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

To: alydar who wrote (28461)	3/2/2000 2:59:00 PM
From: Tim Hogan	Respond to of 64865

Sun's Solaris Operating Environment Achieves Dramatically Lower ERP PlatformCosts Compared to Microsoft's NT I read the study. The numbers are based on 5 case studies; 3 using Solaris, 2 using NT. Not very statistically significant...I think... I'd be interested in seeing a similar study 2 years from now with 50+ case studies which compared Solaris and W2K. Now THAT would be interesting.

To: alydar who wrote (28461)	3/2/2000 3:08:00 PM
From: Steve Lee	Respond to of 64865

I clicked on the link in that Sun Microsystems Company Press Release to find out a bit about META. I found this: "The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties......" I like the way META developed this new model for this particular study. Very scientific. Anyone heard of them before?

To: alydar who wrote (28461)	3/2/2000 3:27:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

blisenko - I see you already have several detractors on your post. But META is a pretty good group... and their model shows what most of us have seen in the ERP space - and also back end services for web farms. Both of these system designs can scale almost infinitely on the front end, and the tendency is to have the lowest-cost systems possible in that slot. But overall scalability is determined by the back end - and in the case of SAP, the data does not partition well, so a big honker database machine is what determines overall system headroom. META's numbers include the startup costs for the SAP stuff - which are typically many times the rest of the capital costs. In an SAP system, there is some benefit to having a common administrative model, so given that the customer wants headroom and selects say a UE10000 as his database machine, he is likely to pick a Solaris capable platform for his app servers as well - and is probably money ahead to do that, even if the base hardware cost is twice the level of an NT based solution. Intel based systems have gradually been moving up the food chain in ERP, but mostly at the expense of HP - Sun still has a BIG headroom advantage that assures them a place in the larger ERP implementations. In web server back end design, the data is often a lot more partitionable - and there, the version of SQL Server that MSFT and CPQ used to run the 200K TPC benchmark would work quite well to provide headroom. That may give them a shot at some of those big web site back end opportunities later this year when the product ships, especially if the database has reliability built in, as most partitionable systems do. The numbers are compelling - nearly unlimited scalability, and at 1/5 the price of a UE10000 / Oracle system which tops out at around 100K transactions. But in the ERP space it is the big single system which wins, and UE10000 is still king there. I don't see anything on the horizon to change that for at least another couple of years.