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

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (24226)	12/7/1999 2:57:00 PM
From: JDN	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Dear Cheryl: "screwdriver company like CPQ " If you call CPQ a screwdriver Company what do you call DELL?? Incidentally, I would caution you on your sexual inuendo in your posts, you know, "pounding machine", "screwdriver company". Wouldnt want the womans liberation people on you, also for some of us there may be snow on the roof but theres still a fire in the fireplace!!(g)jdn

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (24226)	12/7/1999 3:50:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

Cheryl - Michael has cautioned me to mind my manners as I am a guest here... but there are a few things you need to know about your own company. More than 72% of web traffic goes through SUNW servers. You can't compare tiny PC's running against SMP Ultras on the web. Surely you understand that the Ultras are not being used as web servers - they are being used for back end data store and mid-tier processing. There is absolutely no advantage to a big machine as a web server and a lot of disadvantage, not least of which is availability. There are many successful architectures to distribute web transactions in a farm which provide transaction integrity and sub-second failover which give virtually transparent access and easy manageability. And the current low cost high density machines are less than 25% of the cost of Ultra machines for the same performance. You keep referring to any Intel-based machine as a "PC" and I know that this is the politically correct attitude at SUN, but it just ain't so. The machines designed by IBM, VA Linux and others to provide high density web farms are designed from the ground up to do this job and they do it very well. I recently participated in a qualification for a medium sized server provider who wanted to go with Sun - but the Sun 1U offering was more than twice the cost of IBM's product and had lower performance. IBM's system uses Intel PIII processors. So frankly your contention that large Sun boxes are being used as web servers is not supported by what's happening in the market. Sun does of course have a significant presence in that space but the majority of those machines are smaller systems being used in distributed architectures, and are for the most part "pulled through" by the mid tier and back end systems to maintain a common administration model. On the question of who Sun's competitors are, there is an argument that says that architecturally only IBM has an alternative middleware strategy. But from a revenue standpoint, the products that Sun has to sell against include all of the big 4. I know the ASP for the UE10000, apparently better than you do. My point was not the cost per machine but the number of machines. How do you imagine that Sun will go from a run rate of less than 500 units a quarter to 2500 units? The ramp up does not support that kind of projection. So I would again suggest to you that you take off the blinders and look more closely at your company. You were not even effectively addressing my points, and you obviously don't know Sun's sales figures or what Sun products are used in what markets.