Sun Microsystems, SuSE Link Up To Sell Linux

ChilyWily writes "Reuters is reporting that Sun Microsystems Inc. has agreed to resell and support closely held German software firm SuSE's version of the Linux operating system, the leading variant in Europe, the companies said on Friday. This agreement follows a similar one in May between Sun and Red Hat Inc. While I'm happy to see Sun's finally beginning to warm up to Linux (aka if you can't beat 'em, join 'em strategy) I wonder if this is too late for Sun?"

Comments

It's about time...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that Sun capitalized on their immunity from whatever craziness that SCO comes up with next -- no matter what, Linux from Sun is free and clear from litigation.

Re:It's about time...

[melete]

no matter what, Linux from Sun is free and clear from litigation.

Not neccesarily. In the unlikely event that SCO were to win their case, Sun would be distributing any tainted parts of Linux without a valid license from the original copyright holder of the tainted code. For SCO to win, the GPL has to be invalidated, at least in a limited sense, which will leave everyone, including SCO and Sun, scrambling for legal cover.

Re:It's about time...

[Curtman]

"no matter what, Linux from Sun is free and clear from litigation"

Thats fine as long as they are fee and clear to distribute it under the GPL, you and I are free and clear by proxy.

Re:It's about time...

[arcanumas]

Linux NOT from Sun is also clear from litigation.
They can't sue you unless there is a court decision saying they own what they claim they do.

Re:It's about time...

[vsprintf]

Not neccesarily. In the unlikely event that SCO were to win their case, Sun would be distributing any tainted parts of Linux without a valid license from the original copyright holder of the tainted code.

How so? Sun has been in bed with SCO for months. They paid some portion of many millions of dollars for the right to the Unix code. To me it looks like Sun is playing both ends of the game, and in the middle is Solaris. I certainly wouldn't construe this as a friendly move -- just another move for Sun.

Re:It's about time...

[sql*kitten]

How so?

I suppose if Sun distributed a Linux kernel that had code in it that IBM got from AIX or Dynix?

Re:It's about time...

[vsprintf]

I suppose if Sun distributed a Linux kernel that had code in it that IBM got from AIX or Dynix?

Sun was already free and clear. Then they secretly purchased an additional license from SCO, which they don't need but indemnifies them for using the so-called UNIX(C)(R)(TM) code. Now, the licensing deal has been made public. Sun will look like a legal Linux distributer to many. In the worst case of a brain-dead judge in the SCO/IBM case, Sun just drops Linux and laughs all the way to the bank, while helpfully switching Linux users to Solaris. What part of that is so hard to understand?

Re:It's about time...

[Chemicalscum]

This is all about Java and nothing to do with SCO. SuSE is an extension of IBM (IBM rescued SuSE from bankruptcy and parachuted in long time IBM Germany executive Richard Seibt in as SuSE CEO)

My guess is that by getting SuSE to distribute the Sun JVM in return them distributing SuSE on their x86 kit they are hoping it will help to stave of IBM's increasing influence over the development of Java. This is especially so as Linux moves into the enterprise datacenter running middleware where java apps are the key.

Re:It's about time...

[Marc2k]

Mmm....That's the point. A large part of SCO's case is that they claim that code put into any official, registered branch of UNIX (a'la AIX) is their intellectual property in accordance with the UNIX licensing terms. By paying the royalties to SCO now, Sun will be indemnified of all discrepencies (on SCO's part), in the event that the AIX code is, in fact, determined to be owned by SCO through that indirect and shady means.

What I think is interesting is whether or not Sun can and/or will go after SCO to recoup losses for royalty payments that SCO never actualy owned, after this case is settled (provided SCO loses, that is).

Re:It's about time...

[grigori]

more likely recent deals were to buy Intel device drivers that could port easy from SCO to SOlaris 86 instead of write from scratch. Nuffink stupid 'bout that

it never too late

[McAddress]

to go to linux. however, sun is making a big mistake. if they are not marketing solaris, they are losing their main product. why would you use a sun chip if you can get a 4 chip 64-bit x86 system running at speeds greater than 3.0 ghz? for much less. if linux takes off, it will not only destroy microsoft, but there will also be some friendly fire deaths involved as well.

Re:it never too late

[BFKrew]

I think the Sun vs Linux case is one in which the costs of going from Solaris to Linux in terms of hardware and training isn't that. Certainly I can see why spending a few thousand less by going for Linux over Sun.

However, as for Linux "destroying" Microsoft, the case isn't as clear as you simplistically state. There is a far greater difference between a Red Hat/SuSE and 2000 server than Solaris.

Re:it never too late

[Anonymous Coward]

They market linux on their low-end machines, not on their high end machines (yes a 4 chip machine is low end in these waters). Their market is different than the one you're talking about.

Sun already lost the low-end market. They're trying to buffer their high end market by saying "we too can interact with that other OS, no need to change your high-end just to get linux compatibility"

Re:it never too late

[epiphani]

There will always be a market for Sun boxes - of all the higher-end server machines that have been out there, sun has outlived most. They're now the defacto non-intel platform in the server arena. From my experience, sun hardware is the first platform out there that you'll run into if you cut out apple and i386 hardware.

Plus, Sun is much more than just a hardware/OS company. They're diversifying - thats good. They probably see the threat that linux/open source represents to their sun/solaris product lines, and are moving to embrace it, so they can have a peice of the linux pie when it starts eating into their solaris cashflow.

Re:it never too late

[Anonymous Coward]

That's like saying the ground is the first thing you'll crash a plane into, if you cut out the oceans and mountains.

Re:it never too late

[RallyDriver]

Sun was the de facto standard 3 years ago - HP and IBM now are taking big chunks out of this market.

The big PA-RISC / Itanium boxes like superdome kick butt, and HP-UX has now matured into a serious industrial grade large server OS - NT, and (much as I love it for small boxes) Linux both have a way to go in this area.

Re:it never too late

[Curtman]

I think that with GNU/Linux being so portable, there is a chance we might be able to do away with manufacturers locking us in to an architecture. I for one would like to see hardware compete based on cost/efficiency, rather than the manufacturers operating system. It forces Sun to be more competitive if they are going to remain a hardware vendor, and the death of Solaris might free up a lot of resources that could be in hardware R&D. Having Linux as a supported platform also provides us the ability to do real world benchmark results. A comparison of the same code running on different hardware should be more useful than having numbers to compare from Windows vs Solaris vs Mac OS vs Linux vs BSD would anyhow. As long as we don't limit their ability to change the hardware without breaking compatibility we probably don't need Solaris around anyhow.

Re:it never too late

[Anonymous Coward]

so they can have a peice of the linux pie when it starts eating into their solaris cashflow.

When it starts?!?!? What, 2 years ago? We started moving into x86/Linux for high end commercial servers the moment the economy started to go south and we had to cut costs.

There's still a definite market for SUN, and it's still my preferable server platform - but it's losing out on price, and the increasingly high quality solutions available with Linux from the likes of IBM.

Re:it never too late

[questforme]

Wow, A Sun press release saying that their competitors lost market share, I'm surprised. I'm sure it's impartial.

Re:it never too late

[Pieroxy]

They made some good hardware

Hmm...

My company has a lot of Sun boxes, and invariably, every month (sometimes every other week) one piece of hardware fails (CPU, Memory, Mobo...) and the Sun guys come in and replace it.

I never, never had this failure rate with an x86 platform. Even when you buy the cheap "noname" taiwanese chips!!

Re:it never too late

[Kenja]

Your right, why run on a platform that scales to 128+ CPUs with 16megs of cache per CPU when you can run on a consumer platform that cant scale higher then 4 CPUs and has poor IO?

Have you ever realy used Sparc systems? The things are tanks, no matter what sort of work load I throw at them they just don't stop. On a single task a PC will be faster, however under heavy load the PC just falls apart.

Re:it never too late

[n3rd]

Check the source (Gartner).

Can you point me in the direction of any press releases from IBM, HP or SGI that say they're #1 in the UNIX server market?

Would you like me to provide other sources that say they're #1?

Re:it never too late

[1lus10n]

HP-UX is nowhere near as good or refined, or well known as solaris.

and Itanium proc's suck, they aren't even as good as alpha proc's, let alone the newer ultrasparc's. take a look at real world benchmarks for that type of equipment, like database benchmarks. Sun/Solaris OWN high end benchmarks, and still constitute the majority of the enterprize field.

and i wont get into the enterprise level of support that Sun offers, it beats everyone else hands down.

And you know how linux is making leaps and bounds ? take a look at some of the more recent code that has been put into the kernel, and in userland. Sun is a major contributor.

Re:it never too late

[1lus10n]

how old are these sun boxes ? what models are they ?

We have an E450, Two v65's and Two sun fire 210's at work. we have had E450 for several years and the rest of the stuff is new. we have had one hard-drive fail. nothing else.

we also have a ton of workstations, going all the way back to sparcstation 5's. never had any major failures there either, few hard-drives and one stick of RAM IIRC.

Re:it never too late

[ScrewMaster]

Ah ... I believe that Linux has already taken off. Netcraft's Web surveys indicate that Linux not only has a commanding lead in the Web server market but is continuing to grow it. Linux is poised to capture a significant (if not majority) share of the desktop market. And if the collateral damage from that success is the end of Microsoft domination of the desktop, well, I for one won't be crying in my beer over it.

No organization is indispensable (although they often think they are.) If Sun makes a sufficient number of boneheaded strategic errors ala Apple Computer and goes out of business (as Apple probably should have done), so be it. Someone with a better grasp of the market will fill the void, should it need filling. Won't be the end of the world.

Re:it never too late

[ScrewMaster]

Yes, and the truth is that Sun has some damn good Unix programmers. It also wouldn't hurt to have them pile some of their expertise into Open Source, either, much as IBM has done. They do know a lot about network security, for one.

Re:it never too late

[sander]

huh? and exactly who markets linux for large boxes? IBM still only sells linux on up to 4-way boxes and is still in the process of qualifying linux for 8-ways.

Re:it never too late

[miu]

The enterprise series and 1120 machines have had a horrifying number of ecache problems. That has caused credibility problems for Sun hw reliability.

Re:it never too late

[__past__]

And you know how linux is making leaps and bounds ? take a look at some of the more recent code that has been put into the kernel, and in userland. Sun is a major contributor.

Not only the Linux kernel. Sun is who came up with NFS and PAM, they are major contributors in the Gnome project, they open-sourced Star/OpenOffice, they are an important part of the DocBook community, they invented the Morphic GUI now used in Squeak for the Self language, employ several hacker legends like Richard Gabriel, Guy Steele or Bill Joy (well, if you want to call that employment) etc, etc.

I mean, this is slashdot. We should not forget that, all objective topics aside, Sun is just one heck of a cool company! If only they would get rid of that annoying Scott McNealy...

Re:it never too late

[anthonyrcalgary]

They've got a few hundred Ultra 5's at uni. I don't know how old they are. 8 years? Something like that. They never quit. 8 months of the year they're in near constant use by idiots, and I've only seen a handful need attention in my time there. When they were built you couldn't get x86 hardware that solid. Now you can, but you won't be saving a lot of money, and the x86 systems don't scale nearly as well.

The problem is that Sparc/Solaris is overkill for commodity tasks such as basic web servers. There's no reason to spend the extra money. In other areas, Solaris/Sparc or AIX/POWER really are needed to provide the reliability that the customers need.

Linux gets better every day, but it's stupid to assume it can do everything just as well as the big iron, especially when it's often paired with inferior hardware.

Re:it never too late

[Angry Pixie]

So relating back to an earlier story about the new Solaris 9, does this mean Solaris on Intel will certainly be going away? As it sounds, it will be Linux on Intel and Solaris on SPARC.

