Sun's CEO on the demise of ASICs

Sun's CEO recently blogged on the 'Rise of the General Purpose system', reiterating the message that ASIC based hardware appliances are basically dead due to (i) economics and (ii) the rapid rise in performance of 64-bit mainstream CPUs.

Zeus is an excellent example of leading this trend. We’ve taken a market that traditionally has been proprietary-hardware only and turned it on its head. When we originally designed ZXTM it was very clear to us that the future challenges of application traffic management were going to become a software problem, not a hardware problem. Something the rest of the industry is only now beginning to realize. This head-start, combined with building on our proven world-record breaking software architecture, has allowed us to create a product that dominates the price:performance metrics for the industry.

But even more importantly, our software approach has enabled us to more rapidly innovate, to build unrivalled functionality, flexibility and ease-of-use. We were the first, and still only, vendor to provide an integrated XML engine into the traffic manager to allow SOAP/Web Services transactions to be intelligently managed. Now we’re going even further, providing solutions to the challenges of scaling SOA, and leveraging our software-form factor to do some remarkable things with data-center virtualization – watch this space.

And our software is very interesting to general-purpose hardware vendors building industry-standard products like Opteron servers. They can install our traffic management software layer and then sell a much more valuable device. Their VARs can combine value added services to architect, deploy and support a customer's applications – a much more interesting proposition than just selling a vanilla box. In fact, we already do this with Sun and their distribution channel – http://www.zeus.com/news/press_articles/050317-001/ - maybe someone told Jonathan.

PS. I wonder how much ASIC development you’d need to match ZXTM's performance on Sun’s new X4600 16-way Opteron platform…

Damian Reeves [Zeus CTO] 17 July 2006