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Sun Screen The mysterious glitch has been popping up since late last year. At a new web company in San Francisco, a telecommunications company in the midwestern U.S., a Baby Bell in Atlanta, Georgia, anInternet domain registry on the U.S. East Coast, high-end servers made by Sun Microsystems have, for no apparent reason, suddenly crashed. It doesn't happen to all, nor all the time, but it has happened enough to cause problems for America Online, Ebay and dozens of other major corporate accounts, baffling the Sun engineers who have spent months trying to identify the problem. Adding to the mystery is Sun's own reticence. It has never issued a warning to its customers or disclosed the flaw to new buyers. For months Sun told customers seeking a repair that they must sign a legal agreement promising to keep it secret. Many still don't dare to speak out, and Sun still hasn't published an official explanation of the bug on its main website. Sun says that it has finally figured out what's wrong. It is an odd problem involving stray cosmic rays and memory chips in the flagship Enterprise server line, whose models are priced at $50,000 to more than $1 million. Yet Sun won't fix all of the servers it has sold; instead it will make repairs only when it deems them necessary. "We're dealing with this on a one-to-one basis with customers who have had a problem,"says John Shoemaker, the executive vice president in charge of Sun's high-end server business. When the crashes began more than a year ago, Sun believed that the problem was caused not by its boxes but by some flaw in customer data centers. As the months went by and shutdowns kept happening, customers began leaking word of their predicament. Gartner Group, a research company, put out a bulletin. Computerworld, a trade publication, ran a story accompanied by an editorial that criticized Sun's treatment of its customers. Suddenly Sun, a bright star in the high-tech firmament and proud of the power and reliability of its products, finds itself taking heat both for quality and for what looks like a clumsy cover-up. It is not clear whether this will slow Sun's momentum. It owns 43% of the $32 billion market for Unix servers. Sun sales grew 60%, to $5 billion, in the third quarter; net soared 85%, to $510 million. But with this stock Wall Street won't brook any disappointments. At $117, up 70% since January, Sun shares go for 90 times this year's expected earnings. Last November, Verisign Global Registry Services, a domain name registry, was down for two hours after a crucial Sun box crashed. Verisign complained but got no explanation. A few months later an executive at Verisign ran across the Gartner bulletin. "I said to Sun, 'My God, you knew about this problem, and you didn't tell me? That's unconscionable,'" he says. Verisign still uses Sun for some tasks but has moved important systems onto IBM Unix servers. Earlier this year Sun stopped asking aggrieved customers to sign nondisclosure agreements, Shoemaker says. He insists that Sun wanted only to stop the disclosure of secrets about its products, not gag them: "In retrospect, I would not do it again." Sidebar Bug Bites -
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