Sun CEO Scott McNealy has a scalability headache. Cluster 3.0 software, coming in December, may provide relief.
Where there's UltraSparc there's fire
Sun (Nasdaq: SUNW) is the king of e-business servers, although its products are more expensive than Windows/Intel alternatives and often less robust than RISC-based servers from IBM (NYSE: IBM), Compaq (NYSE: CPQ) and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HWP).
The best technology does not always win. Just ask the marketing pros at Sun Microsystems Inc.
Sun's Solaris software and Sparc hardware scale well enough for most customers. But at some customer sites, Solaris and Sparc are reaching their limits, forcing selected customers to buy more servers than they can possibly hope to manage.
America Online, for one, has as many as 20,000 Sun servers -- a number that even Sun acknowledges makes servers difficult to manage and even difficult to find.
Naturally, Sun CEO Scott McNealy is working on the problem.
Coming in December
It's no secret that, after several delays, Sun will launch new UltraSparc III systems next week. But that's only half the story. The company will return for a December encore, at which time it plans to unveil Sun Cluster 3.0 software, Sm@rt Partner has learned.
Cluster 3.0 is a critical product for Sun, because the package will boost the reliability and scalability of existing UltraSparc installations. "It's built into Solaris 8 but we haven't turned it on," says Andy Ingram, Sun vice president of marketing for Solaris. "We've been working on it for six years."
But first things first. On Wednesday, Sun will launch its UltraSparc III systems in New York. In addition to an UltraSparc III roadmap, Sun is expected to discuss UltraSparc III- and UltraSparc IIe-based workstations, a workgroup server code-named Littleneck, graphics innovations based on its MAJC chip, smart cards, and new services.
Meanwhile, Sun is working behind the scenes on clustering. The company is nearly a year behind in its clustering plans, a situation that partners and analysts attribute to the technology's complexity. Both groups say they can't tell whether Sun will fulfill its clustering vision, which they describe as compelling. But they add that IBM and HP both have better clustering than Sun and have whittled away at the scalability advantages provided by Sun's three-year-old E10000 server. Sun's new high-end systems are not due before mid-2001.
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