Sun Offers Trade-Ins to Spur Sparc Enterprise Server Sales

Published: July 24, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For some IT shops, just having the latest iron and the performance and price/performance advantages that they embody is sufficient cause to get out the checkbook and start getting a new system or an upgrade to an existing one. But other IT shops need a little more motivation to make the jump.

That's why Sun Microsystems is offering upgrade initiatives in the wake of the announcement last week of the quad-core Sparc64 VII processors and the upgraded Sparc Enterprise servers that Sun rebrands from partner Fujitsu-Siemens as a replacement (if you want to be mean) or an alternative (which it is for certain customers) to Sun's own UltraSparc-IV+ dual-core servers, which are known as the Sun Fire line.

Specifically, as you can see from this upgrade page and trade-in calculator that Sun put out, Sun is offering a double trade-in value promotion for customers who move from legacy Sun servers as well as from selected competitive boxes made and sold by its rivals if they upgrade to Sparc Enterprise M-class servers. The trade-in promotion can shave as much as 20 percent off the cost of the "upgrade" to the Sparc Enterprise M machine, and Sun is clearly using the term upgrade loosely because you can't upgrade across vendor product lines. Within the Sun lineup, upgrades from Sun Enterprise E4500, E5500, E6500, E10000 servers (which are based on UltraSparc-III processors) and Sun Fire 3800, 4800, F6800, F12K, F15K (which are based on UltraSparc-IV chips), and Sun Fire E6900, E20K and E25K systems (which are based on the UltraSparc-IV+ chips) are eligible for double promotion up to 20 percent. This deal expires on September 30, which is the end of Sun's first fiscal quarter.

As an example deal, which has to be something of a dream customer for the Sun-Fujitsu-Siemens partnership, Sun says that a customers trading in a Sun Fire 15K and a Fujitsu PrimePower 1500 server onto a single Sparc Enterprise 9000 M server will require a net investment of $633,000 and has a return on investment of 195 percent compared to maintaining the boxes separately; Sun also says that delaying the acquisition by three months will actually cost the hypothetical customer $31,000. On this six year deal, the two boxes have 48 processor cores each, and Sun moves them to an M9000 with 24 quad-core processors. The machine has a list price of $1.52 million, and the trade-in allowance comes to 15 percent, which works out to $227,366. So the net price of the upgrade is $1.29 million.

I happen to think, given Sun's financial situation, the discounts are probably a lot better than 15 percent out there, particularly if a Solaris shop is smart enough to bring IBM and Hewlett-Packard in on the deal.

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