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. 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 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.

At various times, Sun had manufacturing facilities in several locations worldwide, including Newark, California; Hillsboro, Oregon; and Linlithgow, Scotland. However, by the time the company was acquired by Oracle, it had outsourced most manufacturing responsibilities.

On April 20, 2009, it was announced that Oracle Corporation would acquire Sun for 7.4 billion. The deal was completed on January 27, 2010.

History

The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix workstation, the Sun-1, was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Bechtolsheim originally designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation. It was designed around the Motorola 68000 processor with an advanced memory management unit (MMU) to support the Unix operating system with virtual memory support. He built the first examples from spare parts obtained from Stanford's Department of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses.

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. The Sun name is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network. Sun was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982.

By 1983, Sun was known for producing 68k-based systems with high-quality graphics that were the only computers other than DEC's VAX to run 4.2BSD. It licensed the computer design to other manufacturers, which typically used it to build Multibus-based systems running Unix from UniSoft. Sun's initial public offering was in 1986 under the stock symbol ''SUNW'', for ''Sun Workstations'' (later ''Sun Worldwide''). 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.

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.

The "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. 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. 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, 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. In 2006, the rest of the Newark campus was put on the market.

Post-crash focus

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.

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.

Sun had engineering groups in Bangalore, Beijing, Dublin, Grenoble, Hamburg, Prague, St. Petersburg, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Canberra and Trondheim.

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.

Sun acquisitions

* 1987: Trancept Systems, a high-performance graphics hardware company
* 1987: Sitka Corp, networking systems linking the Macintosh with IBM PCs
* 1987: Centram Systems West, maker of networking software for PCs, Macs and Sun systems
* 1988: Folio, Inc., developer of intelligent font scaling technology and the F3 font format
* 1991: Interactive Systems Corporation's Intel/Unix OS division, from Eastman Kodak Company
* 1992: Praxsys Technologies, Inc., developers of the Windows emulation technology that eventually became Wabi
* 1994: Thinking Machines Corporation hardware division
* 1996: Lighthouse Design, Ltd.
* 1996: Cray Business Systems Division, from Silicon Graphics
* 1996: Integrated Micro Products, specializing in fault tolerant servers
* 1996: Thinking Machines Corporation software division
* February 1997: LongView Technologies, LLC
* August 1997: Diba, technology supplier for the Information Appliance industry
* September 1997: Chorus Systèmes SA, creators of ChorusOS
* November 1997: Encore Computer Corporation's storage business
* 1998: RedCape Software
* 1998: i-Planet, a small software company that produced the "Pony Espresso" mobile email client—its name (sans hyphen) for the Sun-Netscape software alliance
* June 1998: Dakota Scientific Software, Inc.—development tools for high-performance computing
* July 1998: NetDynamics—developers of the NetDynamics Application Server
* October 1998: Beduin, small software company that produced the "Impact" small-footprint Java-based Web browser for mobile devices.
* 1999: Star Division, German software company and with it StarOffice, which was later released as open source under the name OpenOffice.org
* 1999: MAXSTRAT Corporation, a company in Milpitas, California selling Fibre Channel storage servers.
* October 1999: Forté Software, an enterprise software company specializing in integration solutions and developer of the Forte 4GL
* 1999: TeamWare
* 1999: NetBeans, produced a modular IDE written in Java, based on a student project at Charles University in Prague
* March 2000: Innosoft International, Inc. a software company specializing in highly scalable MTAs (PMDF) and Directory Services.
* July 2000: Gridware, a software company whose products managed the distribution of computing jobs across multiple computers
* September 2000: Cobalt Networks, an Internet appliance manufacturer for $2 billion
* December 2000: HighGround, with a suite of Web-based management solutions
* 2001: LSC, Inc., an Eagan, Minnesota company that developed Storage and Archive Management File System (SAM-FS) and Quick File System QFS file systems for backup and archive
* March 2001: InfraSearch, a peer-to-peer search company based in Burlingame.
* March 2002: Clustra Systems
* June 2002: Afara Websystems, developed SPARC processor-based technology
* September 2002: Pirus Networks, intelligent storage services
* November 2002: Terraspring, infrastructure automation software
* June 2003: Pixo, added to the Sun Content Delivery Server
* August 2003: CenterRun, Inc.
* December 2003: Waveset Technologies, identity management
* January 2004 Nauticus Networks
* February 2004: Kealia, founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, developed AMD-based 64-bit servers
* January 2005: SevenSpace, a multi-platform managed services provider
* May 2005: Tarantella, Inc. (formerly known as Santa Cruz Operation (SCO)), for $25 million
* June 2005: SeeBeyond, a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) software company for $387m
* June 2005: Procom Technology, Inc.'s NAS IP Assets
* August 2005: StorageTek, data storage technology company for $4.1 billion
* February 2006: Aduva, software for Solaris and Linux patch management
* October 2006: Neogent
* April 2007: SavaJe, the SavaJe OS, a Java OS for mobile phones
* September 2007: Cluster File Systems, Inc.
* November 2007: Vaau, Enterprise Role Management and identity compliance solutions
* February 2008: MySQL AB, the company offering the open source database MySQL for $1 billion.
* February 2008: Innotek GmbH, developer of the VirtualBox virtualization product
* April 2008: Montalvo Systems, x86 microprocessor startup acquired before first silicon
* January 2009: Q-layer, a software company with cloud computing solutions

Major stockholders

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

Hardware

For the first decade of Sun's history, the company positioned its products as technical workstations, competing successfully as a low-cost vendor during the Workstation Wars of the 1980s. It then shifted its hardware product line to emphasize servers and storage. High-level telecom control systems such as Operational Support Systems service predominantly used Sun equipment.

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.

SPARC-based systems

In 1987, the company began using ''SPARC'', a RISC processor architecture of its own design, in its computer systems, starting with the Sun-4 line. SPARC was initially a 32-bit architecture (SPARC V7) until the introduction of the SPARC V9 architecture in 1995, which added 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 symmetric multiprocessing servers, starting with the four-processor SPARCserver 600MP. This was followed by the 8-processor SPARCserver 1000 and 20-processor SPARCcenter 2000, which were based on work done in conjunction with Xerox PARC. In 1995 the company introduced Sun Ultra series machines that were equipped with the first 64-bit implementation of SPARC processors (UltraSPARC). In the late 1990s the transformation of product line in favor of large 64-bit SMP systems was accelerated by the acquisition of Cray Business Systems Division from Silicon Graphics. Their 32-bit, 64-processor Cray Superserver 6400, related to the SPARCcenter, led to the 64-bit Sun Enterprise 10000 high-end server (otherwise known as ''Starfire'' or E10K).

In September 2004, Sun made available systems with UltraSPARC IV which was the first multi-core SPARC processor. It was followed by UltraSPARC IV+ in September 2005 and its revisions with higher clock speeds in 2007. These CPUs were used in the most powerful, enterprise class high-end CC-NUMA servers developed by Sun, such as the Sun Fire E15K and the 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), 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