Sun targets $1bn mainframe market with 'Blue Away'

KUALA LUMPUR: Hot on the heels of announcing a major increase in server

marketshare, Sun Microsystems is launching a strong 'Blue Away' initiative to

build up its replacement program, targeting IBM's abandoned mid-range mainframe

(NUMA-Q) customers. "The mid-market mainframe represents a potential

$1-billion opportunity that Sun plans to capture with its Sun Fire Midframe

server family," a senior company official has said.

"The benefits of a mainframe must be justified in terms of its

costs," the official said. "Enterprises that use a smaller mainframe

have higher operating costs per unit of processing, primarily because they pay

more for operating software, than do enterprises with very large mainframes, or

those that are running similar workloads on Unix servers. In many cases, Sun's

mainframe migration program will offer them significant lifecycle cost

savings."

Oracle Corporation, a Sun partner, offers leading enterprise business

solutions that can help companies significantly improve the bottom line. The

combination of the Sun Fire server family and Oracle applications and technology

provide a strong alternative for the midrange market. "In today's

challenging economic environment, companies are taking a hard look at their

bottomline and growth strategies," Oracle vice-president (Platform

Partnerships) Doug Kennedy said. "Together, Oracle and Sun can provide

these companies with a cost-effective, high-performance alternative to their

mainframes running legacy applications that scales as their businesses

grow."

"Sun's Project 'Blue Away' offers mainframe customers increased return

on investment through high availability, reliability and performance. The Sun

Fire 3800-6800 mid-frame servers are specifically designed to offer the

availability and resource management capabilities of mainframe computing at a

fraction of the cost," the Sun official added. He also pointed to benchmark

results, which claimed that Sun Fire mid-frame servers offered over four times

the price-performance advantage of an IBM mainframe.

"In the last quarter, Sun shipped over four times more MIPS than

IBM," Sun Microsystems' chief competitive officer Shahin Khan said.

"Since IBM is the only vendor of mainframes, it has been raising prices on

captive mainframe customers and paying less attention to customers with small or

mid-size mainframes. Through this 'Blue Away' initiative, we are offering a

tried, tested and more cost-effective solution," Khan added.

Sun was recently named by Afcom, the leading association for data center

professionals, as its 'Vendor of the Month' for its mainframe rehosting

solution. According to Afcom, "Customers experience more than a 50 per cent

reduction in cost-of-ownership, in addition to a noticeable improvement in both

online and batch performance, when they rehost mainframe applications on the

Solaris operating environment."

Rajeev Narayan in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia