Although it’s among the market leaders in the low-end server business, Sun Microsystems Inc. has in recent years been known much more for its success at the high end. In this interview with Computer World, Neil Knox, executive vice president of Sun’s volume systems product group, talked about his company’s recent blade-server product launch, its emerging throughput computing strategy and Linux.
Sun’s Neil Knox Weighs in on Blades, Linux and Strategy
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Sun originally made their money in the workstation market. This market has been entirely devoured by low-end x86 workstations.
Now Sun is desperately groping for a market. My place of employment, which originally used IBM RS/6000s for scientific computing and has since moved to Sun workstations is now considering moving to significantly cheaper Xeon workstations running Linux.
Sun is fighting one primary problem: Its products are too expensive.
Sun is still trying to compete in the workstation market… of sorts. It would like companies to move from Windows workstations onto Sunrays. While there are many obvious benefits to thin client environments, there are many disadvantages, specific to Sunrays:
* Sunrays are not sufficiently cheaper than a comparable x86 “thick client” solution. A Sunray 1 costs as much as a Dell 2.4GHz P4 workstation.
* Sunrays require a significantly more expensive server on the backend.
* Sun does not provide any sort of transition path from Windows environments to a Sunray environment.
Here are my suggestions as to how Sun could improve the marketability of Sunray networks:
* Move to a service model for selling Sunrays. Loan Sunrays and the backend server to companies for a period of 2 years. When this period is up allow companies to either keep their existing systems (at a reduced price) or upgrade to new systems (Sun will soon release the Sunray Pro, for example) Set pricing to be very competative with new P4 systems.
* Develop Sunray client software for older Sun workstations, such as Sparcstations. Amoung Sun’s $12 billion in assets are tens of thousands of these systems. Deploy them as inexpensive Sunrays.
* Provide a turnkey solution for using Microsoft productivity applications such as Microsoft Office in a Sunray environment. Sun has already developed a Linux version of the Sunray server software. This can be used in conjunction with Wine and the Codeweavers Crossover plugin to provide a Sunray environment capable of running Microsoft Office.
The bottom line is Sun needs to leverage its assets. The above scenarios all rely on existing technologies which only need to be packaged and priced differently than Sun is attempting to currently.
In all the Fortune 500 companies I have visited or phone-interviewed, approximately 150 of them, I have yet to ever hear one of them kicking and screaming in pain “I need proprietary Java terminals to make my company work better!”.
In this day and age of commoditized mainstream hardware, it will be difficult for a proprietary platform (Sunray) to succeed. If the TCO figures for PC’s were all that bad, companies would be dumping them right and left whether or not Sun even existed. As for the most part companies continue to buy vast quantities of PC’s, one can only assume that Sun’s arguments in favor of the Sunray are specious at best.
The Sunray strategy at Sun is eating up way too much mindshare, time, and energy. Kill it and focus all those resources on problems that customers are actually screaming about. For one, cheaper machines. For two, a number of flexible blade systems based on what sorts of industry problems are being solved. For three, super good Solaris x86 hardware support. There are many problems that almost all Sun customers currently have and really care about. Installing proprietary Java terminals is not one of them.
Sun does have a lot of interesting technology. However, they do not seem to be good at listening to their customers. And their executive management seems especially braindead when it comes to understanding industry trends and then creating a strategy that goes with the trends instead of against them.
I wish them luck.
Play the spot-the-upper-management phrase game!
“I think you are going to see us continue to drive the capability to take these building blocks and optimize them for specific workloads.”
or was it…
“I think you are going to see us continue to optimize these workloads for specific capabilities by driving these building blocks.”
try this…
“I think you are going to see us continue to build optimized capabilities for specific workload blocks.”
yeah.. that’s the ticket…
“I think you are going to see us continue to drive these specific blocks into builds to optimize workloads.”