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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.
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)
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 ?
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.
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
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.
How in the world did IBM, famous for its entrenched monopolist corporate culture, manage to turn itself around so quickly and fundamentally?
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!
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.
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
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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.)
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.