The Palo Alto-based target firm is headed up by Andy Bechtolsheim, who was a co-founder of Sun, and vice president of technology at the Solaris vendor from 1984 to 1995. Sun’s chairman, CEO and president, Scott McNealy described Bechtolsheim as Sun’s employee number one.
Beyond the fact that it is headed up Bechtolsheim, little information is available on Kealia, and its website carries nothing except directions to its offices. Reports have suggested the company is working on a distributed high availability video server.
Yesterday, Sun said that Kelia would become the Advanced Systems Technology group within Sun’s Volume Systems Products organization. Bechtolsheim will be senior vice president and chief architect within the Volume Systems Products group.
His brief will include Sun’s developments on AMD’s Opteron platform. Sun launched its first Opteron-based box, the V20z, yesterday.
McNealy said yesterday, With this guy in the suit [Andy Bechtolsheim] designing Opteron servers there’s going to be nobody with our class and breadth of servers out there.
He added, We are working with AMD in different areas. Sharing design ideas and I/O technology. There’s no reason not to make it as seamless as possible to plug and play Sparc IIIi and IV with Opteron.
Bechtolsheim added, Very few [customers] have adopted [Intel’s] Itanium because there will be a significant cost of getting applications re-compiled.
After leaving Sun, Bechtolsheim started Granite Systems in 1995, which was taken over by Cisco the following year. Bechtolsheim then spent seven years at Cisco, while also backing a number of startups, including Google.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
