Sun Enhances Two Entry-Level Server Lines

Sun Microsystems

The Sun Fire 280R server, aimed at the Web services market, now comes with one or two 1.015GHz UltraSPARC III processors, an upgrade from the 900MHz processors previously offered.

Unlike the previous 280Rs, which did not include an operating system, the new models come bundled with Solaris 8 and can be licensed for Solaris 9, said Laura Finkelstein, group marketing manager for low-end SPARC Solaris servers at Sun.

Also included in the 280Rs is Apache Web Server software. List price with two processors, 2 Gbytes of memory, two 36-Gbyte hard drives, redundant power supplies and a DVD-ROM drive starts at $19,995, Finkelstein said.

Starting next quarter, the 280R servers will also be bundled with the Sun ONE Application Server 7 Platform Edition and the Sun ONE Studio 4 development tool, she said.

Also on Tuesday, Sun enhanced its Sun Fire V100 server by upgrading the processor to 550MHz and 650MHz UltraSPARC IIi versions and doubling the cache and memory compared with the previous versions.

Sun said the Sun Fire V100 servers come bundled with Solaris 8 and can be bundled with Solaris 9. They also include such applications as Sun ONE Web server, Sun ONE Active Server Pages and Apache HTTP Server. List price with a 40-Gbyte hard drive start at $995.

Research firm Gartner Dataquest last month said that Sun was the leading RISC-based Unix vendor in revenue and shipments for the second quarter of this year.

Gartner Dataquest said Sun's second-quarter U.S. server revenue was $945 million, followed by Hewlett-Packard at $334 million, IBM at $269 million, SGI at $51 million and Fujitsu at $11 million.

Total U.S. server revenue for the year was $1.6 billion, Gartner Dataquest said.

According to the researcher, Sun shipped 42,000 units in the United States in the second quarter, compared with IBM's 7,000, HP's 4,000, SGI's 469 and Fujitsu's 220.

U.S. shipments totaled about 54,000 units, reported Gartner Dataquest.

John Murphy, executive vice president of Advanced Systems Group, a Denver-based Sun solution provider, said that he is not sure the new low-end servers will have a big long-term impact on the market. However, he said the servers may help him get some new business and "give us a boost in the short term."

Murphy praised Sun for its focus on attracting new accounts, which he said helps his business. "They have a sales staff aimed aggressively at working with partners," he said.