Sun last week took steps to cut the cost of its products and to further its efforts to become a more flexible IT all-rounder. It unveiled plans to unite its Sparc server lines with Fujitsu's, and said it will make its Solaris operating system open source. The firm is also revamping hardware and software lines with flexible pricing tariffs.

Under their deal, Sun and Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) will jointly produce new server lines that will redefine the server landscape.

This development was welcomed by analysts, who said it should lead to cheaper Unix servers. Andy Butler of analyst firm Gartner said, "This is a net positive move for Sun, FSC and their clients, and provides increased bargaining power for IT buyers, particularly against Sun." Discounted prices are likely as Sun and FSC seek to prevent rivals such as HP from luring customers away, he added.

Currently both Sun and FSC make proprietary processors based on the Sparc architecture. These chips can run the same software, but use two different sets of hardware. The deal will merge the vendors' Unix product lines so that by 2006 each will market the same Unix hardware running Solaris, giving buyers two independent sources of software-compatible Unix servers.

The resulting server family, codenamed Advanced Product Line (APL), will replace today's Sun Fire and Fujitsu Siemens Primepower lines.

"Now, our customers can have their cake and eat it too," said Joseph Reger, FSC chief technology officer. "Software vendors will have a single platform to certify their products against, and customers have two hardware suppliers to negotiate with. Looking to the future, for high-end systems we will use FSC chips, and for low-end systems we will use Sun chips."

UltraSparc V, expected in 2006, will have a feature called Chip Multithreading (CMT), and eight processor cores on each chip. CMT enables each core to run four threads simultaneously, giving 32 simultaneous threads per chip.

Reger said this feature will greatly improve the performance of low-end servers that typically run multiple simultaneous threads.

FSC's Sparc64 chip is designed with high-end features to help increase server uptime and improve throughput for supercomputer-style workloads.

Sun president Jonathan Schwartz added that Solaris will be made open source, although he stopped short of giving details or a date for the change. Any such move could result in a rapid shift of developers to the Unix operating system, which is noted for scalability and robustness.

However, the Solaris announcement could harm Sun's recent efforts to sell Linux servers. "Sun's Linux enthusiasm is waning fast and it feels compelled to promote Solaris on x86," Gartner's Butler said.

Sun is also forging ahead with plans for flexible hardware and software pricing with subscription-based tariffs for storage and developer hardware and software. It has also updated Solaris with a new Dynamic File System and identity management abilities.