Sun Microsystems

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
"SunSoft, Inc." redirects here. For the Japanese video game company, see Sunsoft.

Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Company typePublic
Industry
FoundedFebruary 24, 1982; 42 years ago (1982-02-24)
Founders
DefunctJanuary 27, 2010; 14 years ago (2010-01-27)
FateAcquired by Oracle Corporation
Headquarters
Santa Clara, California
,
U.S.
Products
OwnerOracle Corporation (2010)
Number of employees
38,600 (near peak, 2006)[1]
Websitewww.sun.com
(see: archived version at the Wayback Machine)

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold

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
.

Sun products included

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

relational database management system.[3][4]

At various times, Sun had manufacturing facilities in several locations worldwide, including

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]

History

Sun Microsystems logo history
Logo Years
Original Sun Microsystems logo, as used on the nameplate of the Sun-1 workstation
Revised logo, used from 1983 to 1996
From 1996 until 2010 / acquisition by Oracle Corporation

The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix workstation, the

Motorola 68000 processor with an advanced memory management unit (MMU) to support the Unix operating system with virtual memory support.[7] He built the first examples from spare parts obtained from Stanford's Department of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses.[8]

On February 24, 1982, Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Vinod Khosla, all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy of Berkeley, a primary developer of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), joined soon after and is counted as one of the original founders.[9] The name "Sun" is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network (SUN).[10][11][12] Sun was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982.

By 1983, Sun was known for producing

4.2BSD. It licensed the computer design to other manufacturers, which typically used it to build Multibus-based systems running Unix from UniSoft.[13] Sun's initial public offering was in 1986 under the stock symbol SUNW, for Sun Workstations (later Sun Worldwide).[14][15] 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.[16]

Sun's logo, which features four interleaved copies of the word sun in the form of a rotationally symmetric ambigram, was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt, also of Stanford. The initial version of the logo was orange and had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was subsequently rotated to stand on one corner and re-colored purple, and later blue.

Dot-com bubble and aftermath

During the dot-com bubble, Sun began making more money, with its stock rising as high as $250 per share.[17] 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. In 2000, the bubble burst.[18] Sales in Sun's important hardware division went into free-fall as customers closed shop and auctioned high-end servers.

Several quarters of steep losses led to executive departures, rounds of layoffs,[19][20][21] and other cost cutting. In December 2001, the stock fell to the 1998, pre-bubble level of about $100. It continued to fall, faster than many other technology companies. A year later, it had reached below $10 (a tenth of what it was in 1990), but it eventually bounced back to $20. In mid-2004, Sun closed their Newark, California, factory and consolidated all manufacturing to Hillsboro, Oregon and Linlithgow, Scotland.[22] In 2006, the rest of the Newark campus was put on the market.[23]

Post-crash focus

Former Menlo Park campus, now owned by Meta Platforms
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 offered utility computing services priced at US$1 per CPU/hour for processing and per GB/month for storage. This offering built upon an existing 3,000-CPU server farm used for internal R&D for over 10 years, which Sun marketed as being able to achieve 97% utilization. In August 2005, the first commercial use of this grid was announced for financial risk simulations which were later launched as its first software as a service product.[24]

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.[25]

Sun had engineering groups in

St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Canberra and Trondheim.[26]

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.[27]

Sun acquisitions

Seneca College
(York Campus)
server rack at the Computer Museum of America in Roswell, Georgia

Major stockholders

As of May 11, 2009, the following shareholders held over 100,000 common shares of Sun[68] and at $9.50 per share offered by Oracle,[69] they received the amounts indicated when the acquisition closed.

Major investors in Sun
Investor Common shares Value at merger
Barclays Global Investors
 37,606,708 $357 million
Scott McNealy 14,566,433 $138 million
Ken Oshman 584,985 $5.5 million
Jonathan I. Schwartz 536,109 $5 million
James L. Barksdale 231,785 $2.2 million
Michael E. Lehman 106,684 $1 million

Hardware

For the first decade of Sun's history, the company positioned its products as technical

Operational Support Systems service predominantly used Sun equipment.[citation needed
]

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 using the 68030.[70]

SPARC-based systems

See also: SPARC
SPARCstation 1+

In 1987, the company began using SPARC, a RISC processor architecture of its own design, in its computer systems, starting with the

64-bit
extensions.

