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Sun Buys Cobalt
An anonymous reader was the first to note that Sun acquired
Cobalt. The press release is full of all sorts of PR-speak to basically say that sun wants to enter the low-end server market, and this is how they intend to get into the market.
1. Sun now has several CPU lines in their products (mostly through aquisitions):
T3 runs PPC 603e,
Cobalt is x86 (old Cobalt was MIPS, but it is dead and buried, just so as Sun A7000 which was Motorola 88010);
Most products run UltraSPARC (with changeover to US-III in two weeks);
MicroSPARC-IIep is still alive in SunRay and Serengeti Console.
In the end, UltraSPARC is not about to reunite these products.
2. It may seem tempting to give Linux on Cobalt a boot, however there is a thing in the way Sun operates. Other divisions must pay SunSoft royalties on Solaris. Those are "funny money", e.g. they are included into the price. For example, if Network Storage was to produce a T3++ running Solaris in place of pSOS, they would need to charge customer with $250 or so (well, T3 is not a good example because Sun pays real royalties to ISI for pSOS. But you get the idea, compare that to Linux).
On the whole I think that Linux has a good chance to be present in lower cost offerings from Sun.
P.S. I saw a poster above mentioning US-IIe above with figures of 8W @400MHz for $145. This is decent for it, but a cobalt style box needs a lower point CPU, such as MediaGX. For comparison, MicroSPARC-IIep goes for $80 at 4W and 100MHz. Sun designers complain that it is too slow for a small Cobalt-like box, but costs too much. They'd like to have something with PCI, Flash control (and perhaps ISA/EBus2 and Serial) integrated, doing about 266MHz, 4W, all for about $70. Derivates of US-IIe are not going to meet these requrements.
I'm a bit cynical because I work for a company that does a excellent job of selling high end devices. (ie mainframe) Several times we have bought or built a product that could have sold well in the low end market, but our sales force was unable to sell it. When they look at the ability to make 6 figgures when only closing 4 sales a year, and compare that with the amount of work they need to get any commission on a $1000 box they don't care about the small boxes.
In other words, I'm not really surprized that sun did well with the high end products, but I'm not convinced they can make the low end work.
Actually, the kernel is usually referred to as 5.7 whereas Solaris is the whole collection of programs that accompanies the kernel and it is at 2.7 (7). It's like Linux, the kernel is 2.2.x right now, but RedHat is 6.2.
_damnit_
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
Not really. Sun got their start in the workstation market (on Motorola and BSD before SPARC and SYSV), then they started selling what we would today call "workgroup servers" to support LANs of SPARCstations. Much later on, they started making genuine high-end products like the E10000. The "high end" market has historically been IBM, HP maybe some DEC and SGI in there, some Fujitsu and ICL.
The reason this is noteworthy is because Sun often indicate that their ongoing strategy is SPARC/Solaris/Java, and making their money from hardware sales - unless I am mistaken, Cobalt are Linux on MIPS.
Sounds like you want one of these.
Cobalt has been a great company. I'm disappointed to see to swallowed by Sun. I wish them well, but in the mean time, I'm liquidating my holdings of COBT.
Why Sell? What value does the Sun deal bring to Cobalt? Cobalt has been doing pretty well establishing their market and channel partners. What does this deal do to benefit the company? Sure the stockholders get to line their pockets in the short-term, but it is bad for the company. Until today, Cobalt has been free to focus on doing the network server appliance right.
Now Cobalt is being swallowed by the beamoth Sun, who will doubtless meddle in their affairs. As if bloated corporate meddling won't be bad enough, I imagine use of Linux may be on the way out at Cobalt. Hasn't Sun after all made it a corporate directive that they aren't going to be a Linux company? Sun might "support" Linux, but they sure as hell don't sell it.
Such corporate politics and meddling won't be good for Cobalt. Not that Cobalt will be ruffled by the direction of such a hypothetical directive. They've always firmly stated that they are not in the business of selling Linux, but that Linux helps them sell network server applianced.
Life is like an egg better scrambled than fried. -- Ken Sawatari
- I'm sitting here trying to think of one core competency of SGI's that Sun lacks, and can't source elsewhere. I'm drawing a
blank.
