Slashdot Mirror
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.
What's with the DoubleClick link? Are we not even bothering to have the illusion that the stories are really ads in disguise?
Somebody needs to combine the high-density, inexpensive technology of blade servers with a scalable single-system-image design. I'd like to be able to take a single rack chassis, four units high or something, and put one CPU in it, or two, or fourteen, or whatever, but not have to dick around with clustering or load-balancing or something.
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.
Maybe somebody has done this already. I don't really keep up with the whole blade server thing very much. Anybody know?
I write in my journal
"Most of the industry's growth over the next few years is expected to come from servers using Intel chips and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system. These so-called Wintel systems are generally cheaper and offer a wider range of chips."
A wider range of chips under Windows? They dropped the Alpha, so the only chips are Pentiums and Itaniums, right? I suppose you could argue that you have a lot more clones of Intel systems, plus options for Xeons, PIIIs, and such, but it's not really anything like the BSD or Linux systems' idea of "wider range of chips."
I've always hated the Sun channel - it is considerably more difficult to buy and sell Sun that PC gear. I wonder where Sun would be if they had a really good open channel...
-- $G
I'll be thinking a little bit more carefully about submitting a story in the future until this issue is addressed. If they want to advertise and call it journalism, that's fine - it's their sandbox. But I don't need to help them reach that goal. Of course, I could make sure to only submit stories concerning topics that couldn't possibly be related to any type of product release or the like. But then they could just throw a double-click link into the article. Oh well, no more submissions from this pony.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
I would love to have a Sun box, and each new offering from Sun looks better and better.
But they continue to shrink in marketshare, and the non-hardware related news items coming from Sun make them look, well, stupid.
Are the engineers and PHBs even talking to each other any more?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
I haven't seen the new machines, but for $1395 you get a 550MHz Sun Blade 150 with keyboard, mouse, 40 GB hard drive, 128 megs of ram, etc. It's also just PC-133 memory so you can add a gig of ram for $100 or less. Now, I was amazed to see they got rid of the Blade 100 priced at $995, but this is still affordable. To me, I'd buy a Sun box to act as a server so you can still buy the Sun Fire V100 for $995. As for the PC, that's true. $1500 will buy you a PC that will kick the Sun box's ass. For around that price I built an AMD Athlon 2000+ system with a nice 4U rackmount case, 1GB of DDR ram, two 80GB WD "Special Edition" IDE drives, a 3ware RAID-1 controller, a cheapo ATI Radeon 7000 graphics card, a 3com 3c905 network card, AND an APC 620VA Smart-UPS to replace my old colocated web/shell/mail server box. I had originally bought a Sun Netra T1 105 off of eBay for $1400 to do the same thing (the listing said it had 512MB of ram and a single 18GB SCSI drive, but it came with 1024MB of ram and the 18GB drive) and I spent another $200 to add the proprietary CD-ROM drive to it. So, $1600 down the hole before I finally realized I'd be better off just running Debian GNU/Linux on a PC box as a colocated server. It's just much much easier to keep updated and I never have to physically be at the box to upgrade it with apt-get. So let's see. 1.667 GHz AMD Athlon processor with 1 GB and two 80GB IDE hard drives vs. a 440 MHz Ultrasparc IIi with 1GB of ram and two 18GB SCSI disks. Frankly, the IDE disks run circles around the SCSI disks. I get 45MB/sec out of them. The processor is also much faster. The Sun is a dog serving up webpages and dealing with dynamic content with PHP/MySQL.
a brand new Sun Workstation is nothing special...
:)
I really don't think that there servers are that much special either. When I saw the headline, I thought that Sun was going to announce some competative hardware (faster CPUs and higher memory bandwidth), but this was about blade servers (that you can get just about anywhere) and a 12 processor box (how many people need one of these?).
I coadmin a Sun cluster (I think its like the biggest in the northern hemisphere), and admin an Alpha cluster. And although the hardware is excellent in terms of reliability and overall craftmanship, but they are too damn slow. At least for scientific computing. I've done some benchmarks on brand new 280s with the 900MHz processors (retail about 20k), and they perform as well or worse than an 800$ low end Dell (about 8 months old). Take a look at the Itanium2's performance. These guys are awsome. Memory bandwidth out the yazoo! 64bit addressing, nice machines. We're getting 3 of em soon
I loved this line from the article: Sun's been criticized heavily for sticking to its own Sparc processors and Solaris operating system.
Umm, so if they don't do this, then what do they do? Become an integrator or a reseller? One thing I will give Sun, is Solaris is pretty damn nice.
I will give one thing to Sun's boxes/Solaris. They might not be fast, but then again they never really slow down. I've seen Sun boxes that are almost completely out of memory and have a load of like 10 or 20 (maybe higher, don't remember on a 1 cpu box), and they are completely usable! Compared to my dual Alpha's running Linux, if they are paging hard and the load is about 4-6 it can take a couple of minutes just to log into one of em.
All in all I like Suns, but they look like they are setting themselves up to be an orphaned division of some other company.
