Weta Digital, the New Zealand-based special effects company behind such memorable movie magic as Avatar, Lord of the Rings, and King Kong -- uses Sun's MySQL Enterprise database subscription to help power its operations.

More information on Weta's data center is available here:  http://bit.ly/83Ua1t

[Avatar image is courtesy of the Official Avatar Movie Photostream on Flickr.  Oh, and Flickr uses MySQL too:  http://bit.ly/7t83PJ]

• Delivers up to 23 percent better performance than previous generation

• Consolidates multiple entry-level servers into a compact 2U chassis
• Improves the ratio of energy consumption to application throughput by up to 13 percent (compared to previous generation), helping customers further reduce their environmental footprint

Our VirtualBox team got some very exciting news this week - InfoWorld named Sun VirtualBox 3.1 on their "2010 Technology of the Year" list.

The VirtualBox listing is here (on page 3 of the article).

When I spoke with Andy Hall (senior product manager for VirtualBox) about the award yesterday, he was most impressed by the inclusion of VirtualBox among the other technologies on the list. You can see his blog post here.

Congratulations to the VirtualBox team!

The Sun Identity Management team has just posted a new customer success story.

Express Scripts, a Fortune 500 pharmacy benefits management company, is using Sun's Identity Management Portfolio for a centralized identity management solution that automates provisioning for more than 100 systems based on an employee’s job function or operational role. The solution has accelerated provisioning by up to 64% and created a centralized identity directory that maps multiple corporate identities across disparate systems that are each associated with a single employee.

"With Sun Identity Manager and Sun Role Manager, we have significantly improved our operational efficiency and cut costs. We have reduced provisioning from about 14 days down to 5 days. In addition, there are about 1,000 fewer help desk calls per month."
— Matthew Modica, Senior Manager of IT Security, Express Scripts   

You can also read more identity customer success stories here.

Today, Sun is announcing the immediate availability of GlassFish ESB 2.2.

In case you're not familiar with this product, GlassFish ESB provides a lightweight, modular architecture that enables agile SOA-based service development, deployment and testing.

The Healthcare Pack extends the functionality and features of GlassFish ESB to healthcare organizations who are focusing on  improving the exchange of electronic health care information. It includes the HL7 Binding Component, Sun Master Index, and support for PIX/PDQ profile.

The Platinum Pack extends the base ESB with some additional components including the Worklist Manager Service Engine, the COBOL Copybook Encoder, the BPEL Monitor and a new Event Management API on top of existing Intelligent Event Processor SE.

All in all, some great capabilities have been added to an already outstanding integration/SOA platform. 

Interested in more info? You can download the bits, see more on sun.com, visit the community, view a demo to explore core features of GlassFish ESB or attend a training course.

On the customer front -- Sun will design a SOA solution architecture based on Sun's Java(TM) Composite Application Platform Suite (CAPS) and provide expert implementation services for TechniScan, Inc., a medical device company engaged in the development and commercialization of an automated breast ultrasound imaging system. Using Sun's Java CAPS, TechniScan should be able to bring its SVARA Ultrasound technology to market faster – potentially improving the way breast cancer is diagnosed and treated.

Here's a link to the release: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2010-01/sunflash.20100106.1.xml

For more information on Sun Java CAPS, go to http://www.sun.com/software/javaenterprisesystem/javacaps/index.jsp.

Over on Daniel's blog he's put up a post with replay information for some recent multimedia segments on OpenSSO.

As you may recall Sun announced OpenSSO Express 9 earlier this month and one of the key features of the release is a new fine-grained authorization capability.

For the latest edition of the Identity Buzz Podcast, Daniel and Jamie Nelson (director of engineering for OpenSSO) sat down with  Redmonk analyst, Coté to talk about fine-grained authorization and the latest release of OpenSSO Express (apparently punk rock kittens were also discussed). You can listen here.

Daniel and Jamie also conducted a webinar, which highlights fine-grained authorization, as well as other features of the product.

The Call-for-Papers is out now for next year's MySQL Conference & Expo.  The submission deadline is January 27, 2010.

