Scott McNealy, chairman and chief executive officer of Sun
Microsystems has a reputation for speaking his mind. In a major
interview he discusses everything from reliability problems with
Sun servers to his call for ID cards.
Q: Sun hit the headlines last year because of problems with the
UltraSPARC II that was causing some Ultra Enterprise servers to
crash. Is that something you're still grappling with, or is it
history?
A: We're no longer buying IBM static random-access memory
[SRAM]. They were the biggest source of the problem for us. They
knew about it before, and they didn't tell us.
IBM sure made a big point of telling all of our customers about it
a year and a half ago. But we don't have that issue anymore. We
designed IBM out of that and put [error checking and correcting
logic] across the entire cache architecture.
Q: Are you fully confident that your new Sun Fire 15K server is
free of this whole memory cache problem?
A: We designed all of that stuff out. In all of our old
products we've upgraded to mirrored SRAM. It handles it on the fly
and the problem went away. We're exceeding all of our design specs
on all of our servers right now.
Q: Now that IBM is out, who supplies your SRAM?
A: Sony and a couple of others. You just find suppliers who
treat you with integrity and provide a quality product and good
price/performance. It was our fault. We didn't screen the SRAM for
soft error rates.
Q: Hewlett-Packard and IBM have recently lowered their Unix
server prices to compete more aggressively against Sun. Do you see
a Unix server price war coming?
A: It is a two-company short list situation right now. I
cannot tell you the last time I ran into HP as a legitimate
competitor. It's been a year and a half since I've run into Compaq
as a server company. In the enterprise world, midrange to high end,
it's only IBM and Sun.
Q: So you'd be willing to knock prices down further if you need
to?
A: We'll do whatever we need to do.
Q: Speaking of HP and Compaq, do you think the merger will
happen?
A: I hope so. Both of them have given up on their RISC/Unix
strategies; both of them have decided they're going to be grocery
stores for Wintel.
Q: Sun has done quite a bit in the way of Linux support, but you
really haven't gone the IBM route of marketing Linux-based systems.
Why is that?
A: We're the No. 1 Linux appliance server supplier in the
world with the Cobalt line [from the acquisition of Cobalt Networks
in 2000]. We have Linux extensions to Solaris. We just don't think
a Linux partition on a mainframe makes a lot of sense. It's like
having a trailer park in the back of your estate.
Q: You upset privacy advocates with your support for a national
ID card.
A: If there were no audit trails and no fingerprints, there
would be a lot more crime in this world. Audit trails deter lots of
criminal activity. So all I'm suggesting, given that we all have ID
cards anyhow, is to use biometric and other forms of authentication
that are way more powerful and way more accurate than the garbage
we use today.
Q: Is Sun doing any research and development to make it all
happen?
A: It's already done. It's called a Java card.
There's a second question of whether you want to have a national
database. Identifying yourself is different from creating a
database on you. And I have no problem with it being illegal for
the government to create a database on anybody.
You could also get the same authority [that agrees to phone tapping
warrants] to agree to build a database on [an individual]. And
because we have an audit trail of you at your bank, at your
airline, and your Internet service provider and all the rest of it,
if we think you are a potential terrorist and we've gone to the
courts and shown enough evidence, the government should be able to
quickly build a national database on you for just that instance,
for that particular issue.
Q: Do you ever think about retiring?
A: Every day. No, not really. I can't leave my kids to
Microsoft. The government won't fight the battle. The government
won't enforce the laws.