Oh yea, and BTW, the main reason the Netra interested me was for the LOM support. I can't find any reasonably priced PC parts with both flawless serial console redirection support and the ability to power off/on the box from remote. Adding support like that in a card would probably run $500 easy.
Actually they do sell Linux x86 servers.
Sun will not sit back and let Linux and Intel eat up their market. I also have a friend of a friend who works for Sun and is beta testing Sun's new intel workstation line. Appearently they are noticing companies like Pixar and boeing switching to dell lintel and wintel boxes. They plan to make both 3d as well as software engineering workstations that both will run Linux. Wait until this summer or next fall for the announcment.
Since their own distro is tuned for their own hardware it will be rock solid and stable. This is something thats traditionally an advantage to Unix over Linux. Corporations will love this as well as users.
http://saveie6.com/
There are darn few things which Sun is cost effective for anymore. Running a big DB, etc... But the word is Intel for file and print servers and smaller app servers as well. Choose a Linux box with commodity hardware and you could have that entry level blade for about $1,000. If you are worried about the reliability of commodity hardware, get a back up. You still saved half your money.
Exactly right, and this is why I think they are doing themselves serious harm by still pretending like there is profit to be made in their vertical strategy. Linux hasn't hurt Sun that badly in the computer room, but it is eating its lunch in the network room and on the desktop. Who in their right mind would shell out twice or thrice the bucks for a Sun desktop box when they can get functional equivalence or better with a Linux/Intel one?
Seems like I keep beating this horse...Sun is not going to be able to compete any more on the user end unless they join the commoditization parade. Period. They don't want to recognize this but they really need to. The no-alternative days that saw any corporation needing Unix run to one of the big vendors and forking over millions for end-to-end installations are long over. SGI has been down this path already; Sun won't be able to subsidize their desktop hardware with server revenue for much longer.
You also mention another reason I hate Solaris -- the dearth of what have become common tools and features for an OS. Yes, I know that kickback from Veritas is nice, but volume management support is about six months away from becoming a throw-in. Oh yes, it makes perfect business sense to maintain an entire separate toolchain for things like 'ls' and 'grep'. Etc.
And I really wish Sun would stop calling their shitty workstations "Blades", since that term has become accepted to mean something else entirely.
Yea, and the world is full of people and software capable enough to build and support x86 failover clusters that have 24/7 operation ... right.
... once you get past the technojocks who think networking 4 x86 systems with linux is clustering.
... guess what? You've just gone to 4 independants and paid more for what you could have got just by going to somebody like SUN for a one vendor solution.
... Where are your consultants going to be around long? Or are they just a traveling snake oil salesman?
... you'll find is just as expensive as going to a top notch vendor like Sun.
Oh, I guess not
The fact of the matter is, once you've hired the right people to do this alternative, then invested in the premium hardware (What? Not buying cheap clones for your companies critical apps?), then arrange for Software and software support
On top of that
Linux is cool, no doubt. Intel platforms are inexpensive, no doubt. Linux programmers, Linux support and intel System engineering all combined together for building, deploying and maintaining mission critical apps is not. So the time you took and the money you spent and the money you are going to spend on support
As for Windows? Pftttt, Windows is a toy. Look how much effort Microsoft is putting into the home entertainment market. They see their future quite clearly.
Here's an interesting thought I've been having for the last 20 minutes:
Why doesn't Sun pull something like Apple did? Make a high-end workstation, running Solaris with some much, much better UI over top of it - something akin to Aqua.. Could call it Solarix, heh, or Solaris X or something. Possibly dump X11 in favour of a proprietary display engine, similar to Apple/QNX/NeXT/etc, but keep X11 compatibility availble in the system. Start getting stuff like Photoshop and the big 3d apps, Maya, Lightwave, Softimage|XSI, ported over. It'd probably take a serious expenditure of capital to bribe the companies into supporting the OS/architecture.. but it could be done. The SPARC processor would likely stay, of course, but they'd have to get better 3rd-party video hardware support going to really get this to play nicely. DDR memory would be necessary, too, maybe even AGP graphics. Almost a complete reworking of existing SPARC motherboards, I'd think.
Then you get high-end SPARC servers, and midrange, class workstations equivalent to Apple's best, and, if they design the OS properly, usable by new users as easily as OS X is now.
Pipe dream, maybe. Could be worthwhile for Sun to look in to this sort of thing.
What do you guys think?
Glad you got a good deal on the hardware. Be careful though.
They have a whole section of the Solaris licensing pages dedicated to relicensing. Don't laugh. For some models, Solaris 9 relicensing fees are in the US$100,000's. Not sure if this link will work because the have some strange session-management junk on the pages with the pricing on them: store.sun.com/catalog
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Therein lies the difference. Whereas a company would have to deploy "a shitload" of x86 servers, they would only require a small handful of Sun servers. This also reduces strain on the power feed, backup power systems, etc. and can significantly reduce the TCO. Initial purchase price isn't everything.
Sun equipment is also generally more powerful and scalable than its Intel bretheren, and I for one hope cheap, commodity hardware never replaces proven server-grade hardware. That's a world I'd hate to administer.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.