Slashdot Mirror
Linux Replaces Sun At Weather.com
cwebster writes "Linux running on IBM Netfinity servers will be replacing Sun Enterprise 450 servers at weather.com. Sun will still have a place though, running IBM's websphere application as a back-end on Sun E4500 servers. You can read about it here at CNet." This is actually more than it sounds like, and gives a little glimpse into what IBM is thinking.
Pretty much every MS-SQL shop I know of made the jump from 6.x to 7.0 pretty damn quick. (Well, because 7.0 is much, much better product.) The only exceptions I know of are folks that had a third-party product that wasn't 7.0-compatible, or it was a low-maintenance black box. So, yeah 6.5 sucked. So did 4.2. So did other obsolete software.
This actually explains a lot about the weirdness that had been going on. weather.com is in the middle of a complete site redesign, and one of the things that Came Down From Above was that linux servers were going to be used instead of exclusively Sun servers (the CTO had to be Informed that these boxes were not in fact NT servers-- he called them such in a meeting and nearly gave everyone in the room a heart attack). Originally, a long time ago (1996
So you can really understand the impact here, let me explain: weather.com has several different kinds of web servers. The general www servers are a dozen 4500s, there are 8 or so image servers that only serve images (formerly 450s), 8 or so cgi boxes that do various cgi work, and maybe a dozen or so miscellaneous boxes each handling a particular odd job (dns, mail for the mailed-out weather reports, international pages). If you analyze a page from weather.com, you can see a lot of this in action: images come from image.weather.com or maps.weather.com, ads come from ads.weather.com, cgis and fcgis come from.. well, you get the idea. The machines they're planning to replace with linux boxes are for now the image servers. Those boxes have been semi-optimized to spit out images as fast as possible-- no web server logging is done on them, for example (an image by itself is never a pageview, so it can't contribute to the almighty Pageviews Per Day total, which was running from 4 to 7 million a day when I left). The cgi/fcgi boxes probably won't be replaced, simply because then all the scripts that run on them would have to be tested to make sure they run on the new OS ok, and neither will the www boxes (the 4500s) because those are honkin' BIG boxes and it would take quite a few linux boxes to replace one of those, and it's no fun as it is maintaining the ones they have.
So the moral of this story? It's much easier to change to using linux when there's the will to from the top, rather than pressure from the people that do the work that actually know better. The upper muckity-mucks still send out email with Word attachments, for pity's sake; hell they even managed to send out a Word macro virus that way one time (this was before anyone had heard of Melissa or ILOVEYOU). Just before I left I got dinged by my boss for not writing up documentation in Word (because it'd look better in Word, see).
Apologies if I've revealed the small man hiding behind the curtain, but since I've Been There, I thought it needed to be said.
As of early 2000, weather.com was pulling down on the average between 4 to 7 million pageviews per day. I'd get more recent stats for you, but it looks like they've finally locked down the webserver that has that data on it (used to be, all you needed to know was the acctname and password, which hadn't changed in 2+ years). Most of that traffic comes during business hours-- ramping up in the morning, staying high during the afternoon, then tailing off at 4:30-5pm or so. During the last big hurricane last September, that was upwards of 15M per day for 4 straight days, with a peak of 22.5M pageviews. Of course, pageviews and actual web server hits are two different things-- exact details are hard to come by since among other things, the hosts that only serve images do no logging at all-- but I'd estimate that probably between 10-20 actual web server hits make up each page, and that number just keeps increasing as they find new and more creative ways to increase the number of ads per page.
Actually, weather.com uses 4500s for the main www boxes; the 450s that serve images are the ones being replaced by linux. Load balancers sit in front of those, so that not only do you never get a dead web server, you also in theory don't overload any one particular one too much. Last I heard (which was as of a year ago, I'll admit) cnn.com DIDN'T use load balancing, just round-robin DNS, which is why every once in a while you'll go to cnn.com and it just takes FOREVER to get that page-- you managed to hit the bum webserver that time.
I doubt they'll ever go to linux for the main www webservers, mostly because those 4500s are hefty boxes, loaded up with 8 or so processors per. It'd take several linux boxes to replace 1 of those, and the data distribution is already pushed to the limit getting the data to those (Every Single One of those bloody city pages changes every hour, and all the radar images change too). Granted, weather.com doesn't have to deal with user transactions much, but the sheer bulk of changing data that has to be continually updated on those web servers is Immense.
Actually the 'moderate-sized room' comment made me laugh; half of weather.com was at one point contained in an 8'x14' cage containing 10 racks. It was immensely cramped, of course, but it worked, and hey, we got to share a cage wall with www.sgi.com (funny story: their cage had among other things a couple NT boxes. We asked one of the guys in that cage why they had NT boxes in their cage, and got back the reply: "Don't EVEN get me started.").
