Sun Microsystems found itself between a rock and a hard place. At the low-end of the market it was facing the Wintel combine, while its top-of-the-line UNIX boxes were going head-to-head with UNIX iron from HP and IBM. Now Sun has come out fighting with a Lintel (Linux-Intel) box, the LX50, with which it hopes to keep Wintel at bay, says Prashant L Rao

For years Wintel servers have been getting better and better and slowly they have come to a point where they can offer a credible alternative to Sun Microsystems’ entry-level UNIX boxes, at least on value terms, if not on raw performance. All this while Sun’s only products targeting the SME space (where Wintel dominates) have been the Cobalt series—award-winning products, but a little too fixed-purpose and limited in nature to counter general-purpose Wintel servers. That’s why Sun has just put the finishing touches on its latest ‘anti-Windows’ strategy to replace file and print, Web, firewall and mail servers running Windows 2000/NT with Linux/Solaris boxes powered by Intel’s Pentium III processors.

The birth of a server
When Sun took time out to analyse the SME server market, it found a gaping hole. “We found that the other server vendors—HP, IBM, Dell—were not really selling Linux. They were giving customers the option of buying Red Hat Linux. The customer has to get applications such as MySQL or Sendmail server from magazine CDs. We, on the other hand, have tested all the applications and offer support for the entire stack—hardware and software,” says Anil Valluri, director of Systems Engineering at Sun Microsystems India. “There are only 3,000 Linux servers in India across brands. Most of these are assembled machines, very often they are desktops turned into servers, mostly one-or two-CPU boxes,” he adds.

To fill this gap, Sun created the LX50, a Lintel box that offers an integrated hardware-software solution. For the first time Indian SMEs can buy a Linux server with an integrated, pre-tested stack of software that is guaranteed to work smoothly. Linux has substantial market share abroad but in India it hasn’t made much of an impact in the enterprise space. With the LX50, that should change. Sun expects to sell hundreds of these boxes. That said, the company isn’t looking at numbers per se. The plan is to be a long-term player in edge computing. It expects resistance to Wintel, resulting from pricing and lack of choice, to boost the LX50’s fortunes.

Sun targets SMEs, again...
Sun is positioning the LX50 and its successors as servers for the SME market. Earlier Sun had come out with entry-level SPARC boxes aimed at this market but it now believes that it has a better chance with Lintel. Essentially, the LX50 is a ‘drop in’ replacement for Wintel servers on the edge of the network. Edge servers are basically those that do mundane but essential work like file & print, messaging, proxy, firewall and sometimes, intranet duties.

To offer a painless migration path, Sun has created a software stack that has application counterparts for everything that Microsoft offers. Microsoft has Exchange. Sun has the commercial version of Sendmail, a POP3/IMAP server that’s good enough for most SMEs and happens to be the second most popular mail server in India after Microsoft Exchange. Later this year, probably in December 2002, Sun will release a version of the Sun ONE messaging server for Linux. That will most probably be a product with a price tag, though Valluri states, “It will be attractively priced.”

Similarly, for the other components of Microsoft’s software stack—SQL Server and IIS (Windows 2000’s integrated Web/FTP server)—Sun has MySQL (a freeware database, which while lacking the very high-end features of Oracle or DB2, should suffice for SME database applications) and Apache (the world’s leading Web server with almost 60 percent of market share). To provide a familiar environment for companies hosting their websites or intranets using Microsoft’s popular ASP technology, there’s Sun ONE ASP. Miss your Windows networking? The LX50 has Samba.

The good news for SMEs is that Sun is giving away all this software for free with the LX50, along with the Sun Grid engine that lets universities take advantage of grid computing. The OS, Sun Linux 5.0, is built around a Red Hat kernel with drivers, software pieces and optimised code from Sun. Thanks to Solaris on Intel, Sun had the device driver code handy and didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. Customers get a choice of running Linux or Solaris 8 with the same application availability on both (Solaris has some extra applications but the key applications are common to both OSs).

Better still, Sun has ensured that the entire software stack is integrated and runs smoothly, doing away with software clashes that can make life hell for a CIO or IT manager. While some of these applications are part of popular Linux distributions such as Red Hat, this is the first time that a server major (Sun is the leading UNIX server vendor in India and abroad) is putting its considerable weight behind an integrated Linux-Intel solution.

Customers get to pick and choose what software they want installed. Therein lies the key difference between the LX50 and Cobalt. The LX50 is a general-purpose server that SMEs can tinker with for their unique requirements. Cobalt servers were appliances with auto-sensing and fixed applications. In that sense, the LX50 is a direct competitor to SIAS (Standard Intel Architecture Servers) servers running Windows 2000, something Cobalt definitely wasn’t.

Why Linux and Solaris?
Sun’s vision is that companies will start with Sun’s Lintel boxes and, as their needs grow, they will migrate upwards to Solaris-SPARC without having to spend huge amounts on retraining. Thanks to Sun’s work with the Gnome project, it can offer a common desktop across Linux and Solaris. This is very important since one of Microsoft’s key selling points has always been the boast that it has a common GUI across all flavours of Windows (98/NT/2000/Me/XP). Linux application compatibility has existed in Solaris all along. Sun had held back from announcing Solaris 9 for Intel. Now, due to popular demand from users and insiders, Solaris 9 for Intel will be coming in a few months.

Satisfaction guaranteed by Sun
Sun’s value proposition is that it offers an integrated suite of applications, hardware and services at the same price points as Windows 2000/Intel servers. At present Sun is adopting a horizontal, application-based marketing strategy. It is positioning the LX50 as an edge server for SMEs (file, print, messaging and database, Web, proxy and firewall), streaming media and grid computing. In terms of verticals, the company is looking at edge deployments at telcos, IDCs and corporates. The LX50 will be sold by Sun’s channel development partners—Tech Pacific and Ingram Micro. Sun will not be involving its system integrators who sell SPARC machines to enterprises.
Sun’s LX50 will present a credible alternative to the SIAS-Windows 2000 servers for the first time. Expect this server to boost Linux usage in the country. There is nothing inherently radical about this product. In fact, it may succeed precisely because it isn’t revolutionary. The LX50 offers a ready-to-use software/hardware stack, something previously only available from the Wintel crowd. In the medium term expect Linux shipments in India to inch upwards from the present 5.7 percent (Source: IDC India) towards global levels of 25 percent in 2001 (Source: IDC).