Of the top 5 vendors, Sun was the only one to gain market share in overall server
revenue this quarter, gaining 1.5 points year-over-year, while IBM declined
0.5 points in share.
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"Sun'scomeback began early last year, bolstered by growth of its small but fast-growing
line of Intel-compatible servers, powered by chips from Advanced Micro Devices.
Last year Sun also launched servers that use its own power-sipping T1 family
of chips," said Investor's Business Daily's Brian Womack.
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"[IDC Analyst Jed] Scaramella attributed Sun's growth to its improving financial
picture during the second half of 2006, its 'Try and Buy' program,
which helps get its hardware into the data center, and the growing use of
its Solaris OS. In 2007, Sun entered into a new agreement with Intel that
analysts say should help the company continue its growth," said eWeek's
Scott Ferguson.
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Sun Chosen Over Competition
Check out Smugmug.com CEO Don MacAskill's blog to find out why the online photo
sharing service chose Sun X2200 M2 servers over HP, Dell, IBM and Rackable
servers. "[Sun's] engineering rocks. ZFS is drool-worthy, Thumper is
a cool piece of hardware, Sun Spots are innovative, and Black Box is just
pimp. I'm a geek, what can I say?"
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After trying Sun servers, dating Web site eHarmony bought three Sun Fire x64 servers
to run Oracle, serving its 14M+ registered users. Prior to using Sun servers,
eHarmony used Dell 6800 series machines. "The power consumption [of the
Sun servers] was the absolute lowest we could find, and then we found the
performance was outstanding," eHarmony's Mark Douglas said. Sun is "the
only real hardware company doing engineering."
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A large database marketing firm saved $400K one-time and $100K/year in software
licensing by migrating its Oracle_perl data warehouse to open source PostgreSQL.
After 20 outages in four months on Linux, migration consultant OmniTI switched
the marketing firm to Solaris 10 increasing stability and reliability.
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DVD trading site Peerflix increased membership and vistor-to-member conversion
rates by replacing its .NET Web application platform with a more scalable,
reliable and cost-effective platform based on Sun Fire x64 servers, the Solaris
10 Operating System and Sun Java System Application Server.
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Business Results from Customers
Online infrastructure provider Joyent Inc. reduced power and cooling requirements
by 60% and its TCO by 20%. It also took advantage of the Pacific Gas and Electric
rebates on Sun Fire servers. "The UltraSPARC T1 processors are supercomputers
on a chip, with half the power and cooling needs of Intel Xeon chips. There's
no competition today for servers built with Sun CoolThreads technology,"
said Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman.
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Advocate Health Care consolidated 50 applications into a single user interface, increasing
ease of use while lowering its total cost of ownership with Sun Java System
Portal Server and Sun Java System Messaging Server. "The Sun solution
has freed up a substantial amount of IT time, and we're now adding about
four applications a month," said Advocate Health Care's Gary Horn.
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Corrections Corporation of America decreased its backup window 41%, decreased archiving
time 39%, and significantly increased backup tape availability with a Sun
Fire T2000 server and a Sun StorageTek SL500 Library System.
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Greenplum's
data warehouse appliance, built on a Sun Fire x4500 "Thumper" server
running Solaris 10, is now supplying customer information to Smart Communications'
22M cell phone service customers.
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Sun's Competitive Advantage
"Solaris, unlike Linux, is a mature operating system on multiple processor boxes,"
says Joyent's David Young. Joyent runs its on-demand collaboration service
atop Sun Fire servers running OpenSolaris.
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The Sun Blade X8420 is the fastest blade server on the planet and holds four world
records. It's up to 67% more space efficient and 43% more power efficient
than today's rack-mount servers. This blade can replace 4-socket rack servers
like the Dell 6950, the HP DL585 G2 and the IBM X3755, taking up less space
and using less power.
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The Sun Fire T2000 server is "the best platform for transaction and Web services
as measured by the new SWaP benchmark, has record-breaking performance, unequaled
energy savings and space-saving compute density. . . Another time Sun prepares
a hit for the server market, where no other competitor is ahead of them yet,"
writes blogger Jean Ghalo.
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Evidence of Technological Innovation and Leadership
"[Sun Solaris] Containers are good for software developers, since they allow for
rapid testing of differently configured or even different applications side-by-side.
. . Performance is exceptional - while there are some high-availability
tweaks that you get only with genuine Sun hardware, it's still a screamer
on x86-64," according to ServerWatch's Carla Schroder.
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"Solaris DTrace is such a powerful tool that developers are adopting it for other operating
systems as well. Specific Java VM DTrace probe-points allow you to perform
this comprehensive application debugging from your Java applications as well,"
said Dr. Dobb's Portal's Eric Bruno.
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"No company understands SMP [symmetric multiprocessing] as well as Sun Microsystems,
having invested heavily in the technology since the 1990s. Sun's current UltraSPARC
T1 chips are the most multithreaded processor designs in the mainstream server
market," says InfoWorld's Neil McAllister.
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Compared with older-generation UltraSparc IIIi-servers, Niagara systems have 14x the
performance. The single-chip Niagara 2 systems will have 35x the performance,
and the Victoria Falls systems will have 65x the performance. Read more
Sun is the first in the industry with multi-core and multi-CPU aware network interface
cards (NICs). The Neptune 10GHz Ethernet card is available at 1/3 the cost
of other 10GbE adapters.
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What Others are Saying
Pund-IT's Charles King says, "There's a lot to like in Sun 2.0,"
including Sun's acquisition of StorageTek, which helped round "out a
dreadfully thin storage portfolio." King also says Sun's partnerships
with AMD and "now Intel, helped establish it [Sun] as a credible contender
in the x86 server space."
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Dell should look to Sun to see how to transition leadership the right way. IT Business.
Shane Schick writes, "Major changes to its [Sun’s] operating system
and open source strategy, its alliances with partners Microsoft and Intel,
a pivotal product launch aimed at solving a huge data centre pain point - there is no doubt Jonathan Schwartz is the star of this show now."
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"While smaller than IBM and less influential than Microsoft, Sun, with its talented
arsenal of technologists like Java founder James Gosling, remains a potent
force. Just as the company once battled Apollo, Sun can be counted on as a
prominent counterpoint to what its rivals are doing, even while Sun cooperates
with its opponents when deemed practical," writes InfoWorld's Paul Krill.
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"Sun's turnaround strategy is finally showing up in its financials, said Insight
64 Analyst Nathan Brookwood."You had to take it on faith a year ago.
Sun previously sold only servers and workstations running its SPARC processors.
Now, because it also uses Intel and AMD processors, the company can appeal
to broader markets."
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"Bringing Solaris for x86 back to life was one of Sun's smartest moves in recent years
as it allows the company to have a substantive conversation with the volume
marketplace. Further, by shifting to an open source model, the company is
mirroring the buying expectations of this market segment, while providing
some creative financing options for its hardware. Sun's latest service/support
offerings only reinforce its positioning as a viable alternative to commercial
Linux distributions . . ." said the Sageza Group's Clay Ryder.
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The National Stock Exchange's Joseph Rizzello says, "This [Sun infrastructure]
will allow us to aggressively compete with other exchanges while giving traders
greater options for best execution. I don't think there's any technology provider
out there that could have delivered us onto this path as Sun has."
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Sun gained server market share over the competition for the fourth consecutive quarter, and more
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