Friday, May 30, 2008

Sun - Operating systems

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. 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 a US$1 billion settlement payment from them. Sun now supports Microsoft Windows on its x64 systems, and has announced other collaborative agreements with Microsoft, including plans to support each others' virtualization environments.

SPARC-based systems

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, which were based 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.[24] Cray's 32-bit CS6400 "Superserver", related to the SPARCcenter, was superseded by a 64-bit joint design by Cray and Sun which became 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 and T2 are notable for their multicore design, implementing eight cores, with four and eight threads per core respectively. This can 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. In December 2005, Sun announced the OpenSPARC T1, an open source hardware design of UltraSPARC T1.
In April 2007, Sun released the SPARC Enterprise server products, jointly designed by Sun and Fujitsu. The M-class SPARC Enterprise systems include high-end reliability and availability features.
The SPARC processors designed by Sun are manufactured by Texas Instruments.
List of SPARC-based systems or series: Sun-4, SPARCstation, Sun Ultra series, Sun Fire, Sun Netra, Sun Enterprise and SPARC Enterprise.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Sun Ultra series

The original Sun Ultra series was a series of UltraSPARC-based computer workstations and servers developed and sold by Sun Microsystems from 1995 to 2001. The Ultra series introduced the 64-bit UltraSPARC processor and in later versions, lower-cost PC-derived technology, such as the PCI and ATA buses (the initial Ultra 1 and 2 models retained the SBus of their predecessors).
The Ultra workstations and the Ultra Enterprise (later, simply Enterprise) servers replaced the earlier SPARCstation and SPARCcenter/SPARCserver series respectively. The Ultra/Enterprise series itself was later replaced by the Sun Blade (workstations) and Sun Fire (servers) ranges.
The Enterprise 220R is an Ultra 60 motherboard in a rackable server chassis with hot-swappable power supplies. Similarly, the Enterprise 420R is an Ultra 80 motherboard in a server chassis.
The Ultra range were sold during the dot com boom, and became one of the biggest selling series of computers ever developed by Sun Microsystems. Many companies and organisations (including Sun Microsystems) still rely on Sun Ultra products.
The Ultra brand was later revived in 2005 with the launch of the Ultra 20, Ultra 40 and Ultra 45 workstations and the Ultra 3 laptop. Confusingly, the Ultra 20 and 40 are not UltraSPARC-based systems, but are based on AMD64-architecture processors.

Sun Fire X4500

The Sun Fire X4500 data server (code-named Thumper) integrates server and storage technologies. It was announced in July, 2006[1] and is part of the Sun Fire server line from Sun Microsystems.
Supported Operating Systems
* Solaris 10
* Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0
* SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10
* Rocks Cluster Distribution [2]
* Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (Standard and Enterprise) [3]
* Microsoft Windows Server 2008 [4]

Solutions using X4500
* Sun Streaming System [5]
* Sun Visualization System [6]
* Sun Secure Data Retrieval Server (SDRS) [7]
* Sun Constellation System [8]
* Sun StorageTek Virtual Tape Library Value ("VTL Value") System [9]
* Luminex Virtual Tape Solution for IBM zSeries mainframes via FICON[10]
* SAS Intelligence Storage [11]
* Greenplum's Sun Data Warehouse Appliance[12]
* G10 Enterprise Video Manager [13]
* Media Server for Symantec Veritas NetBackup [14]
Forty-two Sun Fire X4500 data servers are used to provide Lustre cluster filesystem storage in the TSUBAME supercomputer [15], which was number 7 on June 2006 TOP500 list.

TPC-H World Record
In October 2007, Sun submitted TPC-H result with an X4500 running Sybase IQ. At US $8.11/QphH, it archived the best price/performance among the 1,000 GB results

Windows Embedded

Windows XP Embedded, or XPe, is the componentized version of Microsoft Windows XP Professional and the successor to Windows NT 4.0 Embedded. XPe is based on the same binaries as XP Professional, but XPe is marketed towards developers for OEMs, ISVs and IHVs that want the full Win32 API support of Windows but without the overhead of Professional. It runs existing Windows applications and device drivers off-the-shelf on devices with at least 32MB Compact Flash, 32MB RAM and a P-200 microprocessor. XPe was released on November 28, 2001. As of February 2007, the newest release is Windows XP Embedded SP2 Feature Pack 2007.

XPe is not related to Windows CE. They target different devices and they each have their pros and cons which make them attractive to different OEMs for different types of devices. For instance, XPe will never get down to the small footprint that CE works in. However, CE does not have the Win32 APIs XPe has (although CE has an API that is similar to the Win32 API), nor can it run the tens of thousands of drivers and applications that already exist.