Since SUN will be reselling SuSe, does that mean that SUN won't actually be developing Linux using technologies from Solaris? It could be great if SUN were to put a hand into enhancing Linux.

Re:it never too late

[I_am_the_man]

The problem is that Sparc/Solaris is overkill for commodity tasks such as basic web servers. There's no reason to spend the extra money.

You mean this kind of extra money:

• V100 $995
• V120 $1995
• V210 $2995
• V240 $3495
• Netra 120 $3395

5 Servers not counting the blade serves, the Vx servers or the Cobalt stuff starting for under $4K. 2 Single Processor, 2 Dual processor and 1 NEBS single processor. It is not longer a valid argument that Sun is just too expensive.

Re:it never too late

[I_am_the_man]

We started moving into x86/Linux for high end commercial servers the moment the economy started to go south and we had to cut costs.

Who is "[w]e" and what do you consider high end?

Re:it never too late

[XO]

The way I view things, this is kind of how the computer market goes, from least capable hardware to most capable hardware:

Intel PCs ...
Sun ...
IBM

with IBM being the biggest, baddest, best thing you can get that's not a custom built supercomputer ala Cray. There's other things in the middle, I'd probably rank HP between Intel and Sun.. if HP/UX is still the steaming pile of poo it was ten years ago, then HPs at more of a disadvantage... but I haven't seen it in a long time.

Re:it never too late

[anthonyrcalgary]

hm...

550 mhz processor, 256 mb SDR memory... That will handle a reasonable amount to be sure, but you can do better (either cheaper or more powerful, sometimes both) with x86 if you don't need the quality.

I'm thinking of setting up a colo server so I've been looking around, and you can get 1U C3 systems that will easily outperform the "small" V100's with most things with enough money left over for a Solaris 9 x86 license.

I don't need the performance and I do need the quality, so I will probably go with something higher quality, possibly a V100. OpenBSD is getting installed first thing no matter what I get, so I'd rather not pay for an OS license I'm not going to use.

Re:it never too late

[Kenja]

And lets not forget that Ultra 5s are the biggest piles o' donkey dung Sun ever sold. No DMA an the IDE hard disks etc.

Re:it never too late

[jak163]

The linux market is huge and Sun is trying to get a slice. Sun isn't doing terribly, it's just shrunken from the bubble years, when its earning were growing at 40 percent a year and it was hiring like crazy. They chose not to lay off that many people, so their earnings disappeared, even though they're still a big company. I don't think they'll go bankrupt and for now 64-bit is still largely proprietary. Opteron is new and is not yet a large part of the market, and Intel's 64-bit chip still hasn't caught on, so it's IBM and Sun for the time being. If sun can get back into the web and e-mail server market with linux boxes that will help them.

It seems to me that 32-bit computing is rapidly approaching the end of its useful life. I think it's going to be a challenge for Intel to move over to the new chip. AMD has been having a terrible time all over the map in the last few years, which puts Sun in a pretty good position going forward.

I see that the new Gateway server will allow 24GB of RAM using xeons. I thought with 32 bit you couldn't exceed something less than that?

Re:it never too late

[Pieroxy]

How old are they? Does that matter? My old 486 is still running dude! No hardware change whatsoever. I've recycled my first Pentium 75 as a print server at my dad's office... still running like a charm.

I'm not talking only about reliability of the new hardware, but also the longevity.

BTW, one of these boxes was bought (new) last year. The rest might be no more than 3 years old (the age of my company). I don't know the models number or anything...

Re:it never too late

[BrokenHalo]

There's still a definite market for SUN, and it's still my preferable server platform - but it's losing out on price

I suspect that by now, even if Sun were giving away Solaris x86 they would find they've missed the boat in the x86 arena. There's enough market acceptance now for Linux as a free or very cheap and very robust solution, and I suspect that we'll be seeing a lot of corporate systems taking it up over the next 3-5 years. Sure, the BSDs are also great, but they are commonly perceived (rightly or otherwise) as having a smaller range of applications.

Re:it never too late

[Aerog]

of all the higher-end server machines that have been out there, sun has outlived most.

Maybe that could be because of Sun's wonderful 'Buy it now, run it into the ground and pretend it never happened' philosophy. Look at Cobalt. Sun buys a great company, puts out a couple of products, then grinds support and production to a halt and EOL's the entire brand. By the end, support was almost nonexistant.

I'm not saying that Sun is going out trying to alienate their customers, but maybe they should think what this strategy is doing to their corporate image. They've irritated a few customers already and don't need to keep doing it.

Re:it never too late

[CrazyWingman]

Why would someone use Solaris instead of Linux? How about the fact that Linux is not fully UNIX compliant, while Solaris is, and the original slashdot article linked to this here.

You may think "so what?" but you probably haven't realized that the software [many of] these servers are running is specifically designed to run on UNIX, and not necessarily compatible with Linux.

Re:it never too late

[peterpi]

"why would you use a sun chip if you can get a 4 chip 64-bit x86 system running at speeds greater than 3.0 ghz?"

Because the Sun box would spank it silly on performance. It's not just about the GHz, you know.

Re:it never too late

[maitas]

Actually Intel added 4 more bits, so you can address 36 bits... the problem is that you need to use extended processor instructions. Right now, only Windows kernel, Linux Kernel and SQL Server can use more than 4GB ram. Every other process run in those machines won't address more than 4GB, unles they rewrite it using the extended API

Re:it never too late

[grigori]

Nah, not quite. Sun would RATHER sell SPARC+Solaris (1st choice) but on x86 will sell you either Linux or Solaris x86 - preferring that it be Solaris probably. they get the point that they fscked up by ignoring Solaris 86. They said publically that more features from Solaris SPARC will go to SOlaris 86 (like Trusted Solaris &etc) BTW, Sun already puts lotsa stuff in Linux. Not just the obvious stuff like Ooo and Java but look in source: device drivers, bug fixes, other kernel stuff.

Re:it never too late

[grigori]

webservers are the easy, stateless low hanging fruit. Almost any OS can do that even -blech- Windows.

Re:it never too late

[grigori]

What maitas said 'bout 24GB Gateway plus the net result: you swap less or not at all. 32 bits is still 32 bits for 4GB address space unless you use the magic stuff few people will wanna do. Interesting mess. What if Intel rolls over in its sleep and does the same as Opteron to crush AMD as is rumoured. The in x86 world you'd have 3 versions of 64 bit code not just 2 to have to support. Blech

Re:it never too late

[pmz]

why would you use a sun chip if you can get a 4 chip 64-bit x86 system running at speeds greater than 3.0 ghz?

Because Sun boxes (not the PC-derived ones) are built like tanks? I'm serious, the things weigh more than American children (yes, the ones already working hard on their spare tires).

I'm still using vintage 1997 Sun Ultra workstations (2, 30, 60, and AXi...not the 5 and 10); they are SCSI-based, support 2GB or so of RAM, not-so-bad CPU power, and really pretty graphics output. Give them a good Enterprise-grade hard drive and replace a fan or two every five years, and they will last until the motherboard's last breath. Stick Solaris 8 or 9 on them and they make quite an awesome package (though I sometimes prefer OpenBSD for its cleanliness).

What people find, typically, is that to get a x86 machine built like a Sun, the x86's price starts going up and up, until the differences aren't that stiking. Sure, tin-foil white-box machines are cheap, but they'll last a only two or three years with their crappy drives and fans.

One other thing about Sun (and Apple, too, to be fair), is that their computers come as a package. You can go to SunSolve.com, and see exactly what works with what and what doesn't to avoid getting burned. If you want to upgrade something, it is easy to get part numbers, hardware revisions, and even supported third-party components, so there is much less speculation and guesswork involved. In a setting where time == money, this can be very significant.

Re:it never too late

[pmz]

550 mhz processor, 256 mb SDR memory... That will handle a reasonable amount to be sure, but you can do better (either cheaper or more powerful, sometimes both) with x86 if you don't need the quality.

Given that the admins are payed good money to setup and maintain the servers, getting two V120s for $4000, slapping them in a rack, calling them DNS1 and DNS2, and forgetting about them other than patching is a pretty good deal. The admins can be assured that the systems are well-tested by Sun, there is a known source for replacment parts, and they know without question who to bark at if they break.

Re:it never too late

[OrderOfSemprini]

I suppose having an opinion on the viability of a company rates a mod down? ridiculous.

Re:it never too late

[sql*kitten]

The problem is that Sparc/Solaris is overkill for commodity tasks such as basic web servers. There's no reason to spend the extra money. In other areas, Solaris/Sparc or AIX/POWER really are needed to provide the reliability that the customers need.

Not really - you can get an entry level SPARC box in a 1U chassis for under $1000 new these days. Sure you could get a PC, but it's a false economy, this little SPARC will still be serving web pages a decade from now with little or no maintenance.

In all my time in the industry, if I've learnt one thing it's that buying PCs to save money is a false economy. Sure, they're cheaper up front, but a mid-90s workstation like an Ultra-2 or an Octane is still a fully productive machine today running the latest OS and applications, a mid-90s PC is pretty much obsolete - if the cheap hardware hasn't failed. Only buy a PC if a PC is what you need, for example for desktop users who want to run MS Office.

Re:it never too late

[ScrewMaster]

Not so, my friend. Web serving isn't anywhere near as simple or "stateless" as it used to be, given the power of software like Apache and PHP, and the sophistication of modern Web apps. Furthermore, given the importance of reliable, secure Web services to, well, pretty much everyone nowadays you really can't trust that function to "almost any OS." Microsoft would like you to believe that you can, of course, but honestly if I found out that my online banking was running on Windows I'd find another bank.

But that's not the real issue. From a competitive standpoint, Microsoft really wants the Web server market: their consistent failure in that area is preventing them from exercising control over the Web. And the reason that Microsoft wants to run all the Web servers is to control the financial services that run on them, picking off a piece of every transaction for themselves. That among other bad things.

As an aside, Microsoft wants the server market so bad that they are officially looking into designing a command-line OS to compete with Linux's heavy lead in the low-overhead department. If you're looking to run a bunch of blade servers, none of which even have video support and can only be administered via Ethernet, you really can't run an OS that is entirely dependent upon its second-rate GUI. Microsoft has some catching up to do there. Multiuser MS-DOS, anyone?

Re:it never too late

[AvitarX]

I think SGI does?

I think I remember reading about some massive wierd accrinym cluster they are doing (NUMA?)

someone else probably knows.

Re:it never too late

[anthonyrcalgary]

I'm loathe to start a TCO debate. Let's just say having many diverse options benefits us all in the end. :)

Re:it never too late

[grigori]

No argument from me re Microsoft. Unsafe at any speed.

nah

[thesadjester]

It's never too late really when you dominate the high end unix market (with IBM). But really, when it comes to running large oracle databases that are mission critical, sun shines, and that is where their market is. They just want to expand more and keep some of the smaller market to help supplement their main focus. You may argue that the high end server market isn't their focus, but that is the area that they differ from all the other providers, which is an important thing.

Re:nah

[sander]

But there is no workstation market any more really, or rather, whats left is less than 1/3 of what it once was.

cheap?

[broeman]

smells like a cheap-scate version of their original plans, but then again it could let them to be more familiar with Linux and thereby be prepared to create their own distribution later on (and discard their own *nixes).

Re:cheap?

[1lus10n]

hardly. they signed contracts they came at a large financial gain for redhat and Suse. but the major thing for sun is that an open source version of java will be distributed with all redhat and suse systems.

Sun doesnt have any real reason to go back to offering their own Linux distro. this is a better idea. And sun is sure as fuck not dumping solaris.

