NEW YORK-Sun Microsystems Inc. is serving up advanced computing power for wireless network elements and operations support systems, according to separate announcements the company issued last week.
With its new series of Sun Fire Midframe servers now available in quantity, the Palo Alto, Calif., company is taking direct aim at Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp. and Compaq Computer Corp, said Scott McNealy, chairman and chief executive officer, at a press conference March 21 in New York.
These general purpose servers are designed for OSS functions, including customer relationship management, said Ken Won, group marketing manager of Sun. Without taking down the system, these units allow additions of central processing unit hardware for more capacity, installation of software patches and servicing of the unit.
“These (functions typically) require planned shutdowns for eight to 12 hours. The only other way to do it is to have in place a redundant system to take over while the other is out of service,” said Shahin Khan, vice president of product marketing for Sun.
In developing the Sun Fire series, the company “drew from two heritages,” said Clark Masters, vice president and general manager of enterprise system products. Sun melded together the “glass house environment of a data center with the open environment of the Internet,” he said.
Controlled access and high levels of availability, predictability and performance characterize data centers. The Internet offers universal access, networked services, agility and flexibility, he said.
Sun Fire Midframe servers carry an entry-level price of $75,000, “and are configurable with multiple processors up to $1 million,” Masters said.
Meanwhile, at the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association Show in Las Vegas March 20, Sun and Lucent Technologies Inc., Murray Hill, N.J., said they are pleased with their progress so far in developing a mobile switching center that supports Internet Protocol services. The two companies have been collaborating on this project under a $500 million alliance announced in December 1999.
“This system incorporates an industry standard computing platform for managing mobility for the wireless packet core. It integrates key elements of Sun’s Netra ct 400 and 800 servers with specialized software, developed by Bell Labs, designed to yield carrier-grade reliability and scalable processing,” the companies said.
“Lucent’s Flexent Mobility Server is paired with its Flexent Wireless Router, a high-performance radio network controller Bell Labs designed for efficient management of third-generation systems based on cdma2000 and Wideband CDMA.”
