Sun powers up software, servers

SAN FRANCISCO - Sun has charted a new course for the way it will deliver software and manufacture processors in the hopes of keeping users as it faces increased competition from IBM and Intel.

Scott McNealy, chairman, CEO and president of Sun, outlined the company's new attack during a financial analyst conference held here last week. The Sun chief unveiled a project, dubbed Orion, with its goal to deliver Sun's infrastructure software on a quarterly basis with the Solaris operating system. Along with this plan, Sun has developed a new class of multicore processors that the company says will give it an edge over IBM and Intel.

The new technology comes at a time when Sun faces criticism from analysts about its unrelenting focus on the UltraSPARC processor and Solaris. Competitors such as IBM and HP offer a variety of hardware to customers wrapped in services packages that exceed those of Sun. Conversely, Dell undercuts Sun with some of its low-cost Intel systems running Linux.

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

SAN FRANCISCO - Sun has charted a new course for the way it will deliver software and manufacture processors in the hopes of keeping users as it faces increased competition from IBM and Intel.

Scott McNealy, chairman, CEO and president of Sun, outlined the company's new attack during a financial analyst conference held here last week. The Sun chief unveiled a project, dubbed Orion, with its goal to deliver Sun's infrastructure software on a quarterly basis with the Solaris operating system. Along with this plan, Sun has developed a new class of multicore processors that the company says will give it an edge over IBM and Intel.

The new technology comes at a time when Sun faces criticism from analysts about its unrelenting focus on the UltraSPARC processor and Solaris. Competitors such as IBM and HP offer a variety of hardware to customers wrapped in services packages that exceed those of Sun. Conversely, Dell undercuts Sun with some of its low-cost Intel systems running Linux.

"Skepticism is at an all-time high," McNealy said.

To counter this pressure, Sun will emphasize its broad software portfolio and take a very pragmatic approach to delivering applications with Orion. Then, Sun is touting the value of its hefty research and development budget as an edge over rivals.

On the software side, Sun says it hopes Orion will make life easier on its customers. The company has long released the millions of lines of code that make up Solaris on a quarterly update schedule. This means users can plan for bug fixes, patches and new technology to arrive at the same time every 90 days. Now Sun will extend this strategy to middleware products such as the Sun One Application Server, Web Server and Directory Server.

In addition, it will ship management products such as Sun Cluster, its Grid Engine software and N1 server virtualization software on the same quarterly schedule. All these products will arrive on new Sun servers or be available on the disks Sun uses to ship Solaris.

Click to see:

"I had a conversation with a CEO last week," McNealy said in an interview. "They got tired of us releasing the portal one week, the directory server after that, the app server after, the operating system and then clustering. They never knew how to certify and test to a stable platform. So now we are going to give them quarterly releases."

Sun will deliver the Orion package for the first time near the end of the third quarter, making all the software available for standard Solaris and the version of Solaris that runs on Intel and Advanced Micro Devices processors. It then will follow near year-end with the same package for Linux.

The company plans to offer a traditional licensing model akin to what is now offered, a metered model and a flat-rate fee assessed at regular intervals. Sun hopes customers will pick the flat-rate route, which the company says would be most beneficial for users.

Meanwhile, Sun's new approach to chip making is a more radical move, as the company is building a type of symmetric multiprocessing system on a chip that differs from anything IBM or Intel has talked about thus far.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.