Sun box shift leaves users demanding discounts

Sun Solaris users, facing a double whammy upgrade of operating system and hardware next year, should negotiate hard for extra discounts on current Sun technology, an analyst advised today.

Tom Henkel, Gartner Group analyst, said because any Sun server hardware and Solaris 7 purchased now would be dated within 12 months by newer products, users should get that reflected in the price.

"Anything less than a 30 per cent discount [on Ultrasparc II products] and you are paying too much," said Henkel.

Ultrasparc III, the next generation of Sun Microsystems' processor, is due out next year, some nine months late. Anyone looking to upgrade from existing Ultrasparc II based servers or workstations will have to make a complete box shift as the new processor is not field upgradeable.

Henkel said organisations should get competitive proposals from Sun competitors to force better discounts and concessions. This was particularly true as the delay to Ultrasparc III meant Sun will not hold the performance advantage over rivals in the next 12 months that it has held up to now.

"Sun will be under a lot more pressure from HP and IBM and will discount a lot more heavily," he said.

Sun is shortly due to announce the final iteration of Ultrasparc II, a 480MHz processor. Any company purchasing a server before this is available should demand a no-charge upgrade to the 480MHz processor, along with discounts.

Henkel warned that like any new product, users would be wise not to be first to run Ultrasparc III servers until Sun has ironed out the bugs.

He anticipated that Sun would bring out Ultrasparc III products from around June next year, starting with 600MHz workstations and progressing to 600MHz to 750MHz high end servers by the end of the year.

While initial reports from analysts and a Sun representative suggested that Solaris 8 would not run on Ultrasparc II, Sun has since confirmed that Solaris 8 will run on hardware shipped prior to Ultrasparc III.