University students, teachers and nonprofit organizations are encouraged to apply to receive donated Sun Microsystems servers and related equipment as part of Acclinet Corp.’s technology grant program.

Acclinet, a New Hampshire-based independent reseller of servers, workstations and related equipment, will give donated equipment to qualifying entrants who apply using Acclinet’s Web site. The technology grants are only available to people and organizations not seeking profit.

Applicants will be required to provide details about what kind of equipment they’re seeking and how they would use it. Acclinet plans to announce the first technology grant recipient early this fall.

Acclinet is actively raising awareness about the technology grant program after struggling to find recipients in the past. “Believe it or not, it’s hard giving equipment away,” said Acclinet Vice President William Sweeney. The recipients will be picked by a committee that will review all the applicants. The technology grant program focuses on two groups.

The first group is university students and teachers who are learning or teaching UNIX and open-source technologies. “We are committed to furthering the UNIX and open-source communities through the programs we create and support,” Sweeney said. “One of our core focuses is the educational community, universities and their student populations who teach, learn and promote both the UNIX and open-source communities.”

The second qualifying group is nonprofit organizations dedicated to bettering the lives of children. Sweeney said Acclinet recognizes that many nonprofit organizations are struggling during the current economy. Organizations that rely on government funding and donations to stay afloat, he said, are understandably having to hold off on obtaining technology that would help them contribute to the greater good.

“With nonprofit organizations struggling to obtain needed funding in a challenging economic environment, Acclinet is committing substantial hardware and support resources to aid those organizations in furthering their projects and missions,” Sweeney said. “Giving back to the community is something we have been committed to since our inception.”

Available equipment in the donation pool includes entry-level Sun servers and Sun workstations such as Sun V210, Sun V240, Sun V440, Sun SB1500, Sun Blade 1500, Sun Blade 2000, Sun Blade 2500 and Sun Ultra 40, Sun Ultra 45 as well as enterprise-class solutions to qualifying organizations that include Sun Fire servers from E4800 to E15K.

Acclinet already has a history of donating computer equipment to organizations.

Acclinet recently donated computer equipment to the Southwest Health Technology Foundation’s Neurotherapy Center of Houston. The brain fitness clinic is using the equipment to help provide EEG biofeedback services – used to treat cognitive, emotional and behavioral disorders through self-regulation of brainwaves – to clients for affordable prices. Acclinet also donated equipment to Baylor College of Medicine’s Children’s Nutrition Center in Houston, Texas and to the public school system on Grand Turk Island, British West Indies.

Anyone interested in applying for the technology grants can learn more by visiting www.acclinet.com, calling (603) 529-4220 or mailing requests to Acclinet Corp., 425 South Stark Highway, Weare, NH 03281.

According to this Valleywag article, Monty Widenus (the founder of MySQL) has left Sun.

Update: this post says that he may not have actually resigned yet, but is considering it.

Sun announced that its Board of Directors has authorized the repurchase of up to $1 billion of the company’s outstanding common shares.

“The Board’s approval of the additional share repurchase program reflects its confidence in the continued growth of Sun’s business and an ongoing commitment to increase shareholder value,” said Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems. “With $3.3 billion in cash and marketable debt securities, we have maintained a strong balance sheet and feel confident that this program will allow us to further pursue strategic opportunities for growth.”

The stock repurchase authorization does not have an expiration date and the pace of repurchase activity will depend on factors such as levels of cash generation from operations, cash requirements for acquisitions, repayment of debt, current stock price, and other factors. Sun may repurchase shares from time to time on the open market or in private transactions, including structured transactions. The stock repurchase program may be modified or discontinued at any time.

The repurchase plan announced today is in addition to the $3 billion share repurchase program announced in Sun’s fourth quarter of fiscal 2007. There is currently $36 million remaining of the $3 billion prior share repurchase program.

Sun reported results on August 1st for its full fiscal year and fourth quarter ending June 30, 2008.

For the full fiscal year, Sun reported revenues of $13.880 billion, an increase of 0.1 percent over fiscal year 2007. Revenues for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008 were $3.780 billion, a decrease of 1.4 percent from $3.835 in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007. Total gross margin as a percent of revenues for the full fiscal year was 46.5 percent, an increase of 1.3 percentage points over fiscal year 2007. Gross margin for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008 was 44.3 percent, a decrease of 2.9 percentage points from the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007.

Net income on a GAAP basis for the full fiscal year was $403 million, or $0.49 per share on a diluted basis, as compared with net income of $473 million, or $0.52 per share on a diluted basis, for fiscal year 2007. Net income for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008 was $88 million, or $0.11 per share on a diluted basis, as compared with net income of $329 million, or $0.36 per share on a diluted basis, for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007.

Non-GAAP net income for the full fiscal year was $1.101 billion, or $1.34 per share on a diluted basis, as compared with non-GAAP net income of $1.003 billion, or $1.11 per share on a diluted basis, for fiscal year 2007. Non-GAAP net income for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008 was $275 million, or $0.35 per share on a diluted basis, as compared with non-GAAP net income of $458 million, or $0.50 per share on a diluted basis, for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007. Non-GAAP net income excludes purchased-in-process research and development, amortization of acquisition related intangibles, stock-based compensation, restructuring and related impairment of long-lived assets, net gain or loss on equity investments, settlement income and the tax effect of these non-GAAP adjustments.

