Mike -
I am in almost total agreement with Jim's position on Sun.
Sun exploited the need for "fat" servers to support the old-style monolithic database structures used by many of the e-tailers. These designs were not particularly sophisticated, and when the businesses grew, they had no choice but to buy bigger and bigger hardware. Sun purchased the technology for the UE10000 "starfire" machines and has used those machines as "magnets" for sales of smaller UE6500 and UE4500-5500 machines.
Sun is now facing the ugly back end of that approach. The architectural flaw of large SMP machines is that the reliability is divided by the number of active components in the machine, unlike a clustered approach where the reliability is multiplied by the number of nodes, as in a Tandem Himalaya system. But applications need to be re-written to take advantage of a cluster.
The recent Gartner study on the big Sun machines shows clearly that they are increasingly vulnerable on the reliability issue - they are now well below the standard for big Unix systems and recent data says that they are not reliable enough for those jobs. Unless Sun can fix that problem, their high end strategy will be damaged going forward.
The "fat client - thin client" battle has already been fought and lost by the Sun / Oracle guys. The NC (Network Computer) and it's network-centric model were completely rejected by the market. The original value proposition for large commercial customers - low-maintenance clients in a server-centric model, supported by large servers doing the bulk of the work - played well but the NC did not deliver that value.
Now CPQ, with the iPaq, and HP, with the e-PC, have addressed that market with a client which provides all of the IT benefits but preserves the ability to leverage the Windows productivity pieces, and at the same price point as the original NC concept. That is where the market will go. Sun has clearly been outflanked in that fight.
DELL will benefit from this trend as they are now the number 2 server provider in that space. I suspect they will also bring out a client which matches that model, probably linked to the Windows 2000 launch and based on a Webpc-like hardware platform.
Still, the Wintel vendors probably need bigger machines to do the largest jobs - that space is still dominated by the large Unix boxes. Unisys recently announced a 32-way Intel-based box which addresses this market. Perhaps DELL, which has a good relationship with Unisys, could re-sell that system as a "magnet" for their 4-way and 8-way server products. |
