It’s going to be a busy week for Sun Microsystems Inc. It looks as if Siemens Nixdorf Informationssystemes AG’s plan to sell Solaris x86 on Intel Corp servers is coming down today as part of a new strategic plan for the German company’s problematic Unix business. Sun’s mid-range Ultra Enterprise servers get refreshed on Wednesday, and there are faster workstations – including a new high-end model – plus price cuts on older models and other enhancements also due. Presumably the forthcoming UltraSparc III will be put into play. Meantime, SNI’s Pyramid Technology group is expected to reveal a strategy for high-end Reliant SMP Unix servers now that the days of the MIPS RISC architecture as a mainstream CPU are numbered. It will also declare its plan for Unix system software. We wonder if SNI Pyramid is the secret partner Silicon Graphics Inc claims it has for the Intel Merced version of Irix it’s creating.
