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Sun Releases New Servers, Blades & More
desau writes "This Yahoo article gives some tidbits on Sun's new toys that are being released today. Looks like they're aiming their guns at intel based systems with many new blade offerings and several small to midrange servers. The article also points out that they're lowering their prices on other servers." Probably a lot more information will come out from the web view - that starts @ 12:30 PM EST - but I think it'll take more than blade servers to make a difference in the future.Removed the first part of the link - the DoubleClick part was my copying link location, and not checking it - it should be correct now.
Hey, you can always buy used, if all you're wanting is a good play box. I got an Ultra 5 for $30 through the local "Bargain Finder" magazine. Go search ebay.
Xine, Mplayer and XMMS work just fine on Solaris 8,9 and 10 thank you very much. UltraSPARC has had SIMD multimedia instructions since 1994 or 1995 IIRC, long before the Pentium got MMX. Get back under your bridge, troll.
That said, it's one heck of a card; up to 1GB of texture RAM (!!) and it's got great connectivity to the RAM as it plugs into the main system bus on a V880 rather than being limited to PCI bandwidth.
It's a niche item, but it'll do well in visualisation studios; for instance, we have a huge rendering server with real 3D capabilities (i.e. you need the glasses) running on an SGI; this might be able to replace that.
My fault - I right clicked, and pasted the link locaton - it's been updated to the correct one.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
Ads smell foul.
I don't plan on turning Linux into a slow-ass operating system
That's cool, because I have no plans to do that to the Solaris machines I run. It hasn't been "hip" to call Solaris slow since 2.5.1, perhaps 2.6 -- about 4 years ago.
with no multimedia support
This is important on a server...
and 80MB Java footprints from a "Hello World" program
Yes, Java on Solaris sucks. The official Java distribution for Linux is also from Sun -- so go figure, it sucks on Linux too.
so I guess you're right that Linux will never do all the things Solaris does.
Guess I am.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I disagree. I personally feel as though Sun's low end Netra's and the v120's (and company) are excellent. They are not that expensive (I get an edu discount, but I don't think they list that high otherwise), and as far as server's go "They just work" (Tm) And keep in mind that I've seen very few (read almost none) servers that are CPU bound. Servers serve. Workstations (CAD, etc) process.
Ever check out sunfreeware.com? That kinda answers most of your packaging requests. As for CDE, couldn't you just use pkgrm to remove all the uneeded stuff (like the X-server, CDE, misc documentation, etc)?
That shrinks your list down to 2 items if the above are new to you. Of course can't really fix the naming thing now, unless they decide to start over with the naming scheme.
1> you can do a lot to Sun equipment without interupting it.
.com := .boom
2> but they are not worth the price premium they charge.
Unless you need #1. In which case #2 is wrong.
3>Nice x86 boxes which can do most of the things a Sun can do in terms of uninterrupted operation
3>during maintenance can be had for cheaper
Unless you need the things they can't do. Then X86 isn't cheaper. Cheaper doesn't count if it can't do the job.
4>Even in the cases of downtime, a lot of places are finding that failover clusters of x86 boxes
4> are more cost effective and reliable
Unless your application doesn't cluster, or is too expensive to cluster. Then X86 isn't cheaper. There are also applications / problems that will only run well on a large box. X86 doesn't do large well, although Opteron should change that in time.
5>Also, planned downtime isn't *that* bad...
A. Unless its $1,000,000/hour down time. Then it is bad.
B. Unless you are trying to get a product to market to beat the compeition. Then it is bad.
C. Unless dozens, hundreds, or thousands rely upon the provided service. Then it is bad.
5>Couple this with the rather lackluster performance of their offerings in the face of rapidly developing x86 processors,
If the application runs there. If X86 can handle the load (oooh, sorry, its a 4.00001Gb process). If X86 benchmarks OK in the application. (Some actually suck compared to others.) If the X86 operating system supports the job type/ size/ requirements. (Benchmarking & prototyping should be your friends. They have to be if you want to avoid expensive "white elephants." I have no Sun white elephants, I do have a big Dell thats now a sort of joke. "Sill no use for it?")
6>and you are seeing why Sun is in such financial trouble.
7>In the 90s and earlier, Sun was kicking all kinds of ass and was truly worth it for the businesses that used them.
In may respects, little has changed. Sun's CPUs weren't the fastest then, they aren't the fastest now. Sun was innovative then (NFS, NIS, etc. etc.), they are innovative now (Java, N1, Sungrid, Solaris N..N+!). Economies go through boom/bust cycles. I expect that the economy will improve, and so will Sun's position.
8>A 10-year old piece of sun equipment still beat a brand new PC in about 95
I remember PC magazine panning the new SparcLX (Classic?) in a Unix shootoff about that time (Maybe a couple of years earlier). Sun was expensive then, they are expensive now. But for some things, its worth every penny.
Some things are only free if your time has no value. A cheap box that can't do the job isn't a good value.
What is true. Sun is not at the bleeding edge of processor development -- a place primarly for scientific computing. They are however at the leading edge, along with many others, and because of that they produce very stable, very productive, very scalable commercial application servers.
Oh, and please do have a visit to Sparc Consortium and check out the many other who contribute to sparc development.
Gnome is unusually slow on Solaris/Sparc, for some reason. Try KDE or any other WM and it will perform MUCH better.
1) The product formerly known as Disksuite but now much enhanced with many of the features that used to be used to compare with Veritas: Integrated as a core Solaris 9 feature (lvm).
/opt/sfw by default).
2) See last weeks news, Sun has already started shipping GNOME 2.x packages for Solaris 8 & 9.
3) WebStart Wizards + SVR4 packaging is a lot more powerful than most people realise. Please don't confusing the power of the package system with a nice easy download thingy. Remeber also that Sun does real patches not just upgrade everything to the latest bits. Our enterprise level customers need this - minimal change.
4) We ship a full CD worth of stuff including gcc and top already compiled and in SVR4 package form (gets installed into
5) The reason for dropping the "2" from Solaris naming is that there are no plans for a Solaris 3.x line (that would be SunOS 6.x). That one is all down to marketing - I hated it when I first saw it but it actually makes a lot of sense.