Sun Puts JES Release 3 Middleware Out and Through the Paces

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sun Microsystems has begun shipments of its Java Enterprise System Release 3 middleware stack, fulfilling its promise back in February to deliver an upgraded software stack. With Release 3, Sun is now supporting Windows 2000, Windows XP, HP-UX, and Solaris 10 servers (on both Sparc and X86 platforms) with the stack in addition to the Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 and Linux support that Release 2 had.

JES is an amalgam of homegrown Sun and acquired Netscape server software, including Web servers, identity managers, J2EE application servers, and other middleware. The JES software is not sold based on the number of seats accessing the code or the number of servers or processors on which the various elements of the code run, but on the number of full-time employees at the company--with no restrictions on their usage. For the past year, Sun has been selling the JES suite for $100 per employee per year, and in developing countries, Sun shaved the price down to $50 per employee per year. In February, Sun created special sub-suites, which are called Java Enterprise System Suites, to create tailored middleware stacks for niche markets with A $50 per employee per year price tag, and then raised the price of the full JES packaging to $140 per employee per year while at the same time rolling in its Java Studio Enterprise compilers and Studio Creator IDE and adding new functionality, such as the new Java Application Server 8.1 Web application server.

According to Ken Drachnik, group product manager for application integration products at Sun, that key new feature in the JES suite is the enterprise edition of the Java Application Server. The prior two releases had a platform edition and a standard edition. The platform edition is the basic app server support Java Enterprise Edition 1.4 and it is aimed at developers; the standard edition adds security and multi-user and multi-instance capabilities. The enterprise edition adds high availability features for enterprise-class Java applications, such as clustering and failover plus performance optimization for large Java workloads. All of these variants of the application server are based on the Java Application Server 8.1 code base.

Sun is quite pleased with the bang for the buck it claims it can deliver with Java Application Server 8.1, and announced this week that it was the second vendor to publish a test result for the new SPEC jAppServer2004 test. IBM has tested four different setups on the jAppServer2004 test, and its best performance was on a five-node cluster of four-way xSeries 365 servers using 3 GHz Xeon MP processors running SUSE 9, which was able to process 1,344 Java operations per second (JOPS) running IBM's own WebSphere V6.0 application server. While Sun's only result on the test is for a cluster of 13 two-way Sun Fire V20z Opteron machines (using the 2.2 GHz Opteron 248s) topped out at 1,201 JOPS on top of Solaris 10 for X86, Drachnik says this is roughly 90 percent of the performance of the fastest IBM setup, but Sun's said that its setup had a total cost of ownership that is only a third of IBM's WebSphere. Specifically, Sun says that the Sun setup (including hardware, software, and support) cost $164 per JOPS, compared to $504 per JOPS for the IBM setup. SPEC does not include the pricing information, nor does it audit them, so we have to trust Sun's math on that comparison.

There are a few things that the new JES does not yet support. One of them is the Windows Server 2003 operating system. Another one is Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 or 9. (The software is supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 Update 2 as well as RHEL 3 Update 1. No support for the new RHEL 4 as yet, but with Sun clearly gunning for Red Hat as one of its main adversaries, it would like to get a toe-hold in middleware in Red Hat shops and then try to flip the operating systems. And yet another missing platform is IBM's AIX Unix variant. Sun's president, Jonathan Schwartz, has chastised IBM for not supporting JES, but it seems very unlikely IBM will change its mind. The only way this might happen is if IBM's customers started asking for it or if Sun took the whole JES stack open source and the community did a port to AIX and Power platforms. These both seem like remote possibilities. Support for IBM's OS/400 operating system for its iSeries line seems even more remote.