Definately neat to see all these various systems migrating to linux from either unix or windows systems. Especially nice to see that computer companies like IBM are helping to spread this migration.
looks like that CAD site was slashdotted or something :) Got really slow all of a sudden.
I've seen hundreds a UNIX workstations and (SMP) servers (from Apollo, Sony, Digital, Sun, and HP) pass through our offices over the last 12 years. Not one CPU has failed. I did see several memory modules fail, but that is easily explained: when we bought that batch of machines, we decided to save some money by going for third party modules instead of buying the real stuff from HP. Quite a few of these cheap beasts failed, none of the HP ones ever did. The stuff that fails most are the power supplies, the disks, etc.
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
Funny thing is that most companies that use Sun (and I'm only picking on sun here) as their mission critical platform use solaris 2.6, which suffers all of the weaknesses that you harp on. Here's the solaris stuff 12 months ago:
DMP for FCAL arrays under 2.6 was broken (last solution I saw was that FC/scsi emulation drivers were disabling one ring to work reliably on a dual-ringed JBOD). I don't know if this has been fixed.
Veritas' filesystem or volume manager, unless you tune the kernel in a manner that isn't documented anywhere but in sunsolve (and was damn hard to find, at that), you're likely to cause kernel thread stack overflows and crash your kernel as soon as you get a really high I/O volume.
You see, you can't sleep easy with sun either. You still have to be on your toes, and be ready to be on call 24/7. Until you shake out all of their problems for them (remember, with sun's 5x00 arrays, veritas comes with it) you have to assume the worst, because it will happen to you at 4:00am in the morning.
-Peter
== Just my opinion(s)
Their search box SUCKS unless you have the zip code you want...
How about "New York City"? Nope, "The city you entered was not found." No go for "Manhattan" either. It gives you a list of 4 Manhattans, none of which is in NY. "New York" is the only thing that will give you the page.
How about "Hartford, CT"? Nope, same result. "Hartford" works, but the one you want is buried in a list of 10 other ones.
Maybe they can spend some of the money they're saving on the servers and get a little smarts for the site.
Try checking out http://www.sunhelp.org or http://docs.sun.com. There is a wealth of knowledge out there.. you just have to search for it.. like with Linux. On the plus side, if you ARE an Enterprise customer willing to pay you can get excellent help from Sun tech support directly via the phone. Also, there is a ton of documentation that comes on both CD and in print format with a new Sun and a copy of Solaris these days. I'd be very suprised if the answers to almost anything related to the platform itself (and not a third party application) is not handled by the included documentation or the stuff on the CD's.
That serving web hits is a pretty lightweight thing to do. Any worthwhile OS on decent hardware can be a "good" web server. So Linux replaced Sun on a few web servers. Big deal. Being that the backends are E4500's, then I would guess that those are the DB servers for weather.com. Linux still has a way to go when it comes to supporting large-scale OLTP, so I would put away the party hats until Linux can /adequately/ support highly multi-threaded apps that use gobs of shared memory while providing a quick I/O subsystem. Linux as it stands now is pretty anemic when it comes to the first two, and okay at that last one.
Not bad particularly since they haven't done much in the way of new servers or new CPUs in 2 years. (there's been some little things though...). Come on Sun - hurry up and launch the UltraSPARC-III! (would be nice to finally see just how it goes) Looks like it might come out around July or something...
Another thing to chew up - around 50% of Sun's revenue comes from systems that take 8 or more CPUs - ie the E3500, E4500, E5500, E6500 and E10000. Each one of those generates over $1Bn in revenue per year. (actually, the 2-way E250 and 4-way E450 also generate about $1Bn per year each too)
As I recall, Sun has been preaching "the network is the computer" for over a decade. Microsoft is at best *reluctantly* catching up. Millions of devices, most without any plausible need for a desktop with a Start button...that's a world tailor-made for Java/Jini, and Linux. You are correct about the Linux threat to Sun's bottom end. That threat is even more potent vis a vis Microsoft's position with workgroup servers, etc. All in all, Sun's technology and vision is almost perfectly suited to the new order, and Microsoft's efforts to catch up are unconvincing.
Linux isn't secure. It's not fast. It can't bloody well handle mission critical anything. Besides it's so incompatible with everything that you simply can't migrate any system to a Linux platform.
Ohh.. wait. This is the real world where servers simply need to run all the time no matter what and technical staff is allowed to choose the best tool for the job at hand.
When weather.com went online initially Sun was the best choice for a high traffic web site. Now Linux is the best choice. This includes price/performance and stability measures.
The big question is: How do you explain all those NT web sites out there? If Sun and Latter Linux are the best choices for doing big sites and Linux costs less than NT for small sites. It's not all about FUD and tricking suites into forcing NT on Nerds either.
