Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC microprocessors. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Notable Sun acquisitions include Cray Business Systems Division, Storagetek, and Innotek GmbH, creators of VirtualBox. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982.[2] At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California (part of Silicon Valley), on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.
"SunSoft, Inc." redirects here. For the Japanese video game company, see Sunsoft.Company type
Public
February 24, 1982
January 27, 2010
Acquired by Oracle Corporation
- Servers
- Workstations
- Storage
- Services
Oracle Corporation (2010)
38,600 (near peak, 2006)[1]
www
(see: archived version at the Wayback Machine)
Sun products included computer servers and workstations built on its own RISC-based SPARC processor architecture, as well as on x86-based AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processors. Sun also developed its own storage systems and a suite of software products, including the Solaris operating system, developer tools, Web infrastructure software, and identity management applications. Technologies included the Java platform and NFS.
In general, Sun was a proponent of open systems, particularly Unix. It was also a major contributor to open-source software, as evidenced by its $1 billion purchase, in 2008, of MySQL, an open-source relational database management system.[3][4]
At various times, Sun had manufacturing facilities in several locations worldwide, including Newark, California; Hillsboro, Oregon; and Linlithgow, Scotland.[5] However, by the time the company was acquired by Oracle Corporation, it had outsourced most manufacturing responsibilities.
On April 20, 2009, it was announced that Oracle would acquire Sun for US$7.4 billion. The deal was completed on January 27, 2010.[6]
Storage[edit]
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 first application-aware programmable storage solution. In 2008, Sun contributed the source code of the StorageTek 5800 System under the BSD license.[97]
Sun announced the Sun Open Storage platform in 2008 built with 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.[98]
Other storage products included Sun Fire X4500 storage server and SAM-QFS filesystem and storage management software.
Sun marketed the Sun Constellation System for high-performance computing (HPC). Even before the introduction of the Sun Constellation System in 2007, Sun's products were 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 sixth-most-powerful supercomputer on the TOP500 list in November 2008.
Sun announced an OpenSolaris distribution that integrated Sun's HPC products with others.[100]