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Sun Releases New Servers, Blades & More

Posted by Hemos on from the rolling-out-the-new dept.

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.

26 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. New lower prices mean... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I still can't afford one! Yeah!

    1. Re:New lower prices mean... by jobeus · · Score: 5, Informative

      Hey, you can always buy used, if all you're wanting is a good play box. I got an Ultra 5 for $30 through the local "Bargain Finder" magazine. Go search ebay.

  2. Doubleclick by MCMLXXVI · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What's with the DoubleClick link? Are we not even bothering to have the illusion that the stories are really ads in disguise?

    1. Re:Doubleclick by desau · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Indeed! I was the one who posted the article, however the new bit on the end was NOT by me.. and I did NOT put a doubleclick link in my article.

      Is someone at /. trying to make a few bucks?

  3. How the Stack Up by Oculus+Habent · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  4. Re:Linux? by Wakko+Warner · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?"
  5. Re:Forget it by jobeus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Stability: tried, tested, and true. Also, the architecture is a lot more flexible, IMO. Intel's still got its problems.

  6. From the article by automag_6 · · Score: 5, Funny

    >>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.

    1. Re:From the article by pdp8 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Try lugging a V880 to LAN party though...

    2. Re:From the article by larien · · Score: 4, Informative
      Unfortunately, visualisation != gaming...

      That said, it's one heck of a card; up to 1GB of texture RAM (!!) and it's got great connectivity to the RAM as it plugs into the main system bus on a V880 rather than being limited to PCI bandwidth.

      It's a niche item, but it'll do well in visualisation studios; for instance, we have a huge rendering server with real 3D capabilities (i.e. you need the glasses) running on an SGI; this might be able to replace that.

  7. single-system-image blades by Twirlip+of+the+Mists · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  8. This is great news by Uhh_Duh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:This is great news by HamNRye · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "The blades will start at $4,800 and range up to $20,000." Umm, at an entry price of $4,800 they're not competing with Intel. Add to that their $200 keyboards, $100 mice, and $2,000 video cards, and they are still priced way the hell out there.

      We recently replaced the video cards, mice, and keyboards for 2 E450's, and the video card was an ATI rage 128 card ($295). We spent almost $1,000 outfitting our machines with peripherals. The next step up in video cards was $2,000.

      I would say that these exorbidant prices are worth it for Sun HW, but their $3,000 monitors have the life expectancy of a fruit fly. But hey, buy our pricey support agreement and we'll replace it free*! (*Free: n. How much Sun will charge you to replace a $3,000 monitor after they get $20,000 for their support contract.)

      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.

      Does Sun really think anyone is going to shell out for this hardware to run Apache?? If they can't get their foot in the webserver door, what hope is there for Sun ONE?? (Like there was ever hope, but still....) Starts to make you wonder if Sun even knows what they're trying to accomplish anymore.

      My SUN wish list:
      1) Better volume management without needing to buy Veritas. This is just another way Sun is too expensive. Having their Volume management on Par with AIX would be a start.
      2) Die CDE, Die! (Side note - Noone ever sees the desktop of our Sun boxes, noone cares, why not run a default TWM that consumes as little resources as possible.)
      3) Better Package management - Take a lesson from Debian.
      4) Better freeware access. Pre-compiled binaries are rareish, and downloading and installing gcc so you can use top (if it compiles) is just silly. Add to this my complaint about package management and you have a serious problem as far as I'm concerned.
      5) Stop being Microsofty about naming OS releases. I am tired of explaining to my boss that there were not 6 major upgrades to Solaris between 2.7 and 8. I am tired of explaining that the SunOS 3.5 we run downstairs is much, much older than Solaris 2.6. Bastards!

      (Boss, we need to upgrade from 2.6 to 8. - What, how do we know it will work! That's like upgrading WFW 3.11 to Win2000! The world will end! Can't we just upgrade to 3.5?? I hear we have that on one of our servers...)

      ~Jason

    2. Re:This is great news by antifun · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:This is great news by Darren.Moffat · · Score: 4, Informative

      1) The product formerly known as Disksuite but now much enhanced with many of the features that used to be used to compare with Veritas: Integrated as a core Solaris 9 feature (lvm).

      2) See last weeks news, Sun has already started shipping GNOME 2.x packages for Solaris 8 & 9.

      3) WebStart Wizards + SVR4 packaging is a lot more powerful than most people realise. Please don't confusing the power of the package system with a nice easy download thingy. Remeber also that Sun does real patches not just upgrade everything to the latest bits. Our enterprise level customers need this - minimal change.

      4) We ship a full CD worth of stuff including gcc and top already compiled and in SVR4 package form (gets installed into /opt/sfw by default).

      5) The reason for dropping the "2" from Solaris naming is that there are no plans for a Solaris 3.x line (that would be SunOS 6.x). That one is all down to marketing - I hated it when I first saw it but it actually makes a lot of sense.

  9. EDITORS, remove ad.doubleclick link in main story by freuddot · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Editors,
    this is unacceptable.

    Link in story :
    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

    And I'll even post with karma bonus, even though this is offtopic.

  10. Sun equipment... by Junta · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Sun equipment... by hackstraw · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Sun equipment... by Usagi_yo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      Oh, I guess not ... once you get past the technojocks who think networking 4 x86 systems with linux is clustering.

      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 ... 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.

      On top of that ... Where are your consultants going to be around long? Or are they just a traveling snake oil salesman?

      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 ... you'll find is just as expensive as going to a top notch vendor like Sun.

      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.

  11. Sun Blades are Awesome by LordYUK · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  12. Question by IWantMoreSpamPlease · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  13. Important, actually ... by theProf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  14. Re:Linux? by Wakko+Warner · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?"
  15. The real problem by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  16. Sun: Apple 2? by qa'lth · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  17. Re:Won't fix Sun's biggest problem by Usagi_yo · · Score: 3, Informative
    This is not true. The top end commercial systems suppliers all run within 90% of each other when comparing apples to apples. 50% less is a notion you pulled out of the sky.

    What is true. Sun is not at the bleeding edge of processor development -- a place primarly for scientific computing. They are however at the leading edge, along with many others, and because of that they produce very stable, very productive, very scalable commercial application servers.

    Oh, and please do have a visit to Sparc Consortium and check out the many other who contribute to sparc development.