You see if you are a suite and are building the site yourself, NT will probably let you get online with very little technical help. Fortunately Linux is heading in that direction. I just hope the Distribution companies remember that it should be locked down by default.
As for weather.com They have nerds paid to know this stuff so it's not such a big deal what distributions ship. They customize the hell out of it.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Where are you getting the $10 price for Solaris media? Their site says $75 for the media kit. For $10, I'd be happy to try out Solaris 8 on my PC.. for $75, forget it!
--
Jake
The only thing Sun machines have that commodity x86 PCs don't (well, besides the label...) is the 64 bit architechture. That is actually very important for the big-ass database servers that have several gigabytes of RAM. The 32 bit architecture is limited to only 4 GB of RAM, which is not enough for large-scale DB servers. But 64-bit or 32-bit is irrelevant for a workstation that only has like 128-256MB of RAM.
Oh, and there's the CPU scalability as well. SPARC architecture scales up to 64 CPUs. Intel boxes can just barely scale up to 4 CPUs, and even than, from what I heard, not all Xeons actually work properly in 4x configuration.
So, Sun boxes are good for the high end. However, as you correctly noticed, on the low-mid range PCs running Linux provide the same or better performance at much lower prices. But the low-end Sun boxes are expensive for the same reason Sony is expensinve.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
The 420 is a nicer box IMO.. Rack-mountable. And who wants to dick around with internal HDDs anyway, just slap on some external DASD and go nuts..
Your Working Boy,
Usenet and FAQs (this is great for the hobbyist and someone with time on his hands, but for the sysadmin whose mission-critical database just went down, it's not quite a
sure thing that you'll get your system up in no time). Availability. Guaranteed availability.
We had one of the people from the local Linux group work on some Suns being used for DNA crunching in the Biochemistry labs. While he praised the sophisticated hardware interface (and loved working with 200 GB hard drives), he sometimes complained that there was nothing like HOWTO's for Solaris - that if he had a problem he couldn't just search the web for the answer, he usually had to debug it himself.
I would much rather have heard about Linux
replacing Solaris on the E450's, than about the
hardware changing from Sun to IBM.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Last time I checked, Suns weren't overpriced. Their machines are very well engineered, with great I/O throughput, quality components, easy maintenance and upgrades, and responsive hardware support services. Their pricing isn't all that different from Compaq and IBM given the same quality hardware.
At the higher end--say, the 6000 series and up--you can hot swap and hot-plug CPUs. What Linux-friendly x86 vendors (or Linux distros, for that matter) support that?
Mom-and-pops and boutique vendors like VAResearch and Penguin Computing make cost-effective servers for the low to mid range.. with a constantly-shifting product line and component mix that drives engineers nuts. It's sometimes nice to be able to buy the same model configured the same way with the same components twice more than a year apart.
What are you comparing this pricing to? Dell's cheesy desktops in server cases?
Next question: if you're running a 100GB database for a $400 million company, would you put it on Linux, with a filesystem that will need 20 minutes to fsck in the event of an emergency reboot? Is "experimental" support for a shared fiber-channel disk array good enough to allow you to sleep soundly? Calling Sun or another "expensive" high-end vendor starts making more sense here.
Linux is forcing sun to beef up the services side of its business for revenue, as IBM has, and has hurt them--and everyone else--on the low end (1-4 CPU machines), for good reason. But where there's a big database or a heavy-lifting server application, nothing beats the so-called expensive stuff.
Couldn't let your troll go by. Sun sells hardware - if (when) Linux does eventually come to equal or exceed Solaris in all relevant respects Sun will simply adopt Linux and continue to sell hardware.
Sure, it surprised me too to see Sun turn in the growth figures they have, but in retrospect it was just because I didn't understand the market that well.
<petty>
I guess for you guys at Microsoft Sun will be another company you can watch go by on your way down. How did it feel to watch Cisco go by?
</petty>
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
How in the world did IBM, famous for its entrenched monopolist corporate culture, manage to turn itself around so quickly and fundamentally?
Well, the volume management will be there in 2.4. I'm using it right now actually. It's very nice.
Logical Volume Manager (LVM)Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I agree that linux has a fair way to go before becomeing a serious competitor to Solaris, although in general the thing that makes a Sun E450 better than a PIII farm is the high performance hardware. This is something that Sun and DEC(god rest its soul) have had for years, I would even hasten to say go for a PPC architecture over an x86 box. So you see the problem is not simply the one of the kernel but also the underly architecture of the chipset. People tend to think of linux as just x86 project and it isn't just that anymore, you can get PPC, Sparc, Alpha, ARM... the list just goes on.
