Sun Microsystems Inc yesterday unveiled a new fault-tolerant Netra ft 1800 server and software products for the central office plus a slew of partner programs in an effort to beef up its exposure in the telecoms market. Sun, which says it is doing $2bn or 20% of its total revenues in the telco market, is now marketing its work directly against the industry’s established suppliers, Hewlett-Packard, Stratus Computer and Tandem Computers. It claims that at $160,000 and up, the redundant four- way rackmount Netra costs less than half the price of an equivalent Tandem box. Although Sun will initially target network equipment and service providers with the new products – a promotion to service providers will begin March 19 – it believes that in-house corporate IT shops will ultimately require fault- tolerant solutions as e-commerce and online services become mission critical. It says it will address these requirements in future products. Neil Knox’s network systems division, which owns Netra ft and the existing lower-end Netra t products is expected to do $400m next year. The new PCI bus Netra ft 1800 has been developed by Sun’s UK fault-tolerant group that was formed from its 1996 acquisition of Integrated Micro Products Ltd. The Netra ft 1800 and the existing lower-end Netra t products are manufactured in Linlithgow, Scotland. The ft 1800 incorporates duplicated components for fault-tolerance. The CPU is the 300MHz, four-way UltraSparc board found in its workgroup Enterprise 450 server, to which a host of fault-tolerant IP has been added including greatly enhanced device driver technology. Sun claims it offers 99.999% uptime. The box runs the same cut of Solaris as the rest of the Sun server line. Former IMP executives say that when the company was still independent it could not afford a Solaris license and therefore had to perfect fault-tolerance in hardware only. The server fits into Bellcore’s Network Equipment Building Systems rackmount standard and comes with up to 4Gb RAM, 16 PCI and 12 SCSI slots. It will also offer new NEBS-compliant storage arrays with up to 108Gb. Sun has also found more support in the shape of IBM, Bellcore and Trillium for its nascent Java advanced intelligent networks (JAIN) initiative unveiled last June. JAIN is effectively the application of Java Beans for the PSTNs. Bellcore and Trillium will develop JAIN for Signaling System 7 protocol stacks. IBM, Bellcore and Sun will develop JAIN for service creation. JAIN will also provide management and control beans. Sun had Lucent Technologies and Cisco Systems on hand to extol the virtue of the technology though neither was prepared to say how much if any of the kit it will buy. Although the fault-tolerant market is growing at some 18% a year – and Sun’s telecoms business by 45% – the company is still not considered a major supplier into the sector. So yesterday was as much about waving its telco flag as it was about launching new products. 60% of Sun’s telco sales are made in the US although that is expected to change as European deregulation continues. As part of the January 25 roll-out Sun will also describe how it will embed its Jini networked Java solution in PersonalJava and the Chorus-based JavaOS embedded kernel.
