[Am-info] Server Price Wars: Sun Fires Back

[Fred A. Miller]

Server Price Wars: Sun Fires Back

Sun Microsystems on Tuesday unveiled its Sun Fire 12K, a Unix
server with features borrowed from its high-end 15K server and
priced between $500,000 and $1 million, a price range in which
the company previously did not offer a server.

The new midrange server was launched as a price war escalates
between Sun and competitors IBM and Hewlett-Packard. In response
to IBM's new midrange eServer, which was unveiled Monday and
undercut Sun's prices by 34%, Sun lowered the prices on its Sun
Fire 3800, 4800, 6800, and 15K servers by 41%.

The Sun Fire 12K incorporates the company's Uniboard technology,
which is interchangeable among all Sun Fire 3800 to 15K servers.
It also scales up to 52 UltraSparc III 900-MHz processors and as
much as 288 Gbytes of memory, running on Solaris 8. The company
expects customers to use an average configuration of 32
processors. This system is ideal for cost-reduction projects,
such as server consolidation and mainframe rehosting, under way
at IT departments, says Shahin Khan, chief competitive officer.
He expects the 12K, which is available now, to be popular in
Sun's traditional markets: telecom, government, and life
sciences.

"Sun historically has not had the penetration we'd like to see in
that price point," says Clark Masters, VP and general manager of
enterprise system products. Previously, "we had a void in the
product line and had to force customers in either the high end or
the low end." - Christopher T. Heun

For more, see
IBM Pressuring Sun On Prices
http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eGks0Bce7K0V20Bazq0Ao

Dell's Enterprise Business Strategy
http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eGks0Bce7K0V20Ba3B0Aq

-- 
Fred A. Miller
Systems Administrator
Cornell Univ. Press Services
fm@cupserv.org, www.cupserv.org
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