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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.
When will Sun come thru with there plan to phase-out Solaris in favor of Linux [as reported in a previous ./ article]?
When linux does all the things Solaris can do. Don't hold your breath.
- A.P.
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Stability: tried, tested, and true. Also, the architecture is a lot more flexible, IMO. Intel's still got its problems.
That was IBM, not Sun http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/20/125721 8&mode=thread
Also low-end solaris servers are crap anyway, they're built essentially like a PC from dell. Why bother? They have a supposedly better processor but they get spanked by an Athlon XP, let alone itanium or the rapidly upcoming sledgehammer.
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I really dig sun hardware -- it's extremely robust, but when it comes down to price, you can buy an awful lot of intel power for the prices Sun tries to get you to pay.
This won't save Sun for one simple reason... Even if they lower their prices to a point where it's really "worth" the extra dollars to buy the Sun label (again, their hardware is far more robust than anything I've seen on the Intel side) customers aren't going to recognize that.
Sure, bigger companies will still recognize the value of buying more robust hardware, but their mid-market business will dry up and Sun will buckle. IBM will step in to fill the high-end server role (with Linux) and in 6 years, Sun will be a distant memory.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
Editors,
:% 2a| v;5176750;0-0;0;7859018;9323-728|90;2305354|230362 5|1;;%3fhttp://www.sun.com/bignews
this is unacceptable.
Link in story
http://ad.doubleclick.net/click;h=v2|2f40|0|0|
And I'll even post with karma bonus, even though this is offtopic.
Sun is really backed into a corner and this move I don't see as really fixing much....
I have worked at places that use Sun equipment. All but one were using them for legacy apps as they phased them out. The other place used them for everything, but went under because they couldn't recoup the investment.
Sun hardware is nice to work on, and you can do a lot to Sun equipment without interupting it. They are a pleasure to work with, but they are not worth the price premium they charge.
Nice x86 boxes which can do most of the things a Sun can do in terms of uninterrupted operation during maintenance can be had for cheaper than Sun equipment. Even in the cases of downtime, a lot of places are finding that failover clusters of x86 boxes are more cost effective and reliable than Sun offerings. Also, planned downtime isn't *that* bad...
Couple this with the rather lackluster performance of their offerings in the face of rapidly developing x86 processors, and you are seeing why Sun is in such financial trouble. In the 90s and earlier, Sun was kicking all kinds of ass and was truly worth it for the businesses that used them. A 10-year old piece of sun equipment still beat a brand new PC in about 95 and 96 (my personal experience), but now, a brand new Sun Workstation is nothing special...
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Unless they can come up with some HUGE reason to not go Intel/Linux the server market is lost to them.
Huh?! What are you talking about! Sun is the largest producer of big unix boxes on the planet. Unless you are mom and pop shop, Sun has to be one of your finalists for new servers. Ever here of a little thing called TCO?! Solaris is way cheaper to administrate over a thousand servers than Linux/Winwhatever will ever be. Don't even get me started on managing multiple linux kernels!!
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They're not dead yet. Agreed they've got some work to do, but they've turned bad situations in the past.
Personally, I think they should get seriously into the server appliance business. They bought Cobalt, but they don't seem to want to do anything interesting with the company. Those little boxes were really handy and breeze to administer.
They might well have picked the right time for Linux desktops too. Imagine a shrink-wrapped workgroup including a nice Sun box with Cobalt admin tools and a bunch of easy-to-administer Linux desktops. Great for school labs or company call-centeres.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Did you not read the sentence right before the ones you quoted, or are you just a retard? "Sun's been criticized heavily for sticking to its own Sparc processors and Solaris operating system." Why the fuck are you talking about Linux and BSD?
Actually, this is quite important.
...
I do not think Sun is going away. They build good
kit. It lasts, its reliable and its not power hungry. Solaris has been around a long time. Its stable, scales extremely well and is well understood. Its is also very network aware. It does cache filesystems for instance.
