Sun Intro's Servers; Assures Industry of Its Health
 
Microbytes Daily News Service
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
In a press briefing yesterday devoted primarily to reminding the
audience that Sun Microsystems is the fastest-growing
"multibillion dollar computer company in the world," Sun also
rolled out two new network file servers: the SPARCServer 490, a
high speed server priced at over $100,000, and the SPARCServer 1,
a server version of Sun's recently announced SPARCStation 1,
priced at about $18,000 for a basic system.
 
The SPARCServer 490 is intended to compete directly with high-
priced mini and mainframe computer systems such as DEC's VAX or
IBM's AS/400, serving large corporate customers with large
networks. The SPARCServer 490 boasts performance of 22 MIPS and
3.8 million floating-point operations per second, Sun says. The
machine includes a new, high-speed I/O cache, up to 160 megabytes
of error-correcting code (ECC) memory, a fiber-optic network
interface (FDDI), and an Intelligent Peripheral Interface disk
controller, which supports up to 32 gigabytes of disk storage.
 
The SPARCServer 1 is aimed at smaller office and workgroup
environments and is essentially billed as an NFS (Network File
System) file server. The SPARCServer 1 is simply a SPARCStation 1
with additional hard disk and tape storage and preinstalled
network software. The SPARCServer 1 is in direct competition with
the DEC 3100 and Compaq's new Systempro, and according to Sun, is
priced about 30% less than equivalently equipped machines from
those competitors.
 
But although the press conference was held on the premise of
announcing these systems, Sun president Scott McNealy spent most
of the time emphasizing Sun's financial success and Sun's
determination to become a major player in the business market, as
well as in the technical market. With the new SPARCServer 490,
Sun is setting its sights on transaction processing and financial
applications. McNealy said that he doesn't "see much difference
between the requirements of the technical and commercial
markets."
 
In spite of rumors to the contrary, McNealy said Sun will
continue to manufacture and support its Motorola-based
workstations, which account for about 25% of Sun's business,
according to McNealy. He said Sun would support the Motorola
systems as long as customer demand for those systems continues.
However, he added that he foresees a gradual decline of the
Motorola line, as both new and existing customers purchase SPARC-
based systems at a much faster rate than Motorola-based systems.
 
Contact: Sun Microsystems, 2550 Garcia Ave, Mountain View, CA
94043; (415) 960-1300.
 
                             --- Nick Baran
 
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