I'd have to agree.- SGI is going down.
Very much looks like it, unfortunately. However, SGI pretty much have nobody to blame but themselves. Sun's upcoming UltraSPARC-III based workstations and servers, and their new super graphics stuff is going to make life even harder for SGI. (see New York event next Wednesday...)There is the UltraBook though, from Tadpole.
US2e would be pretty ideal for laptops - it has most of the chipset on die already (the "northbridge"). Power efficient too. Demand is another matter...
The embedded server market is really taking off, and Sun have been developing several things in this area for many years. I remember reading last week that they're expected to announce quite a few embedded/applicance server things in the coming months, and I guess this is one of them.
Here's an interesting quote from the PR:
- ``Today we're acquiring Cobalt to establish ourselves in low-end server appliances and immediately jump into the marketplace with a proven,
world class product offering. This move is similar to our entry into the high-end server arena, which we did through our acquisition of Starfire
server technology from Cray. Just as that product line has become one of our most successful product lines to date, we think the demand for
these high-volume, turnkey devices will explode in the next couple of years. Cobalt is our bet for the future,'' said Ed Zander, President and Chief
Operating Officer, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Only a week ago Sun announced the UltraSPARC-IIe - UltraSPARC-II for low-end embedded applications. It has 256Kb on-die L2, and pretty much the whole chipset on-die too and can use PC100 SDRAM, apparantly. The 400MHz part is $145 in volume and the 500MHz part is $225 in volume. They're pretty power efficient too - 8W max for 400, 13W max for 500.- Sun has unfortunately missed out on the whole low-end server game over the last few years, most likely because of their focus on Solaris and other "big iron" type products.
Erm, Sun have made about $1-3Bn/year on the low end for the last several years. Their whole Netra range is embedded/low-end. Their 1U Netra t1 launched last year has been a big success etc. Their low-end sales have been very strong recently - growing 60-80% in the last year.- Whilst they had recognised the potential for webservers, they seem to
have totally missed out on the idea that people would want to run them from home, and this is why Linux has taken off - it
may not be as good as Solaris, but it runs on your home PC.
Sun have always sold to business, not to the public. (while some people do buy them for private/personal use, Sun certainly aren't in the home computer business)- Now they're trying to get back into the low-end market through buy-outs rather than repositioning, because they're just
not flexible enough to do so - just look at Java for an example of Sun's cluelessness when it comes to the market. Buying
Cobalt may given them a portion of the market, but it will hardly path the way for them to gain any appreciable amount of
market share.
Sun started serious development, both hardware and software for the embedded and low-end server market several years ago. They already have a strong presence in the "soft switches" networking market and so on. The embedded/appliance style server market is just taking off, and have a strong reputating in the market, so it seems rather silly to write them off.Btw, most Java developers seem to me to be pretty happy with the Java licencing situation. You also don't seem to realise that Sun have relaxed the license fairly recently too - JCP 2.0, for example...
- To be honest, I don't really see much of a future for Sun. All of their recent moves seem to be those of desparation - giving
away Solaris, trying to keep Java proprietary and now buying Cobalt. Between Microsoft and Linux, they're fast becoming
a non-entity in the computing world.
Making Solaris 'free' has certainly been a sucess - especially on x86/Intel - about 200-300,000 installs in since it was released. That's more than on SPARC...Sun are growing faster than Microsoft, IBM, HP, Dell, Compaq, Intel. They're now the biggest server company (revenue wise) I think, and that's just before they're about to completely revamp their entire product line... (UltraSPARC-III finally coming next week.)
Maybe Sun doesn't know it now, but perhaps this spells the demise (or rebirth, depending on how you look at it) of Solaris? If Sun purchases cobalt and that division continues to make Linux servers, perhaps they can convince Sun to merge the better features of Solaris into the Linux kernel. Just as SGI IRIX may in time enter the flame and be reborn as a more powerful Linux, perhaps so too will Solaris be such a phoenix. One can only hope.
