Data Center to the nth Press Kit »   Just the Facts: UltraSparc III »   Fire Server Family

John Shoemaker Executive VP Systems Product Group, Sun Microsystems Sun Fire Midframe Server 1:07:10:04 US Economic Downturn - Customer Solution I believe that, you know, what's happened is that people have kind of panicked with a downturn in the economy and they're just pulled back on everything. But I believe what they're going to increasingly realize is, and we're beginning to see some of this already, that these products offer tremendous productivity advantages to our customers. That this is very core to their competitiveness and to their strategic planning over the next several years. 1:07:40:17 What customers are going to get: Reliability & Performance They're going to get tremendous improvements in both performance, cost performance, and availability. Uh, and these are really the tools that they need to enable their continued competitiveness and to gain competitive advantage in their marketplaces against their key competitors. 1:08:05:02 High Performance/Lower Price These servers bring outstanding, uh, performance. They move many of the quality and high availability features of the -- the -- until now was only present at the very high end of the market all the way down the midrange or the product line, and we believe will be a real engine to help continue the fueling of gaining of additional marketshare against both IBM and HP over the next, uh, three to five years. Steve MacKay VP/Chief Architect Systems Product Group, Sun Microsystems Sun Fire Midframe Server 1:08:40:06 Broad Customer Base The range of customers for these systems is extremely broad. I mean, it runs from telecommunications companies, Internet service providers, financial institutions, uh, design companies. Basically anybody who has a significant computing need. 1:09:03:05 Scalability One of the great things about the Sun architecture is that it's scalable, that it's expandable. These, uh, new Sunfire servers in particular are -- are built to be very expandable so that you can start small, you can move up. 1:09:22:05 Investment Protection We've paid a lot of attention to the architecture, uh, of these systems, uh, that gives very good investment protection to customers in that way. They run the same applications that they've always run. In fact, we have an application guarantee program around Solaris 8. If you have applications that run on a previous version of Solaris, we guarantee they will run on Solaris 8, Compared to, uh, HP or IBM, uh, Sun has the advantage that from our smallest servers on up to our largest servers, the same software runs in the same way. Um, it runs faster on the bigger systems than on the smaller ones, but the same software runs. 1:10:09:16 High Performance/Lower Price One of the reasons we're calling these sys -- new systems midframes is we've taken a lot of the availability and reliability features that have existed really only at the very high end of the computing spectrum. 1:10:28:19 Reliability Everything in these systems is hot-pluggable. That is to say, every component of these systems can be removed and replaced while the system continues to run. And so this is really important for continuous availability. Ultra SPARC III 1:10:47:07 Speed Some of the customer applications have been running as much as three or four times faster than on the comparable previous generation systems. So we think that this represents a real breakthrough in performance for customers. 1:10:59:29 Resilience It contains a number of high availability features in terms of its ability to protect various pieces of memory and other parts of the system from failure. So, uh, it's a very resilient, uh, engine.