Microsoft Unveils VoIP Solution as Part of Desktop Communications

REDMOND, Wash. — Dec. 11, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today opened a private beta of its new enterprise voice communications server, Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007, to 2,500 IT professionals. Office Communications Server 2007 allows companies to integrate voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) technology into existing telephony infrastructure, eliminating the need for expensive network overhauls and also extending the useful life of existing investments. The new voice server will also allow workers to instantly launch a phone call from 2007 Microsoft Office applications, such as Office Word 2007, Office Outlook® 2007 or Office Communicator, by simply clicking on a colleague’s name to determine his or her availability and initiate a person-to-person or multiparty call.

With native support for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communicator, part of the 2007 Microsoft Office system, interoperate with products from industry partners including Nortel Networks, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., LG-Nortel Co. Ltd., Mitel Networks Corp., NEC Philips Unified Solutions, Polycom Inc. and Siemens Communications Inc. Through these relationships, customers worldwide will be able to support VoIP using their existing desktop phones, data networks and time division multiplexing (TDM) or Internet protocol (IP) private branch exchanges (PBXs). Customers will also able to leverage the softphone capabilities of Office Communicator to make and receive phone calls from their PCs, eliminating the need to purchase expensive IP-compatible phones.

“The convergence of telecom and data networks is happening rapidly. Software will integrate these two worlds, enabling IT managers to deliver new communications possibilities that include VoIP,” said Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president of the Unified Communications Group at Microsoft. “With this open architecture and broad interoperability, Office Communications Server 2007 will give IT managers the flexibility to determine when and how and in what way they move their communications infrastructure forward.”

Microsoft is bringing the pace of software innovation to communications to deliver a people-centric experience. According to a recent Gartner Inc. report, “The ultimate driver of VoIP is not merely cost savings, but is in business process integration. Enterprises should evaluate their long-term strategy toward developing IP telephony applications beyond basic telephony, including business application integration.”1

In conjunction with opening the private beta, Microsoft is hosting a Technology Adoption Program (TAP) Summit this week. Approximately 250 representatives from nearly 100 enterprises will participate in the weeklong event. Attendees represent enterprise IT departments that serve more than 7 million information workers worldwide. The event will kick off with a keynote address by Microsoft Corporate Vice President Gurdeep Singh Pall and includes a showcase of partner solutions, including a demonstration of Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA) scenarios incorporating Microsoft unified communications software and the Nortel Communications Server 1000 IP-PBX.

Office Communications Server 2007, the successor to Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005, is part of Microsoft’s unified communications portfolio. Companies using Office Communications Server 2007 can deploy enterprisewide presence; enable security-enhanced enterprise instant messaging; host on-premise audio, video and Web conferences; and deploy VoIP capabilities. Some of the capabilities available in the private beta of Office Communications Server 2007 are placing and receiving voice calls; advanced call routing; streamlined integration with the new unified messaging capabilities in Exchange Server 2007; multiparty conferencing; call holding, forwarding and transferring; and compliance capabilities, all while working in concert with existing telephony infrastructure.

Office Communications Server 2007 can be deployed with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, a cornerstone of Microsoft’s unified communications portfolio. Exchange Server 2007 complements the voice capabilities of Office Communications Server 2007 with a built-in auto-attendant for answering and routing inbound voice calls as well as unified messaging that unifies voice mail and e-mail in a single inbox. Exchange Server is available for evaluation at http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/eval.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

IBM WebSphere

WebSphere refers to a brand of IBM software products that are mostly proprietary[1], although the term also popularly refers to one specific product: WebSphere Application Server (WAS). WebSphere helped define the middleware software category[citation needed] and is designed to set up, operate, and integrate e-business applications across multiple computing platforms using Web technologies. It includes both the run-time components (like WAS) and the tools to develop applications that will run on WAS.

IBM WebSphere software
Following is the complete list of IBM WebSphere software classified according to the IBM classification.[2] Several tools appear in more than one category.

Application Servers
Distributed Application & Web Servers
Application integration, data access and integration, business processing and distributed transaction monitoring.
* WebSphere Application Server
o Community Edition (free)
o for z/OS
o Network Deployment
* WebSphere Developer
o for System
o for z/Series
* WebSphere Extended Deployment
o for z/OS
o V6
* WebSphere Host Access Transformation Services
* WebSphere Real Time
* WebSphere Studio Application Developer (commonly referred to as WSAD) Integration Edition
* Rational Software Architect
* WebSphere Studio Device Developer