Sun tax?

[SHEENmaster]

How does Sun handle Solaris development costs? Will they sell me an SMP sytem with Linux rather than Solaris?

(I know they have a free download of Solaris 9, but it doesn't run on SMP systems.)

Re:Sun tax?

[Anonymous Coward]

They sell linux on their intel machines, not on sparc. Sun will sell you a dual proc intel machine running linux. Go to www.sun.com for more info.

Re:Sun tax?

[nemaispuke]

I don't know where you get your information on Solaris, but the downloaded version of Solaris 9 4/03 runs quite well on my dual processor Ultra 2! And mpstat shows 2 CPU's! To be "legal" with Sun you need to purchase a license based on the function of the machine you intend to run Solaris on (either Intel or Sparc). Prior to Solaris 9, Solaris 8 Intel could handle up to 8 CPU's out of the box. I am sure that is probably still the case, you just have to pay for the licenses if you use Solaris Volume Manager, multiple processors, etc.

For what?

[Unregistered]

Is this still going to be only for low-end x86 servers/workstations, or is Sun gonna make linux an option for big iron that traditionally runs Solaris?

Gateway adding Linux support

[Anonymous Coward]

According to ZDNet, Gateway will start offering Linux on Monday on some of its servers as well (though they've picked Red Hat).

will Sun buy SuSE?

[wfmcwalter]

It's pretty common to enter into some kind of partnership between two companies as a prelude to a merger or buyout. Sun knows it's behind the times in the Linux front, and building that compitency up by itself is a daunting task. Buying SuSE would radically redress the balance for Sun.

Perhaps the question should be - is there any reason Sun _shouldn't_ buy SusE?

Re:will Sun buy SuSE?

[SpaceLifeForm]

Well, I'd rather have SuSE owned by a German company these days than be owned by a U.S. company that could then be influenced by the U.S. courts, and/or U.S. Congress.

Re:will Sun buy SuSE?

[ElGuapoGolf]

If anyone will buy SuSE, it'll be IBM. They're already giving SuSE Advanced Server away with some of their pSeries line of servers, and they push people to use SuSE over redhat. When you throw in that Munich deal, where SuSE and IBM worked together, you seem to have a very cozy relationshipo between IBM and SuSE.

Re:will Sun buy SuSE?

[The J Kid]

Perhaps the question should be - is there any reason Sun _shouldn't_ buy SusE?

Perhaps the question should be - is there any story in which 2 companies anounce working together where a slashdotter _doesn't_ think the one will buy the other?

Please, use your brain, owning SuSE has no stratigic advantage to Sun under current circumstances.

Re:will Sun buy SuSE?

[SpaceLifeForm]

Good point. Sun working with SuSE may actually be a good strategic move if IBM is thinking of buying SUN.

Re:will Sun buy SuSE?

[passthecrackpipe]

Part of the love is of course the fact that IBM is one of the serious investors in SuSE.....

Um No

[I_am_the_man]

The GPL is not what is in question here and that which is in question is absolutely no threat to Sun (since they have all the licensing they need).

Re:Um No

[Znork]

If they have any separate licensing necessary for Linux then they may not distribute Linux. The GPL prevents distributing GPL code together with code that is licensed under terms not compatible with the GPL.

SCO can try to license their alleged 80 lines in whatever way they want. The problem is you just are not allowed to distribute the other millions of lines together with those 80 lines in any case. Which means any license to do so is worthless.

Re:Um No

[ickoonite]

This is a bit OT, and I'm sure it's been said before, but do the 80 lines matter? That SCO distributed and continues to distribue Linux from its FTP servers under the GPL licence means that its threats are at the very least a waste of court time.

iqu

Too late for Sun?

[antarctican]

No, I don't think so. They've been fantastic in the setup of the cluster we bought from them, full of these new Sun V60x machines. They even threw in 13 extra nodes at no extra cost for a total of 43 nodes.

What will kill them is their supply chain however. We've been waiting a few weeks for mounting rails for the V60x machines.... however this isn't Sun's fault, they aparently OEM these machines straight from Intel. It's Intel who is now able to supply the part, it's actually effected another server we bought straight from Intel. It seems with their linux initiative they're simply relying on the services of others.... Intel for the x86 machines, RH and SuSe for the linux support. They're becoming a reseller when it comes to linux rather then a producer/supplier.

Then there's the NAS system which has been held up in QA for the past 3 months.

They have some great products coming out and good linux knowledge and service, however until they streamline their supply chain they might be in trouble. The rep told me they're putting quality as the top priority, however it seems to have created more problems then good. This new 3310 NAS system was suppose to begin shipping in May.... it's now August....

That will be there downfall, not meeting ship dates. They have the knowledge and inovation to survive, they just need to ride their hardware guys' asses a little harder.

Re:Too late for Sun?

[Biolo]

I really wish I could say more about this, but contracts kind of restrict me. What I can say is that Sun really are putting their money where their mouth is when they say quality is their number one priority. You saw it with the Broadcom chip incident, where they did the right thing and stopped shipments, even though it hurt the bottom line. That is just one incident that got widespread attention. Right now, more so than ever before, they are taking no risks that a customer will get a product that doesn't work just right when it gets installed in their server room. You've got to admire that sort of attitude, especially in this financial climate.

Bombproof computing, they are really making it their goal -although having just come back from watching Terminator 3 I'm no longer sure thats a good thing! :-) . You have to wonder how many other vendors, when faced with something like the Broadcom thing, either 1) don't notice it, 2) notice it but pretended they didn't, or 3) did the right thing even though it hurt them.

As for the holding onto Solaris thing, you can understand that. Solaris is and was a really great product. Having used AIX in a production environment I can understand why IBM aren't so bothered about loosing it to Linux. Given a choice I'd certainly pick Linux. When it comes to Solaris though, it's still not so clear cut, I'd go for Linux on the desktop because that's what everyone is targetting, but I would be sorely tempted for Solaris on the server, and it's a shoe in on the SPARC platform. If you truly believe in your product, like Sun does, it's much more difficult to accept that there may be a real alternative. Part of the problem is that Linux isn't (yet) a real alternative across Suns product range. SGI's Altix scales Linux to 64 processors, but that's the high end limit for now, until Linux gets to being capable of running on the top of the line Sun kit they can't fully commit to it, and by this I mean 128 CPU's, and be capable of handling 256 cores (coming soon(tm)). You've got to look at Suns selling point ever since it was started, Solaris from the lowliest workstation to the highest end servers. Your developers build and compile and test on the low end and deploy straight onto the highest end. Binary compatibility, surprisingly compelling, and Solaris still does this better than Linux, especially across OS/kernel versions.

That said if it was me who made those decisions I'd be sponsoring a major push to get Linux running on the SPARC platform, after all Solaris doesn't really make much money for Sun by itself but its SPARC hardware certainly does, and who cares if the customer runs Linux on Sparc or Solaris on Sparc, as long as they chose Sparc.

Disclaimer: I work for Sun, so obviously I'm biased, and none of the above statements are sanctioned by Sun in any way.

Re:Too late for Sun?

[Alex]

Whats the performance like on the V60x systems?

How do they compared to Dell 1750's say?

(genuninely interested here...)

Alex

Re:Too late for Sun?

[antarctican]

Whats the performance like on the V60x systems?

How do they compared to Dell 1750's say?

I can't answer that for two reasons:
a) I've never used a Dell 1750
b) We haven't power the cluster up because we're still waiting on Intel for those mounting rails

I have been playing with two nodes in my office building a mini-cluster. So far I like what I see. The only change I'd make is I would not have the serial console port where it is, or at the least not use an RJ-45 for it. While reaching around behind the node it's very easy to confuse it with the network connection when going by feel. That cost me a few hours to figure out.... ;-)

Let the Sun Bashing commence

[I_am_the_man]

Sun seems to get a lot of harsh criticism here on Slashdot for some reason. IBM seems to always get a pass or dare I say is a Slashdot darling. You would think Sun was Microsoft. I wonder why this is? I cannot wait to see what comes of the latest Sun Slashdot entry.

Re:Let the Sun Bashing commence

[BFKrew]

My guess is that it's Java...

Re:Let the Sun Bashing commence

[Arker]

Sun was Microsoft before anyone knew what Microsoft was.

And they're still the same, only not as successful.

Doesn't mean they never do anything good, but it's never been smart to trust them.

It is too late for Sun.

[reporter]

The revenue of Sun Microsystems in the quarter ended June 2003 fell sharply from the revenue in the same quarter of 2002. Please read "Sun Earnings Trail Expectations". The revenue fell far short of Wall Street expectations, and the stock promptly crashed.

Linux brings no value to Sun and actually destroys Sun's profits. Why? For years, Sun has hidden its performance-poor servers behind its Solaris operating system. Sun focused its marketing message on "the whole system" and said that performance is only one part of the system value. Most of that system value outside of simple performance came from Solaris.

Now, with Linux, the Sun salesperson can no longer argue that the operating system has some intrinsic value over the operation system of, say, an IBM machine. The IBM machine and the Sun machine are running the same operating system, Linux. Then, the comparison of the two machines comes down to performance. In other words, the customers will be forced to look at the quality of the basic hardware. In this area, Sun falls woefully short. Look at the results for the ""SPEC benchmark" or the "TPC-C benchmark".

Re:It is too late for Sun.

[n3rd]

The revenue of Sun Microsystems in the quarter ended June 2003 fell sharply from the revenue in the same quarter of 2002

There is no mention of this in the article you posted.

The revenue fell far short of Wall Street expectations, and the stock promptly crashed.

"Crashed"? Come on, quit with the exaggerations. Look at this graph. Thus far they have sunk $1 per share or ~20%. When your stock value is that low it's easy to lose a large percentage over a small amount.

I find it strange that Red Hat's stock is higher than Sun's and yet Sun brings in billions every quarter and has 6.6 billion in the bank. I think it says a lot about the relavance of using stock prices as a note for discussion.

For years, Sun has hidden its performance-poor servers behind its Solaris operating system.

Please, tell us about your experience with Sun. Have you administered it and if so for how long? Are you a user and if so for how long?

They have one of the most stable OSes out there, superb hardware and some of the best support which I'm sure amounts to nothing.

The IBM machine and the Sun machine are running the same operating system, Linux. Then, the comparison of the two machines comes down to performance

Once again, you seem ill informed. The Linux offerings are on x86 servers, not SPARCs. With x86 hardware there aren't many ways to differentiate one box from another at a hardware level.

In other words, the customers will be forced to look at the quality of the basic hardware.

You forgot cost and what's most important to companies, support.

or the "TPC-C benchmark"

Sun hasn't submitted a TPC-C benchmark since late 2001, and it was on old hardware. This may or may not be a good thing, but you cannot tell.

Before you keep bashing Sun I would seriously consider doing two things: Getting out into the real world to see how many people trust and use Sun/Solaris and do some research.

Until Sun is unseated as #1 in the UNIX server market (as reported by Gartner) and has less than it's 6.6 billion in the bank along with 13 billion in total assets I don't think Sun is too concerned.

Your post is nothing more than the often repeated "Sun is dying" chant that is not backed up by any relavant facts.

Re:It is too late for Sun.

[cartman]

I find it strange that Red Hat's stock is higher than Sun's and yet Sun brings in billions every quarter and has 6.6 billion in the bank. I think it says a lot about the relavance of using stock prices as a note for discussion.

No offense, but from this I'd assume that you're not an expert at the Stock Market. Stock price is not comparable between companies unless both companies have the same number of outstanding shares. A theoretical company worth only $1 million would have a stock price of $333,333 if it had issued only 3 shares (of course this doesn't happen, it's an illustration).

