MySQL is switching version control ships, leaving BitKeeper for Bazaar, an open-source version control system.

“Both the main MySQL server code and the code for many ancillary projects have been converted to Bazaar and are published on Launchpad,” blogged Kaj Arno, MySQL’s vice president of community. (Sun Microsystems bought MySQL earlier this year.) Read more »

MySQL execs took to the road this week, talking up the database’s increasing relevance to big businesses.

The message at a Boston event Tuesday night, was that Sun Microsystems’ buyout of the open source database company gives MySQL easier entry into very large accounts.

Read more »

Slowly but surely, some of the big high-tech vendors have started pulling their channel partners into their “green technology” efforts. As Barbara Darrow blogged earlier this week, Sun is the latest to put a formal stake in the ground. Actually, honestly, they’re the first high-tech vendor that I can think of that really has made a public effort to include its VARs in this green thing.

So, in case you’re wondering just how much opportunity exists for services related to green technology rationalization, I wanted to share some statistics that were recently released by Forrester Research as part of a report called “The Dawn of Green IT Services.”

First, the bottom line: Forrester believes that overall services related to helping companies rationalize the energy efficiency and sustainability profile of their technology will peak at $4.8 billion in 2013, with roughly half of that spending coming from European businesses. (The services revenue for this year is expected to be around $500 million.) Much like the Y2K wave, green tech services will begin to taper off after this point as the practices become more a standard part of running an IT infrastructure, Forrester concludes. Another note: North America companies will be slower on the uptake than those in Europe, with spending peaking around $2.1 billion in 2013, the firm reports.

You can compartmentalize the opportunity for green tech services into three different buckets: the assessment phase, the planning and development phase, and the implementation phase.

As you might expect, assessments present the shortest-term opportunity, running between two and 10 weeks and costing $30,000 to $100,000. Only about 50 percent of companies will proceed to the next phase: detailed planning. But, Forrester figures that those that do should be willing to spend between $50,000 and $400,000 on roadmaps for any number of initiatives such as server virtualization and consolidation, an enhanced power infrastructure, and more energy-efficient servers and other gear.

Need more convincing that green tech isn’t just a boondoogle?

The big jackpot will go to those VARs and integrators that become involved in making green tech plans become reality. The implementation phases of these projects will take from 30 weeks to more than 100 weeks, according to Forrester. They can cost from $300,000 to $2 million — for the services alone.

By the way, here are some efforts that Forrester considers to crowd under the green IT umbrella:

• Green procurement policies
• E-waste recycling
• Data center optimization
• Supply chain optimization
• Building automation projects
• Collaboration and conferencing initiatives
• Managed print services

Heather Clancy is a high-tech journalists and strategic communications consultant with SWOT Management Group. She can be reached at hclancy@swotmg.com.

Sun Microsystems says it will help partners build eco-friendly IT solutions.

The company’s Eco Advantage Program offers partners tools to calculate for themselves or for their customers how to deploy the best, most energy efficient information technology.

“Partners can take customer data at the server and app level, profile [that] and develop the best case analysis/scenario. They can provide the carbon emission savings, space savings, cooling savings, ” said Bill Cate, senior director of global channel planning and programs for Palo Alto-based Sun.

The program includes the afore mentioned Eco Assessment Service, which evaluates actual data center energy use, cooling, air flow etc.; training on data center power and cooling needs; and modeling tools to help simulate energy requirements of alternative datacenter setups.

Helping customers save money is one way to go into accounts in a collaborative way, said Dermot Duggan, senior director for Sun’s eco drive.

“You can go into your installed base or new accounts and have a rare opportunity where you will get no pushback. You can say, ‘I can save you this much money’ and back that up with real data tied to the customer’s actual servers and storage.”

Hardly any customer will say no to paying less, right?

Vince Conroy, CTO of FusionStorm, San Francisco-based Sun partner said the program aligns with what his company is doing.

“We’ve developed a data center practice and energy conservation is an important component of that,” Conroy said.

Technologies like server virtualization, thin clients, virtual desktop computing, all play into that message.

And, since FusionStorm does some of its own hosting as well as managed services, cost savings are important to its bottom line as well.

Customers are starting to ask about energy efficient computing, although it’s not yet a groundswell, he said. ” It starts with some of the more forward thinking customers and they may be forward thinking because it makes business sense and they’re business savvy or this is a cause for them. In either case we’re seeing more activity [in energy efficient computing.”

Server virtualization, as has been reported endlessly, is one way to get bigger workloads out of fewer boxes and that will be key here. Asked whether it’s really in Sun’s best interests to sell fewer rather than more boxes and CPUs

As to whether it’s really in Sun’s best interests to sell fewer servers, Cates and Duggan said the trend is clear. Either Sun will sell more efficient technology or someone else will.
For hosting partners, the attraction of saving on cooling and electricity is obvious, but it’s also away for partners to help customers save money and perhaps divert some of those savings to additional services.

And the company’s quick to say it’s taking its own medicine, that its latest servers, built on the UltraSPARC T2 chips use multithreading technology and cram 5X the compute power into half the space and get 2.5 times better performance per megawatt.
The Sun execs said the company, through its own eco efforts, received $1 million in rebates onfrom PG&E over the last 12 months.

