Sun Microsystems Inc’s answer to Intel Corp’s drive into the workgroup server market its four-way Pentium Pro SHV boards will be a line of Sparc server code-named Tasmo due after the summer. Sun’s workgroup servers – the market for which is focused on a sub-$20,000 price point according to Sun chief executive Scott McNealy – are being developed by the company’s Chelmsford, Massachusetts-based group. It is run by former Hewlett-Packard Co workstation exec Mark Canepa who Sun lured away from Compaq Computer Corp’s fledgling workstation unit when he’d only been there two weeks. The servers are going to have a bunch of easy install and re-boot, ease of use, management and security features. On a call to financial analysts yesterday, McNealy promised the Tasmos will be the most cost-effective and scalable environment in the workgroup server marketplace for people who want to serve up PCs, print, file, web and Java environments. The Chelmsford unit already has responsibility for the tower form-factor Ultra Enterprise Model 150 server out of which the Tasmos are expected to grow. It’s this workgroup space of course where Microsoft Corp is exploiting Sun’s lack of product with Windows NT; not the enterprise, where Sun doesn’t expect to see it for some time – about five years if you believe McNealy. But isn’t Microsoft is getting all excited about the prospect of being able to support a terabyte of data on its SQL Server? Been there. Done that, said McNealy.
