System News for Sun Users - The Blog

Six Key Reasons and What to Look for in Evaluating Products

Governments globally are embracing open source policies. The White House moved its Web platform to open source this past fall with the goal of reducing costs and improving security. Bill Vass, president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems Federal, Inc., shares his views on why governments are embracing open source solutions, relaying six key reasons, and some guidelines on evaluating open source products.

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Sun Virtualization Technologies Streamline Management for City of San Antonio

The City of San Antonio (CoSA) allows its residents to pay a traffic ticket, apply for a job, or find information about the dozens of activities online. As its server infrastructure had sprawled to keep pace with its service delivery, CoSA decided to upgrade its IT infrastructure to reduce space, maintenance costs, and enhance service. The solution: Sun’s SPARC servers as a platform for Solaris 10 and Solaris Zones, which provided the best roadmap for return on investment (ROI) with its virtualization technologies and energy-efficient, mainframe-class servers.

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Mandatory Access Control and the Solaris OS

President and COO of Sun Microsystems Federal Bill Vass writes about developments at Sun in the area of enforcing Mandatory Access Control (MAC) with virtualization to confine Internet services with simple security configurations using the Solaris OS. Featured in the blog are the remarks of senior Sun researchers John Weeks and John Totah that explain how, in addition to enforcing MAC provisions, they also layered the MAC protection with what users ordinarily expect from employing all of the other Solaris security features combined with virtualization, eg. zones, and Internet community sponsored configuration guidelines such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks.

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Highly Secure Email Service Runs on Scalable Data Storage and Backup Platform

Correos is the operator of the public postal service in Spain. Recently, it decided to build a secure email service for up to 140,000 mailboxes for citizens and businesses to send emails and attachments to government offices. With the support of Sun Professional Services, Correos designed and implemented a fully redundant data storage and backup platform for its new email service based on Sun Fire servers and Sun StorageTek technology.

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To Help Protect OSes Against Certain Types of Attacks

The National Security Agency (NSA) is working with Sun, Apple and Red Hat “to develop secure baselines for their products,” commented Richard Schaeffer, the NSA’s information assurance director, on Nov. 17 at a hearing before the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security.

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White House, DoD Demonstrate Support for Open Source Software

The Office of the Secretary of Defense CIO recently released policy guidance promoting the use of open source software throughout the U.S. Department of Defense. The DoD is not the only area where the federal government is embracing open source, so is the White House whose Web site now runs on open source technologies. “By choosing open source software as the defining technology of Whitehouse.gov, it is clear that the President means business,” said Bill Vass, president and COO of Sun Microsystems Federal.

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Sun Can Power the Economic Recovery, Especially in the Public Sector

“Sun Solution for the Public Sector: Maximizing the Value of Stimulus Fund Investments” is a white paper that surveys the Sun solutions eligible for the the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which has allocated funds to state and local governments, particularly in the areas of municipal, educational, and healthcare projects.

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Linux Administrators Should Take a Closer Look at this Open Source OS

Sun engineer Harry Foxwell, a well known advocate of OpenSolaris and co-author of the book “Pro OpenSolaris: A New Open Source OS for Linux Developers and Administrators,” shared his enthusiasm for the solution with Joab Jackson of Government Computer News in a recent interview. “The point that I made in the beginning of the book is that some people call themselves Linux developers but they really are open-source developers who happen to run their applications on a Linux OS,” Foxwell states. “They could, in theory, use some other OS to support the tools they use. And OpenSolaris, in fact, does.”

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Open Source for America to Advocate Broader Support, Participation

Sun is one of more than 70 organizations and individuals that have joined together to form a new coalition called Open Source for America that will promote the use of free and open source software to the U.S. Federal Government. Gartner recently estimated by 2011 more than 25 percent of government vertical, domain-specific applications will either be open source, contain open source application components or be developed as community source.

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Allows Microsoft Users to Make ODF their Default File Format

The Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office gives users of this office productivity suite the ability to import and export to the Open Document Format (ODF), which is an OASIS and ISO/IEC international standard. The newest version is Sun ODF Plug-in 3.1 which offers support for Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2, and the disabling of automatic registration and product updates - important to businesses with large deployments of ODF Plug-in such as enterprises and governments.

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