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

To: Dennis who wrote (34427)	8/16/2000 12:29:58 AM
From: paul	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 64865

Sun servers dont come from another planet after all - they have stiff competition from other Unix Vendors HP and IBM which more or less provide the same functionality. Intel based servers have been hobbled by their reliance on Windows NT though they have been used by Unisys, NCR and Sequent running versions of Unix with with no real commercial success. Dell and other major vendors embracing Linux is an acknowledgement not just that Windows wont scale or provide the reliability of Unix any time soon, but also that Microsoft is headed in the wrong direction from what Service providers and ASP's want which are becoming the dominant delivery model for applications and computing services (Network Centric vs. PC or OS centric). In the 1-4 way market Intel servers probably provide equal functionality as far as CPU and system performance but Sun has very competitive offerings as well which are growing extremely fast negating the Wintel view that Sun was headed for the "High End Graveyard " the real value with Sun is that you can take an application running on a single CPU Ultra Workstation and scale it effectively to a 256 CPU E10K cluster and even more in the future. This is why internet companies and old economy companies who want to be new ones are stumbling over themsleves adding to Sun's backlog. The old datacenter/mainframe mentality of ladling out capacity in their own good time doesnt work anymore. Demand is unpredictable and useage spikes are the norm on the Internet. While Microsoft would have you believe they just discovered horizontally scalability as the silver bullet for all scaling problems, the fact is that real applications, especially database applications dont load balance very well. Scaling up in the box is still the best route and Sun provides the biggest, baddest boxes to acheive that.