Sun Microsystems is looking to grow its foothold in the blade market and entice new and current customers to stay with its products by offering a unique hardware replacement and upgrade service.
On Jan. 9, the Santa Clara, Calif., company is scheduled to roll out its latest blade offering, the Sun Blade X8420, and detail a new program that will offer its Sun Blade 8000 customers an annual program that will upgrade a data center’s hardware.
The program, called the Sun Refresh Service, is a subscription service for customers that the company will include with the installation of Sun Blade 8000 series server. For a fee of $23,000 per month, customers will be eligible for up to three hardware architecture upgrades during the 3½ years of the contract.
“What we have is a program that pretty much breaks some basic truisms that have been out there in the computer industry,” said Michael McNerney, director of Sun’s blade server product line.
“We don’t see this anywhere else,” McNerney said. “We see this as a breakaway opportunity. This is not about how people think about traditional computer buying with a traditional depreciation or leasing cycle.”
The refresh program is being marketed for those customers in high-performance computer markets, such as Web-based businesses with highly dynamic infrastructures where software costs outweigh those of hardware, and where getting the best performance out of a server is critical, McNerney said.
Read the full story on eWeek: Sun Rolls Out New Blade, Services