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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JC Jaros who wrote (24153)	12/7/1999 3:59:00 AM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 64865

JCJ - Well, web servers are not the only opportunity for Sun, and IMO not the strongest market for the UE10000 - in fact one of the weakest, since that is one area where distributed architectures have gained big traction. That battle is shifting over to large numbers of very dense (1U rack height) processors. Sun has a good but not great 1U offering. IBM has OEMed a machine in that space which has some problems (tends to overheat when packed densely and some compatibility problems with other things in the IBM line) but it hits the price point, and IBM will rev that product in 1Q00... sooner or later they will get it right. VA Linux is currently fielding a 2U product, they also want to get to 1U. High density servers packing 2 processors and half a gig of memory into 1U for about $4K seems to be the design center. That lets a web hoster pack 80 processors into a 42U rack for $160K. That is where the economics of the space are heading, both for self-hosted and ASP hosting. In that context, why are the big machines selling at all? The answer was laid out pretty cleanly by Thomas - the middle and back tiers of large systems do not currently distribute well, and designers of those sites currently have the option of an easy solution to that problem (just buy a bigger machine) or a hard one (re-write the application to distribute). The cost and risk of moving away from a straightforward programming model which applies to a 1 processor system or a 64 processor system equally well, can justify paying some big bucks for very large back end systems. I am still trying to get a sense of the sentiment here and understand what forces the investors on this thread think are driving SUNW up. I know for sure some things that are NOT driving it up - and sales of UE10000 as web servers fall into that category. The acceptance of the larger UE machines as a solution to the headroom problem on the back end has built an annuity for SUNW - as the smaller Sun-based systems grow up, the 4500/5500 and 6500 systems will be replaced by UE10000 as the smaller boxes reach capacity.