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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.
I still can't afford one! Yeah!
What's with the DoubleClick link? Are we not even bothering to have the illusion that the stories are really ads in disguise?
They're screwed anyway.
Unless they can come up with some HUGE reason to not go Intel/Linux the server market is lost to them.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
But how do the new Sun servers compare the to new Apple servers?!
And how many lick does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie-Pop?
The world may never know.
Sorry, couldn't help myself.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
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?"
http://ad.doubleclick.net/click;h=v2|2f40|0|0|%2a| v;5176750;0-0;0;7859018;9323-728|90;2305354|230362 5|1;;%3fhttp://www.sun.com/bignews
:)
You guys always yell at us when we do it, now we yell back
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
>>A high-end Sun[tm] XVR-4000 graphics accelerator, packaged with a workgroup Sun Fire[tm] system for high-performance visualization applications
Alright, my next game box will be a Sun! Cost effectiveness be damned, it'll make up for it in cool points.
I got an Ultra 5 for $30
Hey man, $30 is alot of money for a paperweight!
*ducks*
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
That was IBM, not Sun http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/20/125721 8&mode=thread
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
I would say that is affordable.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
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.
"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."
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.
It's a valid point. There is a problem with this story. I would say this is funny.
>>Welcome to Sun's first Web-based mega-launch
Wow, they are selling *computers* on the *internet*, I guess that's proof that they are ahead of thier time. I shouldn't poke fun at that, but for me, when I hear that kind of marketing fluf as the first sentence in an article, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
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.
Looks like they have, but without an update comment. They really should own up to what they did. I mean, it was in the *editor's* text, not the submitter's....
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I had a level 11 fighter with a Sun Blade once...
nothing like twirling the sword around yer head to blind/stun/destroy undead with Sun Rays...
Sheesh, how is this "news that matters"? Any second rate geek worth his 6 siders knows about Sun Blades...
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
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.
Of course, no one on THIS site appreciates my sense of humor.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
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
If you were running Mozilla, you could turn that Ad into a big, blank box instead.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
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.
everywhere I go is news of this newfangled *blade* thing.
Blades, some new storage options, some big iron, a graphics machine...
;)
The rumour mills already knew about these well in advance
It'll be interesting to see what Sun do next: This
product release was nothing special. Their direction
regarding Linux might be a bit clearer next time around.
Note: As of 18:00 GMT, not all of the products have pages on sun.com
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.
My fault - I right clicked, and pasted the link locaton - it's been updated to the correct one.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
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.
is a some hip young guy to do TV ads.
Dude, your're getting a Sun???
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Mots reliance on sun workstatisn and laptops got them where? another roudn of layoffs at the chicago facility soon..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
What is unstable, untested, or "untrue" about x86 servers? I don't know where this argument comes from. My employer has used x86 servers for years in highly stable, high-use, high availability commerce applications for a very high traffic website.
I've got a SS20, and Ultra5. Sun, I'd love a nice new SunBlade!
The update took longer then the link correction - Apache has to propogate for it to come up.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
Cool, good to see you explain it and admit the correction.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It has 4 banks of 256 MB of texture RAM. The four banks are on separate pipelines and a copy of each texture needs to be duplicated in all four banks since you don't know what portion of the screen they will fall on.
As a result, this solution only has 256 MB of texture which isn't going to be much of a differentiation for very long. (Both NVIDIA and ATI have 256 MB boards coming--although that is shared with FB). The low FSAA resolutions and lackluster performance is what will keep people from paying 10x-20x for this visualization solution.
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?"
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?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Fans powerful enough to work with a filtration system to kill most of the dust intake.
I'd bet that more damage would occur from overheating caused by lack of air flow when the filters get clogged then if there were no filters and the equipment had dust in it.
In a server room environment, it is easier to filter the recirculated air at the central cooler then to worry about each piece of equipment seperately.
