Product puts Sun into Wintel hemisphere

Electronic News, August 25, 1997 by Cynthia Bournellis

Mountain View, Calif.--Sun Microsystems may be showing signs of conforming to the Wintel hegemony.

Last Tuesday in New York, Sun debuted its first product that positions Sun in the Windows NT server market, the Ultra Enterprise 450, a server for corporate workgroups that lets customers plug an enterprise Sun server into their existing desktops, including Windows 95, Windows NT, Novell NetWare clients, OS/2 and Macintosh computers without installing any software on the client side. Meanwhile, on that same day on the opposite coast at the SCO Forum in Santa Cruz, Calif., Compaq Computer and the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) reached a multimillion-dollar agreement in which both companies will work together to promote Compaq servers based on the SCO Unix platform, UnixWare, that runs on Intel processors. Both companies said they will jointly engineer, service and support, market and test these systems in an effort to deliver servers based on industry standards, at price points "significantly lower than those of RISC/Unix systems."

One day prior to the SCO event, Compaq demonstrated two new Pentium Pro-based enterprise servers at a press conference in San Francisco. The new models--which will run applications from Baan, Informix, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Sybase--are the ProLiant 6500 and ProLiant 7000. The systems, for the first time, feature technology based on Intel's Hot Plug PCI spec and ASIC controller. Hot Plug PCI lets systems administrators replace or upgrade existing PCI devices without shutting down the system. Suggested retail prices on the two new models start at about $14,700 and $16,900 respectively.

John Rose, a senior Compaq VP said during the products' unveiling, that the new Compaq servers will give Unix/RISC machines a run for their money. "Intel architecture does not lag behind proprietary Unix/RISC architectures," said Mr. Rose, adding that the new servers will cause some "irregular heartbeats" among Unix/RISC proponents.

But Sun believes its new server, which starts at about $300 less than the ProLiant 6500, will bring in the cash. "We're gonna make money at these prices--good money," said Mr. McNealy. "We didn't go out and get new components. We took them from the higher end (machines)--things like the PCI buses. The Enterprise 450 server's base configuration, with one 250MHz UltraSparc-II CPU, comes with 1MB of external cache, 128MB of RAM and a 4.2GB disk.

"We see Sun's move to PCI I/O technology as an interesting one," said John Young, director of product marketing at Compaq. "This validates their acceptance of industry standards. Sun is seeing the stiff competition that we are offering and doesn't have a choice but to offer the customer a better value than in the past."

Some analysts see the recent announcement by Sun, as well as the deal the company made earlier this month with NCR in which NCR's Intel-based WorldMark 4300 server will become the reference platform for Sun (NCR will sell and support Solaris software with WorldMark servers), as moves that will bring Sun closer to Wintel. "This is the first major licensing deal of Solaris on Intel by a major OEM," said Jim Garden, an analyst at Technology Business Research in Hampton, New Hampshire. "We expect that Sun may end up shipping Wintel systems (in the future)." NCR entered into the agreement in order to take advantage of Intel's next-generation 64-bit microprocessors, due out on NCR servers in 1999.

The PC interoperability of the new Ultra 450 is done through a new technology Sun calls SunLink. SunLink lets PC users running popular applications transparently link to Solaris servers. "Solaris has taken on a chameleon effect and has had to adapt in order to smoothly fit into the desktop user environments that were running Solaris systems," said Mr. Garden.

Another new capability for Solaris is the WebStart installation system. On the upper left-hand corner of the desktop, a user can click on one button to install all of Solaris and all servers. This is available to all ISVs for applications and system software. Over time, Sun said it will add what it calls Sun Cluster architecture to the baseline of Solaris. Due out sometime next year, Sun Cluster will connect up to 16 servers, said Anil Gadre, VP of corporate marketing at Sun.

In support of the new Ultra 450, Sun said it will offer courses on integrating commonly used applications for Solaris and Windows NT. The courses will cover interoperability in areas such as file and print sharing, electronic mail and name services, helping systems administrators manage shared files with a Unix network file server, or NFS. Meanwhile, Compaq's Mr. Young said the company will address integration through its traditional channels and software partners. For example, SCO just released its Tarantella software that lets any client access any server.

With thousands of Novell clients in use, and with the ongoing flux of Windows NT, Unix vendors will have to play by new rules in order to win the server business. "Sun can no longer dictate standards with NFS," said Mr. Garden, explaining how users have had to install it onto their PCs in order to get into Solaris. "That was okay when Unix was in charge. But now Microsoft has developed its own set of standards. And, the customers won't tolerate a Unix standard anymore. In order for Sun to become active in file and print, they have to interoperate with PCs."