"For years, Sun has hidden its performance-poor servers behind its Solaris operating system."

Please, tell us about your experience with Sun. Have you administered it and if so for how long? Are you a user and if so for how long?

I've been using Sun boxes for 7+ years. Their performance used to be slightly inferior but comparable. Now their performance is significantly worse. The UltraSparc III was a substantial design failure, with a 14-stage 4-issue IN-ORDER design at 1GHz, compared to competitors that have shorter pipelines, far higher clock frequencies, more units, more parallelism, and OUT-OF-ORDER designs. Sun's CPU is the last RISC CPU that's still an in-order design, something which by itself can affect commercial performance by more than 40%. Now, Sun's boxes are inferior in performance by a substantial margin.

Sun hasn't submitted a TPC-C benchmark since late 2001, and it was on old hardware. This may or may not be a good thing, but you cannot tell.

Sun withdrew from the TPC-C benchmark because they were trailing their competitors by a widening margin. They publically admitted as much.

Your post is nothing more than the often repeated "Sun is dying" chant that is not backed up by any relavant facts.

Sun is obviously not facing any kind of short-term crisis. But there's a growing consensus that Sun is becoming increasingly incapable of designing and manufacturing competitive high-end Sparc CPUs to power their servers. Intel and IBM are producing much better designs and have access to far better process technology, and there's the perception that this gap is likely to widen over time. Given this situation, Sun will gradually fade into oblivion, or at least that's what some people are assuming. Of course, Sun might pull a "rabbit out of the hat" with this throughput computing thing; we'll have to see.

Re:It is too late for Sun.

[tc]

"Crashed"? Come on, quit with the exaggerations. Look at this graph. Thus far they have sunk $1 per share or ~20%. When your stock value is that low it's easy to lose a large percentage over a small amount.

A 20% decline in the valuation of a company is a pretty big fall. The price of a single share is not really relevant, and should not make it any easier or harder to lose or gain a given percentage of value, unless the price-per-share is in really crazy territory (sub-dollar, or multiple hundreds of dollars).

I find it strange that Red Hat's stock is higher than Sun's and yet Sun brings in billions every quarter and has 6.6 billion in the bank. I think it says a lot about the relavance of using stock prices as a note for discussion.

The price of a single share of Red Hat stock is higher than the price of a single share of Sun stock. However, that's not really relevant, because Sun has so many more shares outstanding. Red Hat's market cap is around $1.1B, whereas Sun's is around $12B.

The price of a single share tells you nothing. After all, Microsoft's current share price is around the $26 mark, but there are many smaller companies who have stock valuations significantly in excess of that per share, they just have far fewer shares outstanding.

Basically, what's important is percentage changes in the overall valuation of the company.

Re:It is too late for Sun.

[cartman]

The TPC-C benchmark as a whole has problems as well. IBM's latest machines have kick-ass scores on TPC-C (200%+), but in deployment are only marginally faster than Sun's high-end hardware (30%, compared with the 900 MHz UltraSPARC III). (As a consultant I was involved in a performance comparison of the PeopleSoft Financials suite running on IBM vs Sun).

I see your point; 30% is not that major. But processor performance is not the largest factor in commercial workload performance. The memory subsystem and disk subsystem are each at least as important as the processor on commercial workloads. Witness that in the top tpc scores, the disk subsystems are far more expensive than the servers themselves, often with thousands of disks in parallel. Sun still has substantial experience in system-building and in this regard Sun is the equal of IBM or HP. Even if Sun's processors are less than 50% of the speed of IBM's this clearly would lead to far less than 50% overall performance degradation, perhaps less than 30%.

Regarding your 'throughput' computing remark, just think webservers and telcos, all they care about is throughput at minimum cost. Itaniums are a lot less efficient than Xeons if you are interested in throughput computing. If Sun has some in-house technology they can use for efficient throughput computing that WOULD be big.

"Throughput computing" refers to a specific Sun initiative by that name. Sun intends to design CPUs in a radically new way, by placing 16+ small processor cores on a single die, each of which can execute a separate thread or process. Each of these small cores is individually unimpressive but combined they will outrun any other CPU (supposedly). These 16+ cores are each extremely small and will all fit on a processor die the same size as a single itanium2. This offers several advantages. First, parallelism is mostly thread-level, therefore the logic for exploiting parallelism can be done by the compiler. Second, such a CPU is easier to design. Anyway, that's the idea; I hope it works out.

Re:It is too late for Sun.

[guacamole]

Sun Linux boxes will be using commodity x86 componets which should bring the price down and also make them competitive in the performance area.

Re:It is too late for Sun.

[sql*kitten]

In other words, the customers will be forced to look at the quality of the basic hardware. In this area, Sun falls woefully short.

Well, when you buy Sun, you aren't just buying hardware or software, you're buying the complete experience - a wholly known platform backed up by a capable services organization. There's little finger-pointing if you have a problem, because it's all vertically integrated. It's the same if you buy Cisco instead of rolling your own router with FreeBSD. That's what people are paying for.

If Sun can recreate that vertically-integrated experience on Linux, they've a future with it, if not, this will be an expensive mistake, both in cash terms in the short term and in reputation in the long term.

Astonishing

[Sean80]

Although this sort of thing has happened at Sun before, it's an astonishing admission of defeat, in my books.

Their entire company is based on big iron using Solaris. Given that the prevailing trend is to run Linux on lots of small Intel boxes, how can this not shatter their most basic business model?

Given the way Java is going nowadays, I agree, how can Sun not be doomed?

Re:Astonishing

[Bo Diddly Squat]

Did you read a different article than me ?

People who need the Sparc/Solaris boxes will still buy them.
That won't change because they can now suddenly run SuSE on Sun's x86 servers.

Re:Astonishing

[Anonymous Coward]

Although this sort of thing has happened at Sun before, it's an astonishing admission of defeat, in my books.

And by your logic IBM admitted defeat by offering Linux (as opposed to AIX). Same with HP and HP-UX.

It's too bad your emotional biases get in the way of a logical argument.

Re:Astonishing

[Decaff]

"Given the way Java is going nowadays"...
Java is the most widely used programming language and is still growing at an amazing rate. Sun sell licences for enterprise java and make a lot of money doing it.

Sun have always used an interesting strategy to open up markets for their products and services. They promote open standards, and even donate technologies to the IT community (such as NFS). Sun virtually invented the idea of the desktop Workstation. The idea being that the bigger the market for open standards, Unix, Java whatever, the bigger portion Sun can take. The more people use Linux, the bigger the Unix-ish market is a whole, and that benefits sun. There will be more users who could want to migrate to a more enterprise-level Unix version.

Safe move

[MC68040]

This was most likely the safest move for SUN's linux solution and idea, if they team up with someone else they more or less just sell an already existing product with modifications, thus legal responsibilities change and they got more behind their back with a old and stable Linux distribution.

And SuSE is most likely 'closed' enough already for SUN to consider it as a safe solution compared to the dangerous ;) open source world. (Pointer: you have to pay for suse).

Re:Safe move

[ElGuapoGolf]

Personally, I *pay* for SuSE. It's good enough that I feel it's worth it.

However, there are tons of people who use the SuSE ftp install. They're getting SuSE, and they're not paying for it.

The only thing you can consider closed about SuSE is some of the software they ship (realplayer, mainactor, flash, etc). But then again, I suspect a lot of people go out and install those applications on whatever distro they use anyhow.

Nice article but its missing alot

[Crashmarik]

The reuter story highlights the difference between information and knowledge.

The reporter completely misssed pricing issues, platforms that sun would be selling it for, the support that would be entailed with the license, ETC.

What is truly missing is there is no comment on the SUN-REDHAT, SUN-SUSE licensing vis a vis the SCO suit and licensing. We know, to the extent that SCO's statements may be believed that sun pretty much has a license to do whatever they want with unix. The question is if they sell/distribute a linux under the GPL does that spill over ? Is it protected ? If I buy redhat from sun is it covered by SUNS rights, if it is how does that affect the GPL that comes with the distribution ?

IT would have been wonderfull if the article instead of just being a parrot had of addressed the questions.

Re:Nice article but its missing alot

[spitzak]

No, the license from SCO will not "allow" them to sell Linux, and if SCO's claims are true will actually prevent Sun (or anybody else) from selling Linux.

Assumme SCO's claims are true. If SCO requires payment and an agreement for this code then it is illegal to distribute Linux containing the code, as that directly violates the GPL that grants rights to copy all the rest of the code in Linux (ie it is illegal to redistribute anything *except* SCO's code). Even SCO is not claiming that their code can do anything useful without all the other code covered by the GPL in Linux.

If the affected code is removed from Linux (or SCO or the courts say that there is no claim to it) then anybody can redistribute the new Linux, including Sun, and the SCO license is meaningless.

I would suspect that Sun's lawyers are not as stupid as that, and have actually purchased something of value from SCO, such as the SCO compatability libraries.

What's the point?

[Trurl's Machine]

OK guys - I know that questions like this most often are modded down as "flamebait" or "troll", but I HONESTLY want to know, what is the point now of buying a non-x86 and non-PowerPC workstation. Mod me down if you please, but also mod up an answer that would provide an insightful, informative and interesting explanation. I mean, I understand it for the early 1990's. When "Jurassic Park" was a big hit at the movies, the sitiuation was pretty obvious - you had these single-user, single-tasking OS'es like Windows 3.11 or MacOS 7 on one hand, and those powerful Unix boxen on the other hand. It was obvious, that you need a special dedicated machine to run high-end graphics tasks and another machine just to read the MS Office documents or play Doom. But now - what is the freakin' point, if you can run MS Office and all the latest games on a high-end personal computer (be it the PowerMac G5 or some x86 machine) and ALSO have your favorite Unix flavor running on it like charm? Where is the market niche for a workstation incompatible with the majority of commercial software?

Re:What's the point?

[bobintetley]

One word: Quality Would you trust your mission critical application to some cheap Intel chip with bog standard non-parity DDRAM and low quality components? Alright, you can swap it out for another if it fails, but how much time will that take and to business, time is money. x86 might be cheap, but if you want hardware you can really rely on that's going to operate without problems for years, you buy a Sun box.

Re:What's the point?

[I_am_the_man]

The whole reason for buying any hardware is applications. If you applications run on Solaris only (or preferably; as this does happen) then that is what you buy.

Out of curiosity I priced out Sun's entry workstation (SunBlade 150) and the SunPCIII Pro Coproccessor Card (basically PC on a card with AMD Athlon XP 1600+ 256MB PC2100 onboard memory (SODIMM) 24 bit graphics) and it came out to be $2090. Not a bad price for two machines in one.

Re:What's the point?

[wkjel]

If you're just looking for a general workstation, the answer is there isn't much of a point.

What you're missing is that workstations haven't been Sun's main line of business for many years. They sell servers for corporate functions, like running very large Oracle databases for transaction processing. Their main selling point isn't raw speed, or Solaris or any other single factor. Like Apple in the desktop world, they focus on integration. They try to make everything work together well. Even if they don't always succeed at this, if you buy from Sun you generally get good, stable, reliable and ultimately cost-effective solution for general business processing.

Re:What's the point?

[niko9]

I honestly don't understand your reply. I'm not trolling but you said "cheap Intel chip"

Is that how Intel's CPU's are thought of in the computing indusrty?

I just purchased an Intel Pentium 4 3.0Ghz and specifically chose an Intel 875PBZ board for it's stability and reliabilty. With The P4's heat spreader and inergrated heat protection, I consider it a high quality product.

After nearly 3 years of worry free opertaion with a dual Pentium box running almost 24 hours a day without so much as a hiccup on Debian Linux, I thought I made a wise choise with buying Intel.

