Guild Companies

According to reports in Network World magazine, Sun Microsystems is getting ready to launch its new Cobalt line of Intel-based Linux servers at the LinuxWorld conference. Rumor has it that the new Cobalt LX50s will be announced on August 13, when Sun chairman and CEO Scott McNealy does the opening keynote for the show. The announcement of the machines, which are code-named "Big Bear," will fulfill promises that Sun made back in March about making generic Lintel servers.

Sun got into the Lintel server market in September 2000 when it acquired Cobalt Networks, a maker of Linux-based appliance servers that use various X86 processors, for $2 billion in stock. This is when both Sun's and Cobalt's stock was riding high before the dot-com bubble finally burst, and at the time Sun paid a $1 billion premium over Cobalt's market capitalization to get ahold of a Lintel appliance vendor that had about $75 million in sales for 2000 and which now ships about 100,000 servers a year. That seriously--some might say ridiculously--hefty premium only showed how much Sun wanted Cobalt's appliance and X86 processor expertise, its 5,000-customer installed base, and those 100,000 shipments a year so it could still claim to be the volume leader in the Unix/Linux server market in general and in the entry server market in particular.

Last March, as pundits and analysts were pondering out loud in the press about what Sun should and should not do with Cobalt and how the very existence of Cobalt inside Sun threw cold water on Sun's mantra that Sparc servers running its Solaris Unix were all that companies needed, Sun's top brass came out and tried to clarify what its Cobalt strategy would be and how future Lintel products would relate to its Sparc/Solaris machines, which compete against Lintel boxes, or even Sparc/Intel servers, which Sun is not really endorsing although Solaris 8 does run on Pentium III servers. Sun's customers are asking for generic Lintel servers running on X86 processors, and that is what Sun is going to give them.

The forthcoming Cobalt LX50s, according to the Network World report, will be based on a dual-processor motherboard using Intel 1.4GHz Pentium III processors. The chipset and other specifications of the machine are not known, but the machine will reportedly have two 72 GB disk drives. All of the Cobalt machines have Sun's own distribution of the open source Linux operating system, which is tweaked with various system management and security programs and which is also fitted with an integrated stack of open source software for print, file, Web, e-mail, and database serving. Sun's Cobalt Linux is at the 2.2 kernel level with the exception of one machine, which supports the Linux 2.4 kernel. It stands to reason that Sun will move all of the Cobalt machines to the more modern Linux 2.4 kernel in short order. How much middleware it puts on the generic Cobalt machines remains to be seen. Odds are the real Cobalt appliances will have all this stuff integrated, and the generic ones will have it available but not preconfigured. The generic Cobalt machines will probably come with support for Sun's Grid Engine grid clustering software as well.

The Big Bear servers will be Sun's third Intel-based server. The RaQ 550 servers announced in mid-May use the ServerSet SE-III chipset from ServerWorks and support 1GHz or 1.26GHz Pentium III processors and from 256 MB to 2 GB of main memory. This RaQ 550 server supports two 40 GB or 80 GB disks with an integrated RAID 1 controller; it has dual Ethernet links as well. The RaQ 550 is the one Cobalt box that supports the Linux 2.4 kernel, by the way. A prior Cobalt machine used an Intel chip as well, but Sun won't say which one. The remainder of the Cobalt machines used clone X86 processors.

Sun has promised to deliver uniprocessor and two-way generic Linux servers, and if Big Bear is the two-way server, then presumably Little Bear will be the uniprocessor. The Little Bear server, if that is indeed what the uniprocessor machine is called internally, will probably look a lot like the RaQ 550 from a hardware perspective.