Sun Ponders the Future of Virtualized Solaris
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server virtualization is all the rage these days, and there are so many ways to slice and dice a physical server into virtual or logical machines that it is hard to keep track of all of the variants. But as Sun Microsystems plots out the course of its Solaris Unix variant, it is going to not only absorb as many virtualization techniques as possible, but it is also going to try to position Solaris as the best, secure wrapper to put around various kinds of hypervisors and virtualization techniques. READ MORE >

Sun Builds on Growth in Fiscal Q1, But Profits Still Elude
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server and operating system maker Sun Microsystems continues to make progress on getting its business in order, and last week reported that for the first quarter of fiscal 2007 ended October 1 it saw sales rise by 17 percent to just under $3.2 billion. And while Sun was able to reduce the size of its loss in fiscal Q1, to $56 million, the company still has a ways to go to reach its long-term goal of 10 percent gross operating profits. READ MORE >

Solaris 10 Breaks Through 6 Million Shipment Barrier
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When the Solaris 10 Unix variant created by Sun Microsystems was announced at the end of January 2005, Sun had shipped approximately 6.5 million Unix licenses in its entire 20-year history--including 500,000 copies of the beta of Solaris 10. This week, after less than two years of shipments, Sun broke through the 6 million registered licenses barrier with Solaris 10, and did so largely because Solaris 10 is a technically slick operating system that is distributed freely. READ MORE >

The X Factor: Form Follows Function
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In nature, the shape of an animal or a plant is the result of the interplay between the organism and its environment--the latter being the sum result of the forces at play, the competitive pressures between competing life forms, and the materials at hand with which to build and sustain the life form. In the data center, similar competitive pressures are at work on computer designs, and instead of working at periodic timescales, evolution happens over a human generation or less. But sometimes evolution is stalled by greed. READ MORE >