Jim - re: IBM has released a new R6000 server which is much faster and cheaper than the Starfire
I question this - as far as I know, the biggest RS6000 is the S80, announced in September, which supports 6 to 24 processors SMP. It is really a competitor to the UE6500, not the UE10,000.
The UE10000 is distinguished by much more than simple number of processors, however - the "switch fabric" design supports static and dynamic partitioning with almost no performance penalty, a big selling point in the markets where starfire is dominant. Only CPQ's Alpha "wildfire" has a similar design, and "wildfire" is still a prototype with no real release date.
Java is much more than "just" PR. I agree that it does not make money - what it does do is provide the perception of architectural dominance. IBM's "WebSphere" initiative is EJB based as is the HP "eSpeak" program. While one could argue that these initiatives take EJB leadership away from Sun, Sun still holds almost all of the Java cards, and the fact that the other major high end players have gone in that direction just reinforces the value of Sun thought leadership.
Itanium (Intel IA64 products) will eventually put pressure on Sun, but not any time soon - Intel will only support a 4-way chipset for Merced, hardly the kind of product which will make inroads into SUNW's bread and butter. Real IA64 "big systems" will not appear until at least McKinley, probably in late 2001 or early 2002. And those will probably not be equivalent to the big UE products in that time frame.
Finally, that part of the high end market is not just about hardware, in fact there is little reason to think that hardware is more than the ante to the game. Only HP, IBM and CPQ have the related services and support to drive into that space, and then only with UNIX offerings, which plays into Sun's long suit.
As far as Workstation and low end server sales, one of the big benefits of the large UE machines is their ability to "pull" smaller Sun boxes which might not be competitive in their own market space. I have seen a number of systems sold into financial institutions where the presence of one or 2 UE10,000 machines and a handful of UE6500's pulled through big numbers of smaller servers and workstations, when the smaller products were 2X or more the cost of Intel-based machines. The reason is that reduced administration and other systems costs more than offset the HW capital cost, which represents less than 8% of overall cost. You can double the capital costs and if the admin and support costs drop by only a few percent, the customer is still money ahead.
Sun salespeople have used this argument to good advantage, along with the "headroom" argument, and the "architectural leadership" argument. |
