Sun joins forces with China’s Dawning

Sun Microsystems has teamed up with Chinese high-performance server maker Dawning Information Industry in a broad partnership that both companies hope will help them better meet the needs of Chinese users.

Under the terms of an agreement announced in Beijing on Friday, Sun and Dawning will establish a joint applications lab and cooperate on the development of hardware and software products. Dawning will also offer Sun’s Solaris 10 operating system on some server models, Sun said. Dawning will not resell Sun hardware under the agreement.

The partnership with Dawning is the first such relationship that Sun has established with a Chinese vendor, the Santa Clara, California, company said. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Dawning is one of China’s top vendors of high-performance servers and is largely focused on government contracts. Like its better-known sister company, Lenovo Group, Dawning was spun off from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Computing Technology in Beijing and became an independent company in 1995.

To what extent Sun’s partnership with Dawning will help it win more business in China remains to be seen. Dawning is not a supplier of volume servers to corporate customers, but working closely with them could help Sun to become involved with more Chinese government contracts, said Avneesh Saxena, vice president of computing systems at IDC Asia-Pacific.

“It serves for Sun as an opportunity to get better mindshare for Solaris in that (high-performance computing) space,” Saxena said.

For Dawning, teaming up with Sun may make its own Solaris-based offerings more appealing to corporate customers attracted by the wide range of applications that support Sun’s operating system, Saxena said.

Sun is not the first foreign company to team up with Dawning. The company has worked closely with chip makers Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and it has a partnership with IBM, which supplies the AIX operating system used with many Dawning servers.

In recent years, Dawning has become a more visible player in the high-performance computing industry. The company produced the Dawning 4000A, the most powerful computer in China, which is currently ranked number 17 among the most powerful computers in the world.

First announced in 2003, the Dawning 4000A has 2,560 2.2GHz AMD Opteron processors, 5TB of RAM and 95TB of hard-disk space. The computer, which runs Novell’s Suse Linux operating system, has a maximum performance level of 11 TFLOPS and is operated by the Shanghai Supercomputer Center.

The announcement of the Sun-Dawning partnership was made during a visit to Beijing by Sun Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Scott McNealy. McNealy is currently on an Asian tour that earlier brought him to Japan, where he announced an expanded partnership with NEC, and to South Korea, where he opened a Java research center and announced the donation of $2 million worth of computing hardware and equipment to local vocational training schools.

During his visit to Beijing, McNealy also announced plans for Sun to donate 100,000 machine hours of grid computing capacity to the China Education and Research Grid (ChinaGrid) for scientific research and teaching, Sun said. In addition, Sun will donate software and provide training and support for students using the grid, the company said. The value of these donations was not disclosed.

ChinaGrid is a grid computing network established by China’s Ministry of Education and 12 Chinese universities.