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Sun Buys Cobalt

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the eating-the-blue-cube dept.

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 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. This isn't a hardware buy. It's a software buy. by hatless · · Score: 5

    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.