> checkout out tpc.org
>
I'm not sure this is quite true (though Win2K is
a great operating system), wasn't the benchmark
used for the Win2K tests one that was completely
parallelizable (sp?) so a group of servers
could run different bits independantly without
the usual overheads of distributed solutions.
Why is AIX not cool for corporate computer people while Sun is?
All I can say is the Solaris on x86 systems I used in College were utter crap compared to AIX 4.3.3 on the H70s I deal with at work.
The AIX documentation is astounding compared to what you get from Sun!
Blar.
Think of the computing industry like an iceberg. What the consumer sees (as the flashy gee-whiz internet appliances) is only the tip. Underneath is the massive IT infrastructure running everything from service delivery, autoamted logging, scheduling, paperwork, tax calculation, currency exchange, more taxes, government regulations, user fees, even more sales taxes, etc ... I'm sure you get the picture. These things, especially taxes, are a royal pain in the neck and it's cheaper getting a few grunt boxes to do the work than to hire a legion of paper shufflers. Companies exist becuse they have evolved to be the most efficient at serving a particular niche (irrespective of how they bullied their way into that domain). If a corporate IT group sees the Sun as a viable enterprise solution to solve certain problems and address scalability issues, then there must be some sort of justification. For a hint, take a look at where the big database systems are porting their software.
Just because you admire the scenery on a road doesn't mean that industrial trucks can't travel the same route. And there's a good reason why a truck costs more than an overgrown bicycle (think reliability, fuel efficiency, capital depreciation, etc). What people don't realise is that the average joe doesn't want to pay for functionality that is invisible (e.g. why have russian spelling checker if you can't speak russian?) and thus the model is shifting towards giving away client software/plugins in order to create a sticky service site (ie a defensive move to prevent consumer serfs from leaving their lucrative branded fiefdom). Microsoft have realised this and in the spirit of maintaing a presence on every desk, are determined to march their way up the food chain. Consumer computing isn't the entire world (not to mention all the other invisible world of real-time manufacturing control, embedded systems, trusted plant operations, etc).
LL
I happen to parse data from weather.com for certain reasons and it is soooooo sloooowwwww.
I am talking about upwards of 5-15 seconds to get a response when requesting area specific weather.
granted, this may also be a db problem, but that type of response time is just plain TERRIBLE
hopefully this will improve....
__________________________
"Oh, you hate your job? There's a support group for that, it's called everyone, they meet at the bar."
Um, Yahoo runs FreeBSD ... doesn't it?
The Ultrasparc can also issue two FP operations
in one clock cycle. The x86 can only do one FP add per cycle, or one FP multiply every 2nd cycle.
So, floating point math is much faster on an UltraSparc.
This is the most trivial example. There are others...
slashdot.com All the news that isn't.
about.com is, and we are the 7th largest, no puny weather.com :P
;)
FreeBSD, the Choice of those who know how to Choose
Right now, sun's growing. Presumably, they can change their stratagy if they need to.
Vote Chad Okere in 2000!!!
The majority of those who oppose the death penalty have never been a victim of violent crime -- CNN
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I know, Its retarded. So retarded that I thought it was funny enough to put in my .sig :P. Just goes to show you how fucked up the media in this contry is, they don't even bother to present a clear picture
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
So that's why they call them "Blue Mondays"
Wah nods back to DA. Thanks man, got it. No turkey, you like chicks. Me too.
--
+&x
Hmmm?? I just picked up a pair of Ultra 5's on an educational discount for ~US$1250. IIRC, that's with 9gb drive, 128mb ram, and Solaris 8 Right-To-Use-License.
Curse their cheap-ass IDE drives, tho.
James - I generally curse most IDE drives, tho...
That puts the phrase "World domination" in a whole new perspective! :-)
Thimo
--
Avoid the Gates of Hell. Use Linux!
Semi-on-topic: What's the name/URL for the popular webpage where you can enter a URL and have it return the server OS/Version number? Thanks.
I ran 3-4 different ones, 2.2.5, 2.2.12, 2.2.14, and 2.2.15. They all died with the same problem;
/usr/tmp/choad?
Supreme file system corruption.
SMP+NCR835+1GB Ram+Linux == complete crap
Wanna see the first inkling of a problem?
while 1
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/usr/tmp/choad1 count=10000\
&
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/usr/tmp/choad2 count=10000\
&
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/usr/tmp/choad3 count=10000
rm -f
end
let them run for about 5-10 minutes, watch your kernel panic and die. Sometimes you'll be ok, othertimes your file system will be hosed.
How much crack are you smoking?
I'm replacing an entire server farm of Linux boxes with Solaris X86 and FreeBSD because of Stability and security issues, not to mention Speed.
So far my big fat E4500's, E250's and even U10's run Oracle all day, 0 downtime for 6 months. I've had to re-install *EVERY* linux box on the site because of instability. Guess which side wins out?