Presented by O'Reilly Media, the show will be held April 12-15, 2010 in Santa Clara, California.  Sun Microsystems is a founding sponsor.  More info at http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2010/

• Java EE: The Foundation for Your Business
  
• Java EE 6: An Overview
  
• GlassFish v3 - Java EE 6 Reference Implementation & Beyond
  
• Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 3.1 Features
  
• Jersey, JAX-RS and REST with GlassFish v3
  
• Java Servlet 3.0
  
• Java Persistence API (JPA) 2.0
  
• Java Server Faces (JSF) 2.0
  
• Web Services in GlassFish
  
• Context Dependency and Injection (JSR 299)
  
• OSGi in GlassFish v3
  
• Dynamic Languages with GlassFish v3
  
• Tools for GlassFish v3: NetBeans and Eclipse
  
• Grizzly: NIO & Web Framework. Comet using GlassFish
  
• Monitoring, Management in GlassFish v3
  
• Java EE Connector Architecture 1.6

• OpenSolaris VPC Gateway: Provides customers with greater choice and flexibility when connecting their systems to the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. The OpenSolaris VPC Gateway software enables customers to quickly and easily create a redundant, secure communications channel to a Virtual Private Cloud without the need for proprietary networking equipment.
• Immutable Service Containers (ISC): Delivers architectural patterns with associated deployment strategies that collectively define a highly secure foundation for service delivery. Incorporating many of the security features of the OpenSolaris Operating System, including Solaris ZFS, Solaris Containers, and Solaris IP Filter and Auditing, the ISC architecture leverages service compartmentalization and improved integration techniques to create virtual machines with significantly improved security protection and monitoring capabilities. 
• Security Enhanced Virtual Machine Images (VMIs): Using many of the techniques developed for the Immutable Service Container project, Sun created several security-enhanced VMIs for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). These virtual machines leverage industry accepted recommended practices including non-executable stacks, encrypted swap and auditing enabled by default. Beyond simple OpenSolaris images, Sun has also published integrated software stacks such as Solaris AMP and Drupal built on these security-enhanced images. 
• Cloud Safety Box: Simplifies managing encrypted content in the Cloud. Using a simple Amazon S3-like interface, the Cloud Safety Box automates the compression, encryption and splitting of content being stored in the cloud on any supported operating system including Solaris, OpenSolaris, Linux and Mac OS X. 

 The MySQL database has a new "milestone" release model -- and new software for the Community to download and try out: 

MySQL 5.5.0-m2

Check out Kaj Arnö's description of the new model and this version's features in his blog here.

 Downloads are available here.

GlassFish Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a lightweight and agile integration platform for service oriented composite application development. Sun's ESB experts have just released an in-depth 42 page whitepaper titled “GlassFish Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) - High Availability and Clustering”

This whitepaper goes beyond just describing how to implement an ESB in a development environment. Instead it covers how to move the ESB into mission-critical, high volume production and provides insight from experts who have successfully delivered real-world, high performance middleware infrastructures.

First, the whitepaper gives an analysis of the key criteria needed to architect a highly available GlassFish ESB solution. Topics include: defining acceptable levels of downtime, degrees of allowable latency, divisions between semi-static and time-critical data and options for recovery. All of these requirements must be considered together to arrive at a solution. In addition, the whitepaper  provides an examination of architecture and implementation considerations, which could affect not only the initial implementation, but future iterations as well.

Following this initial analysis, the whitepaper details a reference architecture for a typical deployment solution. The solution is based on a real-world scenario for a Web-based application to manage a customer’s business processes. The solution needs to accept requests via Web services-based interfaces, manage corresponding business processes, handle faults correct, integrate with existing backend systems and requires asynchronous message correlation.

Expand your knowledge by diving-in to the GlassFish ESB - High Availability and Clustering whitepaper now!

While yesterday was all about Enterprise Java, today, I'd like to announce that Sun has released a new version of the Java Store and Java Warehouse.

This release includes a number of new features such as: account creation in the client, the ability for developers outside of the US to preview applications using the Java Store view, improved integration with PayPal and numerous smaller features, performance enhancements and bug fixes.

We are also opening up the Java Warehouse to 6 new countries:
 - Israel
 - Belgium
 - Germany
 - Poland
 -Taiwan
 -S. Korea

The Java Warehouse is now open in 14 countries.

For more details on the latest release, check out the new 5 minute introductory video.

Terrence also has a good post on the new release over on his blog - highlighting some new applications that are available. And over on the Sun Developer Network, you can watch a 3-part Deep Dive video on the Java Store and Java Warehouse, featuring Bernard Traversat, director of engineering.

Oriental Insurance Corporation Limited (OICL) has launched its new web portal based on Sun's Java CAPS, MySQL and Portal Server products.

