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Linux Replaces Sun At Weather.com

Posted by emmett on from the right-on-the-tick dept.

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.

37 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Suns are overpriced? Which ones? by mce · · Score: 2
    I agree in general, but would still like to know: how often does one need to swap a CPU in what are supposed to be high quality machines in the first place?

    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.
  2. Sun still growing fast btw... by ChrisRijk · · Score: 3
    In Q1 this year, Sun's revenue grew 35% year on year (that's faster than Dell for the same period AFAIK), and it's expected that Q2 will be fairly similar. Their low-end server range is also growing fine (despite the fact that this is where Linux competes most with Sun) at somewhere around 30-35%...

    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)

  3. Come on. by Forge · · Score: 4

    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 ?
    1. Re:Come on. by Dasein · · Score: 2
      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.
      I can tell you why we chose an NT solution -- we had to be able to hire quickly to be first to market.

      When you are in that state, almost nothing is more important than getting out to market. If that means that you have to go with NT to be able to find talent, then so be it. Would I have personally preferred to go with a Sun or Linux solution? Sure -- but in the Seattle area I can make it to market so much quicker with NT.

      Down in the bay area, the opposite is probably true. It's probably much easier to find Unix type talent.

      The offshoot it that we have to spend more cash on redundant systems and on management of those systems but my product has been launched and our customers love it.

      BTW, the url listed as my site (www.euonym.com) isn't the project I'm talking about. That's a tiny little(486 50Mhz) Linux box. In other words, there's no reason for everybody to visit it all at once and cause me to lose my uptime.

      --
      You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
    2. Re:Come on. by PD · · Score: 2

      >But you make it sound like that NT is such an obviously wrong choice that only the "worst half" would be running it. Yup. "Someone's lying."
      Let's see a real argument that Sun/Linux/Other Unix is that much better that it actually makes any more than a marginal difference.

      ------------

      Sometimes it's hard to avoid speaking in absolutes. NT is the right solution sometimes. As someone else pointed out in this forum, you might be located in Lower East Broken Stick, where you have a stock of NT programmers who actually are pretty damn good.

      Or you might be working in an industry where the major software packages all run on NT, and all your customers expect you to run NT.

      There's lots of reasons to run NT, I don't deny that. Just wanted to make the point that the competency of programmers and how many platforms they can juggle at once is a difficult problem for many companies.

      --
      If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
    3. Re:Come on. by PD · · Score: 3

      >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.

      Does your company claim that nobody but the best people get to be employees at your company. Funny....my company says the same. Probably *every* company says the same thing. Is there a company out there who claims to hire only the worst half of all programmers?

      Someone's lying. There's companies full of programmers who can't pick up new technologies as quickly as others. There's companies full of programmers who never developed a refined sense of what is good about a computer, and learned to avoid all that is tasteless.

      The managers who decided on Windows when it was the only game in town for desktop machines might have tried to navigate their company around the curve that the internet threw at them. Some were successful, and they were quick enough to learn new tech or otherwise adapt. The less nimble companies made do with their desktop knowlege and tried to apply it to the back end of the business.

      Some companies can handle the operation of multiple architectures and operating systems, and some cannot. That leads to conservatism, and adoption of the safe choice. Lots of people look stupid for buying Microsoft, but hardly anyone gets canned for it.

      --
      If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
    4. Re:Come on. by kinkie · · Score: 2

      I am now working for an NT-only shop (*sic*), and I sometimes talk with my colleagues about this. And from the talks with them, I got some insights on the "real world". (disclaimer: I don't like this, but it has some merit).

      The point is that non-techies and semi-techies (non-geek techies) will not go with the solution that works better, but rather with the solution that allows them to make the most money. It's that simple.
      For instance, I was talking with a consultant, and I was arguing that Un*x requires less maintainance, thus lowering costs and ultimately allowing a fatter earn percentage. His reply was "but if everything works and I have to make less maintainance calls, I won't get any money for those calls".
      It's as easy as that. If you think about it, the whole Microsoft business is not about creating good software. It's about creating software that works well enough to sort of do the job it's supposed to do, but bad enough that when in two years the Next Release (tm) will come to the shelves, you will have to buy it so that you won't BSOD every half a day. And the Next Release (tm) will require more powerful hardware to do the same tasks, so the computer manufacturers will be happy. And while it will actually convey some improvements, it will still lack some key features so that MS-trained professionals will have to be called to fix problems and the cycle will begin.

