Whats the thinking behind upgrading from Sun Fire SMP servers to the new Sun SPARC Enterprise family?
BECK: Let me start by putting these servers into some perspective. Sun has a pretty long history of successfully providing its customers with consolidation features that significantly reduce cost, footprint, and environmentally adverse consequences of datacenter power consumption. With that said, the architecture of the new server family is an evolution of the existing Sun Fire line, which makes the transition fairly seamless. We think this is crucial to a lot of Sun customers who have a great deal invested in older SPARC/Solaris systems. We want to make it easy for users to evolve their datacenters over time as we develop new systems. Just as it is an easy transition from the UltraSPARC IV+ Sun Fire servers, which are nearing the end of their technical lifespan to the SPARC Enterprise line, we expect the transition to the next generation of CMT-based servers in 2009 to be just as easy. But in the short-term, users of older SPARC/Solaris systems are going to need new hardware. The Ultr