Sun needs to get off their ass and pledge support for Solaris Itanium. It won't ever really compete with Sun's primary offering anyways, and it can only help their business.
Sun is not really dead because of this. They have a target market that is the huge players. Companies like eBay and Yahoo can only run their monsterous applications on a Sun box. Maybe huge AIX mainframes can compete but AIX is not very cool for corperate computer people. On the lower end Linux and NT are scaling up into Sun's market for eBuisiness(isn't it exciting that meaning changes with an e in front of anything). Linux cannot run these monsterous things like eBay, which runs on e10000's. I read that IBM has a 16 way Itanium setup that is coming out. This is the begining of Itel machines with Linux or NT scaling up to compete with Sun's big guns. How this will all turn out is dependdant on the balls that the CEO's that make the decisions have for IBM, SGI, INTEL, Microsoft (bill is working on NT Datacenter), SUN, and HP have as to who has the monopoly. The company that provides computing services with be whittled down to one or two and it will be like bank services or corperate building services are now. There are corperate to copreate banks. There are corperate to consumer banks and so on. Conpanies that provide the selling of services in these markets will choose one company to provide eCommerce (there the e is again) solutions. The CEO that can figure out how to do this without stepping on anyones toes or any courts floors wins the multibillion dollar prize.
- Kill Yourself, spare us all! -
I really wish Linux had in fact been known as Clouds.
I'm pretty sure weather.com has the most hits of all. If it can keep it together it's a rining endorsement. mmm weather.....
Placing Linux on front ends (read: webservers) is a no brainer because you can slap together a few PIII's, put 'em behind a local director and be done with it, and you can do it for the cost of ONE Sun Enterprise 450.
Linux has a formidable barrier to overcome, though, before it's a realistic alternative to Sun in back-end architecture. The volume management isn't there, the shared memory performance isn't there and the heavy artillery hardware support (big fargon disk arrays, etc.) isn't there.
Of course I like to see that Linux is gaining market but these peices walk a fine line between truth and FUD for those who aren't determined to read the fine print. Sun actually understands the Linux market and is opening. Solaris media for $10 shipped? I don't see Microsoft doing that. A better story here would be a discussion on the technology gap between Linux and Sun/Solaris and how it is gradually closing. It's not a Sun vs. Linux story.
ozone pilot
For the life of me I don't understand the enthusiasm of analysts for the future of Sun. On the lower end, they have Linux bursting onto the scene, readily gaining acceptance in *nix shops where developers hold considerable sway. Above them on the performance scale they have Win2k, which on its debut release demonstrated dramatically higher price/performance and raw performance benchmarks on database serving than Sun has ever been able to achieve.
.NET hoopla) in which they envision millions of powerful offline devices, including PCs, handhelds, etc, that can poll services at any time from a broad selection of vendors, with no gatekeeper other than adherance to SOAP XML standards.
Atop this there is the consideration that Sun believes the future will look like the past, with millions of time-sharing clients begging for resources from massive servers. Contrast this to the view MS propounded yesterday (the
What does Sun have going for it in the long run? I see nothing apart from the fact that they have positioned themselves as the "anti-Microsoft", which sounds awfully promising when the DOJ is hovering over MS like a vulture. But really, is that the kind of world you want to live in? And is it really any kind of foundation for a company? Personally I don't think so.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Great. It really sucked when the Sun was running NT. Those BSODs really ruined my day.
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
Okay, I agree Linux is great and all, but replacing the Sun?? Isn't that a bit ambitious?
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
We got an E450 in our lab a month ago, and I must say it's a pretty powerful machine. It has 2 US II at 400 MHz, and 1 GB RAM. I calculated that we got it cheaper than the price of an average quad Xeon 550 MHz system, with similar configuration!
Now, I don't intend to confute those of you who say that Intl-based Linux systems are so cheap in comparison with the E 450; all I am saying is that Intel doesn't necessarily mean "cheap".
Disclaimer: we might have gotten the E 450 at a lower price, since my company in general is buying Sun servers like hot cookies: we recently had to check whether the 3rd floor will resist the weight of all the E 6000 we stacked up there!
Sigged!
On http://my.weather.com/fcgi-bin/custHome.pl (if you have customized your Weather page), I get:
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete
your request.
Please contact the server administrator, root@localhost and inform them of the time the
error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/1.3.12 Server at fcgi.weather.com Port 80
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The only thing Sun machines have that commodity x86 PCs don't (well, besides the label...) is the 64 bit architechture.
