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Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu have announced a quad-core version of the Sparc64 processor and servers to that will use the chip.

Fujitsu--which manufactures and designs the Sparc64 processor--along with Sun unveiled the M4000, M5000, M8000, and M9000 enterprise servers that use the new quad-core Sparc64 VII chip. The two companies claim the processor delivers 80 percent better performance using 44 percent less power than the previous Sparc64 VI processor.

Sun Sparc road map

(Credit: Sun Microsystems)

The Sparc64 VII is made on a more advanced 65-nanometer process than the Sparc64 VI chip, which used a 90nm node.

Sun is no stranger to multicore--putting many processing cores on one chip. Its UltraSparc T2 processor can place up to eight cores on a single piece of silicon. This allows the UltraSparc T2 to run up to 64 threads--parts of a program that can execute independently--or eight threads per core. It's a feat processor giant Intel still hasn't accomplished.

Sparc Enterprise servers using the Sparc64 VII processor are targeted at high-availability, mission-critical enterprise applications, including large-scale databases, data warehousing, and enterprise resource planning.

Current Sparc Enterprise servers can be seamlessly upgraded by swapping out older processors with the new Sparc64 VII chips, the two companies said. Sparc VI and Sparc VII chips can also be mixed and matched within a "single domain."

Pricing and availability information is here.

2008 is the year of the solid state drive. That's what Sun Microsystems believes as reliability finally measures up to the rigorous requirements of server storage and the cost per gigabyte plunges.

On Wednesday, Sun announced that it is preparing to introduce solid-state drive (SSD) technology that "will completely change how server and storage infrastructure is designed and deployed in enterprise data centers." Sun said it is already shipping Solaris ZFS software "optimized" for SSDs.

Though Sun is not specifying suppliers, Intel confirms that it has collaborated with Sun on SSD development for servers. Intel is slated to bring out high-capacity SSDs in the second half of the year.

Sun follows storage vendor EMC, which announced integration of solid-state drives into its product portfolio in January.

Solid-state drives give "customers 3x better performance at one-fifth the energy consumption of traditional spinning (hard disk drive) disk offerings," according to a prepared statement by Sun.

Sun StorageTek server array

(Credit: Sun Microsystems)

Solid-state drive suppliers Intel and Samsung have both discussed the huge potential for servers. Samsung said previously that companies like Citibank and American Express peg server performance on IOPS, or input/output operations per second. Hard disk drives typically achieve 120 to 150 IOPS, while SSDs are in the neighborhood of 10,000 to 30,000 IOPS, according to Samsung.

Intel also sees SSDs playing a role in the server market as a "performance accelerator." The chipmaker cited a streaming video example where 10 SSDs could essentially handle the same workload as 62 high-performance hard disk drives.

In addition to performance benefits, SSDs "save on energy costs compared to traditional Fibre Channel hard drives (and) decrease server and storage sprawl in already maxed-out data centers," Sun said. "SSDs consume around one-fifth of the power of both memory...and disk drives, have no rotating media and consume very little power when not in use."

Sun sees SSDs as a watershed technology. "Flash SSD is the most exciting innovation to happen to system and storage design in over a decade. By mid-2009, it will be in the majority of servers and deliver more capacity than DRAM and far greater overall system performance and energy efficiency," said John Fowler, executive vice president of the Sun Systems Group.

Intel is targeting SSDs for consumer and server storage

(Credit: Intel)

Plunging cost is another factor. "Enterprise-class Fibre Channel hard disk drives have only exhibited a 40 percent year-over-year price decline in the last decade, while the Flash SSD price per gigabyte continues to fall between 50 to 70 percent annually," Sun said.

The Mountain View, Calif., company is expected to deliver Flash-based products to market in the second half of 2008. Sun did not cite price or capacities. Today, typical large-capacity enterprise SSD capacities start at 32GB but can range up to 512GB.

Remember the panic when the first computer worm hit? We're going to have a crisis like that next year when we get the first data center meltdown, predicted Subodh Bapat, a vice president in the eco-computing team at Sun Microsystems.

"You'll see a massive failure in a year," Bapat said at a dinner with reporters on Monday. "We are going to see a data center failure of that scale."

"That scale" referred to the problems caused by the worm created by Cornell grad student Robert Morris Jr. in 1988. His worm infected about 5 percent of the Unix boxes on the Internet, freaked people out, and helped jump-start the security industry.

Of course, it's just a prediction, so there is no guarantee that it will happen. But it does seem possible. Data centers have mushroomed with the flood of processes and jobs being turned over to the Internet. Companies have built up their data centers, but even with technologies like virtualization it's been tough to keep up. At some point, a data center is going to crash and people are going to go spastic.

On a more cheery note, Bapat and other Sun executives said that the IT industry is also on the verge of a construction boom that, if it happens, will lead to big orders for equipment for makers of servers, storage systems, and other data center equipment.

