Very important subject matter (don't know about the conclusions) from the Sunday INQ:
Sun quakes at rise of Intel server commodities
Citizen Smith LX50 – a recession product
By Tony Smith: Sunday 18 August 2002, 22:29
IF YOU CAN'T beat 'em, join 'em. That was undoubtedly the sentiment behind Sun's launch last week of its first Intel-based general purpose server, the LX50. As a company insider told us a not so long ago, Sun staffers lose very little sleep worrying about Itanic. What really has them tossing and turning is the rise of the budget commodity server.
All those 32-bit x86 boxes coming in at the edge of the network and creeping through the enterprise infecting the place with Windows XP... what big iron 64-bit Unix vendor wouldn't quake at the prospect?
Sun's motivation is clear: if it doesn't have a commodity server product, customers will buy someone else's. And given the state of the market, not to mention the dotcom collapse, Sun really needs to start selling lots of boxes. But while the LX50 ought to be a boom product, tapping into a new, growing market, it feels like a recession product, part of a defensive strategy to keep the company afloat rather than build new business.
The defensive nature of the move is shown in the pricing and Sun's decision to push Linux. The LX50 is clearly a very cheap, commodity product. Sun executives in the UK and US were quick to admit as much, confessing it's knocked up by our friends in Taiwan on contract for small change. CEO Scott McNealy even joked that Sun's only contribution to the hardware was the purple plastic logo on the front. The cost to Sun: just 14 cents per unit, he claimed.
The emphasis is on razor-thin margins and inexpensive hardware. And, at $2795 (£2100 over here in the UK), it is cheaper than equivalent boxes from Dell and co. Sun wants us to think it's practically giving the box away. In fact, it just underlines how expensive servers are - we're sure you can get a 1.4GHz Pentium III-based PC for less than that. Even with Sun you're paying a high premium for a thin case.
The software doesn't cost Sun much either. Sun Linux is Red Hat Linux renamed. There's no formal deal with Red Hat, apparently, leaving this reporter with the distinct impression, in no way dismissed or denied by the various Sun staffers we spoke to, that the company had effectively just pulled the OS off of Red Hat's source code server, compiled it on the new boxes and changed the name.
And while it's giving the thumbs up - or maybe the finger - to Red Hat now, Sun might easily go with another vendor in future, say company spokesmen. They imply that will only happen if, say, Red Hat folds or is bought by IBM, but it's still hardly a ringing endorsement of the open source OS. Neither is only offering Sun Linux with hardware, not as a standalone package.
Sun wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to be able to say it offers the leading Linux distribution - Red Hat - with its cachet as a de facto standard. Yet it also wants people to think this is a Sun product no different to Solaris.
Which it is also offering customers. Linux isn't standard, it's an option. Buyers can also choose Solaris 8 for Intel. Next year they'll be able to select the previously cancelled Solaris 9 for Intel.
So on one hand Sun is saying Linux is the best operating system for general purpose commodity servers, and on the other it doesn't want anyone to forget that Solaris nicely scales from the high end to the low and is a key component of the company's vertical integration.
It's the same approach SGI took a few years back and it didn't do too well out of it. Hardware companies can afford to have a multiple operating system strategy, but systems companies can't - they just look confused. They either believe in their own software or they don't. µ
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