2004 saw the end of
the delayed end of the recession in the SPARC market which had started in 2001.
Most analysts had written off Sun and the SPARC market - so when I wrote
an article in April
predicting that Sun's revenue would start growing again in the 2nd calendar
quarter - I felt like a lone voice in the wilderness. Other IT editors and
analysts who talk to me from time to time for in depth SPARC market comments
were surprised - but held off from another round of Sun kicking articles for a
few months till Sun's results confirmed this.
Although Sun's results
from the 3rd quarter of calendar 2004 won't be reported till a month after this
article is published - I expect them to confirm that the last 3 quarters in
2004 taken together will continue showing year on revenue growth. Also I expect
that during 2005 - Sun's own revenue and that of the SPARC market will pick up
growth to around 10%.
It didn't feel like much of a recovery
to most US Sun VARs. Authorized VARs were squeezed into ever smaller niches as
Sun seemed to take more direct business.
...Later
after publication of this article - in a press release dated December 21, 2004
- Sun Microsystems claimed the opposite had in fact happened. Sun stated there
had been a year-over-year increase in the revenue generated through its US
partner and reseller channels - to over 50% of Sun's U.S. revenue. However, the
editor's view is that Sun has a convenient way of designating selected
companies as "partners" which others might designate as "end
users". Sun's statement in its press release may be technically accurate
even though it has indeed taken more potential business away from what I would
call traditional VARs. This is how the circle is squared. Sun says - that a
certain customer who develops software (but uses significantly more Sun servers
internally than it ever sells) is no longer a suitable customer for VAR
business - due to the fact that Sun has made them an iForce partner and will
sell to them direct. Therefore Sun's sales to the ISV for its own internal use
get counted as channel business. Sun VARs get less business while Sun's "channel"
business increases - due to increased direct sales which actually cut out the
traditional channel.)
Suffering most in the US Sun market in 2004 were the gray VARs who were
impacted by Sun's new Solaris licensing policies affecting
remarketed Sun
servers and Sun's third party
maintenance schemes.
The total number of
Sun VARs in the US
declined again by 10% in 2004 as companies went bust or quit the Sun business
altogether. Many of the long time Sun VARs I spoke to were bitter about their
experiences in the Sun market. And I got the impression that Sun's thrashing
around with no clear Linux strategy and a poor SPARC performance upgrade path
was a source of disbelief and frustration. How could a company this size be so
stupid?
One experienced Sun analyst commented - "Sun has a track
record of screwing its partners. Yet despite that VARs, IHVs and ISVs rush to
follow the latest Sun bandwaggon in the hope it will lead somewhere better. You
would think they would know by now that even Sun doesn't know or control where
it's going."
In Europe the situation for the gray Sun
market was a lot better. Two factors accounted for the different experience.
- EU anti-trust laws are tougher on IT companies than in the US. The tight
controls on VAR channels and related service issues which Sun tries to maintain
in the US would be illegal in Europe - so it's a gray market free for all.
- The slide in value of the dollar compared to the two main European
currencies - the Euro and Pound created very competitive pricing opportunites
for gray VARs as product prices kept dropping unbelievably lower.
The
gap in performance between low GigaHertz SPARC and high GigaHertz
Intel Architecture processors - which had contributed to Sun's 60% revenue
decline since 2000 - got some bandaid fixes in 2004 with 3 main announcements.
- Sun confirmed that new faster SPARC processors would be coming soon. Not
from the tainted stable which had blundered by over reliance on simulation
rather than hard electronics expertise and tossed away Sun's reputation for
reliability by leaving its processors open to
Alpha
particle induced crashes in 2001. And not from the 2002 acquisition of
Afara Websystems, Inc., a company that was developing next-generation, SPARC
microprocessor technology. Instead the new faster SPARC chips would be coming
from Fujitsu, who were already shipping them in their own Primeservers. Better
still - Sun and Fujitsu confirmed they would merge their high end SPARC product
lines - which we told readers about in
October 2003.
- Sun's long awaited SPARC IV processors started shipping in 2004. The
initial products clocked at exactly the same speed as the old SPARC III's. But
with 2 processors inside each chip - Sun's new term for this was "throughput
computing" - users effectively got twice the performance for many
applications. This was good business for Sun who were able to publish benchmarks
trashing many of their rivals. It also meant that Sun could revamp old server
lines. The new chips had the same footprint as the old ones. Although similar
products appeared in the Intel Architecture market later in 2004 - it looked
unlikely that they would ge supported properly by Microsoft or Linux for at
least another year.