CmdrChalupa
(who does not, for the life of him, know how to change his sig)
CmdrChalupa, who finally changed his sig (drop -FlogSpammersNow- for my real address)
Extremely unlikely, given that IIRC, Cobalt boxen are MIPS based. That said, it wouldn't surprise me to see that change in the future. With few people adding additional software to their Cobalt servers, the CPU becomes increasingly irrelevant. Sun could quite conceivably bring out a new range based on embedded UltraSPARC processors (or StrongARM or whatever -- even Intel, though that's unlikely). End users wouldn't notice any difference (people don't notice when they're using my Sparc Linux box instead of the normal Intel ones, for example). An UltraSPARC based Cobalt would be capable of running both Linux and Solaris, and it'd be interesting to see which one they picked -- my guess is they'd stick with Linux. A few years ago, they all but admitted Linux was faster on low end machines -- at the time, they were aiming for the high end anyway, so they weren't too bothered about letting little things like that slip out. I doubt we'd hear such an admission now, though.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Yep, so they do. That illustrates just my point perfectly, though. The earlier RaQ2s didn't have an Intel compatible CPU. They made the change for the RaQ3. The user doesn't know (or care) what CPU it contains.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Sun has always been the big boys in the High End stuff. As the prices of Processor drop and the power of them increase. They see that "Low end" equipment is being used alot of time where their "High End" equipment shuold have been used. I do not see this as a suprise let just hope they plat fair.
Uh, that's funny. The way I remember it, Kiva/Netscape's app server, also acquired by Sun, had the more advanced and scalable backend but no good tools to speak of, and NetDynamics had the better development tools and a somewhat anemic and behind-the-curve backend.
The current iPlanet product is essentially a successor to the Kiva/Netscape engine with tools based on NetDynamics, though now most heavy coding can be donw ith your choice of Java IDE. And they provided migration tools and support assistance to customers moving to the merged product.
But I guess conspiracy theories are more fun.
Cobalt isn't in the same business. Cobalt makes preconfigured, browser-managed server appliances for vertical markets, with a focus on easy deployment and easy, GUI-based management.
VA makes high-performance general-purpose servers with nothing but a raw OS installed on them.
You might as well say eMachines and SGI are competitors because they both make desktops that run Windows.
Sun already makes low-end 1U servers. This isn't about buying Cobalt's mediocre hardware like faulty serial consoles, power supply issues, and slow IDE drives. It's about software.
Cobalt makes plug-and-go server appliances. Although you can telnet/SSH into a Cobalt and you can install your own software on them, that's not their selling point. The selling point is that they're web-hosting/email/caching/etc. appliances that can be set up in about ten minutes and managed both by admins and customers almost entirely through slick web interfaces.
This is why ISPs and hosting providers love Cobalt. For instance, the latest Raq models come preconfigured to run as hosting servers for Apache with MySQL, PHP, ASP (thanks to their Chilisoft acquisition), POP and IMAP mail, FTP, log reporting and so forth. With 24/7 phone support for the whole shebang available. And at a price not much different from a vanilla 1U server, that makes them a bargain if you're a hosting provider.
They have competitors, none of whom have gotten it right. Plain servers aren't really competition at all. The Whistler InterJet competes with the Qubes, but it's too rigid and locked down. The Netwinders suffer from awful marketing and a so-so web inetrface.
Cobalt is a brand ISPs trust, and small development shops that build sites on hosted space like the consistency across Cobalt-based hosting providers.
I expect you'll see Sun continue to sell $1200 x86-based, single-processor Raqs and start offering higher-end machines with SCSI and fiber channel, multiple processors, redundancy and so forth, all with Cobalt's well-thought-out browser-based administration rolled in for customers that prefer a few large machines for hosting over racks full of small ones.
And owning ChiliASP can't hurt the iPlanet server line. That's the Cobalt-owned, complete, COM-aware, VBScript and JScript-running Active Server Pages environment for Unix and Linux. Don't be surprised if you see that engine's backend translated into Java and made available on the iPlanet Application Server, for a massively-scalable way to run existing ASP-based applications alongside JSP/servlet/EJB apps.
