Sun Announces New x86 Servers

An anonymous reader writes "Sun announced the new V60x and V65x servers (1U and 2U respectively). The 1U has 2.8GHz Xeon CPUs and the 2U has 3.06GHz Xeon CPUs. They also announced a partnership with RedHat and Oracle running on these boxes. RedHat will also start shipping Sun's Java with their distribution."

Comments

Re:Sun is taking the same route as SGI

[phraktyl]

I've actually been looking at Sun's new entry level servers, the v210 and v240 servers.

The v210 starts at $2,995US, and the large configuration, with 2 1Ghz UltraSparc IIIi processors, 2GB of RAM, 2 36GB 10,000RPM SCSI-III drives, and 4 10/100/1000 network intarfaces comes in at $5,795US. I've seen comparible x86-based servers for more than that.

Price Comparasion

[Deathlizard]

IBM's 1U Server
Sun's 1U Server

At least they are price competitive with IBM. I'm not too sure about Dell but it's a start.

Stop the presses, misleading info...

[Znonymous Coward]

I just read the fine print... Suns JVM will only ship on Red Hat's Enterprise Linux Product.

Unfortunately...

[moogla]

While it is a very cool system... (incl. the 4 network interfaces), 1 GHz UltraSparc IIIis are slow, and they don't have the extra benefit of tons of cache compared to the regular US3. The RAM is only SDRAM (still), and 72GB of space is paltry.

So, if you absolutely need a SPARCv9 architecture rackmount, this is the way to go. But featurewise it falls short of say an Altus 140 from Penguin Computing, or even a 1000E if you want 64-bit. And Peng. Comp. is expensive as far as that kind of thing goes.

That being said, the small Enterprises are quite cool, but they aren't as cost effective. It helps if your organization has a pre-existing agreement, and can get you a break.

Routeness

[fm6]

You're picking up on one little parallel (both sell x86 boxes) and inflating it into a grand paradigm. The differences are more to the point:

• Sun sneers at x86 workstations. SGI would like to sell x86 workstations, but waited too long to enter the market.
• Sun used to talk about doing Itanium boxes, but lost interest. SGI's put a lot of effort into its Altix servers.
• Sun has an x86 rackmount business, SGI does not. Though I often wonder how serious Sun is about this business. I've noticed that people who were customers when it was a separate company called Cobalt are not happy with the new management. And you'll notice that Sun has two or three Sparc rackmount models for every one x86 model.
• Sun still has a huge Sparc development operation, and still uses Sparc exclusively in most of its products. SGI has spun off MIPS, and supposedly plans to give "commodity" systems equal priority -- though MIPS-based systems still dominate their product line.

Re:Sun is taking the same route as SGI

[joeykiller]

Because people in purchasing and management are stupid. There hasn't been a Sun worth the premium since the SS20.

Actually, I don't know if I agree with you about Sun not being worth the premium.

We run a very large web site that mainly consists of cheap Intel based hardware. But at the core of it all we've always used Sun servers with Solaris. Sure, the Sun servers have always cost us 10 times the price of comparable Intel hardware, but the Sun hardware comes with two things the Intel hardware does not:

1) The hardware (and the OS) is remarkably stable. One server ran for five years under heavy load the entire time without needing any maintenance. In the same time period we had to replace a lot of the Intel hardware.

2) In the unlikely event that something actually breaks, even if it's at 2AM in the morning, a guy comes rushing in and repairs the machine. The most amazing thing is that he always seems to have the right spare parts stored away, just in case. It's a fantastic service, and when you run a large scale, business critical operation, that kind of service is _extremely_ valuable.

And although this has nothing to do with hardware, there's (for me) an important point that concerns the OS too:

3) Even when upgrading the OS from 2.6 to 9, old software and strange old Apache modules (which we have to continue using, even though it's developer has stopped supporting them a long time ago) keeps working. I can't think of many Linux binaries from 1997 that would work for me out-of-the-box on a modern distribution today.

I'm not saying Intel hardware or Linux is bad, but I say that there are a few cases where the safety that overpriced Sun hardware can give you, gets more or less priceless.

Re:Competing Solaris against Linux

[akuma(x86)]

I agree that this is a good way for Sun to make money in the computer business. Solaris is better than Linux at certain things and that will differentiate Sun enough for customers to go with them.

Beware the Linux distributions that come out of Sun. It is in their interests to make it look bad compared with Solaris. They tried the same thing with x86 Solaris. They made it so crappy to try to convince customers to switch their hardware from x86 to Sparc.

Hardware (servers in particular) are becoming more and more commodity-like as standard components work their way up the enterprise stack. Sun can't play there, they're too inefficient compared with a company like Dell that has much lower overhead - Dell has minimal inventory and just about 0 R&D cost. In a commodity market the leanest players win and Sun is a big fat pig.

Go with software and services. It works for IBM.