By Timothy Prickett Morgan
As we reported last week, Sun Microsystems Inc has begun offering customers buying its Enterprise 10000 Starfire servers the ability to buy heavily configured Starfires today, but only pay for the portion of the total capacity that they are using under a new Capacity On Demand offering. In Sun’s announcement several days after our initial story on the COD deal (CI No 3,786), the company provided a few more details about pricing. The base Starfire COD server, which has 20 processors in the box but only eight of them activated for use, costs $390,500. Adding processors activating processors nine through 20 costs $66,500 per CPU. For those customers who get initial Starfire COD configurations with more than 20 processors (or those who add COD processors to existing 20-way servers), each additional CPU costs $27,500 each. Obviously, it looks like customers with modestly configured Starfires will be paying more per CPU than those who think that they are going to really beef them up.
The COD pricing is a little different from Sun’s regular pricing. A base Starfire cabinet has a list price of $165,000, $180,000, or $240,000, depending on who you ask. The lower number is from Sun’s official TPC-C benchmark test results, the $180,000 tag is for one purchased off the SunStore and the $240,000 tag is for a box you want from SunStore in 40 days or less. The TPC-C prices show that additional unpopulated Starfire system boards cost $48,750 each, and individual processors cost $12,750 each.
The Starfire can have up to 16 of these system boards, which hold a maximum of four processors each for a total of 64 processors in a frame. Unpopulated memory boards that match the system boards cost $7,500 each and 1Gb memory cards cost $7,125 each. Based on these prices, a regular eight-way Starfire with 4Gb of memory (which matches the base COD configuration) should cost $423,000, a little more than the COD price. But the price of an additional COD processor based on Sun’s list prices should be just under $34,000 each (one quarter of a system card plus one CPU plus one quarter of a memory board plus 1Gb of main memory).
If this calculation is right, each additional Starfire CPU engine costs twice as much as the list price as the iron if you went out and bought it from Sun and did a normal upgrade. This seems like a pretty steep premium, even though the COD deal does keep initial Starfire costs low. Even the lower prices for CPUs out beyond the 20 CPU barrier are not much cheaper at $27,500 each than the list price of the iron. Once Starfire COD customers catch wind of the price difference between low-end and high-end COD buyers, they may start demanding that Sun charge the same price for every CPU in the box – perhaps at a modest premium to the cost of a Starfire engine upgrade because of the benefits that COD provides. But it seems counter-intuitive to try to get customers fired up about buying COD Starfire configurations and having the little guys pay the price for the program while the big guys get iron on the cheap.
Incidentally, Sun says that customers who buy a Starfire under the COD deal can keep any extra capacity beyond their initial configuration around without activating it indefinitely. Current E10000 customers can sign up for the deal as long as they have 400MHz UltraSparc-II processors in their Starfires and have at least 20 processors in the box. Based on the COD pricing and the fact that the average size of the 1,600 Starfires shipped to date is over 32 processors per box, the COD deal seems at least to be initially geared towards Sun’s existing high-end server customers. That said, new Starfire COD customers who might have otherwise gone with an Enterprise 6500 server should negotiate with Sun to pay a single price per CPU rather than the unfairly staggered prices Sun is charging.
