Sharing and participation pays off for Sun

Sun Microsystems' vision of sharing and participating with technology vendors across all sectors of the IT industry continues to result in reducing costs and complexities while allowing customers to gain better economies of scale from their IT infrastructures.

This was the essence of the keynote address at a Sun Forum held in Durban the week of (August 17) in which John Foster, data centre systems specialist for the vendor's South Eastern EMEA region outlined strategies, new product announcements and continued innovation.

"Our policy of sharing which has been in place for over two decades allows us to introduce new technologies with better performance. This will be evident at our next major product showcase to be held in New York on September 12."

He made no secret of the fact that $1.7 billion - or 16 percent - of Sun's revenue goes towards R&D; well above the industry's average of nine or 10 percent.

Its strong development and marketing relationship with chip manufacturer AMD continues to flourish and together the companies are working on systems that scale beyond eight-way. Foster said a joint Sun and AMD announcement is due soon on optimising Solaris, Linux and the Sun Java platforms for AMD Opteron processors.

Foster pointed out that AMD offers superior performance and bandwidth over its rival chip producer Intel.

"Our relationship with Microsoft has changed dramatically and we have settled outstanding litigation. While this took longer than expected defining our interoperability standards has not been an easy task, but we are making progress."

On Sun's 20 year collaboration with Fujitsu, Foster said the two companies will announce a jointly developed new generation of SPARC systems and they will continue to develop and sell current systems.

The company's priorities this year are to address the biggest pain points of its customer base, grow open source communities and increase participation, and continue its innovation to provide the world's best infrastructure technology.

Pain points include addressing compliance to meet new rules, security and viruses.

Foster noted that users can expect to have more choice and stressed Sun's policy of providing full end-to-end solutions for Solaris, Linux or Windows. Java Enterprise Systems are currently available on these operating platforms and these will be expanded.

On Solaris 10 he said there is a session in New York on the 12th September which will discuss Solaris 10 as well as strategies, innovations, and new products and services. The operating system is currently licensed to more than two million users and in excess of 1200 applications. Six Solaris engineers recently received InfoWorld 2005 Innovators Award.

A major announcement in New York will be the introduction of Galaxy which is the code name for a new x64-based server product line that it defines as "the industry's standard for the modern enterprise without legacy constraints". The Galaxy product line is "simplicity of design" with as much commonality as possible. Foster describes it as the most reliable x64 system on the market at an attractive price, breakthrough performance and heightened security.

Foster concluded his presentation with Sun's commitment to Throughput Computing or optimising the compute element. He used the analogy of two waterfalls - one a narrow stream and the other the wide Niagara Falls. The narrow fall can only offer single threaded performance, while the wide fall offers Chip Multi-threaded performance with increased processor utilisation and throughput whilst only using a fraction of the power.

Aptly code-named Niagara, the processor is expected to deliver three to six times the performance at approximately half the power of Xeon It will be shipping no later than early 2006.