Sun Turns to AMD in Effort to Recover from x86 Mistake

SAN FRANCISCO — After a tumultuous year of building and tweaking its
flagship operating system, Sun Microsystems is going
after IT managers with new incentives on Solaris on non-SPARC servers.

During a briefing Monday, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based network computer maker said it would waive the $20 evaluation fee it has been charging on the server operating environment. The move comes after a string of maneuvers Sun has made after abandoning support for Solaris on x86-based machines.

“The server market place is a three-horse race between Windows, Linux and
Solaris,” Sun vice president of operating platforms John Loiacono said. “Our
advantage is that we have more market opportunities and choices given the
fact that we are the only vendor to offer Solaris and Linux on x86 systems.”

Loiacono said Sun’s strategy lies in 2- and 4-way systems. The company’s
current offerings include its SunFire V60x and V65x servers as well as its
x86 blade servers .

The scene today is a 180-degree turnaround from nearly two years ago,
when Sun “deferred productization” of the Solaris 9 Intel version in favor
of one that runs on its own UltraSPARC chips. After some public outcry, Sun
met with a group of customers and developers to work out a compromise. The
debate came to a boiling
point
, when members of Solaris-x86.org fired off an open letter to Sun
CEO Scott McNealy blasting him and the company for waffling on the decision
to support x86 for newest version of Solaris.


The talks proved fruitful and
in August 2003, Sun said it would support Solaris 9 on Sun x86 hardware for its
LX50
server. In February, Sun released Solaris 9 x86 and reaffirmed its commitment
from the management to work in partnership with the Solaris user community.

“We never should have abandoned x86. We should have gone forward,”
Loiacono said looking in hindsight. Over the past year or so, many Sun
executives including CEO Scott McNealy have also admitted the same.

The biggest boost to Sun’s plans for Solaris x86, however, seems to have
been its partnership with AMD . Sun said it made the
decision based on customer requests and is expecting to release its 64-bit
version of Solaris for AMD chips in the first half of 2004.

Developer and Save-Solaris-x86 spokesperson John Groenveld is pleased
with Sun’s progress but says the company can do more.

“I remain disappointed by management’s failure to take very simple steps
to resolve our customer complaints,” Groenveld told internetnews.com.
“I fear that management’s paralysis will lead to further problems for our
community down the road. I’m very happy that Sun has embraced Solaris x86
and more recently Solaris Opteron. I think this will give Sun a competitive
advantage over Dell, HPQ, and IBM.”

The difference between Sun’s relationship with its semiconductor
manufacturers is that Sun purchases Intel’s chips and then turns around and
performs its own engineering for the hardware. Loiacono said Sun’s
partnership with AMD is a little bit “closer” noting that there is give and
take between the two companies.

“There is a widespread belief that Sun is so dead-set against the Intel x86 architecture (based on years of lambasting its inadequacies), that the company could never really bring itself to really support any Sun-badged x86 products,” American Technology Research analyst Mark Stahlman said in a note to the press. “We remember many false-starts by Sun with still-born x86 boxes, boards and add-ons. Nonetheless, we are convinced that the technical “elegance” brought by AMD to the x86 – particularly due to AMD’s incorporation of the HyperTransport ‘packetized bus’ architecture – has won the support of Sun’s internal engineering staff.”

The partnership has set rival Intel down the road
looking at its own Xeon and even Itanium lineup. The reason? Sun and some of
its partners are standing by the 64-bit abilities of AMD’s Opteron family.

For example, Berkeley-based Gracenote, which is best known for helping
Napster weed out the endless variations of copyrighted songs back in 2001,
said it recently changed over its servers from Ultra SPARC to SPARC x86. Gracenote
is looking forward to the 64-bit version without a thought to try out
Intel’s Itanium family.

“We have about a dozen companies already buying into our solution even
before the product even ships next month and I’ve got at least 12,000 bids
in the queue once it does,” Loiacono told internetnews.com.

According to analyst firm IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server forecast,
published in September 2003, the $4.6 billion annual server OS landscape has
seen a surge in the number of 2-way systems and a marked decrease in the
amount of 8-way and above servers. That number is expected to nearly double
in the next four years.


Sun has responded by sending out its
executive team others to evangelize Solaris as well as the Java Enterprise System.

“We go to the IT departments and they put up their hands and say – ‘No we
can’t do this… Turn to Sun for all of our hardware, software and support?
We want customizable systems that we crafted ourselves,'” Loiacono said.
“Then we approach the CIO and tell him that switching to our solution can
save $3 million per year… and then they buy into it.”

The vendor support list is also growing with Sybase as
the latest firm to port over its app server software to Solaris. The
Dublin-based firm said its latest Adaptive Server Enterprise is
ready to run on Solaris x86 and SPARC.

With nearly a year after the launch and a handful of examples under its
belt, Sun said it will announce more ISV partners, channel partners,
customers and more supported hardware in the next few months.

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