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Sun Considers Opteron
Sanjay writes "Official from Sun spokesman. Sun is considering using AMD's Opteron chip in a server it expects to deliver to the market shortly.
Intead of fighting Win of Wintel (like Redhat is doing), Sun can choose to fight both with Linux AMD's servers and also fight with HP/IBM as Itanium is anyway a non starter.
Sun can rise again!
"
It's only the SECOND post and the FIRST post to mention the fact that this article is a dupe, yet some moron mods this as REDUNDANT??? Fucking idiots.
How about a feature of SlashCode that, at preview time, it searches the site for words similar to ones in the story to be submitted, and displays the results. This would allow the submitter to determine if he is submitting a likely dupe.
This can be repeated for the poster...
Which sounds like the perfect definition for a Slashback story. We don't need another full-blown story on this just because Sun confirmed it. All we need is a paragraph in Slashback saying, "By the way, remember this story about Sun and the Opteron? Sun's confirmed it."
Sun needs to start looking at implementing new techniques in regards to it's OS and hardware integration business. Everyone knows that Sun UNIX can perform admirably and is very powerful, but at the same time, IBM is showing that Linux can be substituted for UNIX in the low to mid-level range, and HP has proven that they can sell Linux servers in the absence of huge corporate support.
Many pointy hairs are also awakening to the fact that Linux is evolving way faster then any previous OS in history. This realization is forcing many of them to position themselves in order to benefit from Linux. They are starting by replacing all of their low to medium-level extremely expensive UNIX solutions with Linux implementations, and waiting for Linux to overtake UNIX on the top tier. This saves them tons "in the meantime" and prepares them for the eventual replacement of their high-end solutions. Sun has to know that this scenario is inevitable and play along. Pride will only get you but so far.
McNealy has been fighting Linux for far too long, calling it "just another tool". I got news for you, all OS's are tools. Only this tool here can save your ass a ton while doing everything that every other tool promises to do on the low and medium ends.
Right now, Linux is "it" - and it shows no signs of slowing up. Microsoft makes their money off desktops and their office suite. UNIX makes money off stability and power. Stability and power is what the open source developers aim to improve. UNIX beware - evolve or perish, because you're next..
They probably do, but the search engine on slashdot is complete garbage. I've often found that if I search on something that was in the title of a story three days ago, it is usually on the ninth or tenth page of matches :P
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It never ceases to amaze me how ill-informed people are. Sun has been battered heavily in the stock market, but they aren't "drying" up. There is no way PC architectures will replace "real computers"...they just aren't made to do that kind of job properly. If you're going clock for clock on silly single-user apps, maybe but when are you going to find a partitioned 512 processor PC (in one box) that heals itself and scales as well as Starfire. x86 is junk pure and simple. Opterons are being considered by Sun in the same way as Intel procs made their way into Sun's product list in the form of Cobalt. Sun isn't replacing Sparc with Opteron... that would be utterly retarded and Sun isn' retarded like HP is (read scrapping Tandem, PA-RISC, and Alpha for an unproven architecture that they don't control). Check out the specs on the USIV. Opteron is all about migrating customers off of 32 bit machines onto the Solaris platform. It is a step up to Sparc. Sparc based systems have been 64 bit since Solaris 7 and the Ultra 1 140. That's roughly 1995 or so.
small profits are better than none
Nope, at some point small profits are not enough. If you can get better returns buying government bonds AND the foreseeable future looks no better, you should sell off the company assets and get a fed-direct account.
Check out the SPEC web site [spec.org]. The performance of Sun's SPARC processors is pathetic. Sun is forced to migrate to the x86 instruction-set architecture (ISA). Sun is forced to use Opteron or Xeon. The irony is that the Opteron, the descendant of the lowly 4-bit 4004 traffic-light controller, beats the pants off of the UltraSPARC.
If you buy high-end server hardware based on what an individual CPU benchmarks at in terms raw flops/integer ops, you really have no clue about what people look for in enterprise systems.
If people actually bought systems based on the speed of individual processors, Alpha would have dominated the market.
p.s. How many single-system-image x86 machines do you see with hundreds of cpus?
man tunefs | grep fish
If you don't see why it's a fight, then you don't understand economics!
Each company wants to succeed and make greater profits. In fact, they're *obligated* to their share holders to do just that. However, there's a finite market for these things, so they've all got to compete with each other - fighting.
Look at DEC's Alpha. A truly great product. But because the various companies that owned it weren't able to compete (fight) with it, look where it's at today.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Given how much time Sun has lost on the Linux revolution compared to rivals IBM, HP and even Dell, they need to make a concerted push in less than two directions.
I think the Solaris/x86 effort dilutes the strength of Sun's commitment to Linux. They can say that there's cross fertilization, but they're sending a mixed message to their customers. Those customers, like me, have appreciated Sun's UNIX experience, their leading the way with things like NFS, RPC, NIS and Java, and their emphasis on hardware reliability and performance.
