Guild Companies

Since the beginning of 2003, Sun Microsystems has committed to making major server and software announcements only once a quarter to simplify its product launches and save money. But Sun needs to move fast in the entry server market with its Solaris for X86 and Linux products, and it can't wait until the third quarter to do it. That's why Sun has just rolled out two new Intel-based servers and new alliances with Oracle and Red Hat.

The new servers are all part of Sun's admission that it had not truly understood the Intel-based server market and how strongly many companies support the Intel platform because of the wide variety of operating system platforms and applications it supports. Sun's chairman and CEO, Scott McNealy, was contrite at the announcement in San Francisco the other day. "Maybe we got a little over-enthusiastic about 64-bit Sparc," he said. "But post-bubble [referring to the popping of the dot-com bubble in 2000], we understand that TCO means taking cost out. We didn't jump on the 32-bit bandwagon early, but we have jumped on now in a big way. We didn't deliver on the promise of Solaris X86 over the past four or five years," he said, adding that Sun was the only established Unix vendor that was not abandoning its installed base for Linux or Windows and that it was in fact "doubling down" its support for Solaris as it started to better promote and support Solaris X86 this year as an alternative to Linux and Windows on Intel iron. "We're more committed to Unix and Linux," McNealy said. "IBM and HP are doing Windows. We're doing Unix and Linux on X86. Look at the reality, not the press releases." He said that Sun was pulling about $1 billion in server, operating system, and support sales from small- and mid-sized businesses, and that the new Sun X86 machines would help the company expand its sales in that sector.

The Sun Fire V60x and Sun Fire V65x servers are both two-way machines that use Intel's "Prestonia" Pentium 4 Xeon DP processors. They compete directly against machines sold by server rivals IBM, HP, and Dell. Mark Tolliver, Sun's executive vice president of marketing and strategy, said the Sun Fire V60x was 25 percent less costly than similarly configured machines from IBM and HP, and said that while Dell didn't have such a machine available yet using the Pentium 4 Xeon DP, the V60x is priced lower than Dell machines of roughly the same power class.

The Sun Fire V60x supports 2.8 GHz or 3.06 GHz Xeon DPs with the 533 MHz front side bus. It comes in a 1U, rack-mountable chassis that has room for three 36 GB or 73 GB disk drives. The Sun Fire V60x supports up to 6 GB of main memory., and has two PCI-X slots and dual integrated Gigabit Ethernet NICs. A base configuration of the Sun Fire V60x with a single 2.8 GHz Xeon DP, 512 MB of main memory, a 36 GB disk, and a Red Hat Linux or Solaris X86 operating system costs $2,450. A larger configuration with two processors and 1 GB of main memory costs $3,395.

The Sun Fire V65x is a very similar machine, except that it supports up to 12 GB of main memory and supports up to six disk drives. The Sun Fire V65x also has six PCI-X slots on two separate PCI-X buses and redundant power supplies. This machine occupies 2Us of space in a rack, and supports Linux or Solaris X86. In a base configuration with a single 2.8 GHz processor, 512 MB of main memory, and 36 GB of disk, the Sun Fire V65x costs $2,650. With two processors and 1 GB of memory, the machine costs $4,595.

As part of the announcements, Sun has agreed to support the entire line of Oracle databases and applications on its complete server line. Up until now, Sun focused on Oracle products for its Sparc/Solaris platforms, but it is now committed to supporting Oracle's software on X86/Solaris and X86/Linux platforms, too. In exchange for that commitment, Oracle agreed to support Sun's X86 platforms in its own data centers and to push them into customer accounts. The deal with Red Hat allows Sun to sell and install Red Hat's Linux on its workstations and servers. In exchange, Red Hat agreed to put Sun's implementation of the Java Virtual Machine in all of its Linux distributions. Sun expects to start selling Red Hat Linux this summer.