- In November Sun announced an OS led SPARC performance tweak. According
to Sun's internal benchmarks, customers who upgraded to Solaris 10 OS on their
UltraSPARC systems could benefit from a 47% to 73% increase in Web Server
performance from the Solaris 9 and Solaris 8 OS, respectively.
In 2004
there was an another series of the long running comedy "the x86
Solaris Saga". In a series end twist - Sun announced that it would make
Solaris 10 open source. This move was aimed to lure users away from the Linux
camp. By year end there was no real evidence that Sun had doen anything more
substantial than issue a few press releases and talk about this subject in
interviews.
Fans of this saga will have to wait till the next series
in 2005 - and should not be overly surprised if the first episode starts with
Jonathan Schwartz waking up and saying that the open source statements were all
"Just a dream." That's more likely to happen if Sun thinks it
will get double digit revenue growth in 2005/6 anyway with its proprietary
approach. For fans who were too young to see the early episodes of the x86
Solaris Saga we've got a brief history of the first 18 years in
article:- Surviving
the Solaris x86 Wars..
...Later after publication
of this article - The Register also took up the Sun dream theme in their spoof
article Scott
McNealy's Xmas dream. |
 |
| SPARC History |
| Spellabyte and
Terrorbyte loved sitting around the campfire, discussing the good old days of
SPARC computing. | |
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Virtual
Tape: Can You Afford to Ignore It? - article by MaXXan Systems
Network
connected disk to disk backup systems for the enterprise have come a long way
since the first pioneering products started to appear in the pages of
STORAGEsearch.com in the late 1990s.
Some of the growing
sophistication in the market can be seen by the way that the marketing
terminology has morphed from the early D2d (let's kill tape backup), via D2D2T
(let's be friends with tape / peaceful coexistence) to the current VTL (Virtual
Tape Library - let's just see if they notice that it's more reliable and works
faster - and don't tell them that there isn't a tape in the box) type of
approaches.
But if you think that speed, reliability and cost are the
only things you need to know about the "virtual" versus "real"
tape library argument - take a look at this comprehensive article from MaXXan
Systems which shows there are a lot more benefits than that. ...read the article,
...MaXXan profile,
Disk to disk backup | |
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Serial
Attached SCSI: New Interface, New Storage Rack? - article by Terabytes Server
Storage Tech
Users will need more than just host bus
adapters and
disk drives to deploy
the new
Serial Attached SCSI
technology. But the traditional way of designing the backplanes in storage
racks could lead to high cost and not use the expansion and high availability
aspects of SAS to best advantage. In this article one of the world's leading
suppliers of computer chassis describes their award winning new backplane
concept which gets the best out of the new SAS technology while reducing costs.
. ...read the article,
...TST profile,
Storage Boxes,
Rackmount Storage | |
| . |
 |
Extreme Protocol Solutions
develops,
manufactures, and markets software and
hardware solutions
to test Fibre Channel,
SCSI, iSCSI, SAS, ATA and SATA
peripherals.
| |
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Serial Attached SCSI - Delivering Flexibility to the
Data Center - article by LSI Logic and Maxtor
If you think
you already know SAS because you know SATA and traditional SCSI then think
again. Sometimes disruptive technologies wear an unassuming disguise. In
fiction, Clark Kent, Frodo Baggins and Buffy Summers at first seem harmless, but
we see them change into Superman, the Ring Bearer and the Slayer.
SAS
too comes cloaked in plain garb - with a physical layer which looks a lot like
SATA. But like the Incredible Hulk there are muscles rippling under that shirt -
and you would be wrong to dismiss SAS so lightly. There's a lot more inside this
interface than it says on the box as this informative article reveals. ...read the article,
...LSI Logic profile,
...Maxtor profile,
Serial Attached SCSI | |
| . |
SPARC
Trivia Quiz - Test your knowledge of Sun's technologies and marketing
strategies.
Sun has had an impressive track record of promoting
innovation and inventing new computer technology, especially in its younger
more creative days. Which of the following statements is true?
(a)
- Sun invented the microprocessor.
(b) - Sun invented Unix.
(c)
- the first C compiler was written on a Sun-1 workstation.
(d) - Sun
was the co-inventor of Ethernet (along with Xerox and DEC).
(e) - Sun
invented RAID.
(f) - Sun invented RISC.
