| At Sun, the network has always been at the center of everything we do--and will do. We've always been ahead of the curve, and we're keeping you ahead of the curve with investments in three key areas: massive scalability, realtime response, and continuous service availability for business agility.
| Massive scalability: We've gone beyond x-axis and y-axis scalability and taken a comprehensive approach to ensuring virtually unlimited scalability of system resources. With our new interconnect, we've also ensured that our systems are using big pipes for high throughput. You'll hear the details as we discuss our new system architecture and the UltraSPARC III platform later in this presentation.
| Real-time response: This is a function of multiple technologies working together in concert--from fast processors to a low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect, to symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) technology, to the multithreaded capabilities of the Solaris Operating Environment, to applications that are tuned for real-time performance.
| Continuous availability: Sun recognizes that continuous uptime is achieved through people, processes, and products, not simply reliable hardware and software. Most outages still result from operator error or inadequate processes, not physical failures. Through our advanced RAS features, our integrated hardware and software stack, clustering techniques, comprehensive service, education, and support programs, Sun delivers on the requirements for continuous availability.
| Agility: Over time we have introduced a series of technologies and programs designed to ensure business agility, including dynamic resource management, real-time reconfiguration, rapid redeployment, and rapid service delivery capabilities. In addition, we have provided the innovative Capacity On Demand program which enables customers to add key system resources on the fly over the network. And we protect customers' investments through continued binary compatibility as well as a variety of trade-in, trade-up, and upgrade programs.
| Now we’re making three new bets, and we’re confident they’ll pay off.
| •It is no longer acceptable to implement hardware and software as point products. In the dot-com age, it all has to work together. Network services are central, hardware and software systems should be peripheral. We’re focusing our development efforts on integrated, binary compatible hardware and software lines that let you focus on your services, not the underlying platforms they run on.
| •The Jupiter (NetEffect) launch shows some of what we mean by this. The infrastuctural components will be integrated for you – firewalls? Add your own rules. Web Servers? Add your content and design. Database and storage needs? Sun/Oracle/Veritas can package the underlying system, just add your schema and data.
| •This does not mean that we become a systems integrator. It also doesn’t mean that customers can buy a business in a box—they still have work to do! If you think back to earlier days, we had to write basic system code to get our servers to recogise our printers, and we had to tell each computer how to find every other computer. Now, those are integral parts of the OS, and we take them for granted. The key components of the new computing systems will migrate just like DNS and print services into normal parts of our stack.
| •The Internet age is about immediacy, and that’s why we’re committed to driving latency out of the network completely. We’re dedicated to making network services continuously available, at high performance, any time, anywhere, on virtually any device.
| •Our Service Driven Network is part of this bet, as is the new hardware line with it’s fault resiliance and redundancy and our software offerings with
| •From an IT perspective, the dot-com age creates new challenges for meeting unpredictable demand for network services. We’re focusing our efforts on massive scalability so that you have instant headroom in resources--so that your Web site can take a pounding and keep delivering services at peak performance.
| Everything we’re doing, from Project Genesys, to SOlaris enhancements, to our iPlanet story, and our entire architectural vision combine to make a unified, coherent vision of where technology is leading and hoe to get our customers there.