Sun, About to Unveil Unix Server, Leads Market

According to International Data Corporation’s (IDC’s) latest server tracking report, “Q2CY00 Server Tracker,” Sun Microsystems (SUNW) has widened its lead in sales over Hewlett-Packard and IBM in the Unix server market.

According to the report, Sun shipped two and half times as many Unix servers as HP and nearly two times as many as IBM. Sun ended the quarter with 43 percent market share.

According to International Data Corporation’s (IDC’s) latest server tracking report, “Q2CY00 Server Tracker,” Sun Microsystems (SUNW) has widened its lead in sales over Hewlett-Packard and IBM in the Unix server market.

Sun also maintained its hold on the top spot in overall Unix server revenue, commanding a 37 percent market share on revenue of $2.6 billion.

The report also indicated that Sun continued on a faster growth track than its competitors, and increased its market share in Unix server shipments and factory revenue in all categories that the IDC survey measured. The survey is broken out to measure market share for entry-level, midrange, and high-end servers.

According to a statement released by Sun, the popularity of the Sun Enterprise and Netra servers have enabled the company to maintain its position in total Unix server shipments for thirteen consecutive quarter.

The Sun Enterprise server family is a binary-compatible product line featuring a range of servers that can scale from one to 64 processors, thus providing customers with flexibility, investment protection, and a growth path. The Sun Enterprise server family is designed for workgroup, departmental, and data center computing environments. It aims to provide an ideal platform for a various applications, including enterprise resource planning, e-commerce, data warehousing, and Internet and intranet customer management systems.

The Netra server family is designed to build on the reliability and scalability for which Sun’s systems are known. The small profile and rackability of many of the systems, make them ideal for service providers.

In related news, an article on CNET noted that Sun announced plans to unveil
its new generation of Unix servers and UltraSparc processors on Wednesday. The servers and workstations will use the UltraSparc III “Cheetah” chip, part of the “Serengeti” server family. The company also plans to unveil a new initiative that incorporates its SunUp program to keep computers up and running, sources told CNET.

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