Last week at Sun Microsystems' new campus in Santa Clara, California, Sun announced its latest clustering software, Cluster 3.0, which took five years to complete.
Sun president and COO, Ed Zander, said these products and services are a continued trend from Sun to provide features that are found in mainframe environments to the Unix environment.
The new Sun Cluster 3.0 and Sun Management Center 3.0 software products are backed by 40 new patents issued or pending, and serve as extensions to the Solaris 8 Operating Environment.
Patricia Sueltz, executive VP, Software Systems Group at Sun, said the announcement is an important milestone for the company. "This will raise the bar and enable our customers to better leverage the Internet."
She believes this product will be Sun's biggest revenue generator to date. "At least 75% of Sun's existing customer base is expected to migrate to Cluster 3.0."
Sueltz added that the announcement hails a few industry firsts. "We believe this is the first cluster designed with the Internet in mind, the first file service for standard Unix platforms, and the first cluster designed for both horizontal and vertical scaling."
One of the first customers to implement Cluster 3.0, weather.com, was also at the launch. Mark Ryan, the company's CTO, said weather.com had scalability issues to deal with. "We have seen massive growth from seven million page views per day up to today's average of 30 million per day. Weather.com has also begun to deliver personal weather updates to cellular phones, pagers and voicemail.
"We had problems with systems management. The end-user response times were as much as 18 seconds per page download. Now we have it down to one to five seconds per page.
"One of our biggest issues was to change the mission of a server. We had additional servers that handle non-mission-critical information and wanted to be able to bring them onto the system on the fly. We were able to do just that - move applications to another platform quickly."
Ravi Chhabria, Sun's group marketing manager, Solaris Infrastructure Products and Architecture, said Sun does have the competitive advantage at the moment. "Yes, the other companies will catch up but it won't be easy. The standard reaction to any announcement like this is a 'me too'.
"I advise customers to dig a little deeper before they believe what is being offered. The point is that you cannot build something like this in five weeks. It took us five years. If they weren't working on this since 1995, they can't have it now."
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