Sun will continue to innovate: Krithiwas

 Sun was also the only top-four server vendor to achieve year-to-year server factory revenue growth, posting a 15.5 per cent gain. Sun Microsystems India systems vertical general manager Krithiwas Neelakantan in a conversation with Pragati Simlote of CyberMedia News speaks about Sun’s server portfolio as well as the company’s plans of acquiring a higher market share in this business. Excerpts:

What is Sun’s server portfolio all about?

The Sun server portfolio products can be broadly classified under two domains – those that run – SPARC V9 architecture. Second are those which are based on the AMD Opteron 64 bit processor, which run Windows, Linux and Solaris, etc.

We have recently come out with a revolutionary chip design called CMT and the processor is called ULTRASPARC T1. We have series of servers emerging on the T1 processor. This is a unique product in the industry, as normally one would associate multicore processors to have two cores. This T1 processor has eight cores and each core executing four simultaneous threads, so technically its 32-blade server. The T1 processor is three quarters old and is a significant part of our product strategy.

What kind of server market share do you have?

According to the IDC Q206 Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, Sun is now number three in total server revenue, surpassing Dell. In worldwide UNIX revenue, Sun now accounts for more than half of UNIX server shipments. Sun's year-to-year UNIX revenue was up 11.8 per cent and we also continued to achieve significant growth in its x64 (x86, 64-bit) server line. I think that we are in the top five among the X86 server players in the market.

What would be your focus areas going forward?

We will continue to invest and focus on the ULTRASPARC 4+ processor features plus the CMT strategy based on the T1 processor. We will continue to innovate on the processor and the operating systems level. There are several new features on Solaris 10 that we have recently announced that add significant value to the customer as well as the application vendors who build applications on top of it. So we would continue to take the price performance operational cost leadership as far as our high-end server is concerned. So we would drive that strategy very aggressively.

How do Sun servers score over its competitors?

We are very sensitive about the operational cost that customers incur on these servers. No longer it’s just about cost of acquiring server, operational cost are a significant percentage of the cost of data centers (DCs).

DCs today are of finite parameters – space is not infinite, power is not infinite neither it is cheap nor is the cooling requirement. Increasingly the cost of power and cooling is going up and customers are paying a lot for space. The key dimension we are going to address from a customer point of view is to deliver very high performance at very high densities so that they save on space and at very low power and cooling costs.

What is your strategy to increase server market share?

As far as UNIX is concerned the market is aware that Solaris is the best operating system (OS) that is there. We will ride on Solaris and will continue to invest and focus on the ULTRASPARC 4+ processor features plus the CMT strategy based on the T1 processor. We will continue to innovate on the processor and the OS level.

There are several new features on Solaris 10 that we have recently announced that add significant value to the customer as well as the application vendors who build applications on top of it. So we would continue to take the price performance operational cost leadership as far as our high-end servers are concerned. So we would drive that strategy very aggressively.

We are ahead of the curve in terms of our consolidation and virtualization strategy and have been delivering dynamic domain on our servers for several years now. We have a very mature technology – customers can do server consolidation onto our servers. We are doing something very similar on the X86 side. Sun is a significant player in server consolidation and virtualization. In addition to that we have partnered with VMware to deliver consolidation and virtualization services to our customers.

What are your focus segments in India?

The company is currently focusing on data centers - reducing operational cost, increasing availability and serviceability of its servers. Sun’s products are built for two types of markets – business computing and technical computing. The company also has vertical focused products. We deliver solutions, which are very specific to various industries and are aggressively pursuing the telecom – communication industry, manufacturing, BFSI, education research and healthcare.

We have also invested significantly in the retail space. We think that the market growth on retail in India is very high. Sophistication, market pressure and market dynamics are no different as those in the US. Competition is also very intense in this sector and the need of the hour is running highly operationally efficient systems. As margins are very low, adoption of IT is the only way to increase their bottomline.

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