Sun was founded Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Bill Joy in 1982. Sun went public in 1986 and was raking in $1 billion in annual sales by 1988.

Two companies offering third-party support for Oracle's open-source MySQL database, as well as the MySQL offshoot MariaDB, have announced plans to merge.

n this installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, Arista Networks CEO Jayshree Ullal spoke with Chief Content Officer John Gallant about the reality and hype around SDN, and why the data center requires a different network than your father's general-purpose Cisco net. She also explored how her work at Cisco shaped Arista's strategy, and shared insights on how Arista's partnerships with VMware and Cloudera are making it easier to move to cloud and embrace big data, respectively.

Oracle may have had its hands full lately dealing with Java security issues, but the company's acquisition of Java founder Sun Microsystems three years ago this month still has paid off, company President Mark Hurd said. An investment research firm, though, still has listed Oracle's Sun acquisition as reason to sell off Oracle stock.

Oracle's head of Java security is promising the vendor will "fix" issues with the widely used programming language, as well as improve its outreach efforts to community members, following a spate of high-profile vulnerabilities.

Uptime, response time, mean time between failures - the history of IT is full of metrics improved by reducing risk, making sure nothing interferes with operations and productivity.