ServerWatch: Sun Goes After Wintel/Lintel Vendors with New Server

“Sun Microsystems is taking aim at the high end of the
Wintel/Lintel server universe with the introduction of the Sun Fire
280R rack-optimized server, built around the new 900-Mhz UltraSPARC
III processor. For Sun, this represents an entry-level offering for
the enterprise at a time when the company is losing market share to
low-end servers based on Windows 2000 Server and Linux.

Positioning in this market is relative, of course. Pricing for a
basic Sun Fire 280R begins at $22,995; while that may represent an
entry-level Sun Fire server, it represents the higher-end of
Wintel/Lintel servers from Compaq, IBM, and Dell. And according to
Sun officials, the Sun Fire 280R offers capabilities not found in
the Wintel/Lintel world: the 280R comes standard with eight
megabytes of Level 2 cache and provides up to eight gigabytes of
main memory.

‘Even when compared to their [Wintel/Lintel vendors] high end,
they are far away from meeting the SunFire standards,’ says Maggie
Chan, Senior Product Marketing Manager of Volume Systems Product at
Sun. ‘We are bringing high end performance to the low end
servers.'”

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