Can anybody shed some light?

Re:What's the point?

[I_am_the_man]

...running almost 24 hours a day...

You proved his point right there. *Almost* is something that someone buying Sun does not want to consider. Almost is not good enough.

Re:What's the point?

[cartman]

I HONESTLY want to know, what is the point now of buying a non-x86 and non-PowerPC workstation.

There's still a large body of software for engineering and scientific disciplines that runs only on Sparc/Solaris. This software and userbase are left over from the days when RISC machines were far faster than x86 machines.

Everyone is moving away from Sun workstations, but these migrations take time. Notice that Sun's hardware sales are down 20% year-on-year. Sun already realizes that its workstation business is doomed in the long run.

Sun is going to make a valiant attempt to rescue it's high-end server business by employing a radically different approach to MPU design -- "throughput computing." Sun hopes that this new approach will allow it to surpass the performance of Itanium or POWER boxes on commercial workloads. If "throughput computing" turns out not to be everything it's cracked up to be, then the Sun/Solaris platform is doomed and Sun will have to transition to a different business model, perhaps becoming an enterprise software company.

Re:What's the point?

[cartman]

One word: Quality Would you trust your mission critical application to some cheap Intel chip with bog standard non-parity DDRAM and low quality components?.. x86 might be cheap, but if you want hardware you can really rely on that's going to operate without problems for years, you buy a Sun box.

I've had sun boxes on my desk for years, and from what I've seen, this hasn't been true for quite some time. If you opened up a Sun Ultra5 you'd find that it was made almost entirely out of low-end commodity components. The drive was a Seagate IDE drive, the power supply was relatively cheap, the graphics chipset was ATI/rage, and although the RAM was nonstandard it wasn't ECC and it wasn't superior in quality. For a comparable price you could get an x86 box with far more reliable SCSI drives, and with redundant high-quality power supplies, and with ECC RAM. Such a box would be far more reliable (and far faster, incidentally) than the comparably priced Sun workstation.

Of course it's a different issue entirely when you enter the arena of servers, where Sun still has many reliability features not found on any x86 boxes. But in the server arena, Sun is competing against HP and IBM, both of which make sturdier equipment than Sun. Although all 3 unix makers offer vastly superior equipment to what you'd get from, say, Dell.

Re:What's the point?

[4of12]

Alright, you can swap it out for another if it fails, but how much time will that take and to business, time is money.

You're correct. If I had to bet my life support machine on a single piece of hardware and software, I'd pick Solaris on SPARC over Linux on x86, mainly because of the extra hardware reliability from Sun.

But with the way that clustering technology is developing, it's getting to be a reasonable cost-effective alternative to pickup 2 or 3 Lintel boxes.

If your Lintel box has 99.99% uptime and your Solaris/SPARC box has 99.999% uptime, then 2 Lintel boxes will give you theoretically 8 nines of uptime (I know, I know, in real life, whatever power line glitch caused the downtime for the first machine is likely to increase the odds of the second machine to fail). Even so, 2 Lintel boxes is better.

I really still think Sun can offer value to the emerging and growing market of low-end Lintel boxes in two areas: services (like IBM does), and enterprise management (because they've already worried about it (NIS and follow ons) for Solaris systems).

It's too bad to see another great hardware platform fade. But UltraSPARC has been late in delivery because only real he-men can afford the fabs and development necessary and Intel shows it can afford to make mistakes (like Itanium) and still beat more worthy technology in chips such as Alpha, PA-RISC, MIPS and Power.

Re:What's the point?

[xlark]

There are quite a few niches in which any x86 or Mac machine wouldn't be enough.

Very, Very Big CAD projects need a 64-Bit processor and the extra address space that comes with them. The G5 (or 970) is 64-Bit, but OS X isn't yet 32-bit clean. x86 is out of the question.

A lot of specific applications are also better run on Workstations. I've been told that Molecular Analysis simulations are faster on a MIPS R1k/195 than on a 2 GHz Intel.

Thanks to a lot of open source stuff, lots of applications are availible for these other platforms. Abiword, Mozilla, and others can all be made to work on pretty much all of the Six Big Unicies. Just look at SGI's Freeware collection.

You can even play Doom on most of these machines. ;)

Re:What's the point?

[anthonyrcalgary]

These servers aren't run "almost 24 hours a day". They're expected to run non-stop for decades, and they're expected to do that without any downtime at all. You need to be able to replace memory and processors without a reboot.

They cost a fortune because downtime costs a fortune.

Re:What's the point?

[niko9]

...running almost 24 hours a day...

My mistake, I really should have clarified this point. The only time the machine went down is because my girfriend would not stay over if she had to sleep in the same room with the box running. She couldn't sleeep even with the low RPM fan I installed. So offline she(the box, that is ;) ) went 'till the next morning.

Other than that, the machine has been problem free.

Re:What's the point?

[mihalis]

This is ridiculous. Parity is cheap now, any decent PC vendor can sell you a machine using ECC SDRAM.

Meanwhile, of the three Sun machines I've had from new at work in my current job, the Ultra 10 blew a disk, the Blade 1000 had a fp bug (US-III 750Mhz) and blew a disk, and my v240 has both an ethernet bug in all four NICs, and had to have the power supply replaced before it would boot for the first time as a brand new machine.

I don't buy the hardware quality theory for Sun any more. Sure, the metalwork on my Blade 1000 is very nice, but then VAXes were built like tanks too.

Re:What's the point?

[mihalis]

I've had sun boxes on my desk for years, and from what I've seen, this hasn't been true for quite some time. If you opened up a Sun Ultra5 you'd find that it was made almost entirely out of low-end commodity components. The drive was a Seagate IDE drive, the power supply was relatively cheap, the graphics chipset was ATI/rage, and although the RAM was nonstandard it wasn't ECC and it wasn't superior in quality.

I think this bit is wrong, Ultra 5s take 50ns 168-pin JEDEC DIMMs, ECC error-correction. In fact I'll stick my neck out and say all Sun machines take ECC RAM only.

Perhaps what threw you was that they don't even take SDRAM (it's what I used to call EDO FPRAM I think).

See Ultra[tm] 5 Workstation: Hardware Specifications

Re:What's the point?

[cartman]

I think this bit is wrong, Ultra 5s take 50ns 168-pin JEDEC DIMMs, ECC error-correction. In fact I'll stick my neck out and say all Sun machines take ECC RAM only... Perhaps what threw you was that they don't even take SDRAM (it's what I used to call EDO FPRAM I think).

I stand corrected. Clearly the sun boxen have ECC ram.

Re:What's the point?

[aanantha]

The desktop Suns are an exception to the rule, I think. The Ultra 5's and 10's have shipped (especially in the beginning) with poor quality unreliable parts. I've seen their floppy drives and CD-ROM drives fail, and of course there was that fiasco with L2 cache on the UltraSparc 2 processors. But the Ultra 5's and 10's were the first attempt by Sun to make cheap PC hardware compatible systems. It was the first time Sun used IDE and PCI on a system. (The replacements (Blade 100 and 150) are much improved.) They aren't intended to be used for mission critical applications. They're just cheap computers that can run the same operating system as the servers. They're useful for developers who want to compile and test their software before deploying onto a Sun server. That's probably all that Sun workstations are useful for nowadays. Linux/x86 workstations would be cheaper and faster but the hardware and operating system incompatibility makes them tough to use for that purpose. Except in the case of Java applications, of course. Solaris/x86 took the operating system differences out of the picture, but the poor hardware support makes them infeasible for desktops.

Re:What's the point?

[McTrex]

At my company we are currently setting up a new hosting solution that does exactly that. We are using 'low quality' HP blade servers with Intel processors that are replacing the Sun's on which our customers were running Oracle EBS. If a blade fails we activate another one, deploy an almost ready-to-run image of Red Hat AS , configure the network and in a few minutes we are up and running again for that server. Due to this model we are able to offer a much lower price than when we were using expensive Sun servers. Intel hardware is much cheaper and we have a solution for the 'reduced reliability'.

Re:What's the point?

[pmz]

I just purchased an Intel Pentium 4 3.0Ghz and specifically chose an Intel 875PBZ board for it's stability and reliabilty.

The P4 system didn't come with ECC or parity-correction on every data bus, it didn't come with vendor-certified hard drive firmware, it didn't come with OS-independent Boot PROM-based diagnostics, it wasn't built like a tank, nor did it come with a remote management card or serial console interface, for example. You would need to shell out for a Xeon, at a minimum, for some of these of features, but only a Sun Fire or IBM RS/6000, for example, would come with all of them.

The lack of these features is why Pentium-based systems are inexpensive. The P4-based system will certainly run well, but it shouldn't be expected to run flawlessly 24x7x52x(some years) to such an extent that a person could bet their business on it.

What does the SCO'undrels think of this

[minkwe]

I wonder what McBride thinks of all this.

Videos of interesting interviews about SCO's lawsuit,Sun &Oracle

Is this new?

[edunbar93]

While I'm happy to see Sun's finally beginning to warm up to Linux (aka if you can't beat 'em, join 'em strategy) I wonder if this is too late for Sun?

What do you mean, "finally warming up to Linux?" They've been selling it in their Cobalt products for years.

Re:Is this new?

[Biolo]

Exactly, and of course there is their membership and adoption of Gnome, involvement with Apache, etc. Not to mention that they were the most open of the Unix companies, they effectively open sourced SPARC right at the beginning. Fujitsu make and sell their own line of SPARC chips and servers, because of this, and www.sparc.org is still a real entity because Sun continues to support it. NFS, NIS, Java, and a whole host of core unix things we take for granted today all came about because Sun invented them and open sourced the specifications if not the code. Sun goes on about Open Systems, and are one of the few that really mean it, even if they don't go as far as a lot of people, including some insiders, would like.

Cool

[Nonillion]

I am currently running SuSE 7.3 on a Sun Ultra Enterprise 2. While it works fine there are some problems with the sound server locking up when system sounds are played. Also the power management is something to be desired. Hopefully with this alliance,linux will just get better :)

Re:Cool

[Ella the Cat]

I'm guessing, but try killing "artsd" to fix your sound server problem, or asking xmms to use artsd instead of OSS or ALSA. SuSE is now at 8.2 so the power mgt is 9-12 months improved.

Sun's strategy is BS.

[YinYang69]

Sun doesn't give two piles of crap about Linux. They have been hurting so bad financially that they're hoping to start making money on Solaris.

Their strategy? Pick a popular flavor of Linux to sell with their hardware. Hook them on the H/W, then upsell the "more powerful" Solaris.

They're just using Linux as the free enterprise OS drug to get potential customers hooked, then sell them the expensive stuff and keep 'em locked.

Re:Sun's strategy is BS.

[YinYang69]

To the coward, I am not asian or ignorant.

To those who have mod'ed my post as a troll, is it because you think I am lying and/or spreading FUD, or does the truth hurt that much?

Trust me, it is not FUD or lies. Sun is desperate in making money any way possible, and this is their OS strategy.

Re:Sun's strategy is BS.

[wukie]

Just like Sun's purchase of StarOffice which SUN released for FREE ... (version 5.2 then later OpenOffice)

Remember that? How about Java support for Linux?

Don't hold you breath for .NET support for Linux.

Bright sun

[G3ckoG33k]

"I wonder if this is too late for Sun"

Waddya mean?

* They have StarOffice, based on the GPL'd OpenOffice; they have a great future.
*Java (that pesky little language) was doomed too but still hangs around, much like Basic, Pascal and Visual Basic
*Solaris still has an unbeaten reputation for carrier grade quality in telecom compared to Linux, yet...
*They have their own hardware too, even if Opterons...

