'Green' servers may make Sun shine again

Net Results: On the tech chief executive speakers' circuit, one of the more popular keynoters is the amiably abrasive Sun chief executive, Scott McNealy.

I don't know if he writes most of his own material, but he has superb one-liners and has impeccable dry delivery. He particularly enjoys ribbing other companies and chief executives, particularly good friends like Apple's Steve Jobs and Oracle's Larry Ellison, and he still usually has a biting thing or two to say about Microsoft, even though they publicly kissed and made up a while ago.

If McNealy is on the bill at any big tech event, most people will go along just to hear him, even if they have no interest in Sun or its products.

Of course, one of the problems for Sun has been that, ever since the dotcom crash, a lot of people number among those who have little interest in Sun or its products, though everyone tends to like Sun the company. People widely admire Sun for its pioneering position in Silicon Valley and acknowledge it has often had some of the coolest computers going.

But, badly burned when the dotcoms hit the doldrums (anyone remember Sun's slogan stating they put the "dot" in dotcom? Come the dotcom bust, they ditched that pretty quickly), former market leader Sun has been in a slump, most recently losing share even as the market picked up for rivals HP, IBM and Dell.

In general, Sun has been battered by Moore's Law - the relentless rise in speed and power of the microchip matching an inverse drop in price. That has seen people move away from expensive, powerful, fat-margin workstations á la Sun, towards muscular, cheap Dell and HP desktops. Where a Sun SparcStation used to get the geek boys and girls pretty darn excited, now it's racks of inexpensive servers.

That's why this week's announcement from the company of a new set of Sun Fire servers is big news. Not only are the T1000 and T2000 coming in at some of the lowest price points among the competition, but the two servers also feature a powerful new chip called Niagara (or UltraSparc T1), long in development at Sun.

The chip, which features up to eight cores (microprocessor engines) per chip, can run 32 separate software instruction sets, or threads - which allows it to process many tasks at the same time. The chip also uses innovative techniques to keep the chip running cool, which means that the servers consume less energy, and thus cost less to run.

"No one else has more than four threads, and we have 32," says Marc Tremblay, Sun fellow and chief architect for Sun's Scalable Systems Group, in London for the European launch of the server line. "And the processor itself only dissipates about 70 watts."

That contrasts with Intel's Xeon chips, which need from 110 to 165 watts.

The servers run so coolly that they don't need more than outside airflow to cool them down, he says - and cooling hot servers is a major cost for data centre operators, one of the markets Sun is going after with the new line.

For example, says Tremblay, in 2002, Google was citing power consumption as one-fifth of its total operating costs.

Tremblay acknowledges that four years ago, when Sun began concentrating on the radical Niagara chip architecture, saving energy was not a "hot issue" for customers. "It is today," he says.

Sun isn't losing an opportunity to stress that angle. In the first web advertisements for the servers, Sun is pushing a "green" theme, pointing out that a typical data centre consumes the equivalent of 80 barrels of oil daily.

The advertisements tout the T1000 as "the first eco-responsible server". A cooler chip has meant Sun can shrink the size of the server, too. Overall, the message the company is emphasising is savings on size, cost and power consumption, with increased performance.

Primary customers include those running web applications, databases, mail and messaging and Java applications. Tremblay says Sun is "definitely going after the Xeon market". Industry analysts are split on whether these servers are the start of a regrowth phase for the company. Benchmarking reports are good and, if the chip does what it says on the box, it will be a compelling offering.

Others feel it may not give distinctive enough gains to lure buyers, and that Sun has spent too long talking about the arrival of Niagara while its market share bled away.

The last time I heard a McNealy keynote, in San Francisco in September, he was talking about "iPod moments" - when a company realises that it has an innovative winner on its hands. Of course, it will take months before the market gets an indication of whether these servers rock or not. But they sure look to be the most intriguing product move Sun has made since it disowned that "dot" in dotcom.

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