Sun hardware also has online CPU and memory replacement/addition (at least from the E3500 series on up). No Intel X86-based system offers that today. Sun's E10000 also has dynamic partitions, i.e. the ability to run multiple copies of the operating system inside one SMP servers and dynamically change the boundaries between the partitions. No other UNIX system, based on Intel X86 or otherwise, has that capability today.
The 32 bit architecture is limited to only 4 GB of RAM, which is not enough for large-scale DB servers.
True, but all Intel X86 processors from the Pentium Pro on are actually 36-bit processors, allowing them to support up to 64 GB of physical memory. In a 32-but OS, the processes themselves can access no more than 4 GB of memory, but system performance can still be enhanced by enabling faster access to memory using what are essentially large disk caches.
Indeed, this is the second high-visibility Internet skirmish IBM has won against Sun in the last two months (after snatching away the A.Root server in April).
However, I think it is premature to call this a "fundamental" turnaround for the company. IBM's server unit revenues were slipping in the first part of this year after falling by nearly 20% in 1999, putting it under huge amounts of pressure to strenghen its business. Under these conditions, it is likely to do almost anything to win key accounts.
Right now, a win based on Linux with a high-profile Internet customer is a great way to give Sun a black eye, but IBM still has to get a lot better at basic blocking and tackling in the market to sustain its success.
- on topic
- appreciated
- not wasting people's time
Besides, they need more new material---CONFLICT!!---
CmdrTaco on 1:47 AM -- Tuesday June 4 2000 /.ers. In a related story, hell froze over and monkeys actually flew from RMSs ass.
from the say it isn't so dept.
CmdrTaco writes I've decided to change over to a Microsoft solution and deploy Win2k on all the web servers here. This is a very large investment, but I believe that this will lead to better security, better speed, and a better user experience for
___
Linux/Apache/dynamic presentation engine (tons of open source at this tier) ---- Solaris/App Server/ORBs/Big Expensive Enterprise Apps (virtually no open source at this tier) ---- RDBMS/Legacy System (Oracle and IBM own this final most expensive and least distributed of tiers).
Yahhh!!!! One less thing Sun will be able to turn into a stupid commercial with an annoying catch phrase. I shudder at the possibilities of what dorky saying they could have come up with involving the weather and computers. -BLECH!
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
"Above them on the performance scale they have Win2k..."
ROTFL! +5 funny!
you must be joking, konstant--usually you're pretty insightful, but come on, that's absurd. Solaris kicks Windows 2000's ass for performance.
Actually, Sun makes most of its sales in storage. For just about each Ex000 machine sold about two or three A5x00's or RAID arrays go with it. Its not uncommon to see setups with 90 odd disks hanging off one E5000...
:>
I dont think Sun really sees much of a threat from linux, mainly because of liability and support. Would you trust a task that earns you several $1000's per minute to a linux box because its free and "non-capatilist" or fork out a little extra for support that can have an engineer call you in 6 minutes and be on-site in 2 hours anytime?
When linux runs on E10K's then we can really compare them.. (trust me, I know someone who has plans to give it a go....)
"If everybody is thinking alike, somebody isn't thinking" - Gen. George S. Patton
Heh. This was actually really funny. A little too funny, which is why it didn't get moderated up!
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Probably because you are querying on www.weather.com, our content boxes, instead of the image servers, which are Linux. I can assure you that they are customized Redhat Linux and Apache. I should know, I built them from the ground up, and yes, they are kicking the stuffing out of the (many times more expensive) Sun machines that used to serve our images :-) !!
Linux -- Windows 2000 Service Pack 1
maybe linux will give Sun a run for the money after all. I'm not a big fan of Solaris on x86 and netras cost a pretty penny. Linux can be just as stable in my opinion. Any operating system can be insecure and unstable, it just takes the right admin to make sure as many of the bases as can be covered, are!
Kicking some CAD is good for you
It hasn't been quick. It's taken the better part of a decade, and it isn't complete.
But it is quite an amazing transformation.
Gordon.He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
They're adding Linux-specific calls to AIX.
Actually, I can pretty much do this already. I'm finishing up a large project for IBM (can't say what). My portion is a multithreaded back-end process that interfaces with various separate DB2 databases. I wish I could say more, it's rather cool. I did the development on Linux, then took the code over to the RS/6000. The makefile needed mods for the IBM compiler, and I updated a set of #defines for AIX paths vs Linux paths. That was pretty much it. By sticking to POSIX as far as possible, there just wasn't a big deal.
Of course, I knew to stay away from things that AIX doesn't (yet) have. Once the API is updated, this won't be a consideration.
I think this is a verysmart move for IBM, as makes AIX a no-brainer upgrade for appliations that grow beyond what Linux can do. This gives IBM a much broader product line with cleaner upgrade paths than they had with OS/2 as their Intel-based OS -- and puts them in a much more competitive stance.
Gordon.