Maybe if linux can scale up to handle their entire product line and support things like hot swap and stuff, they will... But until then, they'll just use Linux where it fits into the puzzle. Like they should, rather than trying to shoehorn Linux into ever conceivable computer.
Suns gone on record saying they support Linux in that Linux is Unix, so each sale of a Linux machine not only isn't a Windows sale, it's also a sale that further grows the Unix market, so when people have outgrown Linux they're already ni the family and can move on to Solaris on sparc hardware.
Jupiter buys Potassium, and Venus is investigating a Sillicon purchase...
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
And after going after the "small server" line, they'll want the "big server" line. And look at what company wants to be purchased...
It's a company sitting there with a sub-$5 stock price. It has a brand new product line that kicks ass, but they're not marketing it at ALL. They have all but pulled out of the workstation market. They've divested their share of embedded processors and have all but broken free from their application development houses. In fact, the only thing this company has right now is Big Servers and Big Workstations: categories which don't overlap with anyone else in the business really.
What company will Sun buy next? SGI.
-Chris
The game in the low end market is cheap, cheap, cheap. So, they have a nice beginner friendly admin system. Sh*t on TCO, people down here in the basement want good stuff, cheap. And it turns out the subsegment of bottom feeders who are deluded into thinking they can save money by adminning with trained monkeys go with NT, anyway.
So, Cobalts are cool, but they won't provide an attractive value proposition until they get cheap.
I wonder if Sun's financial clout will allow the cobalts to be manufacturered cheaply, er, inexpensively.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Just so It's known, The RAQ 4i has an AMD K6 475 clocked at 450.
Linux will stay for a while, but Sun has a better OS to put on the box. One thats more mature and reliable... Solaris X86... However, the products that still use the MIPS chips will probably stay Linux for a while, or they might switch to NetBSD/OpenBSD since its more secure than Linux. Who knows, Sun could kill the product line, but chances are they won't for a while at least. Not like Sun is gonna kill development of Linux/MIPS any time soon... Chances are sun will keep the Cobalt interface stuff, go through it and get rid of the Linuxisms, and re-package it as a simple management interface for commercial sale. Who knows what after that...
If they truly are buying Cobalt to get a jump into the low-end server market then they will stll want to offer these with Linux.
For one they are already tested and configured for Linux. And another thing is that Solaris will add a signifigant price to the machine (Sun Tax?).
So why would they take off a tested OS configuration to replace it with a more expensive alternative? Not because Sun requires you to buy their OS either, they sell many machines with Linux or *BSD already.
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
Wow spread of 14 and change! Wish I could have heard about this yestarday.
I dont think this is a move to shut cobalt down. Companies usualy pay cahs if they want to do that. This is a big value added play for sun. They tend to make wise business decisions and I dont see how they would benefit from killing someone who isnt a direct competitor. Especialy considering that they had to dilute by $2B to do it.
Sun is one of my favorite companies in the tech sector. No they arnt as smart as microsoft and no they arnt as cool as apple but I think sun is the best of both worlds.
BTW: If you dont know what a spread or dilution is, please read a book on M&A (mergers and aquisitions) before you moderate me down for not making any sense.
UltraSPARC-IIe for low-end embedded applications. It has 256Kb on-die L2, and pretty much the whole chipset on-die too and can use PC100 SDRAM, apparantly. The 400MHz part is $145 in volume and the 500MHz part is $225 in volume. They're pretty power efficient too - 8W max for 400, 13W max for 500.
Now, I wouldn't claim that that's particularly power efficient. compare to:
- A PowerPC (MPC750@400Mhz) MAX 5.8W
- Digital's StrongArm (SA110@233) MAX 1W
- [I couldn't find MIPS R4000 info]
Granted the Intel Chips use a lot of power, but I'm not sure the USparcIIe is actually applicable to something like a laptop. -DanielThis may sound kind of way out there, but here goes: Why aren't there UltraSPARC chipsets for laptops? Our chipset designers here at work are using UltraSPARCs machines from Sun, and their machines not only fly along, they are so slick it's not funny (although Solaris leaves something to be desired..). The actual box is hardly twice the size of a laptop (component and space wise), and if you are right about that power consumption, they would be more than power efficient enough for a laptop.
