siliconvalley.com: sun microsystems on rebound?

dec 6th

i sure do hope so. sun has had a pretty rough time over the last few years.

Now if only you could multithread your revenue streams: Sun Microsystems may have finally found a way to reverse its sliding market share. This morning the company unveiled two rack-mount servers that promise high performance with lower power consumption at a price that undercuts most of the competition. Based on Sun's recently released UltraSparc T1, or Niagara, multicore processors, the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers are designed for edge-of-network type applications, as well as Java, mail, and messaging servers. Sun says the units will consume about half the power of Xeon- or Opteron-based systems while handling as many as 32 individual software instructions per processor. The new Sun Fires are a "game changer" for Sun, according to Jeff Kohout, vice president of marketing at Sun's Scalable Systems Group. "We think we are five years ahead of the competition," he told vnunet.com. "There is not another system vendor in the world that can field a platform with this kind of performance, power and space efficiency." Sun better hope so. Once the top server vendor, Sun slipped into fourth place for overall server revenue worldwide in the third quarter, according to IDC. This during a period when IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell all posted gains. If Sun plays it right, these new servers could do much to reverse that trend. "Even if the claims about the processor architecture lead and benchmarking results don't fully pan out, it's hard to see how Sun doesn't get significant wins in 2006," Dan Farber writes at ZDnet . "If a strong business for UltraSparc T1 systems fails to materialize, then something is very wrong within Sun or the competition has something up its sleeve we don't know about yet."