'We are strong supporters of the open source movement'

Stuart C Wells

Stuart C Wells joined Sun Microsystems in 1988 and has served in a number of key management positions. At present, in his role as the executive vice-president (Utility Computing), Wells' task includes driving the utility grid computing initiatives and remanufacturing programmes. Reporting directly to Sun's President and COO Jonathan Schwartz, he led the Sun ONE product development and product marketing functions for three years.

After 24 years in the industry, Wells holds five US patents in multimedia, video, 3D graphics and imaging, and has numerous international publications. In a teté-e-teté with Business Standard, Wells talks on myriad issues, including Sun's renewed Wall Street attack and maps it against his present mission to now gradually increase adoption for Sun's utility computing business. Excerpts:

Sun was a leader on Wall Street a decade ago. What went wrong?

It's not that everything went wrong with Sun and Wall Street clients. However, I would admit that Sun suffered a setback in the low-end segment since Solaris did not cater to that segment then.

Historically, Wall Street clients have been strong RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) Unix server users. At that particular point in time, we did not have a stronghold in the low-end server markets and to add to our woes, the Chief Information Officers (CIOs) liked the concept of Linux and thought it would work for their organisations.

Later, we launched Solaris 10. This effectively helped us in addressing the 'price-performance-platform'.

Linux is already an established player.Have you arrived a bit too late?

Sun is not against Linux. We compete against Red Hat. We are strong supporters of the open source movement. But with the introduction of Solaris 10, we believe our customers have a better alternative than Red Hat or IBM.

We have already recorded over 3.4 million downloads of Solaris 10 worldwide, that too from enterprises that go beyond the traditional domains of Linux "� like the academic world and the developer community.

What makes you think Solaris 10 will be a winner?

The new Solaris includes performance improvements for smaller systems. The goal was to make Solaris speedier on lower-end platforms. The success of Solaris is assured, as there is an ecosystem of Sun engineers working on the operating system and then several hundreds of developers and engineers working with Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to port their applications on Solaris 10.

Further, with open Solaris we have taken the best part of the Linux movement and released more code from our middleware stack, including elements of integration standard built for Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs).

Sun has been highlighting the eco-friendly nature of processors. How does this work?

The UltraSPARC T1 is the first eco-responsible microprocessor . It uses less power and creates less heat than a household light bulb. You don't even need a fan in the system.

Customers can thus save millions of dollars in energy and cooling costs. The Sun Fire Servers are based on the 'rack-on-a-chip' technology. We also have 1U and 2U servers, which are energy-efficient, space-saving platforms for Web and application-tier processing. The lower end Sun Fire servers, powered by AMD Opteron processors, provide over 52 per cent power and cooling savings compared with our competitors' products.

What does Sun offer in utility computing ?

The Sun Grid helps customers and partners to derive immediate benefits from an open, grid-based computing infrastructure on a utility basis, by giving them more choice and control over how they purchase and leverage IT.

Its offerings include the Sun Grid compute utility -- a $1 per CPU per hour pay-per-use offering, and the Sun Grid storage utility.

Using the Sun Grid service, virtually any consumer with a Web browser will be able to upload proprietary documents, and have them automatically converted to Open Document Format (ODF).

ODF documents are readable by any ODF-enabled applications such as OpenOffice.org or StarOffice. Moreover, Sun soon expects to make available a retail service that generates audio podcasts from any text based content, such as weblog or website.

The first of the Sun Grid utility services is a basic high performance computing facility and currently available under a commercial contract. The ODF service is expected to be available soon on the Sun Grid Public Compute Utility, which opens access to everyone via a portal. Sun's Grid offering can spare customers the need to build, manage, provision or power their own computers and storage devices.