Sun delivers second installment of new initiatives

During what has become a quarterly event--this quarter called Network Computer 03 Q2 (NC03Q2)--Sun Microsystems made about a dozen announcements that provided a clear product vision for the company as well as an account of where its half-million dollars of quarterly R&D dollars is being spent.

The event also made clear that CEO Scott McNealy is no comedian. In his opening comments, McNealy’s attempt at finding humor in SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) landed with a thud, not once but three times. The event was carried live as a Webcast to 40,000 Sun customers and partners, surely some of which reside in Ontario and Hong Kong.

The intended message of NC03Q2 was to emphasize the company’s continued focus on making network computing more affordable, scalable, secure and integratable.

“Our [main] focus is on affordability,” McNealy said. “When I talk to customers, the first three items that matter most are cost, cost and cost. This is where an integrated environment is most useful.”

Sun’s first series of announcements were for its storage product line. In keeping with its focus on affordability, the company announced a new family of mid-range storage products it claims are 45% less expensive that EMC’s CLARiiON CX400 series and 20% less than HP’s EVA line.

The Sun StorEdge 6120 will scale from 252 gigabits of storage to 12 terabytes. The StorEdge 6320 will scale from 500 gigabits to 45 terabytes.

“We are revamping the Sun 6000 storage family, a family of products specifically designed for enterprise capability where price performance is what really matters, where the SAN matters,” said Mark Canepa, executive vice president of Sun network storage.

Sun also continued to deliver on its N1 strategy with new capabilities for the N1 Data Platform including storage pooling and consolidation, which allows users to allocate new and existing storage resources on demand. The company also increased the breadth of device support for its StorEdge enterprise storage manager.

Six new software products designed to enhance security in network computing were also announced. The Trusted Solaris operating system for SPARC and x86 servers is Sun’s solution for needing to create privacy between multiple users on a single system. The standard edition starts at $999 and provides security, accountability and better protection against security violations. The certified edition starts at $2,495 and has been evaluated at the highest level of IT security under the Common Criteria Certification scheme.

Included in the new software announcements were the N1 Data Platform; the Sun Management Center 3.5 Software, which manages all Sun hardware, applications and the Solaris OS; the Sun ONE Integration Server Secure Trading Agent, a business-to-business solution for exchanging documents between trading partners; Sun ONE Instant Messaging Platform 6.0 Software, which provides the ability to securely capture information for auditing and archiving as well as anti-spam and anti-virus integration capabilities.

The company launched two new services for network computing: managed services and utility computing and introduced enhancements to its Net Connect services.

Sun’s managed services are partner-driven and intended to impart the company’s expertise through best practices and support. “Sun managed services is not a euphemism for Sun doing outsourcing; we work with our partners to do the outsourcing,” said Patricia Sueltz, executive vice president of Sun Services.

The managed services will provide both long-term and short-term engagements, such as managing IT infrastructure through service level agreements and managing processes or assisting with immediate data center needs.

The utility computing service comes with metering and monitoring that allows users to use network computing capacity on demand.

Sun also introduced a new set of infrastructure solutions and services designed around consolidation and continuity. The enterprise continuity initiative is a joint venture with Nortel Networks meant to keep mission-critical applications up and running. Enterprise consolidation is aimed at helping the enterprise reduce costs by providing the methodology, technology and products to consolidate servers into more common architectures.

“BT took out nearly 100 Sun [servers] and consolidated them into six Sun servers. What CEO would not want her CIO achieving 100% return in investment in 18 months and 12 times better application availability,” Sueltz said.

The infrastructure services include what Sun calls the infinite mailbox. It provides an inexpensive solution to secure, e-mail digital archiving. It is platform independent and complies with regulatory requirements for archiving e-mail.

With all the announcements, Sun stressed the benefits of its open architecture. “CIOs want integration with choice. They don’t want to be trapped or locked in. They want open interfaces and that’s what we are delivering,” McNealy said.