.^[45] 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.

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.

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.

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 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.^[46]

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.

On November 13 2006, Sun announced that it would be licensing its Java implementation under the GNU General Public License; they released their Java compiler and JVM at that time.^[47]

Quoting the brand-awareness of its Java software and to better reflect the company's current strategy, Sun announced the change of its long-standing SUNW ticker symbol to JAVA, effective Monday, August 27, 2007^[48]

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 (primarily Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Solaris) 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 better suited to enterprise deployments. Both packages have native for support for the OpenDocument format.

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,^[33] and SeeBeyond. Sun also acquired many of the Netscape non-browser software products as part a deal involving Netscape's merger with AOL.^[49]. These software products where initially branded as iPlanet A Sun|Netscape Alliance and, once the alliance ended, they were re-branded as "SunONE" (which stands for Sun Open Network Environment); and more recently as the "Sun Java System".

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, identity management and SOA/BI roles. The software, when run on Solaris 10, is also referred to as the Solaris Enterprise System (or SES) and is available as a download free of charge (without any support of services offering from Sun), although versions of JES are also supported on Red Hat Linux, HP-UX, and Windows.

Sun has developed data center management software products, which include the Solaris Cluster management software,^[50] the N1 provisioning software,^[51] and a grid management package called Gridware.^[52]

Sun also produces a suite of compilers and development tools under the "Sun Studio" brand name, for building and developing Solaris and Linux applications.

Staff

See also:

Notable Sun employees include 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", coined by John Gage. James Gosling led the team which developed the Java programming language. Most recently, Jon Bosak led the creation of the XML specification at W3C.

Many Sun staff publish articles on the company's blog site. 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 I. Schwartz, whose own blog is widely read, is translated into other languages, and is frequently quoted and analyzed in the press.^[53][54][55]

See also

• Callan Data Systems, an early competitor.
• Global Education Learning Community
• Interactive Systems Corporation
• Liberty Alliance
• NetBeans
• Sun Certified Professional
• Sun Grid Engine
• Project Blackbox
• List of computer system manufacturers

References

External links

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

•  • [ e] Sun Microsystems
Software	SunOS Solaris StarOffice / OpenOffice.org Java Desktop System Java (Java language JVM Java API) JES Network File System JavaFX NetBeans Sun Grid Engine JXTA Sun Java System Application Server / GlassFish Sun Java System Access Manager / OpenSSO JavaDB Logical Domains
Hardware	Sun-1 Sun-2 Sun-3 Sun386i Sun-4 SPARCstation Sun Ultra series Sun Enterprise Sun Blade Sun Fire SPARC Enterprise UltraSPARC T1 / UltraSPARC T2 SPARC JavaStation Sun Ray Project Blackbox Sun Grid Sun SPOT
Education and Recognition	SCPs List of notable employees

•  • [ e] Java (Sun)
Major Sun technologies	Java (programming language) Java Platform Java Development Kit Java Virtual Machine Java Runtime Environment
Major third-party technologies:	GNU Classpath GNU Compiler for Java Apache Harmony Kaffe
History	Java version history Criticism of Java Java Community Process Sun Microsystems Free Java implementations
Language features	Bytecode Syntax Applets Servlets JavaServer Pages Web Start

•  • [ e] Major computing companies
Cellular hardware	HTC Motorola Nokia Palm Qualcomm RIM Sony Ericsson
Conglomerates	Hitachi LG Matsushita NCR Philips Samsung Siemens Sony Thomson Toshiba
Computer hardware	Acer ASUS Dell Fujitsu Siemens Gateway Lenovo Quanta
Computer networks	Alcatel-Lucent Avaya Cisco Ericsson Huawei Juniper Nokia Siemens Nortel ZTE
Dot-com/web services	Amazon.com AOL eBay Google Microsoft Yahoo!
Electronics manufacturers	Celestica Elcoteq Flextronics Foxconn Jabil Kimball Plexus Quanta Sanmina-SCI SMTC Solectron Ultraflex
Storage	EMC Maxtor NetApp Seagate Western Digital
Semiconductors	AMD Broadcom Elpida Fairchild Freescale Hynix Infineon Intel Micron National NVIDIA NXP Qimonda Renesas Rohm Sharp STMicroelectronics TI TSMC VIA
Software	Adobe CA EA Intuit McAfee Microsoft Nintendo Novell Oracle Red Hat SAP Symantec
Telecom	Amrica Mvil AT&T BT Cablevision Comcast Deutsche Telekom Earthlink France Tlcom KT NTT Orange Qwest RCN Rogers SK Telecom Sprint Nextel Swisscom T-Mobile Telecom Italia Telefnica Telmex Time Warner Verizon Virgin Vodafone
Vertically integrated manufacturers	Apple HP IBM NCR NEC Sun