Tag: server

Oracle Buys Sun for $7.4 Billion

April 20th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Industry No comments - Tags: , , , , , , ,

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Following Sun Microsystems’ decline of around $7 billion from IBM, the company has accepted an acquisition offer of $7.4 billion from Oracle.

The deal was announced today between Sun and Oracle that Sun will be purchased at a premium price of $9.50 per share in cash, valuing Sun Microsystems at a grand total of $7.4 billion. It was speculated that IBM also offered Sun $9.50 per share a few weeks ago.

Safra Catz, the president of Oracle said the following in a statement regarding the takeover:

We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined.

The Sun-Oracle deal was unanimously agreed on by the Sun board, which means that Sun Microsystems is a lot more comfortable with the terms and agreements offered by Oracle. You may recall that the licensing agreements presented by IBM in their acquisition offer resulted in the deal falling apart at the last minute.

Oracle is planning to monetize Sun as much as possible in a bid to turn around the $209 million quarterly loss and 11% year over year drop in profits Sun has been suffering from. The acquisition boosted Sun’s shares by 35% to $9.07 per share.

With the Sun acquisition, Oracle has also managed to get its hands on both MySQL and Java in one move – something I’m sure their very pleased about. In 2007 Oracle reportedly offered Sun $850 million for MySQL, which Sun ultimately turned down. What’s worrying users is Oracle’s intent to make money from MySQL, which has been freely available (and has gained incredible popularity) as a web database, which powers the website you’re reading right now.

Sun Rejects IBM Offer, Shares Nosedive

April 6th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Industry No comments - Tags: , , , , , ,

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In a surprise move, Sun Microsystems turns down IBM’s offer for acquisition. IBM responded by withdrawing its offer indefinitely. This is an unexpected occurrence, as a few days ago New York Times sources reported that a Sun-IBM deal was sure to be agreed on.

After the announcement of the IBM withdrawal, Sun’s shares dropped by a whopping 23% today to $6.68 per share. It should come as a relief however to Sun stockholders that despite a 23% drop in value, Sun shares are still way above  the $4.97 per share price-point that it was trading at prior to the IBM acquisition talks.It is reported that IBM’s offer was around the $9.40 mark per share (not the $9.50 per share price expected last week), resulting in Sun Microsystems being valued at $7 billion.

Sun stated, thus far, that the deal was turned down due to the offer being undervalued, as well as licensing agreements that were far to flexible – potentially allowing IBM to walk away from any deal at any time they pleased. The Wall Street Journal has an article stating that in addition to the above disputes about the deal, the Sun board is split on a decision.

Either way, it appears as if Sun will remain independent for a time being, as the company wasn’t exactly being contested by other companies looking to increase their hold on the server market.

IBM Will Buy Sun for $7 Billion

April 3rd, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Industry No comments - Tags: , , , , ,

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IBM is almost sure to buy rival Sun Microsystems for $7 billion or at $9.50 per share.

This deal has been going on for an extremely long time, from IBM combing through Sun’s contracts and licensing deals to IBM decreasing its bid from $10 a share to $9.50. It finally seems to be drawing to a close, and if the deal is sealed (which The New York Times’ sources claim is almost sure to go through) IBM will have market dominance in UNIX-based servers.

Sun has been struggling for a large amount of time financially, but many people will be said to see the creators of Java, MySQL, and the Solaris operating system go. Many also question whether Solaris will survive the takeover. More worryingly however is that with Sun under IBM control, only Fujitsu and HP are left in a UNIX market that is dominated by IBM.

World’s Most Effiecent Supercomputer Put Into Action

April 2nd, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Hardware No comments - Tags: , , , , ,
The Futisu FX1 server rack. Source: Betanews.com

The Futisu FX1 server rack. Source: Betanews.com

It’s called the Fujitsu FX1, and started work for the Japan Aerospace Explorations Agency on Wednesday.

Comprising of 3,008 nodes, each with its own personal Sparc64 VII quad-core processor, and 94 terabytes of memory it truly is a beastly machine. It’s not the impressive speed that makes this supercomputer so special however, despite being “15 times faster” than the previous supercomputer the Japan Aerospace Explorations Agency used.

The theoretical peak performance of the FX1 is 120 teraflops. Whilst running the Linpack benchmark, the FX1 achieved a peak performance of 110.6 teraflops, which means 91.2% of its theoretical performance – a feat of efficiency nobody has managed to reach before.  Fujitsu claims this is result was possible thanks to a combination of improving technology, the skill of its builders and a special middleware that keeps the hardware and software communicating effectively.

The FX1 will be used to run simulations of satellites being launched into space, in order to improve and test insulation methods to stop the satellite from being literally vibrated to pieces before reaching orbit.

Intel’s Nehalem Makes It’s Way to Servers

March 30th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Hardware No comments - Tags: , , , , ,

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Intel has announced that Nehalem-based Xeon processors are on their way to servers worldwide.

You may be familiar with the desktop range of “Nehalem” Core i7 processors from Intel, which are extremely fast. Intel is attempting to bring this new burst of speed and technology breakthrough to servers by creating Xeon processors based on the Nehalem architecture.

The new Xeon chips will have a lot of advantages over current processors, most importantly and integrated memory controller (for that extra “oomph”) and hyper-threading that can simulate up to 16 cores. That’s right, 16. As well as a feature called Turbo Boost (which desktop enthusiasts should be familiar with), which overclocks the processor as needed.

Quite a few companies have already jumped on the bandwagon as eager early-adopters, including Dreamworks and IBM, who are implementing them in all new servers they are currently providing.

Importantly however, nobody is expecting Intel to cause an uproar and rapidly take over the market, as they did with their Core 2 Duo range a few years back. Reason? Intel already has a massive market share in the server environment. Ashok Kumar says,

“We expect only an incremental upside on a unit basis”