The typical life span of a data center is only about 10 to 12 years, said the Sun executives. Thus, a lot of those data centers built at the beginning of the dot-com era need to be rebuilt. Other companies like Facebook are expanding rapidly as well. (Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos mentioned Facebook several times, so it sounds like maybe Sun is working with, or trying to work with, them. Just a thought.)

National labs and universities are also looking at new centers. Next year, one of the national labs has plans to build a data center that will take up 500,000 square feet and consume 50 megawatts. (Big data centers now take up 400,000 square feet and chew up 40 megawatts, Sun executives said.)

Other organizations are looking at 50-megawatt to 70-megawatt data centers.

Update: I added comment from Google.

Painful flashbacks are beginning to torment those of us who lived through the Java wars between Sun Microsystems and Microsoft that began 10 years ago.

Earlier this week, Google released programming tools for its Android mobile-phone software project that shun the existing Java standard-setting process in favor of a Google-specific variety. Sun responded on Wednesday by expressing concern that Google's Android project could fragment Java into incompatible versions.

"Anything that creates a more diverse or fractured platform is not in (developers') best interests," said Rich Green, executive vice president of Sun's software work, speaking to reporters at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. "The feedback from developers is, 'Help us fix this.'"

He said Sun wants to work with Google to nip any problems in the bud. "We're really interested in working with Google to make sure developers don't end up with a fractured environment. We're reaching out to Google and assuming they'll be reaching out to us to ensure these platforms and APIs will be compatible so deployment on a wide variety of platforms will be possible," Green said.

Google unrepentant
Google didn't adopt a terribly conciliatory tone in its response, arguing that when it comes to Java fragmentation, Android is the solution, not the problem.

"Google and the other members of the Open Handset Alliance are working to help solve fragmentation and supporting the developer community by creating Android, a mobile platform that responds to the needs of the developers, has the backing of industry leaders, and will be available as open source under a nonrestrictive license," Google said in a statement.

And asked whether it would discuss the issue with Sun, Google said, "We're talking with industry leaders around the world about Android and the Open Handset Alliance but we're not commenting on any of those discussions."

On Monday, Google indicated that it expects fellow members of the Open Handset Alliance phones who are working on the Android phones to help keep its variation of Java familiar to programmers.

Java today is governed by the Java Community Process, in which a number of companies vote on which features to accept into the Java system and create standard mechanisms called application programming interfaces (APIs) by which Java software can use those features. The extent to which Android will or must conform to these APIs is not clear.

For those who need a refresher on the Microsoft history here, the software company licensed Java back in the 1990s, way before it became open-source software. However, Microsoft added some features to Java that meant that it could work differently on Windows machines, a move Sun saw as undermining the "write once, run anywhere" promise of the technology.

SAN FRANCISCO--One area where Sun Microsystems' Java caught on was in mobile phones, but a leader of the project is working to eventually replace the mobile-specific version of the software.

Sun Vice President James Gosling speaks in May at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET News.com)

Java Standard Edition (SE), geared for desktop computers, will gradually supplant Java Micro Edition (ME) as technology improvements let more computing power be packed into smaller devices, said James Gosling, the Sun vice president often called the father of Java.

"We're trying to converge everything to the Java SE specification. Cell phones and TV set-top boxes are growing up," Gosling said at a Java media event here Wednesday. "That convergence is going to take years."

The prime example of the trend is Sun's own JavaFX Mobile, software Sun got through its SavaJe acquisition and which the company hopes mobile phone makers will embrace. JavaFX Mobile includes almost all of Java SE, though it's missing a few pieces such as CORBA (brace yourself: Common Object Request Broker Architecture) for getting software to work with other programs across a network.

Sun's Java expectation dovetails with recent trends, most notably Apple's iPhone, which architecturally is much more an Apple computer writ small than a mobile phone writ large. In particular, Apple uses a version of its regular Safari Web browser so users will have as much of the desktop Internet experience as possible.

At the same time, Intel is working to bring x86 processors that run PCs into mobile gadgets. It's in cohoots with open-source efforts including Ubuntu Mobile and Mobile Firefox .

The move to Java SE won't happen overnight. Rich Green, Sun's executive vide president of software, said he expects smart phones using various pared-down versions of Java to stay in the market for at least a decade.

But the shift already was under way. "All the work in Java ME had been pushing it closer and closer to Java SE," Gosling said.

Defragmenting mobile Java
Moving to Java SE could help fix one nagging problem with Java ME: fragmentation.

Java ME is a collection of abilities--basic ones and higher-level options layered on top--each defined by a detailed description called a Java specification request. For Java ME, there are a large number of these JSRs for various features. That posed a challenge to Java's original tagline, "write once, run anywhere."

