Sun points to features in the V210 and V240 systems -- which are rack-mounted models 1.75- and 3.5-inches thick, respectively -- as evidence the company is ahead of the curve. For one thing, each has four 1-gigabit-per-second Ethernet ports built in, said Souheil Saliba, vice president of marketing for Sun's volume server products group. Each can accept a specialised $695 "daughtercard" with chips to accelerate encrypted Web page transactions but that doesn't take up an extra expansion slot. A systems' individual personality is stored on a card that can be moved from one server to another. And the machines include hardware that administrators switch off and on and take other actions remotely. A low-end system costs $2,995, but the "sweet spot" where customers are expected to be most interested will be two-processor machines with 2GB of memory that cost about $5,800, Saliba said. The V240 accommodates more hard drives and expansion slots than the V210. The V240 can also hold a maximum of 8GB compared to the 4GB limit with the V210. Future upgrades will double the capacity to 16GB and 8GB, respectively. Sun plans use the Jalapeno chip in a forthcoming four-processor system code-named Chalupa, Saliba said. Faster versions of Jalapeno are expected at 1.2GHz, 1.4GHz, 1.6GHz and beyond, he added. But the Enchilada systems, originally expected at the end of 2002 according to Saliba, arrived a few months late while Sun was vulnerable to competition. "Where we have struggled a bit is (with) a two-processor, 1U (1.75-inch thick) and two-processor, 2U (3.5-inch thick) box that are aggressively priced against the Intel servers from Dell, HP and IBM," Saliba said. The market for low-end and thin "blade" systems is not only one of the fastest-growing segments, it's also becoming more important as the systems assume critical responsibilities once reserved for high-end machines, said IDC analyst Mark Melenovsky. That importance is the result of the gradual maturing of technologies such as Sun's N1 for grouping servers into pools of efficient computing power and Oracle's 9i RAC edition that splits a database across several low-end machines. "When we look at... the advances being made in management and clustering, our projections are that these low-end and modular systems are going to represent about half the spending on servers in the next three or four years," Melenovsky said. Sun also will announce new features to midrange and high-end servers on Tuesday. Some servers will be able to detect failing components and shut them down before they crash the server, a feature that will arrive in the Sun Fire 3800, 4800 and 6800 on April 25 and the 12K and 15K machines later in 2003. Higher-end systems also figure in a number of new services Sun is introducing to help customers build common parts of a computing infrastructure. These services show how to pick appropriate Sun technology to accomplish tasks such as building a backup data centre dozens of miles away from a primary site; setting up an email system that can respond to surging demand; consolidating many lower-end servers onto fewer higher-end ones; and designing systems with sophisticated ways to authenticate computer users. Expanding services
While those services continue in Sun's current direction, the company also is branching out, said Vivek Joshi, vice president of marketing and strategy for Sun services. "Our intent is very different from a year ago or six months ago," Joshi said. For one thing, Sun will be doing more services work directly with customers it once left to business partners such as EDS. On the other, Sun will work to embrace non-Sun equipment it formerly shunned, Joshi said. "We're moving from a Sun-Solaris-only (approach) to heterogeneous," he said. Where Sun previously would try to coax customers away from Windows servers, for example, "We'll take accountability for the whole thing", relying on business partners to support the non-Sun equipment, he said. In addition, Sun will promote services for "utility pricing", in which customers are charged for the computing capacity they actually use. "Invariably most people overprovision. They provision for peaks and beyond. That means massive capital assets are locket up, unused," Joshi said. New financing mechanisms support the utility service. "Most companies want to move (computing costs) from being a capital asset purchase to an expense-based item," Joshi said. Though Sun has long scorned services as an expensive way to cope with problems better solved with technology, the company's services revenue has grown more than 25 percent per year since 1994, and the company is beginning to place a higher priority on it, Joshi said. It's important for Sun to change, said Technology Business Research analyst Humberto Andrade. "They're struggling to realise that services are supposed to drive (hardware) sales, not the other way around," he said. "I believe they are at least one year or 18 months behind HP and three years behind IBM."
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