Edge Servers
Caching, content distribution and load balancing functionality.
* WebSphere Edge Server
Other Application Servers
Other platforms on which to run interoperable applications.
* WebSphere Remote Server
Business Integration
Application Integration and Connectivity
Application Integration and Connectivity middleware reduces the complexity of connecting applications to applications.
* WebSphere Adapters
* WebSphere Data Interchange
o for MultiPlatforms
o for z/OS
* WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances
o WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI50
o WebSphere DataPower XML Security Gateway XS40
o WebSphere DataPower XML Accelerator XA35
* WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus
* WebSphere Message Broker
o for MultiPlatforms
o for z/OS
o with Rules and Formatter Extension for Multiplatforms
o with Rules and Formatter Extension for z/OS
* WebSphere MQ
o Express
o Extended Security Edition
o for z/OS
o V6
* WebSphere MQ Everyplace
o Network Edition
o Retail Edition
* WebSphere Service Registry and Repository
* WebSphere Transformation Extender

Process Integration
Runtime and infrastructure for real-time application integration, event-driven processing, and process automation.
* WebSphere Business Integration Server Express
* WebSphere Business Integration Workbench Entry Edition
* WebSphere Business Integration Workbench Server
* WebSphere Business Modeler
o Advanced
o Basic
o Publishing Server
* WebSphere Business Monitor
* WebSphere Business Services Fabric
* WebSphere Event Broker
* WebSphere Integration Developer
* WebSphere InterChange Server
* WebSphere MQ Workflow
o for MultiPlatforms
o for z/OS and OS/390
* WebSphere Partner Gateway
o Advanced Edition
o Enterprise Edition
o Express
* WebSphere Process Server

Nihars Websphere
Platform framework for e-commerce, including marketing, sales, customer and order processing functionality in a tailorable, integrated package.
* WebSphere Commerce
o Enterprise
o Professional
o Express

Mobile, Speech and Enterprise Access
Device Software
Device software is client-side software embedded in mobile devices & interfaces with supporting server-side software.
* WebSphere Everyplace Custom Environment
* WebSphere Everyplace Micro Environment

Mobile and Enterprise Access
* WebSphere Everyplace Access
* WebSphere Everyplace Deployment, which has evolved into IBM Lotus Expeditor
* WebSphere Everyplace Mobile Portal Enable

Speech
Delivers B2E/B2C services including voice recognition & telephony speech processing.
* Embedded ViaVoice
* Unified Messaging for WebSphere Voice Response
* WebSphere Everyplace Subscription Manager
* WebSphere Voice Response for AIX
* WebSphere Voice Server

Translation
Translation applications convert languages automatically & assist humans performing internationalization tasks.
* WebSphere Translation Server for Multiplatforms
Other Mobile, Speech and Enterprise Access
* WebSphere Everyplace Device Manager
* WebSphere Everyplace Mobile Portal
* WebSphere Everyplace Server for Telecom
* WebSphere IP Multimedia Subsystem Connector
* WebSphere Presence Server
* WebSphere RFID Premises Server
* WebSphere Telecom Web Services Server

Networking
Host Access
Provide multiprotocol transparency, control and connectivity (protocol stacks, terminal emulation) to host applications.
* WebFacing Deployment Tool with HATS Technology
* WebSphere Host Access Transformation Services
* WebSphere Host Integration Solution
* WebSphere Host On-Demand

Organizational Productivity, Portals and Collaboration
Portals
Provide personalized access to a variety of applications and aggregate disparate content sources and services. Portals allow people to customize their user experience, with personalized applications based on role, context, actions, location, preferences and team collaboration needs. There are many other things that can be brought into a portal site.
* WebSphere Portal[3]
* WebSphere Portlet Factory

Software Development
Integrated Development Environment
Application development tools for Websphere
* IBM Rational Application Developer
* Application Server Toolkit

Analysis Modeling & Design
Assist in creating resilient architectures for SOA, programming specifications, business processes and rules.
* Branch Transformation Toolkit for WebSphere Studio
* WebFacing Deployment Tool with HATS Technology
* WebSphere Developer
* WebSphere Development Studio Client Advanced Edition for iSeries
* WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer
* WebSphere Studio Device Developer

Problem Determination Tools
Problem determination and debug tools.
* WebSphere Developer Debugger for System z
Process and Portfolio Management
Implement and manage enterprise processes and investments using proven tools and practices.
* IBM Asset Transformation Workbench

Software Quality Management
Tools that address all dimensions of software quality: functionality, reliability and performance.
* WebSphere Studio Workload Simulator for z/OS and OS/390

Traditional Programming Languages & Compilers
3GL and 4GL/RAD language-based tools and unified development environments.
* COBOL Family

Systems Management
Application Performance & Availability
Define, measure, and manage to committed service levels across complex heterogeneous environments with central control.
* WebSphere Studio Application Monitor
Enterprise Content Management
* IBM WebSphere Information Integrator Content Edition (IICE)
* IBM WebSphere Information Integration

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