Sunny Consolidated Linux Servers
The server business is getting more interesting by the minute. Last
week several news stories dropped from the sky to paint a hideous picture of
where the market and Sun are heading.
First, we learned that
Sun was
helping to port the Ubuntu Linux distribution to their T1 architecture.
It is encouraging that Sun belatedly recognizes the need to be a complete part
of the Linux market shift, but this is both too little and too late.
Ubuntu may well be a fine Linux distro, but the market long ago selected the two
top contenders — Novell and Red Hat — and it is doubtful that any organization
needing T1 power will peg their fortunes on Ubuntu. Perhaps Sun is using
Ubuntu’s team to do the heavy lifting that the big dogs don’t want to do.
And why wouldn’t Novell or Red Hat want to port Linux to T1? Because
the demand is not there. Years ago
Linux was ported to SPARC, and except for a handful of people repurposing
old Sun servers, there was near zero demand for that distro. Since that
time the market has matured, buyers have made strategic decisions about which
Linux they will run and on what boxes, and nothing aside from an outstandingly
good value proposition will change that.
Which might happen anyway. Last week we also learned that server
consolidation is an increasingly strong factor in the market. If the
market accepted the T1/Ubuntu offering, it would do so to create a fairly
massive consolidation machine. But that is a big leap of faith when a
small set of less pricey Intel/AMD servers would work as well. This market
direction seems to be validated by the fact that server revenues are flat, but
shipment volume is rising, which matches the commodity server value proposition.
IDC does note that low priced servers volume grew while mid-tier and high-end
server sales dipped.
Lost in much of this data is the tidbit that
Sun servers are making a tiny comeback, with server sales rising 7.6%.
Since I can’t bribe anyone at Sun to open their internal books to me, I have to
speculate that most of this rise comes from their entry into the Opteron market.
The low end server market grew 6.3%, nearly matching Sun’s rise.
The one amusing conundrum here is Sun’s spin on the UNIX market. They
gleefully note that according to Gartner, Sun is the #1 shipper of UNIX systems.
Yet in the same week IDC notes that UNIX shipments fell 8.7%. This makes
sun the captain of a slowly sinking ship. Sure, it’s great to be in the
crows nest, but eventually the water will reach you.
