When Unix specialist Sun Microsystems announced four new Sun Fire mid-range servers in New York last week, improvements in availability and performance made this one of the most significant events in the firm's 19-year history.
IT Week took the opportunity to ask Sun's top executives to explain the firm's current products and strategies. After all, it was a rare occasion to find so many of the company's key thinkers gathered together.
It is worth remembering that about 10 years ago Sun sold Unix workstations, and did not make server systems at all. Now the company is the worldwide number-one vendor of Unix servers. Adding figures for other operating systems, Sun is the number-one vendor of server systems in the US, and number two worldwide. This is based on recent data, which does not include figures for Cobalt, a supplier of Linux appliances acquired by Sun in December. The new servers announced last week should also boost Sun's sales.
Sun has achieved all this while maintaining binary compatibility across all its products. Had Microsoft adopted a similar strategy, users of Windows systems might have saved on management costs.
Steven MacKay, a Sun vice president and chief architect, contrasted Sun's binary compatibility with its competitors. "If you talk to IBM you'll get a lot of different architectural choices Ã, for example, mainframe, Intel, Risc, and even more operating systems. There is much the same problem with Hewlett-Packard and Compaq."
Sun believes that its customers can save money by using only one architecture Ã, Sparc and Solaris. MacKay said, "A customer might run a large Oracle instance for its product database on the back end, and smaller Oracle databases at the front end. With the Sparc/Solaris combination, no additional skills are needed. If a three-tier model of front, middle and back-end servers is used, different technologies are not required Ã, just different implementations. We have an architecture that spans systems costing from US$1,000 to $10m." He added that Sun also offers some commonality of hardware components. For example, 90 percent of the components from the new Sun Fire systems are common across the range.
Sun's official line is that it does not consider Microsoft and Intel as competitors. However, Scott McNealy, Sun's chairman and chief executive, gave a different impression: "Show me an NT system that does anything like ours. Let's start with 64bit Ã, show me a 64bit Intel system. They like maths on Wall Street, so 64bit is key. If you eat right and live a healthy lifestyle, you might actually see a 64bit Intel computer one day."
Shahin Khan, vice president of product marketing at Sun, also emphasised 64bit technology. "Sun is currently shipping its third-generation 64bit processor. Solaris has eight years of history using 64-way SMP [symmetric multiprocessing] environments. With these new servers we have launched our fourth-generation partitioning technology Ã, we call partitions domains. The news with our fourth generation is that each domain is completely isolated from the others. Nothing from one domain can influence anything from another. There are no other Unix systems that can do anything like this," he said.
MacKay added that Sun has been supporting separate domains in its 64-way Enterprise 10000 server for some time. "It turns out that there are not many applications that need a 64-way server, so domains have become the number-one selling point for the Enterprise 10000," he said. Domains allow a single system to be sliced up into eight or more separate server environments. "The main use is to enable server consolidation, and to test new applications or updates to operating system software. Domains allow this to be done on the production server, without interfering with the online system," said MacKay.