Cash generated from operations for the full fiscal year was $1.3 billion, and the cash and marketable debt securities balance at the end of the year was approximately $3.3 billion.

Tom “Spot” Callaway has a Sun E10K that urgently needs a new home before it gets scrapped.

See this page for details.

James Birdsall, author of the Sun Hardware Reference, has posted a Tour of a Sun 2/120.

Sun has announced preliminary results for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2008, ending on June 30th.

Sun expects to report revenues for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008 in the range of $3.725 to $3.800 billion, as compared with $3.835 billion for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007. Total gross margin as a percent of revenues for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008 is expected to be in the range of 44 to 45 percent.

Sun anticipates reporting GAAP net income per diluted share for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008 in the range of $0.05 to $0.15. GAAP net income per diluted share includes a restructuring charge of approximately $100 million. On a non-GAAP basis, Sun expects to report net income per diluted share in the range of $0.25 to $0.35. Non-GAAP net income per diluted share excludes purchased in-process research and development, amortization of acquisition-related intangibles, stock-based compensation expense, restructuring charges and related impairment of long-lived assets, gain or loss on equity investments, settlement income and the related income tax effects of non-GAAP exclusions.

“In these difficult economic times, we continue to see customers across the world look to open software and hardware as a source of savings, and feel Sun is well positioned with our most robust line ever of server, storage, software and service offerings,” said Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems.

Sun and Fujitsu have announced new SPARC Enterprise systems, available with the new quad-core SPARC64 VII processor or the older dual-core SPARC64 VI chip.

The M4000 can have up to four quad-core processors and 128G of memory.

The M5000 can have up to eight quad-core processors and 256G of memory.

The M8000 can have up to sixteen quad-core processors and 512G of memory.

The M9000 can have up to sixty-four quad-core processors and 2T of memory.

Sun today released new Open Storage product offerings.

The Sun Fire X4540 second-generation “Thumper” server features dual quad-core Opteron processors, a maximum of 64G memory, and up to 48TB of storage in a 4U enclosure.

The Sun Fire X4240 has one or two AMD Opteron processors (2-8 processor cores), a maximum of 64G memory, and up to 2TB of storage in a 2U enclosure.

The Sun Fire X4140 has up to two AMD Opteron processors (2-8 processor cores), a maximum of 64G memory, and up to 1TB of storage in a 1U enclosure.

The Sun Fire X4150 has up to two Intel Xeon processors (2-8 processor cores), a maximum of 64G memory, and up to eight SAS drives in a 1U enclosure.

The Sun Storage J4200 Array is a SAS JBOD tray that holds from 146G to 36TB of storage (2-12 disks) in a 2U enclosure.

The Sun Storage J4400 Array is a SAS JBOD disk shelf that holds from 876G (in a single 12-disk 4U tray) to 192TB of storage (24 disks in two 4U trays).

The Sun Storage J4500 Array is a SAS JBOD disk shelf that holds from 24TB (in a single 48-disk 4U tray) to 192TB (4 trays in 16U)

Sun has announced that it will be offering flash-based Solid State Disks in most of its server products starting in the second half of 2008.

Per this mailing list post, OpenBSD now supports Fujitsu’s SPARC64-V processor in the PRIMEPOWER 250 and PRIMEPOWER 450 systems.

Sun has announced the release of new systems based on AMD’s quad-core Opteron processors.

The new systems are the dual-socket 1U Sun Fire X4140, the dual-socket 2U Sun Fire X4240, and the quad-socket 2U Sun Fire X4440.

For the past three years, Sun’s “OpenSolaris” has only been available as a set of files to be unpacked on top of an already-installed Solaris 10 system. The first official stand-alone OpenSolaris release, OpenSolaris 2008.05, is now available for download at http://www.opensolaris.com.

According to the OpenSolaris General FAQ, SPARC support is not in this release but is planned for later in 2008. A six-month release and update schedule is planned.

Sun also announced that OpenSolaris will be an operating system option on Amazon’s EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud.

Sun today announced results for the fiscal third quarter 2008, ending on March 30th.

“Revenues for the third quarter of fiscal 2008 were $3.266 billion, a decrease of 0.5 percent as compared with $3.283 billion for the third quarter of fiscal 2007. Total gross margin as a percent of revenues was 44.9, an increase of 0.4 percentage points, as compared with the third quarter of fiscal 2007.

Net loss for the third quarter of fiscal 2008 on a GAAP basis was $34 million, or ($0.04) per share, as compared with net income of $67 million, or $0.07 per share, for the third quarter of fiscal 2007. In the third quarter of fiscal 2008, the company recorded a $52 million dollar tax provision, as compared to a tax benefit of $3 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2007. Net loss for the third quarter included charges related to the acquisition of MySQL, which reduced earnings per share by approximately $0.04.

Cash generated from operations for the third quarter of fiscal 2008 was $329 million, and the cash and marketable debt securities balance at the end of the quarter was $3.801 billion. During the third quarter, Sun continued to leverage its cash position, spending $300 million to repurchase 17.5 million shares of its common stock. There is currently $500 million remaining of the $3 billion share repurchase program announced in the company’s fiscal fourth quarter of 2007.“

According to this article from News.com, Sun has purchased a start-up named Montalvo. The acquired company is known for developing low-power, multiple core chip for portable computers. Additionally, the chip is compatible with current software developed for Intel and AMD processors.