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
This kinda of follow-the-money-trail is very instructive. Since the parent of Weather.com is deeply tied (psychologically and financially) to Linux success, it is definitely not surprising to see this adjustment take place.
I wonder if the SEC would be interested in hearing about this symbiotic relationship--especially because the switch from high-profile Sun to high-profile Linux was announced in such a broad, high-profile kind of way. Hmmmm. Given the phenomenon of any Linux-related announcement directly affecting the so-called Linux stocks (in a direct, but disproportionate way) could it be far from the truth to suppose a positive bounce in Redhat, et al, would not be a regretted effect of this timely announcement?
This relationship between Landmark Communications, Weather.com, Great Bridge, and RedHat needs to enjoy the intense light of day (and if it survives, all the better).
Like I said, I wish I had mod points.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
And in local weather, linuxrise is expected at 6:05AM. Remember, if you are going to the beach today, please use a linuxblock with an SPF of at least 2.2.16.
Don't want to pay Lars? Sue him!
if hes trolling im weak since I laugh at them
The top vendors in the database world have all a product that has 90% of its functionality in common with the competition. 10% of it's features are unique. Oracle has more features than sqlserver, but mostly you don't need 'em or you can work around the lack of it. This works vice versa ofcourse. If you need a feature that's unique for oracle, you shouldn't use sqlserver. if you need handy stuff in sqlserver that's not in oracle or it's tools, avoid oracle.
Too many people however don't understand this and go for the 'well known product' while they'd better look out for the best fit for their needs.
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
That shouldn't be a big problem with some Athlons... A friend turns off his Athlon-box every evening because it heats his room too much to sleep... (Well, not everyone has his computer approx. 20 cm away from the bed ;)
Hrmm ... Does that mean that our forecasts from now on will look something like this?
Today will be partly cloudy, however, we will be able to see some Linux out there today.
Today will be a warm day and the Linux will be bright and shiny!
We won't be seeing any Linux today as it will be completely covered by this cloudy day.
Wow, Linux just keeps getting more powerful by the minute, doesn't it?
............ no.
Yes please!
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Umm, try running seti@home on an UltraSparc II 450Mhz and an 866Mhz PIII. They do seti packets in roughly the same time, but the UltraSparc II is running at 1/2 the clock. So what? Well three things:
1.) The 64-bit Sparc seti client makes a pretty big difference with applications that deal with large numbers.
2.) The Sparc processor is much more efficient/faster at floating point ops.
3.) 8MB of Ecache is *really* nice!
From speaking to someone at sun I get the feeling that at present Sun products are priced artificially high because they cant meet the demand from .com's.
The effect of this is organisations that dont have tonnes of cash (from IPOs and VC) are having to change to other OS's.
Universities in particular seem to be switching to linux since it is far cheaper to deploy.
Right now i'm sure the bulk of suns sales come from high end machines, those with lots of cpus and fast memory systems.
Sun know fine well that linux isn't going to run well (if at all) on machines of that calibre simply because it's developed by individual users, I'm very sure that 99% of the linux machines in existance have two or less cpus. And at the end of the day this is probably what linux is best for - medium powered & low cost servers. Far too few linux programmers (in my imagination at least) run 16 cpu machines for the OS to mature well on these platforms.
This certainly cuts suns share of the low end server market, but i'm sure this was always fairly low profit for them since they have to compete with microsoft.
Flame me if you want, but I dont feel linux is quite ready for high end and mission critical operations.
Because, they certainly couldn't before. I live in the Chicago area and around here weather.com sucks. During our biggest snowstorm this year they didn't predict it until a few hours before, while the National Weather Service had it two days in advance. Its typical too... their weather is so inaccurate I rarely go there.
Anyone else think so?
I'm sorry, but your comment about SQL kinda struck a nerve... well, here goes....
/. often, and when anyone mentions SQL Server, I'll be there :)
Microsoft SQL Server seems to do very very well in benchmarks. It is highly optimized for the NT/W2K operating system and likewise NT/W2K are optimized for SQL server. Microsoft has spent its resources optimizing this databsae for Windows and building a friendly UI.
The problem with this product is that SQL Server lacks a great deal of functionality found in other databases. As of 6.5 (The previous version that a great portion of the population is still forced to use, a.k.a anybody with a bloated IS department), columns were limited to 1962 characters wide. Do you need to store 10 varchar(255) columns in a single table... with SQL 6.5 you can't! Do you need a varchar longer than 255 characters... with 6.5, you don't get one. I shudder to think at some of the "kludgeviews" that I've created to remedy such situations. Thankfully, they finally fixed these shortcomings with v7.
