Now that Sun has introduced its news lineup of mid-range servers, the monolithic equipment maker figures it better show administrators and engineers how to use its gear.

by ISP-Planet Staff [March 29, 2001]

Sun Microsystems this week introduced a variety of new services designed to help ISPs attain high levels of system availability and investment protection possible for its new UltraSPARC III processor based Sun Fire servers, which made their debut last week.

The net effect
The new server lineup is designed to deliver mainframe-class functionality at midrange server prices. Paul Musson, Sun vice president of marketing, said the new Sun services are geared up to help customers take advantage of the Sun Fire servers for scalability, availability and agility—to capitalize on the net effect.

"We're helping customers design, implement, and operate the network architectures which can handle the unpredictable nature of the exponential growth and opportunity of the Internet," Musson said.

Readiness duo
Sun is offering two services to help customers implement adoption of its new Sun Fire server lineup. The Sun Fire Application Readiness Service provides enterprises with implementation and project management services to help deploy and configure new Sun Fire System installations. The Sun Fire Data Center Readiness Service is designed to help integrate Sun Fire servers into existing environments serving up mission-critical applications. A third program, dubbed the Data Center Readiness Service, is expected to be available some time during the second half of this year.

New training Services for mid-frame servers Sun plans to offer include:

• IT workforce development solutions linking business goals with IT services.
• Solaris 8 operating environment courseware suite.
• Job-role-based professional certification programs for system and network administrators.

Sun also plans to offer several proactive programs, like its RAS Profile Service, for enterprises with mid-frame servers that demand extreme availability. The remote access education is a pre-emptive service that aims to increase mission-critical system availability and reduce unplanned outages through comprehensive reliability, availability, and serviceability analysis. This service is available on Sun Fire servers running Sun Cluster 3.0 and other Sun Enterprise Servers.

Sun will also offer pre-emptive, on-demand, self-help tools through its Online Service Center for network administrators that prefer to build upon their self-taught Solaris capabilities. System configuration checks provide detailed status reports on the Solaris operating environment, patches, and hardware conditions, while Sun Patch Check compares system patches against current and recommended revisions and allows for automated patch downloads.

Later this month, ISPs will also be able to take advantage of a full portfolio of proactive support programs, including the Sun Remote Services Net Connect, which is designed to help system administrators install and change management configurations.

—End