Changing/checking filters should be routine maintenance but is commonly overlooked. Not an excuse but an observation.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
..is that 64 bit desktops are really on their way now. So Sun has to pre-emptively promote its hardware in the areas where 64bit personal computers could be effectively deployed in the data center. IBM's power4/5, AMD and Intel's 64 bit offerings are going to blow Sun off the map and they know it. This will enable robust RAM addressing space that's good enouguh for enterprise-level servers. When 64bit chips start arriving in quantity (late 03 early 04) we can all kiss Sun's licensing and pricey hardware goodbye.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Yes, you can always get extra third party memory, but how does that help customers perceive Sun better? Quick Answer: It doesn't. The plain and simple fact is that off the shelf Sun hardware (the stuff that comes in a shiny plastic case that you should never, ever have to do anything more than plug in) is heavily underpowered for what it does. And the worst part of it is that filling out the boxes with some serious memory shouldn't affect Sun's bottom line all that much. That is, unless a Sun Engineer is hanging around somewhere and can tell me the critical point I'm missing.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The difference is in the pricing structure - before this box came out, you had to jump to a "midrange" server, and pay a massive premium:
...
V880 - 8CPU @ 900 MHz, 16GB - 100k
V1280 - 12CPU @ 900 MHz, 24GB - 174k
4800 - 12CPU @ 1.2 GHz, 48GB - 450k
6800 - 16CPU @ 1.2 GHz, 64Gb - 743k
6800 - 24CPU @ 1.2 GHz, 96Gb - 1,000k
Prices c/o http://store.sun.com
So, if you didn't quite fit on an 8 CPU box, watch the prices jump
As funny as this sounds, I'm buying more Sun equipment now then I ever have. I'll admit I love sun boxes, but I also manage 300-400 linux boxes. But we are buying more and more Sun equipment because it's so cheap. I just got a 420 (4proc/2gigmem) with D1000 (12x18GB) for about 6k. I get stocked 250s for 2.5k. They are almost new, and much much much more reliable than all my rackables.
While I know this won't last, I find it interesting. Linux was always easy because it was so cheap, but used sun prices have really changed things. For the first time in about 3 years I'm seeing an increase in the number of Sun boxes I manage
" The Slashdot default score should be the median score of your last eleven moderated messages"
Don't you mean "mean" or "mode"? With median, in a set of eleven comments, each being modded -1, with the 6th being modded 5, the default score would be 5, even though though the poster would seem to be a troll. With mean, the default score would be the more appropriate 0. With mode, the default score would be -1.
Or maybe I'm wrong. I'm not aware of any other definitions of median, though. If I am wrong, I apologize.
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
Alright guys....let's mod Hemos down ;-)
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.
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?
Sun needs to focus it's business. IMHO they should focus on mini mainframe systems. Dell, Compaq, and Apple are taking the low end. Sun can't compete where they stink.
Sun has very high grade hardware. Reliable, and proven. They should stick to that.
To many markets spreads a company to thin.
Even the OS should stick to being high end, industrial product. Don't make solaris for everyone. Everyone doesn't need it. Redhat, et. al. have that end covered.
And Java could use a good overhaul. Make it more capable, rather than frozen in time like it appears now.
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
I think Sun will continue to lose, both marketshare, overall sales, stock value, everything. They do a lot of neat stuff, but the one that pays the bills is getting hammered by cheap Intel/Linux solutions. There's less and less need for enterprise class servers these days as the cheap stuff gets more powerful, and that business will go to companies offering the best service -- probably IBM. Since IBM is best able to continue Sun's work on this front, IBM is a natural buyer to step in at the last minute to save Sun's ass. Not to mention that IBM is already as big a Java player as Sun itself, and could benefit from Sun's talent. How soon will this happen? I'd say give it a couple of years, maybe three...
Heck, for that matter, a -1 or 5 poster would be Babe Ruth, home runs or strikeouts. Mod that person up because they make the conversation interesting.
In the real world, the difference would be small anyway. I agree with the basic sentiment though.
Maybe the base should be the standard deviation of the previous modifications. That would block the Karma whores and contribute to risk taking.
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
Ummm, isn't this the idea behind a multi-cpu box?
Yes. That's what "single system image" means. But it would be cool if the systems were more scalable and less expensive. The V880 scales from 2 to 8 processors and the V1280 only goes up to 12. That blows in terms of scalability. It seems that there should be a way to make a system scale from 1 to N processors, for some very large value of N, for a lot less money up front and preferably less money per upgrade step.
Single system images are easy, for some very large value of easy, up to 1024 processors; SGI sells 1024-processor machines right off their price list. You can phone them up and order one. Why can't we apply blade server technology, high-speed interconnects, and single-system-image operating systems to make a system with a low entry price that scales economically?
