Sun's Server Revenue Grew
24% - Says IDC
FRAMINGHAM,
Mass., February 26, 2007 – According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly
Server Tracker, factory revenue in the worldwide server market grew 5.2% year
over year to $15.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2006, marking the third
consecutive quarter of growth.
Worldwide server unit shipment
growth was flat in 4Q06 when compared with the year-ago period.
For
the full year 2006, worldwide server revenue grew 2.0% to $52.3 billion, while
worldwide unit shipments grew 5.9% to 7.5 million units. This represents the
highest annual server revenue since the market peaked in 2000.
Sun was the 3rd largest server vendor with $1.5 billion server revenue
24% higher than the year before quarter.
After two
consecutive quarters of single-digit revenue growth, Linux server revenue growth
accelerated once again, growing 15.3% to $1.8 billion when compared with 4Q05.
Linux servers now represent 11.9% of all server revenue.
Unix servers
experienced 2.8% revenue growth year over year when compared with 4Q06.
Worldwide Unix revenues were $5.1 billion for the quarter, representing 33.5% of
quarterly server spending and reflecting continued IT investment in this server
market segment, with particular strength in the high-end enterprise segment of
the Unix market. ...IDC
profile
Editor's comments:- Sun was 25 years old this month - so
this independent affirmation of Sun's server growth by IDC made a nice
birthday present.
Earlier this week
NetApp's founder
Dave Hitz referred to Sun's lamentable storage failures during the
2000 - 2003 IT recession
in a 19 page
planning document from that era which he made public. In it he said "Sun
is a big loser in every segment, by both revenue and TB."
Is
that still true today? - I think born again StorageTek / Sun is wobbly on
storage - and not doing as well as they should - but the jury's still out - so
I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
NetApp's own success at
climbing back up the greasy revenue pole after the recession seems to be due to
its focus on "bet the farm customers" - and pleasing customers who had
the potential to be the biggest accounts if they switched more of their
discretionary storage spending to a single vendor.
Sun says "Stop moaning about server speeds and buy
faster NICs"
Editor:-
February 20, 2007 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. is waking laggardly customers
up to the idea that they had better migrate to faster Ethernet cards if they
want to get good performance from their servers.
As part of this
program Sun is offering an introductory risk free trial of a supported $498
NIC.
It's the prospects of these 10Gbps (and expected 20Gbps)
Ethernet cards and multi-core processors which brought on an early ice age
for the once hot InfiniBand
from which it never truly recovered.
I remember when Sun did something
similar in the early days of the SPARCstation market (circa 1990) and issued an
edict saying that every customer had better start buying
CD drives - because they
were going to stop releasing software on
tape. Customers moaned
because it meant an additional outlay - and the drives cost hundreds of dollars.
It was good for resellers though - because it gave us an excuse to
sell something new to all our customers, and talk about
memory upgrades etc. At
that time the average age of the Sun SPARC base was less than a year old and had
mostly migrated away from DEC.
I think today's announcement by Sun is
a warning shot that customers are not going to get good performance out of new
systems which are tied together with pieces of old string. The next one - I
predict - will be about connecting modern servers to dinostaurs...
McNealy's Podcast
Editor:- February 14,
2007 - Scott McNealy talks about the Intel deal, 7 million
Solaris x86 licenses etc with Jonathan Schwartz in this podcast.
The
former CEO and founder isn't getting out of Dodge. And the pair of them reckon
they have swapped more email than anyone else in the universe.
Sun's
direction in the next 5 years?
Sun wants to be an important part of
the arsenal for companies who view IT as a weapon.
Interphase Offers SPARC Based IP SIGTRAN Solution
3GSM
World Congress, Barcelona, Spain – February 13, 2007 - Interphase Corp
today announced the availability of its iNAV 9400 Signaling Gateway product
integrated in a Netra T2000 based NEBS certified rack mount server.
