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Sun Unveils Next Steps in its Vision of “The Network is the Computer”
During its quarterly Network Computing ‘05 launch, Sun Microsystems presented its vision for a new era in network computing and unveiled major elements of its new Sun Grid utility offering. Sun's drive to simplify computing is anchored by its pioneering approach to enable customers to tap the power of the network - using only what they need, when they need it - for $1/cpu-hr (USD).
The launch marked the opening day of the annual Sun Analyst Summit where the company introduced new Client Solutions practices and a comprehensive set of new services and solutions designed to radically simplify the business of selecting, acquiring and using IT infrastructure.
“Despite the warped logic and rhetoric to the contrary, most successful businesses figured out long ago that IT matters,” said Scott McNealy, chairman and CEO of Sun Microsystems, Inc. “Today Sun has taken the next big step in offering IT as a utility and is the first vendor to truly deliver on the promise of an open, standardised grid. As the IT industry continues to evolve, customers will need to move away from building data centers in a one-off customised model toward a standardised model and eventually to a utility model. Sun’s $1/cpu-hr and $1/GB-mo compute and storage offerings provide the right answers for customers worldwide to take advantage of IT as a service.
It's imperative that CIOs and CFOs benchmark their own data centers to see how they stack up against the one buck threshold.”
Sun’s expanded vision and new technology innovations represent a significant evolution in its approach to network computing and serve as a pointer for service-oriented data centers of tomorrow - spanning the availability of true IT on tap from the network to agile data centers designed to provide maximum security and efficiency. New products, solutions and services rolled out as part of Sun’s quarterly event include:
• The Sun Grid Goes Global - with thousands of CPUs powered up in Texas, Virginia, New Jersey and Scotland, and plans for more to come from Sun and its iForce(SM) partners in 2005, in locations including North America, Europe and Asia.
• New Client Solutions Organisation - brings together more than 10,000 world-class experts across Sun, focused on six global practices, to provide customers quicker and easier access to Sun's wide range of deep industry expertise and iForce partner offerings.
 • New and Enhanced Solutions - including the new Sun Compliance and Content Management Solution program; new Sun Infrastructure Solution for Secure Network Access Platform, which encompasses the Sun VoIP Application Services Solution with technology from Lucent Technologies; and enhanced Sun Service Optimised Data Center program.
• Java ES and Java Suites - new release of Java ES and initial suites, including identity management, application platform services, system availability, Web infrastructure and enterprise communications. Each of the Java Suites is available by subscription for $50 per employee, per year with an infinite right-to-use (RTU).
• New Sun Services - Sun Preventive Services with added partner capabilities and system-level connected services. Enhancements to Sun Preventive Services, Sun Update Connection services and Net Connect services will help customers reduce management costs, increase system availability and reduce risk. A pivotal new piece of Sun's services portfolio comes from the recently completed acquisition of SevenSpace, enabling Sun to further expand its offerings to include remote management and support services for heterogeneous environments, including Linux, Windows, HP-UX, and IBM AIX.
A Focus on Essential IT Infrastructure
Also on stage at Sun’s event, Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO at Sun, emphasised how the company’s approach to the data center will usher in a new era of computing in which customers build IT infrastructures that can deploy network services on the fly, tailored to unique business and technology requirements.
Through best practices and methodologies from the company and its more than 20,000 iForce partners, Sun can help customers move towards a service optimised data center to increase agility, improve efficiency and lower risk.
Sun Lights Up the Grid
The company continued its industry-leading drive with new utility computing offerings, revolutionizing the way customers buy and use IT infrastructure. The company introduced the Sun Grid and unveiled its plans for new innovations in technology and delivery mechanisms expected to be rolled out this calendar year, including new compute, storage, developer and desktop utility offerings. Sun's new utility offerings include the Sun Grid compute utility, a $1 (USD) per CPU per hour pay-per-use offering ($1/cpu-hr), and the Sun Grid storage utility, a $1 (USD) per gigabyte per month offering ($1/GB-mo). Sun is already working with customers today from numerous industries, including financial services and oil and gas. The company is in the process of rolling out Sun Grid Centers worldwide; initial locations include Virginia, Texas, New Jersey, Canada and Scotland.
It expects these centres to be fully operational later this year. After successful customer implementation of its compute utility offerings, it plans to release a commercial version of the Sun Grid compute utility later this year. The price is expected to be $1/cpu-hr, with a click-through license and a four hour minimum usage requirement.
“There's an industry misunderstanding at the moment – it's not computers that are commoditizing, it's computing. What do all commodities have in common? Transparent pricing that can be compared against each other,” said Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO at Sun. “Sun is ‘lighting up the grid’ and unleashing the computing power of the network for the transparent price of a dollar.
