Can Sun really come back?
A lot of the news DailyTech has posted about Sun Microsystems has not been the most cheerful and uplifting journalism. In fact, I have posted several news articles that led some readers to believe the demise of Sun may be near. However, I wasn't as convinced that Sun would finally roll over and die. Much to my delight, it is clear they haven't thrown the towel in yet, and I will explain why. There are more than enough articles talking about the bad things about Sun, so I am going to talk about the good things. I still have some faith that CEO Jonathan Schwartz will be able to turn the company around... some how.
Schwartz announced that he didn't plan on cutting jobs when he took over the company in April. Although this was clearly something that would have been difficult for him to do, analysts were pleasantly surprised when it was announced the company would not eliminate as many jobs as analysts originally believed. If he can continue doing business without massive job cuts while he is CEO, analysts may give him some slack.
I will briefly explain each new products introduced at the Sun Microsystems NC event several days ago, in this blog entry. The Sun Fire X4500 server is the first hybrid data server that will offer large amounts of storage capacity while not sacrificing any performance advantages. It's a two-CPU system that can accept dual-core Opterons and up to 48 hot-swappable Serial ATA 2 hard drives for up to 24 terabytes of storage. The Sun Fire X4600 does not have as much storage capacity, but it is more powerful. The X4600 is a 16-way system that is able to use eight Opteron 856 or Opteron 890 processors. It currently can be configured with up to 64GB RAM.
Also during the Sun Microsystems NC event last week Sun introduced the Sun Blade 8000 modular system, which is a monstrous, rackable blade server. It uses express backplanes to connect the blades to I/O modules. Based off of Sun's Galaxy x64 server architecture, it has room to allow customers to expand systems in the future without having to purchase an entirely new system. Taken from Tuan's recent article:
The Sun Blade 8000 uses PCI Express backplanes to connect the blades to the I/O modules. Using this design, customers will be able to mix and match different I/O modules to blades. This is something that Lawler says other manufacturers can't do.
Last Tuesday's launch of new products was a "pretty important launch for us," Schwartz, said during the Sun Microsystems NC event. According to sales figures presented last week, Sun's third quarter server revenue increased 7.6%. However it posted a third-quarter loss of $217 million, on $3.2 billion total revenue.
With beta testers like the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the University of Southern California pleased with early products like the Sun Fire X4500 server, support is already being shown for Sun's new products. If you missed the announcement and launch of Sun's new Opteron systems, click here to read up on our coverage of the products.
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