(g) - all of the
above.
(h) - none of the above.
This is just one of many
similar questions you'll find in our entertaining
Sun SPARC
Trivia Quiz | |
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Has
Infiniband Established Itself in the Market? - article by Engenio
This
article looks at the state of the Infiniband market at the end of 2005.
After
5 years stirring in the emerging market cauldron the Infiniband market hasn't
turned out to be the popular flavor which was originally anticipated. But
it's finally starting to get served up in some important markets.
An
Infiniband port now costs half as much as a fibre-channel port and delivers
many times the performance rate. According to the author, Infiniband is now
ready to take its place on the mainstream technology menu. ...read the article ,
...Engenio profile,
InfiniBand | |
| . |
 |
Arkeia provides backup
solutions
for departments and mid-size
businesses utilizing Linux. | |
| . |
 |
the Impact
of Compliance on Archival Storage Strategies - article by Plasmon
It's
difficult enough protecting and archiving your data so that it's available to
the right people at the right time (and cost). But now that's only part of the
problem. With so many new rules and regulations which prescribe how you should
destroy data records at the appropriate time - how do you guarantee that they
stay deleted?
Archiving data on the wrong kind of media could mean you
run the risk of breaking the law. Advances in the
data recovery
industry, and the future cohabitation of storage search-engines both mean that
Compliance Officers have to pay much more attention to the ways in which data is
dispersed and disposed of in different types of media.
This article
summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of currently available market
technologies. ...
read the article,
...Plasmon profile,
Optical Libraries | |
| . |
Squeak! -
Why are Most Analysts Wrong About Solid State Disks?
Most
analysts and editors of other computer publications don't really understand the
solid state disk market. They show their ignorance and naivete by prefacing
every discussion of SSDs with a superficial analysis which compares the cost per
byte of storage between flash and hard disk drives. That's the wrong answer to
the wrong question. And it's far removed from why the SSD market is racing to
become a multi billion dollar market seemingly in blithe ignorance of the cost
per byte proposition.
This article tells you what's important to
users and the main applications in which SSDs are already being used and new
applications where they will be used in the next 3 years. ...read the
article, Solid State Disks |
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|
January
2004 - 2004 was a breakthrough year for the SPARC notebook market. SPARC
notebooks, mostly used by the military and government markets, had previously
been priced out of reach of most commercial users's budgets with typical costs
being many times that for a desktop workstation. In 2004 we saw a sharp trend
of price onvergence between SPARC notebooks and Intel Architecture notebooks.
By dropping prices - manufacturers hoped to substantially increase the total
market size. New models and new VARs made notebooks one of the most dynamic
segments in the SPARC desktop market.
NextCom LLC announced the first
sub $2,000 UltraSPARC 64 bit Solaris Notebook and mobile server. A $1,995 priced
configuration included a 14.1" high resolution TFT display and UltraSPARC
IIe 400MHz RISC processor.
February
2004- High end Sun SPARC users in the military and financial markets -
who had got tired of waiting for faster SPARC processors had been turning their
attention to solid state disks.
SSDs gave users application speedups of x2 to x 3 in the same way as the
unavailable faster SPARC chips.
Texas Memory Systems, Inc . announced
that the RamSan-320 solid state disk has completed Sun Microsystems' Solaris
Ready certification. Later in the year Sun UK became a reseller of this product.
With
the US and British liberation of Iraq stretching into a long term occupation -
the military SPARC market continued its strong demand for products.
TAG
released its new 2U 2000S-SF rugged server designed for warfighters running UNIX
applications in combat situations. Unlike many other servers that are based on
the Ultra SPARC IIIi processor, the 2000S-SF's standard configuration provides a
full array of peripherals in a compact 2U 21.5" deep, rugged chassis.
TAG's patented and proven cooling technology enables the server to operate at
temperatures of 60 °C.
March
2004
NatureTech launched the Proso 2000, a 64-bit IIIi dual
processor-capable portable solution with 15" UXGA TFT panel (1600 by 1200),
up to two 1.28GHz UltraSPARC IIIi processors. This was aimed at the Homeland
Security market, which had been a strong market for SPARC vendors since its
inception.
2004 was also notable for some things which didn't
happen. Many analysts had predicted that Sun and other server makers would
be shipping InfiniBand
clustered servers in volume. Instead the InfiniBand market remained small and
almost ignored. One reason was that main server companies were hanging on as
long as possible to their more profitable proprietary interconnects, and the
recession had stymied the threat from potential startup server makers. Another
reason was that conventional technologies were getting faster - and in the minds
of many users - might make the need for InfiniBand irrelevant.
