Sun Teams With Oracle, Debuts Low-End Servers

Sun Teams With Oracle, Debuts Low-End Servers
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Sun Microsystems Monday pushed forward with its low-end strategy by announcing a tighter partnership with database giant Oracle.Sun Microsystems Inc. on Monday pushed forward with its low-end strategy by announcing a tighter partnership with database giant Oracle Corp. and rolling out two new low-cost servers.

At an event in San Francisco, Scott McNealy, president, chairman and CEO of Sun, and Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison spoke about how many data centers in the near future are going to run smaller servers linked together by technology such as Oracles Real Application Clusters and running as one large system.

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Such a setup, using low-cost Sun boxes to run Oracles powerful database and other software, snatches away the one charge Oracle competitors have been able to throw at the company, Ellison said: That Oracle software is too expensive.

"When people talk about Oracle and Sun together, they say, Yeah, theyre scalable, theyre fast, theyre secure, but they run on those big, expensive computers," Ellison said. "[They say,] It just costs too much. You dont need all that power and security. We can do it good enough [for less money.] The only thing they keep hitting us on is we cost too much. We decided to attack that thing head-on."

The two companies are also promising a tightening of their already close, 20-year-long alliance that will result in a "no finger-pointing" service and support scenario for joint customers, McNealy said. "What this means is you have absolute, total choice across the two product lines, with only one throat to choke," he said.

As far as the message regarding total joint compatibility goes, it echoed one that Ellison and Dell Computer Corp. CEO Michael Dell put out during an event in New York April 2.

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