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

wow

[banka]

is this a ditch effort by sun to stay alive? it seems as though they've just been slipping away in recent years; they had the "One" platform of ubiquotous distributed computing and then that sort of disappeared, are we going to see the end of solaris soon?

Sun is taking the same route as SGI

[mikael]

Remember when the x86 workstations began to eat into SGIs bottom line? They responded with building x86 workstations. The same thing is happening to Sun. Their SPARC servers are not keeping up with x86 servers, just as SGI IRIX/MIPS workstations began to lag in performance.

Now before the slashdot crowd begins to scream "But hey! The Sun Fire V480 is really fast!", remember that it is $19,995.00 in the base configuration. You'll get 10 IBM rack servers for the same price. In a clustered enterprise situation 20 3GHz Xeon will perform better than 2 900MHz UltraSPARC. Especially if we are talking Java.

Just as SGI was faster in the absolute high-end, so is Sun. The E15k is a monster. For some very specialized applications, this may be the only way to go. But for the very large majority of systems being purchased, a simple x86 server will do, especially if you can cluster it. This is where Sun is loosing the grip. Earlier you had to have a SPARC machine for advanced enterprise computing. These days are over, just as you had to have a SGI to run 3D software.

Now they are competing head to head with Dell in the x86 arena. This is a bold move. Wonder how long they will last.

Re:Sun is taking the same route as SGI

[BWJones]

Just as SGI was faster in the absolute high-end, so is Sun. The E15k is a monster. For some very specialized applications, this may be the only way to go. But for the very large majority of systems being purchased, a simple x86 server will do, especially if you can cluster it. This is where Sun is loosing the grip. Earlier you had to have a SPARC machine for advanced enterprise computing. These days are over, just as you had to have a SGI to run 3D software.

Actually, I am seeing a number of folks either 1) migrate to or 2) seriously consider Apple's Xserve for purposes sort of in-between. The Xserve runs UNIX, it is absurdly easy to manage, they are cheap, and give pretty good performance especially when code is optimized for Altivec. Add to that the power consumption (or rather lack thereof), and for large numbers of servers, the Xserve becomes even more attractive in terms of lower electricity and cooling costs.

Re:Sun is taking the same route as SGI

[CatOne]

The IO on the box is already amazing, for large file transfers/etc. And if you want disk speed, hook up an Xserve RAID and run a 7 disk SCSI 5 array. Benchmarks are showing 210 MB/second *sustained* for reads and writes.

Might help get x86 into Sun-only shops

[djh101010]

I'm in a corporate environment where trying to get Linux or *BSD into the data center is an uphill battle. If the box comes from Sun, and runs Oracle, that makes that argument a whole lot easier for me. Even if it's more expensive than commodity hardware, they do have a deserved reputation for solid hardware, and I can use the logic that if Sun is willing to put their name on it, they're willing to back it up. I'm building a support system that's going to need it's own database; this box is worth looking into, for me.

Re:Might help get x86 into Sun-only shops

[crotherm]

I work for a rather large aerospace corp whose name name starts with a B, and we still do not have a real linux road map. With SUN putting its name on low cost servers, hopefully this will make it that much eaiser for me to get linux in here and stop the windows server advance in the machine room.

Re:Ahh, the final nail in the coffin called Sun.

[stratjakt]

Sun, like others, looks to be making the switch towards a more software and service oriented company, and less on the hardware. I've had no first hand experience, but from what I've heard, their support is second to none.

So these things are competitively priced, and if they come with useful support by people who actually know what they're selling and building (unlike Dell who no doubt has those moronic interns answering the phone), then they could definately make a go of it.

But the writing on the wall is that all of these specialized architectures are doomed to obsoletion. Commodity hardware is ever faster, fast enough to handle what were previously 'big iron' chores.

Re:They don't care that Sun Java is non-free?

[Wesley Felter]

Red Hat only cares about open source for their regular distribution; for Enterprise Linux they're willing to make an exception. I wonder if they're going to continue to include IBM's JVM in RHEL, though.

Competing Solaris against Linux

[HighOrbit]

are we going to see the end of solaris soon?

Absolutely not the end of Solaris. Sun is shifting some of their focus (if not most) from producing hardware to being a software and services company. Although this was announced along with the Red Hat deal, this is actually an attempt by Sun to compete Solaris against Linux at the low end. Sun is basically admitting and re-acting to what people have been saying for months (if not years) - Linux has been eating at Solaris by replacing high-cost sparcs with low cost x86.

The Red Hat deal is an obfuscation. The real aim here is to co-opt Linux by having current Solaris shops stay with Solaris. Lots of these shops that would have replaced the Sparc/Solaris platform with Linux are now going to be induced to stay with Solaris on x86. Sun figures that it is better to sell Solaris services without Sparc than to sell nothing at all.

Up until now, Solaris on x86 was always a "redheaded stepchild" at Sun. The hardware support was terrible and limited (very few video cards, for example). Hopefully, Sun will now give x86 good hardware support.

This is only for RedHat Enterprise Linux

[miniver]

If you look at Sun's press release about Red Hat you'll see that Red Hat will be including the JVM with their RH Enterprise Linux distributions ... not with Red Hat Linux, and that Sun will only be supporting RH Enterprise Linux. Why? Because Sun still won't license the JVM for redistribution. I'm not saying that Sun is wrong here (it's their toy, they get to choose the license), but this is what has been slowing the acceptance of Java on Linux with many developers. (Except for corporate Java developers -- they love it, and thus, so do I.)

Sun's trying to balance control of Java against market acceptance, and Solaris against Linux. Sun obviously thinks that anyone who wants Java for Linux will go to the effort of downloading it from Sun, while at the same time they get to differentiate Solaris from Linux by including Java. On the other hand, Sun could hardly sell & support Linux on Sun servers without also including Java; this agreement gives them what they want without letting go of their (perceived) control of Java.