Oh, and speaking of economically, you got ripped off something big. A thousand bucks per desktop? That's terrible. You either overpaid for your server, or you're seriously underusing it.
I write in my journal
...People who divine the future and interpret industry news by gazing up their own asses.
"Sun's single operating system, single chipset design, is getting a little old now," said keen MTV viewer and Sageza Group analyst Charles King.
At least Sun is making steps in the right direction, analysts say. Its new blades are compatible with Intel systems, as if this is fucking news to anyone who has ever put a PCI card in an E450.
"That means customers can connect Sun's products with all types of different blades and use them together," said Jim Garden, a deluded inmate in the special care wing of the local happy house. Unless "use them together" means "plug them into the same electric supply".
"Now they've got to go out and win more customers." Doh! That's where they've been going wrong! Although come to think of it, I can recall several companies that seem to be on the opposite tack.
Ade_
/
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
"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.
Well, the Fire 15K scales up to 96 CPUs, it even has something like blades - it is called Uniboards. ;-)
Sure the price for base configuration it still high.
Same with SGI - just they have a litte bigger granularity with their CPU Bricks, as they like to call them. You see, modularity is there.
The problem is that the high-speed interconnects that acually scale up to several hundred CPUs are hideously expensive. Gigabit Ethernet just doesn't cut it for these applications and that is what common blades usually have.
Red Hat does not have the capability to provide support round the clock every time for both hardware and software.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You see, modularity is there.
;-)
God, dude, I really appreciate your input, but you are so missing the point. Read my original post, okay? I started with the Origin series and said, "Gee, wouldn't it be cool if you had a system that scaled like a blade server but used a single system image like an Origin?"
So like I said, while I appreciate your input, we are now right back where I started from.
I write in my journal
Indeed.
But there won't ever be, as single system images limit scalability.
But there won't ever be, as single system images limit scalability.
Single... what? SSI defines scalability. "How far does this system scale?" "Uh. Two processors. But you can cluster them!" "So the answer is two processors, then. That sucks."
I write in my journal
Every SSI has some amount of intercommunication it needs to keep itself in a consistent state. At a certain number of CPUs this communication grows so large, that adding more CPUs doesn't yield results.
This is the scalability limit I meant.
That said, please decide what you want.
You can have large CPU Single System Image scalability, go to SGI and pay the price. As I wrote above in this thread, the interconnects for node coupling that is sufficiently fast for SSI operation isn't cheap.
So, maybe your question should rather read: "Gee, wouldn't it be cool if you had a massively scalable system that was as cheap as a blade server but used a single system image like an Origin?"
To which I'd say: "Yes, would be cool, but won't ever be there."
Many CPUs, Cheap, SSI, pick two.
This is the scalability limit I meant.
;-)
We have yet to reach that limit. I've personally seen 1,024-processor systems-- well, one system, but there are others out there-- and I've heard that 2,048 is working in the lab. The limit right now has nothing to do with anything intrinsic; it's a cost issue. It's really expensive to get two 1,024-processor systems in the same place at the same time.
That said, please decide what you want.
I already have. I want a scalable blade system.
I write in my journal
The Whole poin of N1 is to allow many many smaller servers to act as one big virtual server
Virtual smirtual. The goal here-- in my little thought-experiment-- is to have scalability and cost effectiveness without unnecessary complexity. Clusters, apart from being unsuited for many tasks, are unnecessarily complex. N1, as I understand it, is basically a glorified cluster with some additional layers of complexity on top to make it seem simpler. (Which strikes me as wrong-headed, but that's just me.)
Thats 714 CPUs in one system image with *near* linear scalability.
Yawn. You can buy an Origin 3000 with 1,024 CPU's with considerably better bandwidth than what you described with nothing more than a phone call. The systems ship preconfigured from SGI's Eagan plant. They're not special orders or anything; they're in the price list, for cryin' out loud.
This has been the case since about 1996. The size of the largest supported system image has increased-- from 64 processors to 128 to 512 and now to 1,024, with 2,048 coming later this year-- and the interconnects have gotten faster over time, but the software and the overall system architecture have remained essentially unchanged for the past seven years.
It's good to see that Sun is finally catching up to where SGI was in the mid-1990's.
I write in my journal
That's pretty much the question, isn't it!
...
I suspect Sun will bring in the V1680 when they feel that there is a perceived need to compete on price at the 16 CPU level