Sun 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

Sun Enterprise 10000
high-end server (otherwise known as Starfire or E10K).

In September 2004, Sun made available systems with

Sun Fire E25K
.

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 in 2007 by the UltraSPARC T2, which extended the number of threads per core from 4 to 8. Sun has open sourced the design specifications of both the T1 and T2 processors via the OpenSPARC project.

In 2006, Sun ventured into the blade server (high density rack-mounted systems) market with the Sun Blade (distinct from the Sun Blade workstation).

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. Later T-series servers have also been badged SPARC Enterprise rather than Sun Fire.

In April 2008, Sun released servers with UltraSPARC T2 Plus, which is an SMP capable version of UltraSPARC T2, available in 2 or 4 processor configurations. It was the first CoolThreads CPU with multi-processor capability and it made possible to build standard rack-mounted servers that could simultaneously process up to massive 256 CPU threads in hardware (Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440),[74][75] which is considered a record in the industry.

Since 2010, all further development of Sun machines based on SPARC architecture (including new

SPARC T-Series servers, SPARC T3 and T4
chips) is done as a part of Oracle Corporation hardware division.

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.[76]

Sun's brief first foray into

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 Sun Java Workstation W1100z and W2100z workstations.

In September 2005 Sun unveiled a new range of Opteron-based servers: the Sun Fire X2100, X4100 and X4200 servers.[77] 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.

In January 2007 Sun announced a broad strategic alliance with

x64
server line, starting with the Sun Blade X6250 server module introduced in June 2007.

In May 2008 AMD announced its Operating System Research Center (OSRC) was expanding its focus to include optimization to Sun's OpenSolaris and xVM virtualization products for AMD processors.[80]

Software

Logo of SunSoft, the company's dedicated software division, established in 1991
Logo of SunSoft, the company's dedicated software division, established in 1991

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

Java programming language and acquired software such as StarOffice, VirtualBox and MySQL. In February 1991, the company established SunSoft, Inc., a wholly owned division of Sun dedicated to the development of operating systems and application software.[81]

Sun used community-based and open-source licensing of its major technologies, and for its support of its products with other open source technologies.

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.[82] 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 best 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 4.2BSD Unix, as the operating system for its workstations. SunOS included

window system
.

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.

System V Release 4 (SVR4) was jointly developed by AT&T and Sun.[84] Sun used SVR4 as the foundation for Solaris 2.x, which became the successor to SunOS 4.1.x (later retroactively named Solaris 1.x). 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.

In the early 1990s, Brian P. Dougherty, founder of Berkeley Softworks (which would go on to be re-incorporated as the GeoWorks Corporation) accused the Java development team at Sun for studying GeoWorks's PC/GEOS operating system and incorporating features of PC/GEOS into their Unix-based operating system. Brian claimed that the object-oriented and flexible UI of PC/GEOS was "to this day the most sophisticated UI technology ever built into an OS".[85]

From 1992 Sun also sold

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
]

Sun dropped the Solaris 2.x version numbering scheme after the Solaris 2.6 release (1997); the following version was branded Solaris 7. This was the first 64-bit release, intended for the new UltraSPARC CPUs based on the SPARC V9 architecture. Within the next four years, the successors Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 were released in 2000 and 2002 respectively.

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 supported both

Canonical Ltd., Wind River Systems and MontaVista
also supported their versions of Linux on Sun's SPARC-based systems.

In 2004, after having cultivated a reputation as one of Microsoft's most vocal antagonists, Sun 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.[86] Sun supported Microsoft Windows on its x64 systems, and announced other collaborative agreements with Microsoft, including plans to support each other's virtualization environments.[87]

In 2005, the company released Solaris 10. The new version included a large number of enhancements to the operating system, as well as very novel features, previously unseen in the industry. Solaris 10 update releases continued through the next 8 years, the last release from Sun Microsystems being Solaris 10 10/09. The following updates were released by Oracle under the new license agreement; the final release is Solaris 10 1/13.[88]

Previously, Sun offered a separate variant of Solaris called

least privilege
access model. Solaris 10 included many of the same capabilities as Trusted Solaris at the time of its initial release; Solaris 10 11/06 included Solaris Trusted Extensions, which give it the remaining capabilities needed to make it the functional successor to Trusted Solaris.