We encourage all CIOs and CFOs to look into their data centers and ask themselves if they are spending more than $1/cpu-hr, including electricity, HV-AC and labor.
We're certain Sun can reduce costs by an order of magnitude, allowing customers to allocate resources toward activities delivering competitive advantage.”
“Sun is further bolstering its leadership position in utility computing with Sun Grid,” said William P. Hurley, senior analyst, Application Infrastructure at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Today's offerings underscore Sun’s commitment to use its innovative technology to make it incredibly simple for its customers to go to one vendor for all their computing needs.”
Sun partners are seeing opportunity with Sun Grid. “Sun Grid gives us an opportunity to optimize our customers' computing environments while providing a real solution for addressing their compute intensive business needs. Our customers trust Sun to provide a secure environment with the latest technology. They're looking to ICSynergy to provide applications that are optimised for Sun Grid,” said Mike Thompson, Managing Partner at ICSynergy, a Sun iForce(SM) Elite software partner.
Sun Grid Provides Simplicity and Transparency
It enables customers to simply, predictably and reliably deliver the power of multiple systems resources to a single user for a specific purpose—at the transparent price of $1. With Sun Grid, customers and partners have access to Sun's facilities, resources, systems (both SPARC(R) and Sun x86 platforms) and software, with the Solaris(TM) 10 Operating System (OS) at the core. Sun's new utility offerings include:
• The Sun Grid compute utility – provides customers with fully virtualised cpu memory and high-performance storage connected through a secure networked grid, at a price of $1/cpu-hr. Customers can use it for jobs such as Monte Carlo simulations, protein modelling, reservoir simulations, mechanical CAD simulations and similar non-transactional workloads. The Sun Grid compute utility will deliver a standard computing grid, powered by AMD Opteron(TM) processor-based systems, Solaris 10 OS and N1(TM) Grid Engine, to help provide customers optimal performance, functionality and security. With access to the Sun Grid compute utility, customers will be able to avoid long project lead times by simply plugging into the Sun Grid, radically simplifying how they select, acquire and use next-generation IT infrastructure. By using the Sun Grid, customers can “plug into” a powerful, agile, reliable, cost-effective infrastructure, offloading compute power and applications with optimal security. This pay-per-use model enables customers to move capital expenditures to operational expenditures, allowing for more choice and control in how IT power is purchased and leveraged.
• The Sun Grid storage utility – supports customers' grid jobs at a price of $1/GB-mo (USD), or can be used independent of the compute utility. This standardised, high-performance pay-per-use storage offering allows customers to access the resources they need, when they need them. As with any true utility, customers won't have to worry about the exact configuration of the hardware, software and services that comprise the storage. Instead, they can focus on selecting the appropriate class of storage and leave the delivery and management to Sun. The Sun Grid storage utility offers safe and secure storage and is designed to help customers meet their off-line storage demands for capacity, for any length of time.
Array of Market-Driven Software Suites Unveiled
Sun broadened its strategy for the subscription-based Java ES offering with a new array of market-driven software suites. The Java System Suites provide high-impact customer solutions, including identity management, application platform services, system availability and enterprise communications.
Sun also introduced a Web services suite to solve the mid-market's need for affordable, easy-to-deploy Web services. This suite, the Java System Web Infrastructure Suite, is central to a new mid-market initiative for Sun. Current Java Enterprise System customers may upgrade for free. Java Enterprise System Release 3 is currently available by subscription for $140 (USD) per employee, per year.
Robert Youngjohns, Executive Vice President, Strategic Development and Sun Financing, said, while speaking about the launch, “First, Sun is clearly back on the offense, setting a bold agenda with customer requirements as the prime focus.
Sun is executing its strategy of extending the reach of network computing, simplifying access by creating new modes for customers to tap into the immense power of the network grid. Sun's unwavering commitment to R&D innovation is bearing huge returns with Solaris 10, the industry's most advanced operating system launched last quarter to highly positive market response; continued rapid increases in customer adoption of the Java Enterprise System — we have sold over 400,000 seats in the year since we've shipped — and significant contributions of source code and Sun patents to the open source community.
“Second, Sun has the strongest product line in its history, from the low-cost to the highest-performing systems. Sun's engineering innovations being matched with bold new thinking on software pricing, easy access to utility offerings, and customer engagement models that are designed to solve the most vexing IT problems faced by business customers today.
“Third, the experience of the last couple of quarters suggests very plainly that customers are embracing the new solutions from Sun. Grid computing is “incremental” revenue for Sun and gives us an opportunity to go after new customers. Sun is gaining traction, winning new customers and is on the offensive again.” |
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