Sun Microsystems' release of new products and services form the foundation of the company's strategy for the next five to 10 years. According to the global solutions provider, its Net Effect architectural design will change the way enterprise designs, builds and utilises its IT investments.
The Net Effect appears similar to Intel's peer-to-peer networking strategy announced at the International Developers Forum last month, with multiple systems working together to perform one task faster than any single system could calculate the result.
The most notable difference in the two competitors' messages is that Sun sees the Net Effect as a force being driven by the processing pressures of the Internet, while Intel's peer-to-peer (P2P) seems to be vendor-driven.
"The Net Effect is a compound set of networking pressures," comments Greg Papadopoulos, Sun's senior VP and CTO. He argues that "this is not peer-to-peer in the traditional sense," due to the centralised control and marshalling of resources not typical of a P2P strategy.
Sun attacked Intel for following Moore's Law too strictly, which it feels is defunct. The company believes that a steeper model of computing power growth represents the needs of the enterprise more accurately, and says the Net Effect architecture will be able to harness this ramp in MIPS.
An enhanced version of Solaris 8 is being touted as the operating system platform for Sun's strategy, backed by its new UltraSPARC III 64-bit processor.
The new processor's address bandwidth underlines Sun's strategy, with a 9.6GBps address bus for multi-processor scalability, allowing hundreds of processors to use a single memory source.
Sun hinted that its roadmap includes beyond-the-box multi-processor scalability, meaning that - in a simplified example - multiple machines could act as a single massive processor. "We are not going to distinguish box boundaries anymore," says Papadopoulos.
Solaris 8 enhancements include performance optimisations for the UltraSPARC III, as well as IP network multi-pathing, allowing NIC load spread and fail-over; mobile IP, which applies a fixed IP address to a mobile device; Solaris WBEM Services, an extension of the management tools; IEEE 1394 (Firewire) support; removable media support; and support for CD-RW drives.
Sun has already released the Sun Blade 1000, a workstation running on the UltraSPARC III 900MHz processor, as well as the Sun Fire 280R, a rackable server built on the 750MHz UltraSPARC III and the Sun Fire Plane interconnect.
New services backing the architecture include remote service technologies, training and consulting services.
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