The
gateway can operate either as a signaling end point or as a signaling transfer
point in SS7 and IP SIGTRAN networks for SS7 signaling.
...Interphase
profile
See also:-
article:-
Leveraging IP for Distributed SS7 Applications (pdf),
article:-
Signaling Evolution: Transition to Next Generation Networks (pdf)
Intel's 80 Core Teraflop Processor Presented at ISSCC
SANTA
CLARA, Calif - February 11, 2007 - Intel Corp researchers have
developed the world's first programmable processor that delivers
supercomputer-like performance from a single, 80-core chip.
This
is the result of the company's innovative 'Tera-scale computing' research aimed
at delivering Teraflop performance for future PCs and servers. Technical
details of the Teraflop research chip will be presented at the annual
International Solid-State Circuits
Conference this week in San Francisco.
Intel has no plans to bring this exact chip designed with floating
point cores to market. However, the company's Tera-scale research is
instrumental in investigating new innovations in individual or specialized
processor or core functions, the types of chip-to-chip and chip-to-computer
interconnects required to best move data and most importantly, how software will
need to be designed to best leverage multiple processor cores.
...Intel profile,
events,
storage chips
Editor's
comments:- well I guess we can see where that's going. But the limiting factor
in most big server environments is the storage speed - not the speed of the
processors.
Is it a threat for SPARC? - Maybe it's an opportunity...
If Sun talks nicely to its new pal Intel - they might be able to borrow some
chip designers. The TI
people are nice - and have been helpful to Sun in the past - but they don't
bring much to the server party. Intel hates
AMD enough that anything's
possible.
More Throughput But Still No 2GHz SPARC Chips from Sun
Editor:-
February 8, 2007 - Sun's SPARC Chip Roadmap is discussed in an article
today on CBRonline.
It's one of many which are based on Sun
briefings earlier this week.
You'll find another on
ZDNet.
Meanwhile
an article on the
State of Enterprise Linux in Datamation provides an all in one refresher on
the history of this Solaris nemesis. In the 1970s Datamation magazine included
witty cartoons which lightened the sombre tome.
And that backward
reference reminds me it's 5 years since the market was ready for a
2GHz SPARC chip.
Although Sun's long detour via "throughput computing" is now showing
its benefits as a viable holding strategy - you can't help but wonder how
different the SPARC market would look today if Sun hadn't used its Machiavellian
skills to make sure that nobody else did it first.
NextComputing Ships 1.6GHz SPARC Portable
NASHUA, N.H. -
February 7, 2007 - NextComputing integrates the 1.33GHz and 1.60GHz
UltraSPARCIIIi processors in its Vigor ULTRA-III rugged deployable server line,
committing to Sun Microsystems' server-processing architecture beyond 2010.
Encased in a compact, rugged chassis with flip-down keyboard
protecting the integrated (1600 x 1200) LCD, the Vigor ULTRA-III is currently
used to support critical C4 field deployments, as well as a stand-alone, "small-footprint"
server in command and control and training simulation centers worldwide. The
modular, open-standards architecture of the Vigor ULTRA-III results in the
superior flexibility, scalability, and extended lifecycle viability compared to
static "point-solution" designs like the
Bullfrog
laptop, whose parent company has not addressed future support strategies or new
mobile SPARC product announcements since 2005.
"NextCom remains
committed to the worldwide Solaris user base. Solaris 8 is supported, as well as
Trusted Solaris, Solaris 9, and Solaris 10," says Bob Labadini, NextCom CTO
and founder. "We offer the most comprehensive support and enable our
clients to port proprietary applications from Solaris 8 to Solaris 10 within the
same platform, while also providing a migration path to Solaris 10 X86,
Enterprise Linux, and Windows 2003 Server with our Vigor Opteron, featuring a
common platform package, and the same look and feel as our Vigor ULTRA-III."