After the release of Solaris 10, the Solaris source code was opened under the

SXCE that used SVR4 .pkg packaging and supported OpenSolaris releases that used IPS
. Following the acquisition of Sun by Oracle, OpenSolaris continued to develop in open under illumos with illumos distributions.

Oracle Corporation continued to develop Solaris, reverting new development back to the proprietary licensing; its next release was Oracle Solaris 11 in November 2011.

Java platform

Main article:
Java platform

The Java platform was developed at Sun by James Gosling 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 was not 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

server side
of the Internet.

The platform consists of three major parts: the Java programming language, the

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.[89]

Java programs are compiled to

byte code
, which can be executed by any JVM, regardless of the environment.

The Java

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.[90]

In February 2009, Sun entered a battle with Microsoft and Adobe Systems, which promoted rival platforms to build software applications for the Internet.[91] JavaFX was a development platform for music, video and other applications that builds on the Java programming language.[91]

Office suite

In 1999, Sun acquired the German software company Star Division and with it the

open source community
.

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.[92] 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.

Derivatives of OpenOffice.org continue to be developed, these are LibreOffice, Collabora Online and Apache OpenOffice.

Virtualization and datacenter automation software

VirtualBox, purchased by Sun

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

Sun Ops Center
provisioning software for datacenter automation.

On the client side, Sun offered

Sun Secure Global Desktop and Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
.

Database management systems

Sun acquired MySQL AB, the developer of the

Java DB
.

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,

Sun ONE" (Sun Open Network Environment), and then the "Sun Java System
".

Sun's middleware product was branded as the Java Enterprise System (or JES), and marketed for web and application serving, communication, calendaring, directory, identity management and

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

Sun Grid Engine
and firewall software such as SunScreen. For
Network Equipment Providers
and telecommunications customers, Sun developed the Sun Netra High-Availability Suite.

Sun produced 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.

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 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.

High-performance computing

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]

Staff

Main article: list of Sun Microsystems employees
A fountain within the Sun main campus in Santa Clara

Notable Sun employees included

W3C
.

In 2005, Sun Microsystems was one of the first Fortune 500 companies that instituted a formal social media program.[101] Sun staff published articles on the company's blog site.[102] 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.[103][104]

Acquisition by Oracle

Main article:
Sun acquisition by Oracle
Logo used on hardware products by Oracle

On September 3, 2009, the European Commission opened an in-depth investigation into the proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle.[105] On November 9, 2009, the Commission issued a statement of objections relating to the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.[106] Finally, on January 21, 2010, the European Commission approved Oracle's acquisition of Sun. The Commission's investigation showed that another open database, PostgreSQL, was considered by many users of this type of software as a credible alternative to MySQL and could to some extent replace the competitive strength that the latter currently represents in the database market.[107]

Sun was sold to Oracle Corporation in 2009 for $5.6 billion.[68]

Sun's staff were asked to share anecdotes about their experiences at Sun. A website containing videos, stories, and photographs from 27 years at Sun was made available on September 2, 2009.[108]

In October, Sun announced a second round of thousands of employees to be laid off, blamed partially on delays in approval of the merger.[109]

The transaction was completed in early 2010.[6]

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.[110] In February 2011, Sun's former Menlo Park, California, campus of about 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m2) was sold, and it was announced that it would become headquarters for Facebook.[111][112] The sprawling facility built around an enclosed courtyard had been nicknamed "Sun Quentin". The campus is now the headquarters of Facebook's parent company Meta Platforms.[113]

On September 1, 2011, Sun India legally became part of Oracle. It had been delayed due to legal issues in Indian court.[citation needed]

See also

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Further reading

External links

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