Precision
I/O, Inc. raised $10 million in venture funding to bring to market a new
high-performance server I/O architecture based on Ethernet. The company's
products, to be introduced beginning in mid-2004, will open up the
server-to-network bottleneck that has plagued enterprises in their efforts to
bring the benefits of high-speed networking to data-center and high-performance
computing applications. Precision I/O products will be implemented initially as
software solutions that support network speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second,
and later as hardware/software solutions that support wire-rate processing of 10
Gbps.
April
2004 - after years of delays - Sun finally launched a new processor
range.
Sun Microsystems, Inc. shipped the first of its mid-range
UltraSPARC IV processor-based throughput computing systems, the Sun Fire E4900
and E6900 server systems.
In 2004 Sun signed a record number of
agreements to OEM storage technology from other companies, in effect admitting
that its earlier strategy of developing internally developed storage products
had failed to win enough users.
Procom Technology, Inc. signed a
multi-year agreement with Sun Microsystems, Inc. under which Sun may license
certain Procom technologies related to the
NAS market.
May
2004
BiTMICRO Networks announced the successful acquisition of
Solaris Ready certification from Sun Microsystems on both SPARC and x86
platforms for its 3.5" Fibre Channel, IDE / ATA and SCSI Wide solid state
disks.
Gigaram, announced a new line of Sun Licensed memory upgrades:
2GB memory upgrade for the new Sun Fire B100X Blade, 1GB through 4GB upgrades
for the Sun Fire V20Z & the 1GB through 8GB upgrades for the Sun Fire E2900,
E4900, E6900, E20K & E25K.
June
2004
Fujitsu announced enhancements to its 5th generation
SPARC64 processor. The Fujitsu SPARC64 V processor is fabricated using
90-nanometer process technology and operates at 1.89 GHz.
Sun and
Fujitsu confirmed they will bring together their Solaris and SPARC-based server
product lines by mid-2006. When complete, the new product line will replace
Sun's and Fujitsu's existing Sun Fire and PRIMEPOWER product lines,
respectively. Customers will benefit from safe and seamless binary compatibility
along the SPARC roadmap.
StorageTek announced a strategic OEM
partnership agreement with Sun Microsystems. Under the agreement, Sun will
market and sell StorageTek's StreamLine SL8500 under the StorEdge brand, as well
as StorageTek's L-700e and L-180 tape libraries.
July
2004 - after 3 years of declining revenues - Sun finally started the
process of recovery. As we'd find out in later quarters - this was more than
just an example of dead cat bounce.
Sun Microsystems, Inc. reported
results today for its fiscal fourth quarter and full fiscal year, which ended
June 30, 2004. Revenues for the fourth quarter grew to $3.110 billion, an
increase of 4.3% as compared with $2.982 billion for the fourth quarter of
fiscal 2003.
AMD announced that the AMD Opteron processor will power
the 4P Sun Fire V40z server as well as the 1P Sun Java workstation W1100z and 2P
Sun Java workstation W2100z, the latest in a family of AMD Opteron
processor-based products from Sun Microsystems. Sun hyped up its AMD based
server line - but all externally available market data suggested that Sun's
progress in the Linux market was little more than a fleabite of market share.
August
2004
S2io, Inc. announced that drivers for its Xframe 10
Gigabit Ethernet Adapter will be integrated into Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s
Solaris for SPARC, AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon based systems. In addition, S2io
will be working with Sun to deliver a TCP/IP offload engine with RDMA
functionality to enhance performance and scalability in intense compute/server
environments.
September 2004
Sun
Microsystems introduced two new Solaris powered UltraSPARC IV servers-the Sun
Fire V490 and Sun Fire V890. The Sun Fire V490 and Sun Fire V890 servers have
set world-record benchmarks for sub-$50K platforms, outperforming equivalent
systems from HP and IBM in the 4- and 8-way space.
October
2004
Engenio Information Technologies, Inc. announced that it
has broadened its OEM agreement with Sun Microsystems, Inc. Engenio will
provide Sun with new modular storage technology and will co-develop future Sun
storage products. The first Sun product to emerge through the new arrangement,
the Sun StorEdge 6130 array, was launched.
