Sun, Intel Target Telecom

The move comes less than a week after Intel made a play with new products and initiatives aimed at chipping away at Sun's lead in this space.

Sun's new telecom server, the Netra 120, is a Network Equipment Building Systems (NEBS) Level 3-certified 1U rack-mount offering. It is a DC-powered, one-way server rugged enough to withstand a level-four earthquake, as well as dust, humidity and pollution that might affect non-NEBS servers, said Pradeep Parmar, senior product manager for volume system products at Sun.

The other server, the Sun Fire V120, is similar but is not NEBS-certified and runs on AC power.

Both products are basically Sun's Netra T1 servers with cache doubled to 512 Kbytes, maximum memory doubled to 4 Gbytes, and hard-drive capacity doubled to 72 Gbytes, Parmar said.

In addition, the servers come bundled with Sun ONE (Open Network Environment) Web Server, Sun ONE Active Server Pages and Apache HTTP Server, software that previously was optional. A new option is the Crypto Accelerator card, which increases the number of SSL transactions to 170 per second, compared with 76 per second in the past, Parmar said. A Netra 120 with a 650MHz processor, 512 Mbytes of memory and one 36-Gbyte hard drive lists for $3,395.

Meanwhile, Intel last week unveiled new carrier-grade NEBS-certified servers it hopes systems builders will adopt as an alternative to Sun's Netra line, said Shantanu Gupta, director for Intel's telecom platforms.

The vendor late last year started shipping a 2U, dual-Pentium III-based, carrier-grade rack-mount server for the telecom space, Gupta said. Last quarter, it followed with a 1U server. By early 2003, Intel expects to offer Xeon- and Itanium-based servers for the telecom market, he said.

Intel has teamed with Fujitsu-Siemens to make its Resilient Telco Platform software available for the new telecom servers. Intel also opened a Linux lab in Beaverton, Ore., for testing Linux applications with the servers, and it is participating in the Service Availability Forum, an organization of telecom vendors aimed at producing servers with six nines (99.9999 percent) of service availability, Gupta said.

Intel still has a long way to go to catch up to Sun in the data-center and telecom markets, said John Woodall, senior infrastructure architect at Integrated Archive Systems, a Sun solution provider in Palo Alto, Calif.

"Intel relies on third-party software vendors to provide the solution and doesn't offer a cohesive platform like Sun ONE," he said.