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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?
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"
Stability: tried, tested, and true. Also, the architecture is a lot more flexible, IMO. Intel's still got its problems.
>>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.
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
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Er, sorry, Canadian dollars. Our money's worth crap all up here. ;)
And hey, it does stuff... Almost as much as the SGI Indy I got for nothing!
"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.
>>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.
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!!
Q. What is Calvin's monster snowman called? A. The Torment Of Existence Weighed Against The Horror of Non Being
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
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.
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
It's only a matter of time until the GNU community catches up with admin tools too.
Also - When I said Linux I meant OpenBSD. Dunno what came over me.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
Anywhere between five and fifteen times faster?
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Gnome is unusually slow on Solaris/Sparc, for some reason. Try KDE or any other WM and it will perform MUCH better.
"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.