EqualLogic, Inc. today
announced an agreement with Sun Microsystems to resell the iSCSI compatible
PeerStorage Array 100E. 2004 was another dismal year for the overhyped
iSCSI market.
The main reasons for the slow adoption of iSCSI by users were discussed in
an article on
STORAGEsearch.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. reported results for its
fiscal first quarter, which ended September 26, 2004. Revenues for the first
quarter grew to $2.628 billion, an increase of 3.6% as compared with $2.536
billion for the first quarter of fiscal 2004. This proved that the growth
reported in the previous quarter was more than a flash in the pan.
|
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November
2004
Deep Nines Inc. announced that Sun Microsystems has
become a reseller of the DeepNines Security Edge Platform. By 2004
security had become
the last bastion in which Sun's products retained plausible superiority to
Windows based servers, having earlier lost the crowns for highest performance
and reliability. The constant news about viruses, worms and other attacks
during 2004 which brought down Windows based networks wordlwide remained the
best adverts for security conscious users staying in the Unix camp.
BakBone
Software introduced VaultDR Plugin Modules , a comprehensive disaster recovery
solution for Linux and Solaris SPARC. VaultDR PMs substantially reduce
downtime in a disaster recovery scenario by allowing full system recovery
including the operating system, applications, system settings, disk partitioning
information, and data in hours as opposed to days. BakBone was one of the
fastest growing storage
companies in 2004. But accounting irregularities led to late filings and
eventual delisting on one major financial market.
December
2004
Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced that the combination of
the Oracle E-Business Suite 11i9, Oracle Database 10g running on Sun Fire E4900
systems with the Solaris 10 OS and Sun StorEdge 6100 series storage arrays
achieved a record throughput of 1.27 Million order lines per hour using the
Oracle Applications Standard Batch benchmark. The batch benchmark includes the
High Volume Order Import (HVOP) program, which is one of the batch components of
the Oracle eBusiness Suite Order Management module. The HVOP benchmark focuses
exclusively on meeting the high order volumes originating from the electronic
channels, such as consumer and business web sites, B2B exchanges, and EDI/XML.
This was another milestone for Sun to reclaim the SPARC performance
highground and pick up from its lowest point in the summer of 2002 when things
looked so bad that I wrote an article
How Long Can Sun
Stand the Heat in the Server Benchmark Wars?
Looking ahead to the Sun SPARC market in 2005
- I predict that Sun's revenue for calendar 2005 will be around 10%
higher than in 2004. Remember where you heard this first.
- I predict that Jonathan Schwartz will say about Sun's open source Solaris
statements - "It was just a dream". But if Sun does kill this story
line they can always bring it back to life. That happens a lot on TV although
- not so much in comedy.
Will I be right? Stay tuned and see for yourself on
Sun SPARC Solaris
news |
Later...
Sun's Revenue Growth Stalled Slightly
Sun Reports Results
for Fiscal 2005 Third Quarter
SANTA
CLARA, Calif. - April 14, 2005 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. reported
results today for its fiscal third quarter, which ended March 27, 2005.
Revenues for the third quarter were $2.625 billion, a decrease of
1.0% as compared with $2.651 billion for the third quarter of fiscal 2004. Net
loss for the third quarter of fiscal 2005 on a GAAP basis was $9 million or a
net loss of $0.00 per share. This compared with a net loss of $760 million or a
net loss of $0.23 per share for the third quarter of fiscal 2004.
"We made good progress in the third fiscal quarter, but more
importantly we're seeing a marked improvement over the first nine months of
fiscal 2004," said Scott McNealy, chairman and chief executive officer, Sun
Microsystems, Inc. "Break even is a huge move forward from the loss
we experienced a year ago. We've made over a $1 billion improvement in Net
Income on a year to date three quarter comparison," McNealy continued, "Revenue
was stable for the first three quarters of fiscal 2005 as compared with the same
period in fiscal 2004, while margins have improved and we've made tremendous
strides in reducing our R&D and SG&A by over $400 million dollars. On
top of that, in the third quarter we experienced growth in Sun x86 server unit
shipments, good traction in Netra servers, Sun Fire 4-8 way and 12-24 way SPARC
processor-based servers, and Solaris 10 registrations exceeded expectations. All
of these results, combined with a solid new product pipeline, point to real
improvements in the business."
...Sun profile
Editor's
comments:- Sun has a better lineup of server and storage products and is in a
fitter more competitive state than it has been at any time since 2000. |
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