Is Sun Back?

Sun is often touted as a zombie company.  After all, they generally failed to monetize Java and their strategy depends on selling super-expensive closed systems, right?  That was then.  Sun has been plugging away for the last few years, making tweaks that finally seem to be paying off.  The major components of their strategy seem to be:

• Open-Sourcing Solaris and making it competitive to Linux with ZFS, Zones, etc.
• Niagra's way-parallel CPUs, with up to 64 thread units on a chip
• X4500's 24TB-in-4U density
• Java

It looks like Sun has a two-tiered strategy, where Java drives mindshare to Sun and hardware drives revenue.  But Java is an aging platform that is well into its maturity phase.  Java 1.5 didn't create half the buzz of (say) Rails 1.0.  So to create excitement, Sun has instead relied on its core asset: hardcore systems engineering.  Giving Solaris tangible advantages over its main competitor in the server market (Linux) was a smart tactical move.  But what I think will ultimately prove to be more valuable is the sheer value of these machines.  For instance, a 6-core T1000 starts under $4k and only takes 1U in a data center.  As a developer running this hardware, I'm already ahead even before any potential gains in power efficiency.  So far, it looks like the new product line is bearing fruit.

How did Sun accomplish what looks like the beginnings of a rise from the ashes of the dotcom collapse?  It may sound trite, but from the outside it looks like they just listened to their customers.  What did their customers want to do with their servers?  It turns out, not a whole lot of computation.  They want to serve lots of HTTP requests in parallel.  They want to push lots of I/O.  They want to store tons of stuff.  As Tim Bray says, Sun likes "to sell computers to run software on", a focus that should lead Sun to make Solaris the #1 platform for PHP, Rails, Python, J2EE, whatever. 

So Sun has damn sexy hardware and a fancy OS in Solaris.  So why aren't more startups running Sun?  I think the answer comes down to a hole in the Sun channel that is exacerbated by the new startup funding model.  In a nutshell, new Web companies don't usually have tons of money.  Many of the prominent firms were bootstrapped or ran on very small investments for much of their lives: del.icio.us, flickr, 37 Signals,Odeo, Blogger, Writely.  And that's not even considering the Y Combinator startups.  Even the firms that do raise capital (i.e. YouTube) are much more likely to have started in a kitchen than in a VC boardroom.  And for the purposes of launching their sites (there are no more 2-year site build-outs anymore), they are all essentially running on personal savings.  So they will all go through roughly the following process to get their first servers:

1. Google for "dedicated hosting".
2. Click a link.
3. Sign up the same day.

They will generally not colo because they either have other jobs, or don't want to pony up the money to buy redundant hardware, or would rather build the site than configure RAID all night. 

The problem for Sun is that following these 3 steps is almost guaranteed to NOT get you to a Solaris machine.  Googling for "dedicated hosting" gives ~92m hits, "solaris hosting" only ~7m hits.  And once you've started in your kitchen on Linux, it's going to take quite a bit of convincing to get you to port your infrastructure to Solaris.  Even a productions site running something like Rails+MySQL, will have tons of scripts that Just Work on RHEL or whatever Linux you chose.   It doesn't take a genius to realize that moving to Solaris is not going to be a zero-effort migration.  Plus, once the site is launched you have bigger things to worry about, like finding a business model. 

So Sun needs to catch startups at the time of their creation.  One way they could do this is by courting the big dedicated hosting companies (i.e. Rackspace, etc.) and getting them to offer Solaris.  Many companies would pay a small premium to get the Niagara machines, and we would kill for something like the X4500 over the crappy storage options Rackspace has.  If Sun was in the managed hosting centers, they would capture today's startups like they owned the Web 1.0 startups.  Hopefully, their evangelism will move down to the managed hosting companies so that we can get some X4500's.

So I generally like Sun's trend but I'm not sure why they are missing this obvious gestator of startups.

Comments

[David Comay]

Interestingly enough, a number of hosting companies are beginning to offer Solaris or use Solaris as part of their infrastructure. One example are the folks at TextDrive who are utilizing the above mentioned Zones/Container feature in OpenSolaris.

http://textdrive.com/hosting/container