Based in India, OICL wanted to integrate its 26 regional offices and more than 900 operating offices across the country with a unified portal that catered to its customers and agents.

Because their legacy application infrastructure core did not support web services, OICL is using Sun software infrastructure technologies to create a web services layer to expose their core insurance services and SOA enable their application infrastructure.

OICL's new web portal facilitates transactions and claims management for 8,000 customers, agents and third party agencies by providing secure Web-based access to legacy insurance applications. In addition, OICL uses Sun SPARC based Solaris systems to run all of the software from end-to-end.

It's great to see the ongoing momentum and support that open source software is finding by United States government. The White House recently announced its Open Government Directive - an initiative requiring each federal agency to make high value data publicly available and to also quickly come up with formal open government plans. Click here for the announcement on the White House blog and also be sure to check out a statement from Open Source for America!

There's a new Identity Buzz Podcast available now.

In this episode, Daniel discusses the Sun OpenSSO Enterprise / Layer 7 SecureSpan Gateway integration with K. Scott Morrison, Layer 7 CTO & chief architect.

The Sun Developer Network also has a good article on the Sun/Layer 7 integration - Delegating XML Gateway Runtime Authorization to OpenSSO.

For the latest & greatest Sun Identity Buzz you should subscribe to the feed to get episodes automatically. Here’s the iTunes link and the Feedburner feed. 

Today, Sun is announcing a new version of Java Enterprise System - Release 7 (Java ES R7) and a updated release of GlassFish Portfolio. The new Java ES R7 and GlassFish Portfolio releases include updates to the individual software components and some notable new features. Over on Ed Conzel's blog, he lists out the details on what's new in the Java ES R7 and GlassFish Portfolio releases.

Java Enterprise System – Release 7
Java ES is a comprehensive set of subscription-based services that combines software, support, professional services, and educational services into a single package with a simplified price. All products within Java ES are coordinated during development and released along identical time lines. Java ES is comprised of several Java System Suites, which allows customers to purchase components based on their business requirements. And then, as business needs change, they can easily add additional Suites.

• Sun Java Enterprise System Base

• Sun GlassFish Portfolio

• Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS)

• Sun Java Identity Management Suite

What's particularly helpful about Java ES is that all the software components are rigorously tested to ensure interoperability and reliability. So that way, you know which version of GlassFish Enterprise Server works with NetBeans and OpenSSO Enterprise and Directory Server Enterprise Edition and so on...

GlassFish Portfolio
Sun GlassFish Portfolio, the most complete open-source Web application platform, offers enterprise-class features and support, best-in-class performance, and flexible subscription-based pricing for enterprises of all levels.

Built on leading open source projects including: Apache Tomcat, Ruby, PHP, Liferay Portal and GlassFish, the Sun GlassFish Portfolio packages these components into a complete, pre-integrated and fully-tested open source platform, resulting in increased productivity and faster time to market.

In October and November, members of our sales, marketing and engineering teams combined forces for a "road show" highlighting some of Sun's open standards-based software products, including GlassFish Portfolio, JavaFX and MySQL.

If you didn't get a chance to attend in person, I've got good news for you - the team has just launched a website that contains all the presentations from the event plus product whitepapers, customer case studies, ROI calculator, videos, interactive tours and galleries.

It's a great resource for people to learn more about the features and benefits of the products, as well as how Sun's software solutions can reduce your application costs by up to 90% while significantly improving your price/performance.

Sun will be demonstrating the major new enhancements of the upcoming release of Sun's GlassFish Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) 2.2 at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration (AADI) Summit in Las Vegas December 7-9 2009.

GlassFish ESB is a lightweight, modular architecture that enables agile SOA-based service development, deployment, and testing. Product experts will be available at the Sun booth to highlight the new features including a new Healthcare Pack, RESTful Web services support, BPEL monitoring console, POJO service engine, a worklist manager, email binding component, COBOL copybook encoder, and more.

Stay tuned for upcoming details on these new features coming in GlassFish ESB 2.2, scheduled to be released on December 22 ...just in time for the holidays. (Which my team tells me would also make a perfect holiday gift)

If you are attending the Gartner AADI event at Caesars Palace, stop by Booth F to meet the Sun ESB team & get a sneak preview of GlassFish ESB 2.2. You can also enter the raffle for a chance to win a Flip Mino HD.