Followup: Sun announces new servers/pricecuts in order to compete with Intel

[Thalaxis]

What does Jobs have to do with Sun?

[Array]

Jobs, who owns Pixar, recently announced that Pixar will be switching from Sun to Intel servers for their production needs. This seems to be the fallout from his announcement.

[Thalaxis]

No, I don't think so... Sun has been losing money for several quarters now, and this is but one example of why. Amazon.com was probably of a similar magnitude, for example.

Sun has been steadily losing marketshare over the last year, and Intel and IBM have been gaining it.

A lot of people have been wondering how long it would take for Sun to wake up and start trying to cut their losses...

[Pixelmaestro]

"Unlike some competitors' products, Sun's Sun Fie B1600 blades run just one processor. But the devices are modular, so you can tie 16 together to get more power.

The blades will start at $4,800 and range up to $20,000."

This price is after the %35 cost reduction? The chips must be still expensive?

"The company's also introducing its Sun Fire V1280 model. That's a 12-processor server made to compete with larger systems using Intel chips."

I did not see a mention how much the intel chip Sun Servers cost

[Thalaxis]

FYI Pixelmaestro -- you misunderstood the last quote. That refers to the competive target for the SunFire, not the offering; SunFire is based on UltraSPARC processors, and is intended to keep Intel out of the mid-range server market. Sun's low-end servers are the only ones getting the Linux/x86 treatment.

You are correct, the Blade servers are quite expensive... they're now so far behind the upscale x86, as well as the Itanium2 and Power4/Power4+ that they're actually losing business because of cost, believe it or not... since you can acheive 2x the performance of an UltraSparc machine using 1/2 as many processors, the software licensing costs (Oracle is $40,000 per PROCESSOR, and if you implement a full web/portal/security/personalization server suite, you're talking about around $100,000 per processor) are making Sun's a painful option.

Since that's Sun's core busines... well here's an example:

Amazon.com stated that switching from a Sun solution to an HP/x86(P4)/Linux solution saved them $17 million.

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