The N1 idea is a pearl. Admittedly they have a way to go in implementation but you can see the point where they completely virtualise storage and hardware. If you read the docs for the blade stuff (computer on a card with standard connectors) you see that they are already offering automatic drop out & replacement from pool of failed gear. That is really very impressive. And they will do Linux. You try and do this at home
PS
For some reason these forums now seem to attract a huge amount of vacuous posts. No reasoning, just kneejerk "X company are dead cos they dont do linux/wintel".
A very large base of the open source software you all now use was created on Sun gear. If SMCC had not survived 12 years ago I really doubt there would be a Linux. Show some perspective.
SGI kind of went that direction with their Origin series (2000 and 3000, and now Altix), but they're overbuilt. It costs a fortune to buy an empty system, and a fortune to put processors and slots in it.
This is a hard problem. As you say, it would be really nice, but what you end up with in practice is having to put high-end parts in low-end models and get killed on cost.
I've got a SS20, and Ultra5. Sun, I'd love a nice new SunBlade!
Personally, I love Sun hardware. Intel hardware still can't break the 4 gig barrier and Itanium isn't looking promising. Plus, Solaris gracefully handles just about any emergency situation you can throw at it. Too many threads? I hadn't noticed. Too much traffic through the network card? Huh, hasn't seemed too bad. Compare that to Windows were suddenly terminal services die, processes get locked in place, and things just generally spin out of control. The ONLY problem I have with Sun right now is their propensity for undercutting you on memory. Every time I try to configure a machine, it comes with about half the memory a machine its size should have. So I try adding it, and BAM! the machine is suddenly 10x more expensive. If Sun would just stop skimping on the memory and fill these boxes out, the Sparc platform would start to look *way* more attractive. I mean, how are you supposed to get the message across that your machines are powerful if they have half the memory of an Intel machine?
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Hey man, $30 is alot of money for a paperweight!
If a full-blown 64-bit machine is a paperweight, what does that make your 32-bit peecee?
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
Can you hot swap the CPU's or RAM modules on a x86 server while its running? Or can you have 512 (is that what they are at now?) CPU's all in the same system? I don't know of any x86 servers offhand that can scale to over 8 processors (maybe they have 16 now?) or that you can hotswap CPU's in. Also its just a recent development that x86 server could address the massive amounts of ram that Sun's have been able to for years. I mean if there are x86 servers which you can do this, I wonder how their prices compare to Sun's prices, obviously you don't have hot swap CPU's on your latest gaming motherboard so its not exactly a common item there.
Sun's CPU offering is simply not competitive. On commercial workloads it gets apprxomiately half the performance of its peers. This is for two reasons: 1) the design is bad, leading to lower performance at a given clock speed, and 2) the manufacturing process is very old, leading to low clock speeds. (double whammy).
It would be very difficult for Sun to sell competitive boxes when their CPUs are half-speed. How are they going to sell an 8-way box for the same price as a 4-way commodity Xeon 3GHz?
What Sun has to do is: GET THE HELL OUT of making CPUs. It costs them tons of money, and they can't do it well, and the failure is crippling them. Everyone likes Solaris; everyone likes Sun's reliability features; everyone HATES Sparc's performance.
My advice to Sun? PARTNER WITH FUJITSU!! Fujitsu currently makes a Sparc chip that's almost twice the speed of Sun's! Sun should just drop their own CPU development and buy Sparc CPUs from Fujitsu. This would save Sun the $400M they currently spend on CPU development, drastically lowering their prices, and would double their performance. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
"If you are worried about the reliability of commodity hardware, get a back up"
This is not applicable in many situations. If you have 1TB of data it is going to be a PITA to recover that from tape.
You need mirroring and if possible data replication in a different machine or machines (each one of which has the data mirrored) if possible in different locations.
Backups must be your last resort once all the other preventive measures have failed.
If your data is really important then you owe yourself to do more than rely on slow tapes (starting with good quality systems perhaps, those 2 or 3 thousend bucks that you "saved" may come to bite you later when you face downtime. There are not blanket solutions, sometimes commodity hardware will do, other times you must use other solutions).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.