The tagline came about because a program written in Java could in principle run on any computer that had a Java virtual machine. The JVM is a software foundation that lets a generic Java program run on a particular computer. But with the multiplicity of Java ME extensions, there was often little guarantee that a program written for one mobile phone would work on another.

Java SE has a much richer basic set of abilities, so using it instead of Java ME could at least in principle restore some of Java's promise of software portability.

JavaFX mobile is one component of a multipronged effort called JavaFX that Sun announced in May at its JavaOne conference.

"JavaFX is probably the largest and most complex software engineering effort Sun has ever done," Gosling said. Here's a quick tour of the JavaFX components:

Tour de Java FX jargon
Unless you're a serious Java nerd, and maybe even if you are, Sun's latest nomenclature is a crazy hodge-podge of terms. Java SE--OK, that's been around for nearly a decade, we can handle it. Though there was some numbering madness a few years ago, Sun seems to have settled on the current version being Java SE 6. But let's work outward from there.

First comes Java 6 Update N, formerly called the Consumer Java Runtime Environment (JRE). This is an attempt to make Java SE easier on the average computer user, chiefly through improvements to the plug-in that Web browsers use to deal with Web pages using Java.

Among the Update N features: It preloads Java when the computer boots to avoid the excruciating delay when you encounter a Java Web page. It installs faster by loading only a bare-minimum kernel--typically less than 4MB--that gets things started and then updates itself with the full 12MB Java software collection. It takes advantage of Windows' Direct3D graphics abilities. And it includes a more graphically modern user interface that gives a unified look across multiple operating system.

Update N should go into beta testing in December and be available a few months later, said Chet Haase, Sun's Java SE client architect.

Atop Update N comes JavaFX Script. This is a new scripting language geared specifically for fancy user interface actions such as transparency and other effects that are difficult with the prevailing Web browser scripting language, JavaScript (which contrary to what its name may imply isn't based on Java). JavaFX Script is geared toward use more by design types than engineers, Gosling said.

Of course, you can't have a script without something to understand it. Thus there's JavaFX compiler to translate people's code into instructions the computer can execute.

Last is the aforementioned Java FX Mobile. This software is in part a reaction to gripes by Java ME developers who wanted a more unified foundation, Gosling said. Another difference compared to Java ME is that Sun will deliver it as a prewritten binary program; Java ME typically comes as source code that programmers must compile into something useful.

Potshots at the competition
Gosling and Java have been at the vanguard of an idea that in a way is just coming back into vogue: rich Internet applications, which is software that runs in a Web browser but comes with a lot more pizzazz and capability than bland Web pages.

Java caught on as a way to run server software and to run games on mobile phones, but one original promise of Java was turning a Web browser into a foundation for sophisticated software. (If you're having flashbacks to Netscape taking on Microsoft Windows and the resulting federal antitrust case, just breathe deeply for a moment to settle down.)

But much of the rich Internet application action is happening with software such as Ajax, the Adobe Integrated Runtime (nee Apollo) and Microsoft's Silverlight and Google Gears.

Gosling thinks JavaFX has a chance, too, though, listing several advantages he believes it has: a richer user interface, faster performance, a robust and well accepted language and better abilities when a computer is disconnected from a network.

And security, he adds. Adobe's AIR is designed to let programs work like regular PC software, but Gosling thinks the approach unwise. "It's a petri dish for viruses. Security is really hard to implement well."

Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy said he was misquoted in a South Korean newspaper earlier this week as saying Sun and cell phone maker Samsung Electronics are working on an iPhone-killer.

McNealy, who stopped in New York Thursday on his way back from South Korea to deliver a speech at the World Business Forum, said that the newspaper must have misunderstood a translation of what he had said.

Scott McNealy

"I never said that," he said. "I'm not really sure where they got that. I think it was a translation problem."

When pressed further during an interview with CNET News.com, McNealy remained tight-lipped on any news.

"We haven't announced anything," he said.

Indeed, the company has not announced any official partnership with Samsung, but a representative for the phone maker told the Associated Press after the misinterpreted quote circulated yesterday that the companies are working together.

It makes sense that Sun would be working with Samsung. And it wouldn't take a huge stretch of the imagination to figure out what they could be working on.

Sun, which already provides a stripped-down version of Java for billions of cell phones sold around the world, announced in May a more robust version of its Java software called JavaFX Mobile. It's geared toward small devices like smartphones that have more processing power than the average cell phone. Unlike the Java Micro Edition, which today runs on billions of cell phones around the globe, the JavaFX Mobile software is most similar to the Java Standard Edition (SE) software that runs on standard PCs.

With this more powerful software, Samsung and its partners could develop applications for cell phones that more closely resemble those running on PCs. This means Web surfing and interactive cell phone games would look more like what people are used to on their PCs.

