Sun Microsystems has recently announced that a massive restructuring is underway and that the company will have to lay off 6,000 of its employees. The firm is still dealing with previous layoffs from May this year and it reckons it can save itself some $700 million to $800 million a year by causing long term queues in Santa Clara unemployment offices, but, unfortunately, the move will also cost $600 million in charges over the next year.

Things have been going bad for Sun lately, after the company recently revealed that it had a $1.67 billion loss in the last quarter. This comes as Sun’s big Wall Street buyers in the financial service industry are not buying quite as many high-end server and storage systems as Sun would like.

The Tennessee investment firm which recently bought 21 percent of Sun, Southeastern Asset Management, keeps its confidence in Sun, after seeing the financial results, but it still wants to talk about improving the stock value of the company. Sun has already made a few changes aimed at getting itself back on track. After eight years of devastating financial problems and multiple attempt at restructuring, Sun’s latest woes have ramped up speculation that one of the most storied names in computing could be snapped up dirt-cheap by a bigger rival, such as HP, IBM or Dell.

Upsetting for Sun, its software chief, Rich Green, has resigned, as the company splits its software division into three new business groups. One of them will handle Sun’s Java programming language and open-source database offerings, another will deal with Sun’s Solaris operating system, used in the server technology and the third will focus on developing programs for “cloud computing” services delivered over the Internet.