The Network Is the Computer, Again

Announced last month with a splashy presentation at one of San Francisco's hippest hotels, the Sun network computing strategy has a very different look than the one quixotically championed by Larry Ellison and Oracle in the late-90s. While Ellison's version revolved around client-centric computing, Sun's vision is firmly entrenched in the server. The launch event featured a host of new announcements for products and services along with the promise that similar announcements will occur every quarter from now on.

"We've been spending a couple billion dollars on R&D every year but rolling it out in a piecemeal approach," says Sun CEO Scott McNealy. "The computer industry is so components focused, we've decided to try to unify it with quarterly announcements, which should make things incredibly simplified for our partners."

Among the new products is the $79,995 Sun Fire V1280, a rack-optimized 12-way system for the midrange server market that, according to Sun, delivers a three-year cost of ownership that's 14 percent less than Unix and 18 percent less than Wintel. VARs say its price tag and performance are its main attractions.

"Sun is now offering its partners a price-competitive server that allows the solution provider to compete and win in the Intel-based server market," says Rich Severa, president of MOCA, a division of Arrow NACP, an enterprise-level VAR and OEM. Other products announced by Sun include its StorEdge 3510 Fibre Channel array and 3310 NAS product, and the company said it is reducing the prices across its midrange and high-end Solaris systems by 25 percent to 35 percent. All this quarter's announcements fall under the heading of NC03Q1, which stands for network computer, 2003, first quarter. Future unveilings will be labeled accordingly.

The network computer (N1) itself is a refrigerator-sized box that holds blade servers, storage and networking devices,the building blocks that, when incorporated into the server, are designed to optimize virtualization and reduce time to deployment from a few days to a few hours. With network computing, a partner can come to Sun with an outline of its needs, and Sun will create a customized solution for the partner, demonstrating and tweaking it until it's correct, before the partner ever spends a dime. With this system, McNealy contends, Sun "isn't first to market, but we're best to market, and none of this works unless we and our partners can deliver the right services around it."

Sun executive vice president of volume system products Neil Knox says the servers, which have two shelves and hold 16 blades each, will allow partners to include specialty blades in their servers or develop their own specialty devices. "This is a tremendous opportunity for our partners to develop their own value-added products and services," he says. McNealy added that the percentage of Sun's recurring revenue from the network computer and related services, which currently comprise roughly 30 percent of the company's overall revenue, will increase over time. "We believe the utility/subscription model will become a bigger player in our own revenue model," he says.