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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.
"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?"
Stability: tried, tested, and true. Also, the architecture is a lot more flexible, IMO. Intel's still got its problems.
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...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
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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