SUN is better than its reputation here, I believe.

Re:Bright sun

[Billly Gates]

SUn makes a shitload more money from there $20-100k sun servers. They are losing to wintel and lintel.

Sun keeps laying off and laying off and hiring Indians just to stay alive. Solaris on intel is considered dead thanks to premature killing of it earlier and Java is free so they tet no money from it.

Sun is in trouble.

Re:Bright sun

[Decaff]

Sun have just re-released Solaris on Intel.

Java is free, but sun makes a lot of money licencing J2EE.

Sun is doing fine.

Re:Bright sun

[inc_x]

> SUN is better than its reputation here, I believe.

It's not where they are today, it's where they go tomorrow. And with Scott McNealy playing the FUD-card on open source as well as their cozy relationship with SCO I have absolutely no trust in their future business decisions.

McNealy reminds me too much of pre-SCO Caldera's Ransom Love.

Why hit Sun?

[junkgoof]

Sun does some great stuff, and they have great support, but they can't decided what to do in terms of business. x86, linux, CDE, solaris, SCO-meddling, java...
Sun tries so hard to damage M$ that they hurt themselves, their friends, and their clients.
That said I'm a Solaris admin, and I like Sun hardware and software in spite of the Applesque pricing (yes that HD is $400, yes it is physically identical to the $80 PC drive, no you can't get the mounting bracket separately).

Re:Why hit Sun?

[mousse-man]

If I run out of warranty on some expensive unix boxen and don't want to extend the contract, I usually remove the disk from the bracket and buy my own. Much cheaper. And sometimes, you get options you don't have available from the manufacturer.

Great! That means they'll...

[Santabutthead]

..be giving legal guarantees because I'm sure they wouldn't want to go against the CEO's words.

Nice Microsoft advertisement

[FatAssBastard]

...right below the article for Linux being sold by Sun. "Microsoft Windows 2003 Server: Do more with less". That's rich (is it ironic? I can never tell...)

I think Sun is just hedging their bets here. Plus, they can offer 'immunity' since they have the license from SCO. I know, I know, it's all crap (the SCO issue), but they can trumpet the fact that they have a proper license to all the code no matter what. None of us gives a shiat, but some PHB's might find it puts them at ease.

Re:Nice Microsoft advertisement

[spitzak]

No, unfortunatly any such "license" immediatly makes it illegal to sell (or give away) a copy of Linux containing the code covered by the license. This is because it violates the GPL that covers the rest of Linux.

The only way for this license to have some value is for SCO to identify what part of Linux it covers, and for that part to be a module or a user-level program or library (such licensed properties are allowed to be added to a Linux distributionj). SCO is definately claiming the exact opposite.

Re:Nice Microsoft advertisement

[pmz]

"Microsoft Windows 2003 Server: Do more with less" ...of other people's products and much more of our own!!! HAHAHA!!! We'll suck you dry!!!

Seriously, the genious of Microsoft's marketing department is amazing. "Do more with less" is brilliant doublespeak, ranking with "Patriot Act" with its cunning alluring name.

Sun Fu

[Anonymous Coward]

I see this as a good thing. Sun doesn't make their own x86 kit but neither does Dell or H-Paq or anyone else (with regard to supply chain problems).

If the suits in a corporation are familiar with Sun they are going to feel good with Linux coming from Sun on Sun gear. Same Sun name, same Sun support, etc.

Sun's challenge is going to be to convince me why I should buy their x86 servers running Linux rather than a Dell or H-Paq box running the same flavor of Linux.

This is not a zero sum game. There does not have to be a winner and a loser. Solaris/SPARC make sense for certain things and Linux and BSD make sense for other things. Each is a better option than settling for Microsoft churn.

Sun should give up on sparc

[Billly Gates]

First off the versions of Linux provided are for some amd blade servers. Sun is experimenting at this stage to see where the market is.

The sparcIII was years late and already obsolete when it hit the market. SparcIV has been delayed which also gets in the way of the upcomming sparcV which supposed to come out late next year.

The sparcIV supposed to be just as fast as a pIV and a sparcV is going to be even faster. However by the time the sparcIV comes next year it will already be obsolete as well.

Also sparcs are expensive.

My solution would be to switch to AMD64. They are cheap, really fast, and Solaris has already been ported. They can keep their expensive bus technology and only use the cpu's in exchange from sparc's. Or even better just use hypertransport and reduce the costs.

They should also look at the powerpc970 and 980'd. Unfortunately no version of solaris exist for those platforms. AMD64 would probably be a better bet.

Sun's are expensive and underpowered. Commidity hardware makes sense.

Re:Sun should give up on sparc

[mslinux]

Sun's are expensive and underpowered. Commidity hardware makes sense.

Same could be said for Apple.

Re:Sun should give up on sparc

[__past__]

Sparc systems have one important advantage over AMD64: They exist. I wouldn't expect anyone to run mission-critical apps on a 128-CPU AMD64 server any time soon.

Sun

[rihock]

To be honest, I think partnering with SuSe and RH is a good thing. The Sun version of Linux never really took off, so why not partner? Sun makes great hardware, and they are now making great software as well (email, directory, calendar, identity, portal, app server) that run great. I don't think the press gives them enough credit for the effort.

Re:we can only hope

[I_am_the_man]

They are a business. Did you expect them to not use a golden opportunity to profit from a less than ideal situation? They spent the money to make sure they were on solid legal ground and now they are glad they did. It amazes me that people bash Sun when they struggle to do anything right for their bottom line and then get mad when Sun uses perfectly sound leverage to try to gain market share with a tactic that may hit home to the beloved operating system.

2 flavors of Linux on Sun X-86 Servers.

[revans]

Who says the ENTIRE company is based on ONLY selling big-iron? Just like IBM, Sun sells big-iron, and smaller-iron, and software. Sun also sells this stuff through partners.

So now Sun re-sells two flavors of Linux for its X-86 servers: RedHat and, now, Suse.
Sun is simply giving their customers a new choice.

Running an increasing number of small Intel boxen requires increasing support costs. As needs increase, switching to fewer more powerful big-iron boxen can help to flatten support costs. Seems like Sun is positioning itself to take advantage of that trend.

Given that Java still seems to be growing, so much so, that the IBM folks seem to be obsessed with controlling the standard, I don't see how Sun cannot succeed.

Smaller Business Apps

[ratfynk]

It is the Citrix lock that they are after, with Munich going Suse alot of small town and city hall ma and pa people are taking notice. Hey why the hell should we spend 4 or 5 million on Win servers when we can get the same hardware and support at less cost with Linux. It is happening all over Europe and it will happen all over North America. The target of Suse and Sun is the MS small intranet market which in reality is bigger than the internet. Boy /. readers can sure be blind to anything other than the server side net apps, most of them wouldn't know a thin client from a fat pipe!

You people have really missed the point.

[EoRaptor]

1. Sun offers 'big name' support contract for Linux.

2. Fortune 1000 companies require this type of backing on any new 'deployment'.

3. Sun now has an 'in' for their sales and support team.

4. Eventually, the solution to further growth will be something linux is 'unable' to do.

5. Experience with Sun, means Solaris is a natural upgrade choice.

6. Profit!

Sun doesn't care at all, they'd support windows if they could figure out some way to convince people that Solaris was the natural upgrade path from that. Linux will always have the 'hobby' stigma attached (mainly becuase Sun will always be whispering in the right ears. After all, they have access.) and thus Solaris is an easy sell, along with the dedicated, lock in hardware for it. Sun can't lose, even if they cna't upsell the client, they have still made a truckload of money on the support contract.

Grow up everyone, Sun isn't run by technologists, and doesn't give alick about Linux (or Solaris for that matter). What they want is money, and this is a means to that end. It may align with some peoples goals to promote Linux, but don't get confused about what Sun is really doing.

Why not DEBIAN??

[cies]

Can anyone of the slashdot crow tell me why big companies DONT GO WITH DEBIAN??

Is it becouse of the free nature of Debian -- they can't buy 'm out if it's time for it?
[the free nature of Debian must also have it's pro's right?]

Anyone?

Cheers,
Cies.

Re:Why not DEBIAN??

[brsmith4]

Because, the only way to get any relatively new packages or software for debian is to go with their distro that is dubbed "unstable". Who the hell in their right mind would do that? Plus, does the Debian group offer support for their product in the corporate sense of the word? I don't think so. Your average CIO/CEO etc. is not going to be happy knowing that any problems with their IT infrastructure will be handled by some guy on a mailing list from some other country. This scenario is not at all attractive to the corporate big-wigs that run companies.

Re:Why not DEBIAN??

[sander]

Because there is effectively no company behind it? Exactly how would one go about signing a binding contract with Debian? And how would Debian be going about making sure its developers follow the terms of that contract?

Re:Why not DEBIAN??

[sbszine]

One word: support.

Re:Why not DEBIAN??

[brsmith4]

To moderators:

The parent is not flamebait material. Just because you use debian or love debian does not mean you have to mod a post flamebait. This is the absolute truth. I did not say that debian suxors or some bullshit like that, I stated that debian is NOT very attractive in the corporate sense due to support and what some would call bad "marketing".

That said, debian is a solid distro and has contributed great things to the open source world. I have no ill will toward the debian project.

Perhaps restating this line

Because, the only way to get any relatively new packages or software for debian is to go with their distro that is dubbed "unstable". Who the hell in their right mind would do that?

As:

Because, the only way to get any relatively new packages or software for debian is to go with their distro that is dubbed "unstable". What unknowing corporate executive, in their right mind, would take that chance?

would clear up any confusion.

Re:Why not DEBIAN??

[wukie]

I certainly wouldn't want to support Debian.

Support ALWAYS means something is not understood or has gone wrong.

Debian is no pleasure cruise when everything is going right, I'd hate to try and fix something broken over the phone with a newbie.

Well imagine that

[TCaM]

a corporation acting in the interests of profit. Isn't this what they are supposed to be doing?

Now what I really want to know is how this fits in with the whole SCO debacle and the special golden child status that Sun apparently has with SCO.

Yay!

[stevey]

I'm glad of this - I run several Oracle installations on Solaris and a couple of small ones on SuSE.

SuSE and Redhat are the two platforms that are certified by Sun, and I had been worried that they'd drop the SuSE support when they got into bed with RedHat more.

Happily it looks like that's not going to happen which is good for me.

(Now if we could only get somebody to pay for Sun to certify Debian ;)

The enterprise is a big cluster intercourse

[yerricde]

*Almost* is something that someone buying Sun does not want to consider. Almost is not good enough.

If you have an 8-node cluster, then running each node for 21 hours a day and staggering each node's scheduled downtime will provide 7 available nodes 100% of the time, provided that your UPS is good enough to weather any power outages caused by bad weather.

Re:The enterprise is a big cluster intercourse

[bluGill]

You need to work in the real world a little bit. The sun workstations I know are rebooted only when the power goes out. These things operate just fine without reboots. Servers have a higher expectation, most operate for years at a time. When they are rebooted it is only because the out of date OS is no longer worth the gain of uptime, and then a slow time is picked well in advance. Well in advance means if you want to reboot on christmass this year, you are too late, the plans take longer than that.

Remember we are not talking about little servers here. Sun sells some big iron servers that do critical functions. Risk of the cluster software failing is not something they want to take. It sounds good on paper to say you have a 8 node cluster, but in practice it is very hard to do. I've personaly had to impliment software to deal with custom hardware failing in operation, and I can tell you it isn't easy. Despite hardware assurance that some procedure would work and was testing, when I implimented it we discovered (years latter) that there was about 1 chance in 100,000 that data would be lost. Tiny, but unaceptable.