Apple has already attempted to do this with its iPhone, which allows people to shrink and magnify Web pages so that the pages render on the screen just as they do on a regular computer.

Even though McNealy denies he said Sun and Samsung are working on an iPhone-killer, there is still a very good chance that something is cooking between the two companies. Any plans are likely still in the initial stages of development, so stay tuned.

In a development that could be anywhere interesting, sleep-inducing or potentially even fictitious, Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy said Samsung is building a Java phone that will have better features and lower cost than Apple's iPhone.

Sun software chief Rich Green holds a Java FX Mobile-powered phone from FIC at the JavaOne conference in May.

(Credit: Sun Microsystems)

At least, that's what the Associated Press story about a report in the Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo.

Java is open-source software that at least in principle lets the same program run without having to be modified for different hardware. It's already widely used on mobile phones, including models from Samsung. What could make this story more interesting is if Samsung is embracing Sun's Java FX Mobile software, which Sun obtained through its acquisition of start-up SavaJe.

Typical phones today use the lightweight Java ME, stripped down for phones' anemic processing abilities, but Java FX Mobile is a variant of the desktop Java SE version. Adapting desktop software for increasingly powerful mobile devices is the strategy that Apple embraced with the iPhone and that Intel and Ubuntu sponsor Canonical are adopting with mobile Linux.

Of course, it all could amount to nothing, too, and given that whatever McNealy said likely was translated at least twice, that possibility shouldn't be ruled out. The AP quoted a Samsung spokeswoman Lee Soo-jeong as saying the two companies have talked but that "no decision has been made regarding co-development of the Java phone."

For its part, Sun wouldn't comment in detail on the situation. "Sun has a longstanding relationship with Samsung, working for years on Java-enabled phones and devices. Beyond that we have no comment about future plans and products," spokesman Russ Castronovo said.

The Sun Streaming System -- film festival diva?

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Can you make a server sexy?

Short answer: No.

But you can still throw it a glitzy launch party.

Over the past week or so, I've been poking my head into various events at the Tribeca Film Festival in lower Manhattan, which runs through tomorrow. I've always thought of film festivals as sort of low-tech affairs, and in a lot of ways, it's true--at a screening of Edward Burns' new flick, Purple Violets, the producers apologized for the first reel being "too light," and at the premiere of Spider-Man 3 co-star James Franco's latest project, Good Time Max, Franco acknowledged that the sound on the film was still a bit iffy.

But despite that, there are more than a few high-tech companies among the festival's list of sponsors. Some are no-brainers--Apple, for example, seems quite at home among the stars and red-carpet premieres (and festival kickoff guest-of-honor Al Gore). But Verizon? Yahoo? Sun Microsystems? Last week, Sun debuted its Sun Streaming System, a new product geared toward speeding up the delivery of Internet protocol television (IPTV), in conjunction with the festival. Guests were invited to the luxe Tribeca Grand Hotel for an evening of wine and hors d'oeuvres, followed by a private screening of Burns' Purple Violets. The Sun Streaming System, meanwhile, was standing awkwardly out in the hallway, humming away. A few people opted to pose for photographs next to it. But let's just say it wasn't exactly the life of the party.

Yes, the Sun Streaming System is a step forward in IPTV's short history, but an indie film premiere still seemed a little bit of a disjointed promotion for a server, to say the least. I was in attendance that evening, and my goal was to figure out exactly what both Sun and Tribeca Enterprises had at stake in such a partnership. The answer, according to Adam Sloan, the festival's executive vice president of sponsorship sales and marketing, is content delivery. Whether it's Verizon's V-Cast TV for mobile video, or Yahoo's video portal, or Sun's IPTV-oriented offering, the festival is attempting to broaden its reach through broadband video content. "Everything they're doing is ultimately lowering the cost and increasing the capability to do more video on demand and IPTV," Sloan explained to me, "and being able to give a bigger and broader platform for films that otherwise might not be seen."

So are film festivals inking these new-media content delivery deals because they're afraid they'll be losing market share to Ask a Ninja if they don't expand? Sloan assured me that isn't the case. But the truth is that films nowadays have started to rely heavily on viral buzz, and the Internet is (for obvious reasons) the place to build that buzz. I asked Sloan about whether or not the festival was doing anything with that perpetual buzzword--user-generated content. After all, it's one of the major reasons that IPTV and broadband video are gaining the momentum that they are. "In many ways, everyone's becoming a filmmaker, and that's what makes it really fun," he said, but then added that the Tribeca Film Festival currently does not have any categories that the average person would associate with the YouTube revolution. There's a Cadillac-sponsored award that viewers vote on, and Sloan hinted at adding some more interactive features to the festival's Web site. Aside from that, it's still a hand-picked selection. Not very 2.0--but the idea I got was that it's gradually evolving to that point.

As is everything these days, right?