Sun’s
Quarterly Course Tuning
Sun took advantage of its quarterly
technology update to announce a number of products, product updates,
and new business models. We’ll cover some of the highlights.
Sun And Fujitsu Deepen
Alliance In Sparc & Solaris Market
It turns out that Sun’s prior
announcement that it was discontinuing further development work on
SPARC V and VI and moving directly to Rock and Niagara was only part
of the story.
They will do that by collaborating on
the development and delivery of a future generation of Solaris and
SPARC based systems, bringing together their Sun Fire and
Fujitsu’s PRIMEPOWER product lines into a new Advanced Product
Line (APL). When APL is
ready, in the 2006 time period, it will replace these existing
product lines, supporting Solaris, the Java Enterprise System, and
Solaris-compatible enterprise applications.
During the development process of APL,
Sun and Fujitsu will work to make each other’s current product
lines available through both companies.
Fujitsu is believed by many analysts to
have the best implementation of the current SPARC technology and
this partnership is expected to lead to a more efficient way to
offer these follow-on SPARC products to the market, allowing Sun to
concentrate on its multi-threaded products due starting next year.
This will allow both Fujitsu and Sun to offer a broad range of SPARC
products for a complete range of workloads.
It will also, Sun hopes, broaden the market for the Solaris
version of the UNIX operating system, leading to more economic
arguments for the continuing development of SPARC-optimized
software.
Sun
needs such efficiencies to better meet the needs of a leaner
business model, as it struggles to fit a profitable way to address a
marketplace that has become less interested in paying premium prices
for hardware.
Sun Offers Storage By The
Gigabyte
Sun
will now be offering its customers Sun Utility Computing for
StorEdge Systems, storage capacity on a utility model basis.
Customers will be able to pay for storage on a usage basis,
rather than buying hardware and storage management software. The products can be hosted by Sun, Sun business partners, or
internally by the customer.
Pricing
is based on Sun StorEdge Power Units starting at $.02 per megabyte
per year. The Sun StorEdge "Power Unit" delivers a
combination of hardware and software infrastructure and associated
services, including all installation services, service support,
management portal (including the Sun Fire(TM) V240 server) and
essential software licenses.
This is a somewhat different support than some utility
offerings, which may price in a more componentized fashion.
Since customers pay only for storage capacity consumed,
up-front capital IT expenditures for both hardware and software are
eliminated. Sun
estimates that customers using their storage utility pricing model
will spend up to three times less versus the costs normally
associated with leasing or purchasing and maintaining the physical
storage asset over a three-year period.
Sun
already offers some utility offerings through business partners and
this should be looked at as a broadening of the offering in both
product areas and choice of hosts.
Sun
also announced new storage management software, based on its Pirus
acquisition in 2002 and enhancements to Sun’s File Management
System, providing enhanced Information Lifecycle Management support.
Sun
Preventive Services Designed To Minimize Downtime
Sun
has begun offering an integrated portfolio of more than 100
services, at a single subscription-based price, designed to provide
preventive diagnosis and increased uptime for all of the Sun
equipment in a customer’s datacenter.
The service is focused on the customer and the
performance of the data center, not on the hardware.
The tools help the customer understand risks and set goals.
Customers are rewarded for reaching those performance goals
by discounts in the price of the service.
Preventive
Services begins with a comprehensive analysis of the people,
processes, hardware and applications in a customer's network
computing environment to identify and measure operational risks.
From this analysis, Sun produces a set of Key Performance Indicators
(KPIs) to measure the likelihood of failures. Sun then designs an
integrated set of services from the portfolio to help control risks
and drive down the KPIs. The
emphasis is on preventing first, restoring second, reducing
unplanned downtime and performance variability.
Advanced services can be delivered across the network to
monitor and measure results. Sun
Reliability, Availability and Serviceability Profiles provide
periodic technical reports to help ensure that datacenter equipment
is running optimally, identify new areas of risk and track closure
of previously identified issues.
Sun Extends Its Java
Enterprise Subscription Pricing Model
Sun
is now offering a per citizen pricing model to provide its Java
Enterprise software to developing nations.
This is a complete stack of software (including a core set of
services: Network Identity, Web and Application, Portal,
Communication and Collaboration, Availability, and Security services
plus new features including: a Java Application Server, support for
Solaris on both SPARC and x86 and Sun Cluster, OASIS
Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP), Java System Portal Mobile
Access,
Enterprise Messaging Migration
services, and access to messaging and collaboration services.
The Java Enterprise Systems runs on Solaris or Linux and is
normally priced at $100 per employee per year.
Now,
federal, state and local governments of developing nations
can purchase receive the Java Enterprise System for a much lower
single annual price, ranging from $0.33 to $1.95 per citizen per
year, based on the number of citizens in the government entity and
the stage of development of the country, as defined by the UN’s
Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
It remains to be seen whether governments will find that this
offer (which, after all, presumes the purchase and use of tens of
thousands, even millions, of copies) is either (a) practical or (b)
fits government policies better than a decision to support the
internal development of a native software industry.
The current version of Java Enterprise System
is available for download and is generally available directly
through Sun and Sun iForce(SM) partners. Free evaluation for 90 days
is available for the Java Enterprise System or any of its component
products. Sun also offers an automatic term renewal each year based
on the then current number of employees. More information and access
to a download of the Java Enterprise System is available at: http://www.sun.com/partners/javaenterprisesystem
Sun And Open Source
Sun seems to be having a philosophical
conversation with itself, perhaps as a result of its former software
chief, Jonathan Schwartz ascending to the presidency, on the
commercial and political advantages of open source. Nearly simultaneously, Sun has opened preliminary
conversations about open sourcing Solaris (which has been hinted at
before, but never taken very seriously) and reopened conversations
about the possibility of open sourcing Java.
The devil, of course, will be in the details.
Sun has indicated that it is not yet prepared
to describe just how or when it might open source Solaris, although
the upcoming debut of Solaris 10 would obviously be an ideal
opportunity. Some key
issues:
- Would it open source just a particular
version, say the –x86 version, to compete with Linux on
Intel/AMD platforms, or is this a more general thought?
- Is Solaris really open sourceable in its
current form? A
recent issue of Client Server News, for example, remarks about
prior discussions of open sourcing Solaris and problems with (a)
parts of the code that are not attributable to known sources and
(b) parts of the code that may be licensed (even if they are
royalty-free) and, therefore, carry their own restrictions.
- What kind of open source does Sun have in
mind? One reading
of Jonathan Schwartz’s remarks from the Sun Shanghai meeting
seems to indicate a leaning toward the Java Community Process (JCP),
which would scarcely be considered open source outside of Sun
circles. However,
Sun hasn’t indicated yet a firm stand in any direction.
As to Java, Sun’s Java technologist Raghavan
Srinivas in a recent interview in Builder AU indicated that an open
source version of Java would happen, while declining to indicate
when or how that might occur. Some
at Sun like to say that the JCP is Open Source, although this is
loudly dismissed by many in the open source community, who consider
Sun’s JCP as little more than a proprietary product with an active
user group.
What does seem clear is that more discussions
about the value of Open Source are happening at Sun and that’s a
good thing. If we may
stick our nose in, we’d advise them that Sun could increase its
credibility and good will in the open source community by these
moves – and its ecosystem of support for Solaris and Java among
both other software vendors and also among resellers, independent
programmers, and customers. That couldn’t be bad.
In fact, it could be an important step in putting Sun back on
the profitable side of the ledger.
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