The enterprise that pulls together. -- continued
Q: What are some examples of how Sun innovations help cut costs?
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Andy Ingram, Sun Vice President, Marketing, Scalable Systems Group
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Andy Ingram: Let me start by saying that innovations are only interesting if they bring real value to the customer. Sun aims at delivering value in three categories: innovations that help customers cut the cost of infrastructure, that reduce the cost of managing the infrastructure, and that protect investments. They're equally important.
Let's look at how Sun helps you cut infrastructure cost. The cost of a physical server or box is determined by the resources and capabilities that are built into it. If a Sun innovation can double the system's throughput without changing the basic cost structure, then customers can eliminate additional purchases. That's exactly what happens with our Sun Fire V490 and Sun Fire V890 servers. The innovation is chip multithreading. The result is that you can have the throughput of an eight-way server in the form factor of a four-way server. That's higher compute density with lower total infrastructure cost.
Q: How does Sun help cut management costs?
Andy Ingram: Through innovations in the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) and our N1 Grid Computing strategy, Sun enables you to apply automation to provisioning and managing your environment. When you can use automation instead of people, you can cut costs. Automation also speeds up many provisioning and management tasks. In fact, we've shown that with Sun's N1 Grid Engine software, you can provision software on a 128-node cluster grid in less time than it takes to configure the latest version of Microsoft Windows on your desktop.
Q: What about investment protection--what's unique about Sun's approach?
"When you build the whole, you deliver something that's much better than the sum of the parts."
Andy Ingram
Sun Vice President, Marketing,
Scalable Systems Group
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Andy Ingram: There is no vendor more committed to protecting investments than Sun. What's different about Sun's approach is that we continue innovating, year after year, without breaking compatibility. Sun is the only vendor that has the guts to guarantee binary compatibility. What that means is that as you take advantage of new Sun innovations, you don't have to constantly rewrite or recompile your applications to run on a new platform. There are tremendous cost savings inherent in that capability.
Another key point is that Sun has always been--and will continue to be--one of the industry's strongest supporters of standards. The network insists on standards. So the interfaces we adhere to are open: TCP/IP, NFS, SCSI, the Java platform, POSIX, Linux. We are fanatical about being open. It drives better products, more innovation, and lower costs.
With Sun you can continue to upgrade your systems without painful and disruptive migrations. We've been very creative over the years about our upgrade programs. In our smaller systems, you can simply add more capacity over time as your needs grow. And in the higher-end systems, you can mix-and-match additional processors to handle whatever your particular workload is.
Q: What innovations excite you the most?
Andy Ingram: A lot of the really interesting new developments are happening at the operating system level. The Solaris 10 OS has quite a few innovations that will help customers improve performance and cut costs. For example, dynamic tracing--we call it DTrace--lets system administrators and developers see what the system is doing, as well as how applications are interacting with each other, so they can find performance bottlenecks. Running DTrace on pilot systems, development systems, production systems--even systems that have already been performance tuned--can improve performance dramatically.
The N1 Grid Containers technology, found in the Solaris 10 OS, is another cool innovation. With Containers, you can logically partition your system, creating multiple fault-isolated partitions so your applications and data are protected. By running multiple partitions on a single operating system instance, you can reduce the administrative overhead of managing multiple operating systems and allocate resources according to your service-level requirements. That gives you real flexibility.
It's a very exciting time for Sun. We're still innovating, still adding value for customers by lowering cost and complexity, and still pushing the envelope of performance and scalability. It keeps us young at heart. And it keeps us competitive in the market.
Click here to return to the first part of the interview with Andy
Ingram.
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