SQL Server lacks support for functions. It can't substring search CLOBs. Its sorely lacking in just about every other area of its featureset too. When you need a feature that isn't in a database, you the programmer have to go and make something up to fill the need with the tools available. Given SQL Server's limited toolset, quite often you wind up writing expensive cursors, triggers, and nasty subqueries to make up for the database's deficiencies. Such kludges suck up all SQL server's performance gain and more!
I remember trying to come up with a way to efficiently display hierarcheal information stored in a "hierarcheal table" (it had a foreign key to its own primary key) with SQL Server, and failing miserably....we couldn't find anything that would do it with at all reasonable performance. For comparison, Oracle 8i, offers the simple (and extremely fast for what it does) CONNECT BY clause that solves such things in one query.
6.5 was all too much fun before Service Pack 4 came out. I just love tearing apart my own code in search of mistakes and then finding out that the tools I'm using are failing ridiculously. 6.5 even has an unfixed bug where it (rarely, but enough) forgets the last identity primary key (sequence) value issued and can't insert any more rows into a table because it violates its primary key constraint every time it tries. Worse, I've got a server setup right now where the test server has one fourth the RAM as the live server, yet performs queries ten times faster on the same data... and no one can figure out whats wrong!
I know 7.0 and 2000 are better and faster, and possibly more reliable. But having been tainted by 6.5 so badly, and having seen some of the amazing capabilities of Oracle 8i, I'm trying as hard as possible to avoid every using this "database" they call SQL Server again.
I read
Weather.com is replacing the SUN?!?!? What does this mean, that instead of having the sun's rays heat the earth, we will now have the output of a Linux box heating the earth?
(Just kidding, I know what a Sun box is).
=================================
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Whatever happened to the classic argument of FreeBSD's stability over Linux? Why isn't any vendor supporting FreeBSD?
Something Mr. Wladawsky-Berger said caught my eye:
Linux compatibility with AIX (IBM's version of Unix) is coming out late this year. You can take a Linux application and recompile for AIX with just about no changes.
Does this mean that they're making a Linux distribution (or hacking the kernel or gcc libs or something), or does it mean thay're changing AIX?
Does somebody know? It sounds really cool.
Be nice to your friends. If it weren't for them, you'd be a complete stranger.
has cnet actually been slashdotted, or is it an unrelated problem? sweet jesus!
netcraft say weather.com is running Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP3 on Solaris
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
If Linux is replacing the Sun down at Weather.com, does that mean Windows will be replacing the storm clouds? ;)
Zahlman Q. Namlhaz, esq. {:> "Zahl Incorporated - the Last Word in Everything(TM)"
IBM's "new" direction has a lot to do with the CEO, like _Swank said above. When Gerstner got here, he was surprised that none of the employees took agressive, even offensive advertising by competitors seriously. Since then, he's tried to instill in the people at IBM a bit of pride.
He also is very fond of the quote by Wayne Gretzky that the way to play great hockey is while everyone's skating to where the puck is, you should skate to where the puck WILL BE. However, IMHO, IBM could not do this as much before they got out from under M$'s thumb.
Now if only IBM would start using Linux for their own networks.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
What exactly do Sun SPARCs offer that intel-based Linux workstations don't? We've got a lab full of Ultra SPARCs at the University where I work, but despite their cost I don't seem to experience any kind of particular speed difference in using them (together with Solaris 8) and with a P450 running Red Hat. The specifications (i.e. processor speed, memory) seem pretty similar to that of intel PCs - what exactly is in a SPARC that justifies its price?
has anyone seen what Micro$oft has to say about the linux operating system running as a server, as opposed to WindoezNT? I pity the foo who wrote that.
linux=punk rock
This move on weather.com's part is not incredibly surprising (although auspicious for open source/free software's continued growth) as the parent company of weather.com is Landmark Communications, which has relatively deep connections to the open source community. The chairman of Landmark Communications, Frank Batten Jr., was personally an early angel investor in Red Hat, and now his company has funded ($25 million) a subsidiary, Great Bridge LLC to provide commercial support for the advanced BSD-licensed PostgreSQL. The press releases detailing the connection between these companies can be found here.
Hu? Umm no ofense or any thing but that is imposibble. The sun's have a much larger Data I/O bus. They also have much more powerfull CPU's I think you need to look over your data again.
------------ Unix Sysop http://www.acol.com -------------
They should use the sun to host their mail. =P
----
the pr0n-o-matic http://www.phatmax.net/
I didn't think penguins were too fond of the heat supplied by the sun... Oh well, more power to them!
I like it.
( Read More... | 1 of 37000 comments )
I work for an ISP who sells rackspace to the NWC. They actually have a Netfinity running Windows NT4, two custom built Win2K boxes, and 2 custom built Redhat boxes. These are used for gathering data from field instruments and ironically, the NT box is their firewall. I was quite impressed to hear that they are running LVS :)