...NextCom
profile, SPARC
Notebooks
ProStor Appoints Sun Alumni as New VP Marketing
BOULDER, Colo -
February 7, 2007 - ProStor Systems today announced the appointment of
storage industry veteran Robert Williamsen as its VP of marketing.
Williamsen will direct all product marketing and management worldwide
for ProStor's removable disk backup and archive technology RDX. He will also
lead all marketing initiatives with the company's strategic partners and
licensees, including Tandberg
Data and Imation.
Williamsen joins ProStor Systems from
Dot Hill where he
headed up marketing for the company's high-performance, modular enterprise
storage platforms. Before that, he served as the senior director of strategic
marketing and director of product marketing at
McDATA, responsible for
new technology and business initiatives and all aspects of product management
and product marketing. Williamsen has also served in executive and managerial
positions at Sun Microsystems,
Connex,
Ridge
Technologies, Adaptec
and
Dysan/Xidex.
...ProStor Systems
profile,
storage reliability,
Storage People
HP Joins in the Sun / Intel Solaris Hoo Har
PALO ALTO,
Calif - February 6, 2007 - HP is making it easier for dissatisfied Sun
Microsystems server customers to migrate to higher performing, more
affordable x86-based HP ProLiant platforms.
By expanding certification of the 64-bit version of Solaris 10 on 7
of its existing Intel Xeon-based HP ProLiant servers, HP (says it) is providing
users of Solaris on SPARC-based servers more options than ever for adopting
industry-standard computing.
Since 1996, HP has certified various versions of Solaris in both 32-
and 64-bit mode on select AMD Opteron- and Intel Xeon-based HP ProLiant servers.
HP shipped more than a half million more x86-based servers worldwide than Sun in
the third quarter of 2006. In the same period, HP grew its shipments
year-over-year by almost twice the entire number of platforms Sun shipped. In
addition, HP is the No. 1 provider of UNIX on x86, shipping more than 3
times the number of UNIX servers on x86 than Sun in the quarter.
HP
offers a comprehensive set of automated tools, system trade-ins, financial
incentives, migration assistance and integrated support capabilities to help
customers migrate from Sun to HP ProLiant, BladeSystem, Integrity and
StorageWorks platforms. Since 2004, HP has generated more than $1 billion in
revenues from moving Sun customers to HP servers.
...HP profile,
the New
Solaris Migration?
Editor's comments:- although
Sun
and Intel stirred up a hype-storm recently with their lovey dovey
announcement that Sun will support Intel's quad-core Xeon with Solaris - I felt
so unmoved by the news that I didn't even run it on our news page at the time.
People who know the industry know that Sun sells trivial amounts of Intel
architecture servers - and only a small fraction of Solaris X86 servers run on
Sun supplied hardware.
Of course - 8 years ago - at the height of the
dotcom boom - when I wrote a heretical article called
Should Sun make its
own brand of "Intel Inside®" PC's? - an Intel-Sun Alliance
would have set the computer world on fire. Now it's more like old soldiers from
opposite sides in World War 2 getting together for a nice cup of tea. The
biggest threat to Intel's processor sales isn't SPARC. It's
solid state disks - which
will reduce the number of processors needed in all architectures by 50% during
the next few years. | |
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IDC Reports on
Server market
The Network is Better at 10Gbps
McNealy's
Podcast
The Network is Better at 10Gbps
Interphase Offers
SPARC Based IP SIGTRAN Solution
Intel's 80 Core Teraflop Processor
Presented at ISSCC
More Throughput But Still No 2GHz SPARC Chips
NextComputing
Ships 1.6GHz SPARC Portable
HP Joins in Sun / Intel Solaris Hoo Har
earlier news -
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NextCom
is a Nashua, NH based extreme
mobile computing solutions provider, capable
of filling nearly every requirement, including a
full line of mobile
UltraSPARC Solaris note-
books and mobile servers; as well as open
standards
based Unix blade servers.
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