Sun technology targets low-end server market

Computerworld - Sun Microsystems Inc. today announced a slew of hardware and software products aimed at lowering technology ownership costs and reducing complexity for users. The mass rollout also heralds a fresh assault by Sun on the low end of the server market.

The products are coming from several different business units at Sun and include a line of blade servers based on a mix of Intel Corp.'s chips and Sun's own UltraSPARC processors. Sun officials last week said the company will also unveil blade server virtualization software, a 12-processor midrange system and CPU upgrades for its high-end servers.

The agenda also includes price cuts that will reduce the cost of some high-end systems by as much as 35% and the addition of services aimed at helping users implement Sun's new N1 data center resource-optimization technologies.

On the Offensive

The laundry list of announcements comes at a time when Sun, like its major server rivals, is trying to jump-start a business that has been slowed by the sluggish economy.

"They're trying to find new spots where they can make a few bucks while doing what they need to do to push their existing products out the door," said Charles King, an analyst at The Sageza Group Inc. in Mountain View, Calif.

Andy Ingram, a marketing vice president at Sun, said the product launch is designed to show that the company can deliver on the N1 vision with technology that reduces costs, complexity and the time it takes to get a return on investment. Sun also wants to signal that it "is committed to competing in the low-end market really aggressively," he added.

The Sun Fire B1600 Blade Platform technology will lead Sun's charge at the low end. Although Sun is behind its top rivals in shipping blade servers, the B1600 devices offer enough differentiation to attract attention from users, said James Garden, an analyst at Technology Business Research Inc. in Hampton, N.H.

Sun is the first vendor to let users put blade devices based on different processors in the same chassis, Garden said. The new servers also are the first hardware offered by Sun with support for N1 virtualization software that's designed to let IT managers quickly configure blade server farms.

Later this year, Sun said it will add specialized blade servers for IT security and content load-balancing uses.

Such capabilities should address some of the scaling and IT resource-utilization challenges users face when dealing with Web-based applications, said Craig Richardson, assistant vice president of hosting at Telus Corp.'s Business Solutions unit in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Telus is Canada's second-largest telecommunications company and one of Sun's biggest customers in that country. Richardson said the new blade servers will let Telus offer more efficient performance-scaling options to its large customers. And the support for putting both Intel and UltraSPARC chips in one box gives lower-end users more technology choices, he said.