Sun Microsystems yesterday unveiled a range of products and services at its quarterly network computing update in Washington DC, aimed at providing greater flexibility and cost savings to customers.
Announcing the company's new offerings, chairman and CEO Scott McNealy commented that the new technologies and services would provide smarter options for enterprise and government customers and amplify the capabilities of Sun's Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) and Sun Grid.
One of the products, Sun Connection, is the first of many services that will be delivered as part of the company's Sun Grid model, and is built on Solaris 10. The 'always-on' Sun Connection programme joins Sun's 'compute and storage' offerings as services that extend the group's grid strategy.
The Sun Connection is an integrated secure network services connection, which allows for continuous benchmarking of IT health and performance. The first new Sun Connection service is Sun Update Connection, which delivers the latest fixes and features for Sun software.
"Today, Sun is providing customers with smarter technology options, more control over their data centres and the ability to maximise economies of scale throughout their IT infrastructure," McNealy stated.
"CIOs no longer need to hand over the keys to their kingdom to services behemoths, because the power to run their business is back in their own hands. With the combined power of our new Sun Connection services and Solaris 10, we're offering to take responsibility for security updates and systems monitoring for our enterprise and public sector customers."
Standardised model
Yesterday also saw the launch of the Sun Java StorEdge programme and a new storage subscription offering that removes the complexity of licensing storage software and support services.
Mark Canepa, Sun's executive VP of network storage, explained that the Java StorEdge programme is a unique way for customers to acquire and deploy Sun's storage and data management software and services in-house.
Sun also announced its Managed Storage Services programme, a new way for customers to outsource the management of their storage environments to Sun's storage experts.
The Sun N1 System Manager, a tool for managing large and small installations of Sun systems, simplifies data centre management, starting with Sun's x64 servers and broadening to include more systems in the future.
In addition, Sun unveiled its N1 Service Provisioning System, the Sun Operations Management Solution, the Sun Business Intelligence Network Computing Solution, the Sun Fire x64 servers with dual-core processors and the SunEdge 6920 system.
The group also took the opportunity to launch its '4x4' approach to how customers can faster achieve economies of scale in their data centres.
Its four principles of design provide a framework for building IT infrastructure that is focused on competitive differentiation; demanding open, interoperable infrastructure; standardising and automating to maximise service levels; and making security part of the core architecture design.
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