Those customers are looking at the economics of Linux/x86 and like what they see. That's bad for Solaris/SPARC, except where the big iron hangs out. And the cut-off transition from where x86 won't suffice to mainframes that will do the job keeps moving up the food chain. Sun's food chain. The lucrative high end is becoming an ever shrinking market.
What does Linux need that Sun can do better than others?
Where Sun can make a big difference is in enterprise level management. Big directory/authentication services; interoperable services for managing heterogeneous LANS. Performance tuned next generation NAS/SAN services.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I'm currently reading Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma". His hypothesis perfectly describes Sun's predicament. Successful established companies will pursue higher end, higher margin markets and ignore smaller markets that have smaller margins and more competition. Eventually, an underpowered underdog (say, Linux) captures the smaller markets. Through gradual improvements, the underdog is eventually powerful enough to meet the requirements of the established company's customers. The established company is then left holding nothing. This pattern of "lousy but cheap (or smaller)" eventually beating "good but expensive" can be seen in many industries.
cpeterso
I'm pretty sure Compaq and others already have hot-swap for cards, and support terabytes of storage (which is really just a matter of having enough FC bandwidth for whatever you're doing and plugging into the same standard storage arrays the Sun can).
Hot-swapping CPUs and RAM is trickier, but Sun only offers that on high end models which have no direct counterpart in the PC marketplace. Even then, it's a dicey situation at best.
With the E10K generation, you can hotswap CPU boards (there's 16 of them, each holding up to 4 processors, 4G ram, and two I/O busses (4x Sbus cards or 2x PCI cards). Thus you very much have to plan ahead to make sure you can "swap out" a given board without losing anything (oops, the failed memory is on the board with the only controller for this scsi disk over here, or the only one with this gigabit network connection). Assuming you built the machine right so that no single board is a single point of failure, you hit the next problem: If a CPU or memory module were to actually fail during runtime, it is still just as likely to cause an OS crash. The advantage is that in most cases the offending peice of hardware (1 CPU, 1 bank of RAM, etc) will be blacklisted and not used at all when the machine reboots from the panic (now you have a 15 CPU machine instead of 16). Then after that reboot, you can go about hot-swapping in a replacement with the OS online. You run some commands which basically tell the scheduler to stop scheduling on those CPUs, and tell the VM to not allocate any more physical ram in a certain region - then it goes about paging all the allocated RAM off to other ram or swap until it has emptied the board - then you can swap in the new stuff and re-add the CPU/mem into the OS.
On the newer SunFire architecture (3800s, 6800's, 15K, etc), they finally split the I/O boards from the CPU/Mem boards to make this a bit less painful, thank god. Still, in either case, you dont get a 4-way that scales to 64. You could buy a 64-capable machine (or higher now with SunFire architecture), and only populate it with 4 CPUs because you expect growth - but an E10K with just 4 CPUs in is a huge waste of cash - we're talking at least several hundred thousand dollars, for the hardware equivalent of what other companies sell for just a few thousand dollars. I think at one point a few years ago my company bought one 1/4 configured (16 CPU 16 GB ram) and left the other 3/4 open for expansion, and the cost was on the order of around $1,300,000. Do you really want to pay 50x+ over the same hardware capacity of a top end x86 just to be able to expand and have better support?
And in any case - these solutions, ultimately, may have slightly better sigma numbers on uptime, but they are still riddled with single points of failure, and ultimately no Sun solution is truly reliable with resorting to redundant clustering of oen sort or another. Once you resort to a redundant cluster, you're saying "I don't care if the hardware fails occasionally, my cluster will handle it while we do the maintenance". At that point, are you going to spend that much more money to make the difference between 99.9% and 99.999%?
Lets make a rough real example - a 24/7 Oracle database. In the Sun world, to get 24/7 uptime, you'd build out two machines of appropriate power (let's say 2x 6800s), and drop Oracle's OPS or RAC (or whatever they call the next generation) on it for a fully fault-tolerant cluster. You'd attach it to an FC SAN of appropriately configured redundant storage.
On the x86 side, you'd rack up the equivalent in I/O and CPU horsepower worth of 1U boxes (let's say 32x 1U dual processor large-ram crap-reliability boxes from Penguin Computing or something).
Either one is going to be very reliable because of Oracle's nonstop clustering stuff. You'll experience more failures/year on the x86 solution, but losing one of 32 machines is no biggie for a few hours while you drop in a spare.
Two fully loaded 6800's is gonna run you about $2.0 million. 32 high end-ish (lets say 10K a pop) 1U machines is gonna run you $0.32 million. You do the math.
11*43+456^2
Don't forget Fujitsu. They make direct replacements for Sun's servers.
And I do mean direct: They have SPARC compatible processors which are better than Sun's and they run Solaris. No idea on cost, though...
If I were Sun, I'd be a bit worried.