      Can we do something about this? Damn right we can, but it will take time and hard work.

      --
      /kinkie
    5. Re:Come on. by kinkie · · Score: 2

      I never had to deal with Sun, so I don't know how they conduct business.
      But I guess that they would do a leasing type of deal (and they throw maintainance in), or something like that.
      But Suns are not really aimed at the consumer market: they're for business and research, where that kind of contracts is the norm, isn't it?

      --
      /kinkie
  4. Re:Uninformed question about Sun hardware by RelliK · · Score: 3

    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.
  5. Re:E450 not so expensive by otis+wildflower · · Score: 2

    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,

  6. Why not linux on the E450's? by fishbowl · · Score: 5

    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.
  7. Suns are overpriced? Which ones? by hatless · · Score: 4

    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.

  8. Sun sells hardware by SurfsUp · · Score: 2

    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.
  9. I like this guy. by ajdavis · · Score: 5
    Wladawsky-Berger seemed to be a very smart, non-marketeering, down-in-the-trenches kind of guy. He spoke with enough easy jargon that C|Net, even in a technical article, had to insert parentheticals explaining what he said. He mentioned SGI (a direct competitor) in an extremely positive way, and didn't take the opportunity to bash Sun. If IBM has people like this working at its highest level ("vice president of technology and strategy"), I have great hopes for their continuing wonderfulness.

    How in the world did IBM, famous for its entrenched monopolist corporate culture, manage to turn itself around so quickly and fundamentally?


    1. Re:I like this guy. by _Swank · · Score: 5
      How in the world did IBM, famous for its entrenched monopolist corporate culture, manage to turn itself around so quickly and fundamentally?

      In 1993 Lou Gerstner took over as CEO of IBM. He had no experience in the technology industry (he came from RJR Nabisco), but he did have a solid vision for IBM and really saw IBM's strengths and weaknesses and how to leverage them. He transformed the overly formal and stuffy internal culture and policies (the "blue suits" stereotype), helped revamp the public's perception of Big Blue(a new and different ad campaign, more customer centric, more open), and set strong goals for IBM's future.

      The details can be read in the book IBM Redux by Doug Garr, a former IBM executive. It's a pretty well-written book about where IBM was (almost dead) and how they got to where they are today.
  10. Re:Sun is really in trouble by LL · · Score: 2

    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

  11. Re:Uninformed question about Sun hardware by stange · · Score: 2

    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.
  12. Re:Server Software by tcr · · Score: 2

    You can get that from netcraft.

    --


    Information wants to be beer.
  13. Re:wahoo... by bifrost · · Score: 2

    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.

  14. that's good publicity by superape23 · · Score: 2

    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.....

  15. Sun vs. Linux. by Ozone+Pilot · · Score: 5

    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
    1. Re:Sun vs. Linux. by Twanfox · · Score: 2
      I have to agree on this topic. I'm familiar with Linux quite well, having run it a number of years now, and one thing that Linux has over most operating systems is tunability, more so than 'registry keys' or such like that. You want a bare-bones webserver? Tune the kernel down so all it does is fast network support, give it the minimal kernel options it needs, drop a webserver on there, built to order, and disable every other service on the machine. While most of this stuff can be done on most other OS's, the kernel tuning cannot. MS is locked in on one kernel suits all, Solaris, while is modular, is not very tunable beyond 'load or unload' this module. You can't tweak the kernel to do just what you want.

      I've seen Linux servers as front end webservers, and even as email/web exchangers. Why? Because at least in one case, Exchange (shudder) is incapable of providing it's own defenses against attacks, and buffering it via a sendmail/apache+ssl setup in front actually provides your security for you. Not quite a firewall, but close, and tuned to order.

  16. Sun is really in trouble by konstant · · Score: 3

    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.

    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 .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.

    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!
    1. Re:Sun is really in trouble by softsign · · Score: 5
      Given that you work for Microsoft, I can understand why you'd be spouting the dot-truth that so thoroughly disgusted anyone with even a simple understanding of the facts.

