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Customers advise Sun

Sun's Solaris operating system has a home in one of every two IT shops, the company's servers generate more revenue than Unix systems giant IBM, and its workstations stand second only to Dell.

Sun matters a lot to network executives, so Network World talked to a cross section of the company's customers and asked what they would like to see from the vendor. Heading their wish lists are a plea for price relief on servers and workstations, and increased support for less-expensive X86-based hardware. In addition, customers question Sun's continued role in the storage market and what's seen as lip service support for Linux.

Here are the specifics:

1. Lower the prices, please.

Ron Rose,CIO of Price line.com, an online e-commerce service in Norwalk, Conn., puts his request simply: "I'd like Sun to give us all the wonderful tools and products they have at PC prices."

Rose uses an array of Sun servers, including midrange Sun Fire Serengeti machines, which use the 64-bit versions of Sun's UltraSPARC III processor and Solaris operating system.A low-end single-processor Serengeti (the Sun Fire 3800) with 2G bytes of memory starts at $85,500.

John Groenveld, associate research engineer for the Applied Research Lab at Pennsylvania State University, has the same need at the other end of Sun's product line: "On high-end [servers] Sun's pricing and technologies are competitive with IBM and other large system vendors," Groenveld says. "It's on the low end that Sun is particularly vulnerable."

Groenveld says most users can't afford expensive SPARC portables or Sun Blade workstations anymore, and should be able to use Solaris on inexpensive Intel- or AMD-based PCs and laptops. Whereas Sun's high-end workstations start at $1,000 and the heftier Sun Blade 2000 starts at $11,000, Groenveld says he can get the same performance for less than $1,000 if he chooses Intel-based workstations.

2. Shelve storage products.

Some customers say Sun's best strategy for the storage market would be a quick exit.

"The company should exit the disk business as fast as possible," says Rocco Esposito, CTO for window-covering manufacturer Hunter Douglas in Upper Saddle River, N.J. "The [company] missed the boat that enriched EMC and others, and needs to find other products and services that have significant margins. Enterprise storage is far too competitive today. This is a major strategic error that might cost Sun its viability."

Michael LaPorta, senior project manager for TXU Energy in Dallas, says that while Sun's servers are robust enough for databases, until the company started reselling Hitachi storage products such as the StorEdge 9900, its storage products weren't suitable for data center needs.

"The T3 [array] could not offer what we were looking for, although we have two," LaPorta says.

Robert Banniza,senior system administrator for Ascension Health in Evansville, Ind., says price also is a problem with Sun storage. "I would purchase more storage from Sun but Sun's prices [would have] to come more in line with everyone else," he says.

3. Give us Solaris 9 on X86.

Sun's decision to put on hold Solaris 9 am development on the X86 processor platform might send customers into the arms of Linux unless the company reconsiders.

"Sun has to apologize for the bad will it caused in the customer community by indefinitely delaying the X86 version of Solaris 9 and more generally mismanaging and underutilizing X86 products over the last several years," Penn State's Groenveld says. "If Sun abandons this community by not providing them the Solaris on X86 processor option, then the community will migrate to Windows or Linux." Groenveld uses a mixture of Dell PowerEdge servers running Solaris X86 and Sun Ultra servers for Web hosting and database applications.

Priceline's Rose agrees. "We're very happy with what we have from Sun, but sooner or later, Linux comes tip to scale, and it's going to cause Sun a lot of heartburn, even though Solaris is a superb operating system."

4. Ratchet up the R&D.

While customers are generally happy 40 with Solaris, they say it needs to be bulked up.

"We would like to have a better clustering system. SunCluster is very painful [to use] and therefore costly to deploy," says Paul Eric Tavil, CIO of an international communications company in Munich, Germany.

TXU Energy's LaPorta would like the domain capabilities of Sun's E10000, 12000 and 15K extended to smaller servers "so I can domain an eight-- processor Sun Fire V880 [server] and get four two-- way systems."

"The company has fallen behind its competition on the chip-performance curve," Esposito says. "I'd like to see Sun take a leadership position again. If they fall behind too far, even the quality of Solaris won't help them sell enough hardware to survive."

5. Support can use some help.

Customers say Sun's support systems could improve.

"Sun needs to have better communicalions about updates, patches, etc.," LaPorta says. "They should be willing to provide a proactive response for free. We have too many servers to keep up with the patch levels and feel that Sun should do something proactively to assist us with this."

He also says Sun should keep historical data on a per-server basis for each customer it supports. This would let them see if a trend is forming for a particular server or range of servers.

"With no historical data for service calls, trending is almost impossible," LaPorta says.

6. Simplify the documentation.

Dan Gahlinger, senior network engineer for Interlynx in Hamilton, Ontario, says that Sun could help users by shipping operating manuals and documentation with their software.

"The first thing you do when installing a new system is go out to sunfreeware.com [or docs.sun .com] and download a couple hundred megabytes of packages," Gahlinger says. "Why not include some or most of this stuff on companion CDs?"

He'd also like Sun to put the GNU Compiler Collection on a disk that it ships with Solaris. "It took me over two hours to download 271M bytes as a TAR file," he says. TAR is a Unix command that compresses files.

7. Taller would be better.

"Sun should add a taller [rack-mount] cabinet so I can place more hardware in the same footprint," says LaPorta, who would like to "at least get three Sun Enterprise 450 servers in a cabinet."