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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!
"
Here
:)
Whatever happened to those of us with acess to TMF being able to submit notice for pending dupes? I tried, but there's no easy way to figure out how to send a note to the editors. I still like the idea (naturally, since I brought it up) of a little form on TMF stories with the ability to submit dupe notification right then and there.
Of course, if I'm wrong, then, fine.
And maybe we should change that slogan, what about:
News for the amnesiac. Stuff that mattered
After hearing that Microsoft is going to use it, and Now, Sun.
So when is Intel going to use Opteron?
SCO to Hell
Is taco really a human? The /. editor turing test (/.ETT) has been applied and the answer is ....
YES
Since any computer could be programmed to check for dupes. Unless of course TacoAI is sooo devious that it intentionally posts dupes to make is _seem_ like there is a real human being.
When Taco starts singing "Daisy", then we'll know the truth.
Let me get a press release together, hang on...
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
April 8: Sun may use Opteron
April 9: Microsoft commits to Opteron
April 10: Sun considers Opteron
Who's following who ?
The problem for Sun is that Linux on Opteron does not give Sun much in the way of profits because the profit margin is low and competition is fierce. Sun cannot compete against IBM and HP in this area. Worse, Sun has no services organization to make any money by helping its customers to use Linux on Opteron.
Anyhow remember that stupid comment by Scott McNealy, who claimed that Sun is a one system -- one OS and one processor -- company. Now, Sun is distributing 2 OSes and 2 processors. Read the article at the Economist web site . It says that Sun will lose out big time in the Linux marketplace.
The Sun is setting. Good Riddance.
You've GOT to be kidding? If you were running desktops or small workstations, maybe. But, servers?!
Ever hot swap a CPU on a SMP PC? How about adding a CPU or RAM module without powering down? Hot sawp PCI? How about 4-way machines scalable to 64-way? 64+ Gb of RAM? Terabytes of storage?
PCs are only starting to be able to compete in that market, which is why Sun, IBM, and HP still sell those types of machines.
If you don't need those types of options, then PCs are fine.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
From the office of Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf (aka Baghdad Bob):
"Sun actually can rise again!???"
Think about it.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
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
Hell, I only spend a few minutes a day reading slashdot, and I have no trouble instantly spotting the dupes, so it wouldn't be too onerous a burden on your editors, would it?