      But anyways, having worked with all the OSes mentioned above, I can tell you why Sun is still great. Their server solutions work. And work _great_. You don't have to be a magician to make Solaris run well on Sun hardware. And if you ever do mess anything up, you call up Sun's tech support and they help you fix it. Contrast with Microsoft $9/min tech support - "Oh no, you don't have to call back, I'll wait while you reinstall Office". Or with Linux support, which until recently has consisted mostly of IRC, 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.

      Of course, there's a price to be paid for the kind of solutions and service Sun provides. Their high-end stuff is priced accordingly. Why? Well, because there are obviously enough people in the world willing to pay for it. It's the beauty of the market economy. For the same reasons that Windows hasn't yet died a long-overdue death (and somehow controls the home OS market), Sun continues to sell mission-critical hardware for a premium: people think it's worth it .

      Besides, you can hardly say that the Linux/Netfinity solution here is cheap. $1 million. And I'm pretty sure that's not all hardware.

      I guess they should have gone with Windows 2000, the price/performance leader.

      --

    2. Re:Sun is really in trouble by Pinball+Wizard · · Score: 5
      Hmm...a perfectly good comment, marked as a troll being pro-Microsoft. Typical, substitute 'Linux' for Microsoft/Win2K and this probably would have been +3, Informative.

      Ah Well. So much for getting all sides of a story on this forum.

      This guy is right: check out tpc.org and you will see an industry standard ranking of database servers. Windows 2000/SQL Server does indeed blow away all other contenders, running the heaviest IBM and Sun iron and Oracle.

      However, I don't think Sun is really in trouble. Rather, Microsoft is. The are still the belligerent company they always have been, and I for one have developed a severe distaste of having to deal with incompatible software and devious methods to hook people into staying their customers. So what if it performs better, I need software that works well with everything else I use.

      Take a lesson from IBM, and quit trying to dominate the world. Treat people as humans rather than competitors to be crushed, and perhaps the anti-Microsoft sentiment will fade. Until then, expect people to go with other solutions.

      --

      No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?

  17. Re:Linux replaces the sun? by levendis · · Score: 2

    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.
  18. Linux replaces the sun? by levendis · · Score: 5

    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.
    1. Re:Linux replaces the sun? by Money__ · · Score: 5
      Re: "Great. It really sucked when the Sun was running NT. Those BSODs really ruined my day."

      So that's why the sky is blue.
      ___

  19. IBM: 2, Sun: 0 by Loge · · Score: 2

    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.

  20. Win2k replaces Linux at /. by Money__ · · Score: 5

    CmdrTaco on 1:47 AM -- Tuesday June 4 2000
    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 /.ers. In a related story, hell froze over and monkeys actually flew from RMSs ass.
    ___

  21. wahoo... by purefizz · · Score: 2

    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

  22. Adding Linux API by /dev/zero · · Score: 2

    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
  23. Re:Weather.com's past connections to linux by rjamestaylor · · Score: 2
    Oh, I wish I had moderator points...I'd moderate this up as Informative.

    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
  24. Re:Keeping in mind... by Some+Id10t · · Score: 3
    That serving web hits is a pretty lightweight thing to do.

    Oh please. I agree with your points, except this one. Serving web hits for a major Internet site is not in any way a "lightweight thing to do."

    By major internet site I mean the type of thing that hundreds of thousands of users have as their default home page and millions view every day.. Not your ISP web hosting site- your dual-T3 redundant, backed up by load balancing and cacheing, monitored by a very large engineering team 24 hours a day type of site.

    These types of sites are usually hosted on a bank of Sun E450-type machines.. enough to fill a moderate sized room. Seeing Linux being trusted to this type of thing is a major accomplishment.

    I feel I can say this due to being part of the engineering team for a website that itself draws over 8 million hits a day... and I can only imagine how much busier weather.com must be.

    --
    (Note: There are no x's in my email address.)
  25. Replacing the SUN at weather.com? by AntiNorm · · Score: 2

    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...
  26. Weather.com's past connections to linux by freedman · · Score: 5

    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.

  27. So you could say by Workpad+z50+User · · Score: 2
    The forcast for the Internet is partly SUNny becoming overcast by Linux and FreeBSD?

    I like it.

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