Sun to announce plans for Opteron servers

Next week at Comdex in Las Vegas, Sun will announce plans to build servers based on AMD's Opteron chip, sources familiar with Sun's plans said Friday.

Sun sells servers based on Intel's Xeon processors, but Chairman, President, and CEO Scott McNealy will shed light on Sun's plans to adopt the Opteron chip during his keynote address on Monday, the sources said.

Sun declined to comment on its plans for Monday's keynote, but a spokeswoman said the company would make "a direction announcement."

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Next week at Comdex in Las Vegas, Sun will announce plans to build servers based on AMD's Opteron chip, sources familiar with Sun's plans said Friday.

Sun sells servers based on Intel's Xeon processors, but Chairman, President, and CEO Scott McNealy will shed light on Sun's plans to adopt the Opteron chip during his keynote address on Monday, the sources said.

Sun declined to comment on its plans for Monday's keynote, but a spokeswoman said the company would make "a direction announcement."

This year, Sun has announced its plans to offer a version of Solaris for Opteron, and executives have spoken favorably of the AMD chip. "We're selling x86-based equipment today, and I can look at Opteron as a 64-bit processor with the advantage that it is not limited to 32-bits," said Andy Ingram, a Sun vice president of marketing, in an interview last week.

IBM is the only other major U.S. server vendor to use the Opteron in a server, announcing its plans for the eServer 325 during the Opteron launch event in April. 

Sun's announcement will come as part of a push to emphasize low-cost computing, and what the company calls its "scale-out" strategy. The company rose to prominence in the last decade selling large, expensive servers based on its Sparc processors and Solaris operating system, but the growth prospects for those types of servers have dwindled as customers look to smaller, less-expensive servers based on Xeon processors and either Microsoft's Windows operating system or the Linux operating system.

While Sun has recognized the need to offer a low-end server based on the x86 instruction set that runs Intel and AMD's processors, it competes strongly for the high-end of the market with Intel's Itanium 2 processor. This makes the company more inclined to support an Intel competitor, analysts have said.

AMD also declined to comment on Tuesday's announcement.

Robert McMillan of the IDG News Service contributed to this report.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.