When I worked in data centers (as engineering support for critical customers with problems I was an expert with) we were not allowed to reboot some of the Sun servers even though they had a full backup next to it that was running and full confidence in their failover software. It was well tested, everything would work and so they could reboot, but keeping things running was so critical to their buisness that we weren't allowed to reboot it anyway. The chance that the backup system would fail in the few minutes it took for the primary reboot wasn't worth the risk.

Dull poster

[I_am_the_man]

SUn makes a shitload more money from there $20-100k sun servers. They are losing to wintel and lintel.

What does this mean? Are you saying this is where Sun is making money and this is where Intel is threatening them? If so do me a favor and find me a Dell server that will cost me more than $50K (single server, it is possible, but that would be if you install every option). Find me a Dell server with more than 4 processors. Find me an Intel server that does not need some special hacked OS with more than 8 processors. Sun considers anything from 1 to 8 processors Entry Level Servers. Do you think Intel thinks an 8 way box is Entry Level? Yes the very low end of the range you gave is certainly lost for Sun, but $50K - $100K is a totally different story.

Sun keeps laying off and laying off...

They have had 2 layoffs where they have gone from 40,000 enployees to about 35,000 employees. You make it sound like they are SGI or something. This is still a company that does 12 Billion a year in revenue. They have about 6 billion in the bank. They are not going anywhere anytime soon.

Solaris on intel is considered dead...

This is also crap. Sun is now pushing Solaris x86 out the door on server preinstalled!!! To my knowledge they have never done this before. I would guess that there are more people using x86 Solaris now than ever before. With the SCO issue at hand I can see Solaris X86 being a very appealing choice. This is not to say that Solaris x86 is taking the market by storm, but by its own numbers it is far from dead.

java is free so they tet no money from it.

This is the most misunderstood thing in the technology industry. Sun makes plenty of money off of Java. Sun had a choice:

• Restrict Java to Sun/Solaris forcing those who want to use it to adopt their hardware/OS.
• Allow Java to run on all hardware/OS's, but charge a boatload for it.
• Give Java away, allowing it to be easily adoptable/learned and reap the benefits when people begin to run more and more Java applications in their enterprise.

The first option is totally out. Nobody would have been forced to go all Sun just for the sake of Java. The second option would have probably generated some decent sales, but it would never have generated the market that exists today. The third option create a dominating market, of which Sun gets a share of in server sales, services, etc. This was definitely the best option. I am not sure why the media and those in the Tech Industry cannot understand it.

How?

[Rock Ridge]

Can I change from being a schill for Sun into a shill for GNU/Linux/Whatever?

Any advice?

Solaris 10

[dodell]

Well, I've got Solaris 10 alpha test CDs. Solaris 10 is coming out and has some killer features. I don't think this is an "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" situation at all. Sun has spent years developing and marketing Solaris/SunOS, and I don't think they'll stop here. It's very profitable for them to sell a true UNIX OS.

I imagine it's also just as profitable for them to do support/development for Linux. And I think that they're expanding, not downsizing or rethinking an entire business model.

Re:Solaris 10

[__past__]

Well, I've got Solaris 10 alpha test CDs. Solaris 10 is coming out and has some killer features.

Care to mention some? Or are you under NDA?

Re:Solaris 10

[anthonyrcalgary]

heh Care to elaborate?

Re:Solaris 10

[anthonyrcalgary]

I googled around a bit. Some of what I saw includes making it easier to remotely upgrade a computer.

What really caught my eye was the improvements in how you can designate resources for a particular task. I believe these features are present to a certain extent in Solaris 9, but I don't think it was so finely grained and optimized. I don't know Solaris that well though so don't take my word for it.

Another thing that caught my eye was the security improvements. I'm always happy to see those in any OS.

They're not so pro linux

[tvm662]

Sun boss, Scott McNealy has been hitting the new quite a bit lately. Sun might have struck a deal with SuSE, but Scott has recently warned companies "Don't touch linux without legal guarantees" He's had lot more things to say including calling Gates and Ballmer dropouts,

Re:They're not so pro linux

[tvm662]

oops, pressed the wrong button...

Anyway Scott has had a lot of interesting things to say recently including saying of the IT industry "We're down to three - IBM, Microsoft, and Sun. The rest is collateral damage.", of the M$ top brass "Ballmer and Gates are drop outs" and of Redhat "With Red Hat you get the kernel. With Sun you get the application server". Last time I checked Redhat is a little more than that.

I was thinking could all this big talking be a McBride like attempt to raise the stock price of his new 1.5 million shares? Or am I jumping to conclusions because their names both begin with Mc?

Tom.

Missing the point about SuSE

[panurge]

The garbled Reuters (close company) I think is trying to say that SuSE is not public. It's an AG. It's German. It doesn't have to be bought by anyone. It may well be a sales benefit in the German speaking world for a US company to have a local business partner. Patriotism is not limited to Americans, you know.

Sun has also always had a strong Indian connection and it is unsurprising that it should leverage that.

The "Sun is doomed" crowd closely resemble the "Apple is doomed" crowd. They seem to think being a mere $12G player in a huge industry is somehow a guarantee of failure. Depends. Spreading your alliances, being perceived as more rest-of-world friendly than Microsoft, being good at big tin that has to run with low outage, these could be good strategic positioning.

And the short-term opinion of the NYSE on this counts for precisely zilch. (as does the instant opinion of the typical /. reader, me included.) Stock exchanges are not able to make rapid long term evaluation of strategic decisions by enterprises. If they were, they would be economic analysts, not traders.

Re:Missing the point about SuSE

[jak163]

Apple was doomed. Gates bailed them out with money to try to forestall antitrust actions.

BRILLIANT ... absolutely brilliant

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a wise move by Sun!

Suse provides 64bit Linux, so Sun has a chance to sew up the Quad Opteron server market.

Now how about a Quad Opeteron Workstation with an AGP slot? Sun ... hello? ... remember how you started? ... The very best workstations!

My guess is...

[imtheguru]

My guess is that sun lacks a mascot who stands for liberty, love and the pursuit of happiness all the while standing up for the little guy.

A mascot should enjoy being a super hero, fragging, and sports and should appeal to the geek, the freak, the n00b and those corporate types.

And no! Duke is not cool. Duke thinks that he is cool. But he only reaches cute. And cute is for sissies.

suns dead?

[xo0bob0ox]

I thought they said that about Apple. They seem to be doing better. And at least Sun and Apple aren't evil..

Re:Yet another split direction for Sun

[WindBourne]

IBM is going to go with Linux over time, it is just that now AIX seems like the way to go.
Actually, AIX is still selling and making money so it will continue until profits are gone. At that point, AIX will stop. However, IBM has openly said and likewise shows that Linux is the real future for them. It is the only OS that runs on all their hardware. Likewise, they are only porting to Linux. Finally, it is the only platform that gets nice discount. If you wish to run the standard AIX, MVS, OS-400, etc, you will pay full price. But if you switch to Linux, it is done at a discount. As to HP, well, the upper brass want to switch, but they will support with what makes money. In addition, in house HP has always fought against radical change. Back in the early 90's when I work there, HPers were against Windows coming in. It was the radicals that went with MS. From what I hear, now it is the HPers that want MS and the radicals that are pushing Linux.

Sun also losing faith?

[AndyFewt]

You would think Sun would be more inclined to push Solaris (v10 now?) as much as possible with their perpetual unix license. I know they're pushing it still saying how it will keep their customers free from any potential lawsuit from SCO, but you have to wonder why they made this move to back linux. Does their "expansion" to linux mean they are seeing that the unix ship is slowly sinking with SCO? I mean, wouldn't SCO see this as the large vendors jumping ship before it goes down?

I'm guessing Sun either are making no direct contributions to SuSE or believe their AT&T/SCO license will cover them and their customers. IBM still ships AIX but also pushes Linux as an alternative (getting that last bit of blood from that stone?). Perhaps IBM's reply to all of SCO's FUD has made Sun see the light (har).

I have to wonder what their *actual* motive was. I thought they wanted to keep the position of "solaris is fully licensed and free of tainted code" but now they're shipping the very product and potential liability they claimed they were protected against. Something in their unix license??

SuSE? bad? have you tried 8.2 on x86?

[kb3hag]

seriously, the home version of suse is a hell of a good deal, the install is clean and consice, the package managment is click the checkbox and install, and the startup/shutdown screen is nifty too. i'm not saying there can't be somthing better, but for the end user, this is the best. also, using suse in servers, i've only used x86 single proc servers, but i've never had any trouble with it, it worked flawlessly for me. and 8.2 has like a 2.4 somthing kernel, a pretty much recent kernel, beinc as 2.5 is still in devel (i think)

Their Death is Near

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a SCSA and I have to say their death is near. Not from Linux, and their in ability to grasp it's importanance, but from their hardware. Sun has traditionally been the low cost Unix machine. They were the first in the sub $10K, $5K, and $1K Unix servers. I got a blade at work... It was like getting a Celeron POS... I could get a better Dell with Red Hat for far less $$$.

With IBM planning to introduce their powerPC chip for the entry level market. And to run Linux or AIX on those servers, Sun will have to do something pretty hoot'n fast to catch up. $3,500 for an IBM powerPC 4 proc box! I'm saving now. And with some luck, I will have built my very LAST X86 box.

Re:Their Death is Near

[swordgeek]

Oooh, an SCSA. That certainly gives you great authority on Sun's internal workings.

I'm a SCSA, a SCNA, and an enterprised-certified service engineer. My company is a Sun Strategic Partner. This means FUCK ALL as far as either technical knowledge (which it's supposed to indicate), or internal business knowledge.

So after my rant about "ooh, I'm an SCSA and I know all about Sun," let me proceed to some useful data.

1) Sun has seen some hard times. They know it, we know it, MS knows it.

2) For Sun to respond RIGHT NOW to some of these problems, they would have had to plan for it about six months to two years ago.

3) They have.

Watch for the new machines, likely to come out later this month. They will show you a degree of price/performance that you haven't seen from Sun in quite a while. After drooling for a while on those boxes, remember this final point:

Sun's core business is not in workstations; it's in mid-high end servers, and they are STOMPING IBM and HP in that market. (And Linux still isn't any more of a blip on the map than Microsoft--but they are being watched carefully.)

is McNealy bipolar or what??

[Anonymous Coward]

What's with this "now I support it...now I oppose it" crap? Here's another article from the other day where he warns companies against using Linux or open source software:

McNealy: Don't touch Linux without legal guarantees

In this article he says he supports Linux but also warns companies agains using it. Can someone explain his strategy to me?

Throughput Computing

[thanasakis]

Have a look at that (3rd time I post this link in /.)

Sorry guys, but Sun is a great company. They have supported open standards before anyone had a clue about it and they have already given a lot to the community. Java gains groud where microsoft still tries to enter the market (mobile phones etc), solaris is a mature product (solaris 10 is being used/tested inside sun for almost a year) and their hardware may soon fill the performance gap.
I do not see why it may be too late for them.

Re:Throughput Computing

[mihalis]

heir hardware may soon fill the performance gap

Perhaps the throughput computing stuff will be great, but until then, Sun has a bit of a problem in their traditional markets, because their cpus don't deliver competitive bang for the buck in the workstation and small server markets any more. This is where they grew all the mindshare which got them a lot of success. Since they announced US-IIIi at 1GHz, Apple/IBM came back with 2GHz G5. I am fairly confident a dual 2GHZ G5 Powermac is a better unix workstation for many uses, especially for the money. Sun does not ship AGP graphics cards, and hence is cut off from the majority of high-end graphics solutions. My job involves a product which uses fast 2d graphics on both Windows and Solaris, and it's just a dismal comparison between any Sun desktop product and the competition. Even their "high-end" workstation is very disappointing (fiber channel disks are a waste in a desktop, firewire support virtually absent, poor 2d graphics performance, hell, mediocre outright cpu performance).

