Guild Companies

Sun Microsystems, having seen the light and swallowed a lot of pride, is committed to keeping its new V60x and V65x Intel-based servers in line with offerings from Dell, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. That's why Sun has added faster processors to the machines and cut prices on the boxes.

The Sun Fire V60x and Sun Fire V65x servers, which are both two-way machines that use Intel's "Prestonia" Pentium 4 Xeon DP processors, were announced at the end of May.

The Sun Fire V60x supported 2.8 GHz Xeon DPs with the 533MHz front side bus when it was announced back in May. 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 cost $2,450. On August 19, Sun debuted a version of this machine supporting the faster 3.06 GHz Prestonia processors.

With the Sun Fire V65x, which is a larger 2U server that supports up to two Prestonia chips, Sun is cutting the price of the box a smidgen and rolling out faster processors. The Sun Fire V65x supports up to 12 GB of main memory and up to six disk drives; it has six PCI-X slots on two separate PCI-X buses and redundant power supplies. In May, a base configuration with a single 2.8 GHz processor, 512 MB of main memory, and 36 GB of disk, cost $2,650. That machine's price has been cut to $2,550 this week. A version of the machine with two 3.06 GHz Xeon DP processors and 1 GB of memory costs $4,595 back in May, but will now sell for $3,995.

As Linux is increasingly popular in commercial sites as an alternative to any of the various flavors of Unix, as clustering of smaller machines has become feasible because of improved middleware, and as customers have started moving away from big Unix boxes--these are three related but separate trends--Sun has had to shift its position on X86 machines and concentrate on peddling both Solaris and Linux on a whole new server line. Sun has also had to cut prices to the bone on its V100 and V120 lines of UltraSparc machines, and is trying to ramp up sales on the more powerful V210 and V240 "Enchilada" servers, which use the new UltraSparc-IIIi processor.

Laura Finkelstein, group marketing manager for Sun's low-end servers, says that Sun has rolled out 18 new entry server products in the past 20 months to attack this market, and says that Sun is definitely seeing a shift away from high-end machines and towards machines in the entry class. While companies have always used such entry machines for tier one jobs such as Web, print, or file serving, the big action these days is using these machines--sometimes in clusters--in the second tier where applications reside on the network. Only a few years ago, she says, customers would have opted for a more traditional and more expensive Unix midrange box to do the same work. "Some customers are replacing high-end systems with multiple low-end systems," she confirms. The idea here is that people are not using these so-called entry machines just in tier one. They are doing mission-critical work now, too.

The question is, of course, how much of Sun's new business for the entry X86 and Sparc servers is coming from its existing base and how much is coming from new customers. As you might imagine, Sun is not inclined to be specific in answering that question, but Finklestein says that more than 50 percent of the growth that Sun is seeing in the entry server market is coming from within its existing customer base. This implies that Sun is eating its own lunch before Dell, IBM, and HP does even as it is extending into new channels to try to eat some of those companies' lunches. Finkelstein also said that even with the delays in shipping the V210 and V240 servers last quarter (which was due to an issue with a third party supplier's parts), the sales demand for these entry machines (including the V60x and V65x) was more than 50 percent above the supply that Sun could deliver. Finkelstein said that Sun has sold entry machines against the competition into Land Rover, General Dynamics, Southwest Airlines, Best Buy, and a slew of universities in the past quarter.