Sun Kicks Off New Wares On Wall Street

After all, it was the financial-services industry that embraced its workstations in the late 1980s and later spawned the development of its SPARC-based servers in the 1990s. And it was among the first to deploy enterprise Java when it became a credible force in more recent years. But with the dot-com bust hitting Sun hard, the company is unwrapping a bevy of new products and strategic direction that it hopes will put it back on the map and has decided to return to Wall Street to give it a first crack.

"If there is one industry on earth for whom IT matters, it's Wall Street," said Sun president and COO Jonathan Schwartz, speaking at a company event in New York called "Sun On Wall Street."

"The financial-services community operates in a commodity market and delivers huge, huge returns based on technology as a competitive advantage. And make no mistake, this is exactly the place where we believe we need to return to understand where the next generation of IT innovation is going to occur and how folks want to spend money to go achieve the advantage from it."

As much as it was to show customers, analysts, partners and reporters that it has a product and business road map that will revitalize the company's fortunes, Schwartz acknowledged some key missteps. "Our shelves, in all honesty, were empty," Schwartz said of the past three years. "We just didn't have much. You came a knockin', and we didn't have much to deliver."

Much of the company's transformation revolves around its decision to sell Solaris on other platforms, a move that has brought a tectonic shift within Sun, particularly those who were compensated for the sales of hardware. "This is a fundamental culture shift in Sun," Schwartz said. Key to Sun's long-term future is Solaris 10, which will ship this fall.

The new OS includes a completely rewritten TCP/IP stack, Linux interoperability, grid containers, improved security and self-healing capabilities. Sun also used the event to unveil its new pay-per-use computing grid, where customers can purchase grid cycle in hourly chunks from Sun partners at a rate starting at $1 per CPU per hour. Sun will let partners sell both Sparc and AMD Opteron servers running Solaris, offering wholesale pricing to VARs.

Still, Sun's resurgence is far from guaranteed. While analysts say they have an impressive engineering road map and new business model, the proof will be in the implementation and its ability to convince customers to hear the company's story. "They have their hands full," said Frank Gillette, an analyst at Forrester Research. Also key will be getting VARs educated and trained expeditiously, he said. "You have to think those Opteron servers look interesting to the VAR channel and others as a much better alternative than shoving HP or IBM boxes because those guys will compete with the VARs in ways that Sun won't."

Sun also took the wraps off two new Solaris-based servers running the company's UltraSparc IV processor. The Sun Fire V490 and V890 are four-way and eight-way servers, respectively, using Sun's Chip Multithreading Technology (CMT). Sun also provided a preview of new networking capability from its acquisition of Nauticus Networks that will add virtualization and resource optimization to systems in the future. The new technology is benchmarked to support 10,000 SSL connections per second and cryptographic throughput of 2 Gbps.

On the storage front, Sun unveiled several new wares including the StorEdge 6920, a midrange storage system that will also be offered with the usage-based pricing model. The 6920 supports up to 65 TB of storage, has 28 2-Gb Fibre Channel ports, 16 GB of cache, support for 448-GB drives and CPUs that support such functions as storage pooling and snapshots, as well as in the full replication. Based on technology Sun acquired from Pyrus, the 6920 can take on the grid functionality that's embedded in Solaris 10. That function, N1 Grid Containers, gives applications their own dedicated resources, caching, I/O and memory in the server. With the Pyrus software, "we take that capability and extend it all the way down to the storage device," says Adam Mendoza, Sun's director of strategic alliances in its network storage business unit.

The device is structured with a management blade that offers up an SMI-S based standards interface provider, so any customer that has a storage resource management or SAN management tool can discover the device and effectively configure it, Mendoza said. "But we've added extensions, as well, to that model in order for customers to utilize data-snapshot and data-pooling capabilities, as well as these profiles that we have that are applications-specific," he said. "We have 14 profiles that map to Oracle, OLTP environments, a specific Sybase implementation, etc. That is a unique capability for this class of device, because you are effectively using the standards-based interface for extended data services."

As part of its launch, Sun also said it is aggressively looking to win back the business of financial-services firms and will do so by offering migration programs and promotional programs. Among them are a Xeon trade-in program that will give those firms credits for migrating Xeon servers to its Sun Fire Opteron"processor-based systems. Those credits will start at $560 for a low-end Sun Fire V20z server and up to $1,250 for a midrange V40z server. The company also is offering 50 percent discounts for customers that upgrade from Linux to Solaris. In addition, Sun is expanding its programs for financial-services developers, offering what it calls Wall Street-specific Sun Tech Days this fall, a developer council and several other promotions.