The company is hardly alone many hardware vendors have jumped on the green bandwagon: Hewlett Packard and IBM also have eco initiatives going.

 Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

Given all of the apparent love flowing from Microsoft to its new-found open source allies and given that Microsoft’s go-to open soruce guy Sam Ramji keynoted at the recent EclipseCon 2008 conference, the obvious question is: Will Microsoft join The Eclipse Foundation?

Ramji listened politely and said it was not something under consideration. Funny. BEA Systems once said the same thing and look where they are now!

He then also quoted physicist Niels Bohr “who has a few more Nobel prizes than most of us.” Bohr once famously said  that predictions are difficult, “especially if they’re about the future.”

But finally Ramji deferred to the Eclipse Foundation’s executive director Mike Milinkovich: “He said Microsoft would probably join before Sun will,” said Ramji.

So that leaves the door open then.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

“You know, Sun Microsystems has one simple request. And that is to have microchips with frickin’ laser beams!”

Tomorrow afternoon Sun and Microsoft will co-host a conference call to talk up hopefully some tangible new facet of their plan to make their respective operating systems and toolsets work well together.

Headlining the event will be Sun systems chief John Fowler and Microsoft Server & Tools marketing guru Andy Lees. Notice of the event was sent to reporters Tuesday night.

The companies will talk about what the e-mail called an “expanded relationship.”

Read more »

Network Appliance Inc. today announced that it has filed a lawsuit against Sun Microsystems Inc. seeking damages and an injunction against Sun to prevent further distribution of Sun’s file system technology. 

The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court, Lufkin, Texas, alleges that Sun violated seven NetApp patents primarily related to its ZFS technology.  In addition, NetApp is asking the court to declare that it has not infringed on three of Sun’s patents.   

In a conference call today, NetApp officials said the intellectual property spat began 18 months ago when Sun presented to NetApp a set of patents that they claimed NetApp infringed upon and requested a cross license agreement as well as “a lot of money,” David Hitz, NetApp’s founder and executive vice president explained. 

“That demand caused us to examine carefully whether we were infringing their [intellectual property] rights and also whether they might be infringing ours,” said Dan Warmenhoven, NetApps chief executive officer.  

In a blog that further sheds light on NetApp’s counter attack, Hitz said Sun’s ZFS “was a conscious reimplementation of our Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL) file system with little regard to intellectual property rights.” 

In the meantime, the ZFS file system was donated to the open source community in April and is a key element of Sun’s OpenSolaris storage strategy.  According to NetApp executives it’s difficult to delete patented technology like a file system that has already been released to the open source community.  The best court decision, they say, is to stop Sun from developing ZFS altogether.   

“What we are interested in is getting Sun to stop developing [ZFS] and stop releasing it as a commercial product,” Hitz added.     

Sun Microsystems Inc. intends to introduce new products for the low end storage market including a new Linear Tape Open (LTO) offering in its fiscal year 2008.  The move is in reaction to poor sales of products that Sun sells to the low end storage market which contributed to the company’s dismal storage revenue performance in its fourth quarter.   

Bret Schaefer, Sun’s vice president, investor relations, outlined Sun’s storage plans during a call on Wednesday as he tried to put the best face forward on Sun’s surprisingly positive overall fourth-quarter results and dismal performance in its storage division.   

Sun’s storage products revenue for Q407 was $639 million  – a decrease of 10.4% compared to the same period last year.   Schaefer said the decline was the result of weakness in low end tape and disk sales and that Sun will have to turn its storage business into a more profitable position moving forward.  Schaefer touted to storage analysts the success of the Sun Fire X4500, otherwise known as the Thumper. Sun shipped nearly 20 Petabytes of Sun Fire X4500 in Q4 and is now on an annual billing run rate of $100 million.  Sun executives view the Sun Fire X4500 as the foundation for a new line of data warehousing appliance based on general purpose computing and open source operating systems.   

During Monday’s Q4 earnings call Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said Sun is also hanging its hat on its virtualization strategy, saying in Q4 the company began to see the impact of Sun’s virtualization investments with support for Solaris 10 containers and as of last month support for bundled virtualization giving customers the ability to buy fewer but more richly configured systems and storage on both Sparc and x64 platforms.

“We clearly see Solaris and its core virtualization properties as opening a world of new opportunity beyond computing,” Schwartz said on Monday. 

Letter to the editor, SearchITChannel.com

As a principal partner of a Sun Microsystems reseller, my sales people are asking what our response should be to the large number of our customers that have been contacted directly by Sun inside sales people regarding the huge discount they can get on Sun servers, storage, and other products at Sun Store [Massive Savings; Two Weeks Only].

These discounts are not available to Sun resellers like ourselves, and I would like someone to ask them what their thoughts are regarding the impact on their partner resellers.

I have been a Sun reseller for a long time, and they have always been channel friendly in the past.  It’s disheartening to see their lack of consideration for those businesses that have stuck by them through their financial troubles.

Regards,

Mike Willard
Principal Partner
Soccour Solutions