Feature Story

Spend less, get more.

With new Linux offerings, Sun is taking the lead in low-cost network computing.

5.Aug.03--To CIOs grappling with shrinking budgets, Linux must seem the answer to their prayers. By coupling power and flexibility with the Holy Grail of lower costs, the penguin has palpable appeal.

With Linux adoption predicted to grow annually by 22 percent over the next two years, Sun Microsystems is pitching in with offerings designed to build on that momentum. Armed with a license to distribute Red Hat Linux, Sun teamed up with long-standing partners such as Oracle to launch a series of 32-bit enterprise network computing solutions that provide the levels of integration, scalability, fault tolerance, and performance that financial institutions demand.

Alongside Linux offerings, Sun is delivering systems that run the Solaris Operating System on Intel-based machines.

At the May 19 announcement, Sun CEO Scott McNealy emphasized the company's commitment to lower-cost solutions. "Post bubble, TCO stands for 'take costs out,' and everyone's looking for lower-cost ways of building their computing environment," McNealy said. "We understand, we get it, and we're all over it. It's a $30 billion market opportunity we're going after."

To that end, Sun has released two new entry-level, Intel-based servers that are more powerful and less expensive than anything Dell currently offers and cost about 25 percent less than equivalent products from IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

In addition to making sure Oracle software will run on all Sun platforms, Oracle is also supporting N1 software--Sun's radical variation on grid computing, which allows an administrator to move computing resources around dynamically--and the Solaris Operating System (x86 Platform Edition). Oracle is linking the Sun StarOffice Office Suite with the Oracle Collaboration Suite and will offer Oracle 9i with Real Application Clusters (RAC) on Sun's x86 products.

As Oracle CEO Larry Ellison explained on May 19, the benefit of clustering Intel-based servers running the Solaris platform or Red Hat Linux is that you can run large, power-hungry applications such as SAP on multiple low-cost machines as if they were one expensive, high-end box. Microsoft and IBM, on the other hand, can't run such applications on more than one machine.

"We can take these applications, run them on a cluster, and something incredible happens: They run even faster than on a big computer," Ellison said. "If one of those machines should fail, no one cares; the software just keeps running. It's unbreakable." That's good news for brokerage houses looking to deploy clusters as part of their enterprise continuity strategy.

Take Your Pick

With Sun's approach to low-cost computing, the emphasis is on choice. When customers want tried-and-tested reliability, cross-platform features, and broad expansion capabilities, they can choose the Solaris Operating System (x86 Platform Edition). When broad hardware and community support and horizontal scalability are more important, businesses can opt for Linux, thanks to Sun's deal with Red Hat to distribute all x86 variants of its business-class version of Linux. Additionally, Red Hat will distribute Sun's virtual machine for the Java platform (Java virtual machine or JVM machine) with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which will further extend the reach of Java technology.

Sun has added over 100 new independent software vendors (ISVs), systems integrators, and channel partners to the list of more than 600 that support its low-cost-computing strategy. Together these vendors--which include Oracle, Computer Associates, Financial Fusion, SAS Institute, SunGard, Sybase, and TIBCO Software--offer more than 1,000 applications for the Solaris Operating System (x86 Platform Edition).

This article is presented courtesy of Executive Boardroom.