Sun Microsystems

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Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Type Subsidiary
Industry Computer systems
Computer software
Fate Acquired by Oracle
Founded 1982
Founder(s) Vinod Khosla
Andy Bechtolsheim
Bill Joy
Scott McNealy
Headquarters Santa Clara, California, USA
Products Servers
Workstations
Storage
Services
Parent Oracle Corporation
Website www.oracle.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.[1] 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.[2] Sun Microsystems, Inc. was subsequently renamed Oracle America, Inc.[3]

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 included 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.[4] Sun's main manufacturing facilities were located in Hillsboro, Oregon and Linlithgow, Scotland.

Contents

[edit] History

Original Sun Microsystems logo, as used on the nameplate of the Sun-1 workstation

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 as a 3M computer: 1 MIPS, 1 Megabyte and 1 Megapixel. 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.[5] He built the first ones from spare parts obtained from Stanford's Department of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses.[6]

On February 24, 1982 Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy of Berkeley, a primary developer of BSD, joined soon after and is counted as one of the original founders.[7] The Sun name is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network.[8][9] 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).[10][11] 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.[12]

Revised logo, used until early 1990s

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 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.

[edit] 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. The stock rose to a level that even its own executives struggled to defend.[citation needed] In 2000, the bubble burst.[13] 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,[14][15][16] 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.[17] That factory later closed, in 2006.[18]

[edit] 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.[19]

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.[20]

Sun had engineering groups in Bangalore, Beijing, Dublin, Grenoble, Hamburg, Prague, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, and Trondheim.[21]

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.[22]

[edit] Sun acquisitions

Sun server racks at Seneca College (York Campus)
This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

[edit] Major stockholders

As of May 11, 2009, the following shareholders held over 100,000 common shares of Sun:[59] 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

[edit] 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]

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.[27] 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.

[edit] 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.[60] 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.[61] 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.[62] 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.[63]

[edit] 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. Since then, Sun developed and acquired other software, including the Java programming language.

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.[64] According to this report, Sun's open source contributions exceed the combined total of the next five largest commercial contributors.

[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.[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.[65] 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]

In the past, Sun has 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 10 11/06 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 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's SPARC-based systems.

In 2004, Sun surprised the industry when, after having cultivated 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 US$1.95 billion in settlement payments from them.[66] Sun supported Microsoft Windows on its x64 systems, and announced other collaborative agreements with Microsoft, including plans to support each others' virtualization environments.[67]

[edit] 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 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. 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.[68]

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.[69]

In February 2009 Sun entered a battle with Microsoft and Adobe Systems, which promoted rival platforms to build software applications for the Internet.[70] JavaFX is a development platform for music, video and other applications that builds on the Java programming language.[70]

[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 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.[71] 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.

[edit] Virtualization and datacenter automation software

VirtualBox, purchased by Oracle

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. Virrtual desktop products included Sun Ray Server Software, Sun Secure Global Desktop and Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

[edit] Database management systems

Sun acquired MySQL AB, the developer of the MySQL database in 2008 for US$ 1 billion.[72] CEO Jonathan Schwartz mentioned in his blog that optimizing the performance of MySQL was one of the priorities of the acquisition.[73] In February 2008, Sun began to publish results of the MySQL performance optimization work.[74] Sun contributed to the PostgreSQL project. On the Java platform, Sun contributed to and supported Java DB.

[edit] 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,[43] SeeBeyond, and Vaau. Sun acquired many of the Netscape non-browser software products as part a deal involving Netscape's merger with AOL.[75] 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 the Network Equipment Providers and the telecommunications world, Sun developed the Netra High-Availability Suite.

Sun produced a suite of 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.

[edit] 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 world's first application-aware programmable storage solution. In 2008, Sun contributed the source code of the StorageTek 5800 System under the BSD license.[76]

Sun announced the Sun Open Storage platform in 2008 built with open and 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.[77]

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

[edit] HPC solutions

With Sun Constellation System, Sun was increasing its focus in High-Performance Computing (HPC). Even before the introduction of the Sun Constellation System in 2007, Sun's products were already 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.[79]

[edit] Staff

See also: List of notable Sun Microsystems employees

Notable Sun employees included John Gilmore, 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.[80] 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.[81][82]

Logo used on Sun products by Oracle

[edit] Sale

Main article: Sun acquisition by Oracle

Sun was sold to Oracle Corporation in 2009.[59] 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.[83] The transaction completed in early 2010.[2] 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.[84]

[edit] See also

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[edit] References

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