Sun to Sell Servers with Intel Xeon CPUs

With his usual candor, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz this afternoon revealed, in a joint press conference with Intel CEO Paul Otellini, that 70% of Solaris licenses are for x86 processor-based installations. While Sun's 2004 agreement with AMD may have been one catalyst for that, Sun announced this morning it will now be building Intel Xeon-based 1P, 2P, and 4P servers for the first time.

"Nearly 70%, seven out of ten downloads of Solaris, were not running on Sun hardware," pronounced Schwartz, the astonishing part really being that he finally admitted it. "They were running on Intel innovations, on systems built by HP and Dell and IBM; and clearly, if there was going to be an indication of opportunity for us to work together, it looked an awful lot like, here's a great motivation."

The operating agreement between Sun and Intel today means that Xeon-based servers will be added to Sun's existing product line, which up until April 2004 was comprised solely of Sun's own SPARC-based workstations and servers, but which after that time was expanded to include AMD 64-bit Opterons. Now, the product lines of the four top server vendors: HP, Dell, IBM, and Sun (perhaps in that order worldwide, according to recent analysts' estimates) now come in AMD- and Intel-based options.

Xeon-based Sun systems will begin shipping late in this half of the year (expect June), while Xeon support for the latest version of Solaris is available now.

"We're certainly looking forward to building out uni-processor, dual, and quad-processor systems," Schwartz added. He then proceeded to drop a hint, and drop it perhaps a little too loudly: "I think we've also suggested that we're not just going to end there; again, we see this marketplace as growing, both in requirements and the need for scale. And we're going to be building out things that are greater than four-way. I don't think it takes a lot of creativity to figure out what's greater than four-way, but it sounds an awful lot like an eight-way. (Six-way? Probably not.)"

Intel's Otellini would not expand on that part of Schwartz' comments, though it only seems natural that eight-way is next on their joint list. Instead, Otellini pointed toward the need for operating systems such as Solaris to expose new features of the underlying hardware that Intel is pushing into servers.

So Otellini tried to tie some of Intel's key buzzwords, like "virtualization" and "demand-based switching," in with the heralded Sun buzzword, "SOA." "At the highest level, the biggest single thing that's happening is that all data centers, regardless of their size, are now focusing on evolving to a service-oriented architecture," Otellini began.

"What that means, when you think about the data center providing critical services for a company, large or small, it means that you start worrying about the cost of that environment, the overall ecosystem buildout, in particular, how you use your equipment. Things like utilization rates of servers are becoming very, very critical, particularly in the era of rising energy costs. You want to be able to use them more, but also have them cost less in terms of the overall construct of the data center."

Schwartz added to that theme: "Virtualization in a chip is less interesting if it's not exposed by the operating system. If the operating system doesn't know how to deal with it or leverage it or take advantage of it, that makes the overall systems package less interesting. If we can synchronize and coordinate our releases around virtualization, whether it's application virtualization, OS virtualization, or network virtualization, that's on the upside."

Solaris is becoming, Otellini said, "the mission-critical Unix for Xeon. What does that mean? It means we can collaborate together to make sure that the feature sets that buyers are focused on - availability, reliability, demand-based switching, virtualization - can be unleashed from the microprocessor through the operating system into the hardware that people buy. This lowers our end customers' costs and increases their utilization rates."

But what's the interest for Intel - ostensibly a chip company - with a seemingly software-centric concept like SOA? Schwartz tried to rescue Otellini on that point: "The single biggest issue with SOA in the marketplace - look, SOA is a horrible buzzword and we can all agree that it represents something, but no one can quite identify what it is - [is] just economics. Brutal efficiency. Environmental capacity," Schwartz commented. "That, I think, has become the dominant issue in large-scale enterprises; that's very different from developer productivity, where obviously we've been making a lot of progress with NetBeans and the Java platform."

Next: Schwartz and Otellini reveal some sore spots