I guess it's all about what the market wants and what will sell. Too bad, I'm all for small, fast, and integrated user machines.
Rami
--
rJames.org - illustration
Can't you see the obvious...This is a direct assault against EMC's storage market. Here's the facts. Sun has indicated in the last few months their desire to get into the server appliance market. Here's the chronology:
06/12: Ed Zander details Sun's "Storage for the Net Economy".
07/14: Sun announced "Purple", Codename for it's StorEdge T3 Disk Arrays.
07/14: Sun announced deal w/VERITAS to integrate Jiro and VERITAS V3 SAN Access technology.
08/15: Sun announces a deal w/LinuxCare to offer support for StorEdge disk-array servers in Linux.
I think we're about to see an explosion of low-cost Sun servers based on Cobalt technology. Sun will more than likely co-brand the line, similar to the Forte brand of software tools.
> the higher end colbalt servers aren't x86
> though.. i *think* they are mips based. only the
> low end cobalt's are x86.
Actually they _were_ Mips-based, but Cobalt has announced in october 1999 that they were dropping Mips for x86. Its whole line is migrating progressively. This decision essensially boiled down to the wider availability of Linux software for x86 compared to Mips.
Convoluted? In what way. I setup Mandrake in about 5 minutes to file and print share with my other boxes. Oh right, you mean file and print share with Windows clients, yes that is a bit harder, I blame the monopoly. If they used common networking protocols instead of their own badly-documented crud then you wouldn't have a problem and the Samba team would be able to do something better than have to figure out the garbage hack that Microsoft Notworking is (no offence to the Samba boys, you do a fine job, you just shouldn't have to)
If they can compartmentalize VA and hold them to certain margins and markets, Sun can keep them out of the more lucrative higher-margin mid-range market.
The better Sun encircles VA, the better protected their midrange market is.
Thats right (and obvious) - crush your competitors while they are small. Why wait for the more expensive battles that invariably loom if linux (and VA) continues to grow?
"However, in the long term, Sun expects to move Cobalt's products over to
Sun's UltraSparc CPUs and its Solaris operating system, Schwartz said."
well hell, if you can't beat 'em, buy 'em out :)
They were a small startup that had an application server and development tool that allowed developers to utilize Java to create a "web application" that ran server-side sort of like Microsoft's ASP, or IBM's WebSphere, or BEA WebLogic. It was more or less the industry leader in this type of development and directly competed with some of the things Sun was trying to do. Around the time NetDynamics 4.0 came out, Sun bought NetDynamics. Before NetDynamics 5.0 could be released, AOL bought Netscape and Sun licensed Netscape Application Server from AOL. Shortly after NetDynamics 5.0 was released Sun anounced that the NetDynamics line would no longer be developed, and instead they would be doing something new using Netscape Application Server. Most of the NetDynamics 5.0 code had been written before Sun aquired the company, so they never really invested anything into the product. Basically they acquired their biggest competitor in a paticular strategic line and stuffed them in a closet.
Could the same thing happen here? Stay tuned.
Dude, I want some of what you're smoking.
Missed out on a market with next to zero profits? While focusing on machines that have huge profit margines? Wow, Sun really blew that one, because now they have enough money to buy a leader in the low end market...oh wait.
Sun a non-entity?
Oh man...
That's funny.
Look for a job lately? Notice how the 'non-entity' Sun is all over? Jeez...
In non-ISP 'net markets, Sun is huge, at the expense of HP, SGI, and IBM. Sun is the only non-open source based Unix vendor to grow their market share lately.
Not sure what you're talking about in regards to Java. Sure, Java's client side market didn't take off like it's server side has, which is huge now. And guess what all these server side Java programs run best on? Why, that'd be Solaris on a sparc! And Sun is basically the Linus on the Java world, the benevolent dictator who calls the shots.
Need a sturdy web application built in the shortest time? You're hard pressed to beat Java on a Sun. And yes, I know Perl/PHP on Linux is close, but the fact is that Java is a cleaner language. When you have a team of coders at different levels trying to hit impossible deadlines, Java forces everyone to write decent and maintainable code.
-- topher71