Re:Throughput Computing

[Milo77]

How is "throughput computing" different than Intel's hyper-threading? It sounds very similar and hyper-threading is available today - as opposed to two years from now. I'll read the whitepaper tomorrow, just wanted to see if someone had an opinion...

Re:Throughput Computing

[n3rd]

Hyperthreading uses unused parts of the processor to act as a second CPU is how it was explained to me by a friend who works at Intel. So if X is waiting on Y then X can be used for another task while it waits for Y.

What Sun is doing is putting multiple fully functional CPUs on a single die. Think of it as a single Pentium 3 Slot A cartridge that contains 10 Pentium 2 CPUs.

I agree about the "first platform" thing

[wukie]

Sun might not have the edge in single processor performance, but compared to IBM, Microsoft and even Apple, the company is VERY APPROACHABLE.

Essentially "Sun wants to sell hardware and make a profit in the process". Their home grown products are very good and scalable, but very expensive.

When "life or death" is thrown in though, speed is not everything (or in some cases it the problem). Sun are releasing previews of Solaris 10, so nothing has changed in that department.

What Sun should be doing with Linux is providing the VERY BEST hardware and software platform solutions at a lover price than Sparc/Solaris. This is exactly what IBM and HP are trying to do.

Sun can provide the very best 64bit Linux products using the Opteron platforms if they try. But IBM is making the CPU's for AMD, so there might be problems there.

Fortunately it is very early as no one has a lead. Let the race begin ... Go Sun!

Keeps desktops away from MS!

[mabhatter654]

Remember that Linux installs could keep people from buying MS...the enemy of my enemy type stuff...

Suse desktops don't really take away from Sun's sales...MS already did that. Now if Sun would work for a decent Java GUI bindings they'd have someting..QT or GTK work on almost all major plaftorms...use 'um!

Re:SuSE == bad

[Billly Gates]

SuSE Linux is ok. SuSE and Redhat certainly are not bad.

The only thing bad about redhat is it comes with apache2 which the mods are not all their yet. This means you need to compile apache and install it manually. Second is the rpm package system.

SuSE has alot of nifty features like SAX2. This also makes it kind of sluggish compared to FreeBSD or debian.

But that does not mean its bad. It just does not fit my personal tastes for a fast light customizable OS. If you do not have the time to install and custom configure then SuSE or Redhat makes sense. If you need to customize your system then debian, slackware or FreeBSD might be your pick.

If you installed the PostgreSQL sources you could re-install it with spinlocks. On a server you need to customize things. I happen to agree with you on SuSE supporting older versions of Linux but I am supprised they would not have updates on the enterprise edition since these users do not upgrade as much as desktop users.

Just curious...

[enomar]

Any idea why IBM pushes SuSE over RedHat? Just curious...

Re:Just curious...

[ElGuapoGolf]

There are a lot of technical issues with RHAS, which probably end up costing IBM a lot of time and manpower. That's been my experience with RHAS, and that's what I've heard from others.

SuSE Advanced Server, while not perfect, doesn't have as many of the gaping flaws that RHAS does.

Solaris uber alles

[gelfling]

Solaris anschluss of Linux. McNealy proclaims "Peace in our time."

Film at 11

Do me a favour, will ya?

[multipartmixed]

I can't for the life of me get the SVM to run reliably under Solaris 9 -- most of the time, SMC hangs when I go into "Enhanced Storage".

So, please test and report the following bugs:
- type "smc" and notice how long it takes... four minutes to get to SVM is retarded!
- test smc over lbxproxy
- test smc after sys-unconfig with a new hostname. Try this with and without disksets.

Thanks! :):) I'm getting sick and tired of configuring SVM by hand, it's enough to make me want to downgrade to Solaris 8 so I can run the patched SDS 4.2; it's slow and ornery but it works every time. SVM is very slow and most of the time won't even load for me. Grr.

Re:Do me a favour, will ya?

[bolthole]

what the... you're using SMC to configure the VOLUMES??? sheeesh.. you need a gig of ram for that stupid GUI :->

just learn the command line for disksuite, aka "the SVM". it's relatively easy, and if you're getting tired of setting it up, you can SCRIPT it, after all.

Re:Do me a favour, will ya?

[multipartmixed]

I suppose I could write some nice scripts to do all that, but it would just as complex as meta* given the wildly varying configurations I use.. lately I've been going from the "commands.log" files of similar installations I did under Solaris 8 and tweaking it as appropriate. At least things are simpler now that I don't have to make trans-meta (logging) volumes..

And as for RAM -- you'd think that an idle box with 4GB RAM and 4x450MHz CPUs would be able to run a freakin' disk GUI -- 'specially when the Xserver is on another box!

The new GUI is good when it works, though. Using it, I did my last twin A5200 configuration (including labelling blank disks popping on the right VTOC from the shell) in ... get this ... 7 minutes. Way faster than I can sit and think about what freakin' switches I need to throw on the command line!

The wierd thing is, one of the hosts in the diskset couldn't run the SVM, the other could. What a load of shit. They were identical fresh Solaris 9 installs -- one duped (ufsdump | ufsrestore) from the other and sys-unconfig'd to the new hostname, even!

Re:Do me a favour, will ya?

[illumin8]

I suppose I could write some nice scripts to do all that, but it would just as complex as meta* given the wildly varying configurations I use.. lately I've been going from the "commands.log" files of similar installations I did under Solaris 8 and tweaking it as appropriate.

DiskSuite 4.2.1, or SVM as it is known in Solaris 9 works exactly the same as it has in Solaris 8 and previous versions. Use the same commands to set it up and you should be fine.

They were identical fresh Solaris 9 installs -- one duped (ufsdump | ufsrestore) from the other and sys-unconfig'd to the new hostname, even!

This is not the appropriate way to duplicate a Solaris install. Use flash copy. If you're not sure how to use it, do a "man flarcreate". I think your ufsdump | ufsrestore trick probably left some hostid or mac address specific configuration information behind.

Re:Do me a favour, will ya?

[multipartmixed]

> This is not the appropriate way to duplicate a Solaris install.
> Use flash copy. If you're not sure how to use it, do a "man flarcreate".

Hey, thanks. I didn't know about that -- I'll be sure to investigate it tommorow morning.

> I think your ufsdump | ufsrestore trick probably left some
> hostid or mac address specific configuration information behind.

Hmm - I thought about nodename/hostname stuff getting left behind (and hunted very hard for some!) -- but that doesn't explain the GUI on the *duped* not working. Or does it? I suppose in a very strange circumstance it could, maybe I oughtta init 0 the duped boxes and see what happens (my latest bunch of boxes aren't production yet, anyhow).

It's frustrating to have so many problems with such a simple task, though -- I really hope I stop having them. :) The SVM GUI (when it works for me) is much faster to use than the SDS GUI, and both are faster (for someone who only sets up boxes every few months) than the command line.

Maybe I should bite the bullet and write a curses TUI.. now how can I justify a couple of days on that... :)

If you don't know, you don't need one

[xixax]

OTOH, if you have a stonking huge RDBMS that does heavy transactions, or are modelling complex systems, you *might* be interested in a big Sun box.

We haven't used Sun desktops for a long while now, but our 700 MHz 4800 still runs demanding stuff faster than our 2 GHz x86 desktops. The forthcoming 64 bit x86 stuff will make life very interesting, but we'll have to wait and see how much of the big end of town moves that way.

And I don't need a special PC for word processing now that I have Open Office.

Xix.

Identical drive?

[multipartmixed]

When was the last time you flashed the firmware in a COTS harddrive? Does it even work? Are you sure it's *exactly* the same? If you're flashing the firmware, you'd better be!

Same deal with EMC. They support certain disks, and SUPPORT THEM. EMC brackets, BTW, are much harder to come by than Sun brackets..

Re:Identical drive?

[junkgoof]

Believe me. Seagate drives, same model, same everything. Just no bracket. They give you an unusable filler bracket... I was tempted to use duct tape (and I know people who have just left disks free in the case, heck, I've done that in some Ultras where there is no real space for a third HD). I've put PC disks into loads of Sun boxen, no issues.

It's the same reason I don't buy macs anymore. When mac made really different hardware with different buses and RAM and cards there might have been a justification for the pricing. Now that the hardware is PC but more expensive (at least they haven't switched to USB yet (I have a firewire card on my PC)) there is not justification for the pricing. It's too bad. A great BSD-based O/S with a great gui and lots of software. I just can't bring myself to pay for the hardware, especially when they could (there was a download for specific PC hardware) port it so easily to commodity hardware.

There are a number of reasons NOT to buy x86.

[emil]

1. Memory scalability. x86 is 32-bit. UltraSPARC is 64-bit, and can address magnitudes more memory. Intel is dragging its feet on 64-bit x86 while pushing Itanium, while AMD pushes x86-64 extensions incompatible with anything produced by Intel. This situation is a mess; if your process needs >2gb of memory, you will have to leave Intel x86.
2. SMP Scalability. I believe that Unisys has scaled x86 to 64 cpus max. A Sun E15k scales to 100-120, and a LOT more people run >32 Sparc cpus in a box than Intel.
3. OS Scalability. Solaris partitions are much more extensive and powerful than VMWare, and this is only going to improve in Solaris 10, which runs one OS, but multiple, separate OS environments.
4. I/O Scalability. Solaris disk I/O is the best in the business. Your 33MHz PCI bus is old and slow by modern standards, and is now fragmenting into PCIX and PCI Express.
5. Reliability. Hot-swap components, shut down and locked out by the OS, have been part of Solaris servers for some time.
6. Standards compliance. Solaris is a UNIX98 OS. I don't think that there are any Intel UNIXen that meet this standard.

Processor megahertz is not everything, but Sun does need to ramp up the clock sometime soon.

Personally, I think that Sun should stop fighting and build an E15k with Opteron chips. AMD is also in great trouble... perhaps a Sun buyout would be beneficial to both.

Re:SuSE == bad

[ElGuapoGolf]

Dude, yeah... Sax2 really slows stuff down. I mean, you totally run it once when you install or change your video card, and it never runs any other time. Clue, you're needed at comment #6602013!

Storage

[AusG4]

Someone once told me that Sun makes most of their money from their storage business. If you look at the RAID array technology Sun sells, it make sense.

At any rate, this is good news all around, though dooming Sun is preemptive. A lot of larger institutions use Sun machines simply because of the TOC and the reliability of the things.

We have about 12 Sun machines in our data center cabinet, 2 of which are 12 CPU'd monsters, and we have -no- reliability problems with them or our Sun supplied software.

Too tired for real commentary.

SuSE 9.0

[crusher-1]

Soon to start the next beta cycle, hehe I can't wait to test drive this and see what I can shake out. Hmmmm, is 2.6 in the cards.... I'll know soon!

Cheers.

aka if you can't beat 'em, join 'em strategy??

[antis0c]

What?? I don't know what corner of the world you live in but Sun Microsystems software is in use quite a lot still, and still beats Linux when it comes to server market share.

I work for a large data hosting company which shall remain unnamed so I don't get a memo with a copy of the NDA and privacy policies I signed, that has somewhere around 15,000 - 20,000 servers. We primarily offer 3 basic managed systems. Windows 2000, Sun Solaris, and RedHat Linux.

Of the servers about 55% of them are Compaq servers running Windows 2000, 40% of them are Sun Solaris servers, and a whopping 5% of them Compaq servers running RedHat Linux.

Who's beatin' who huh?

* Of course I believe Linux will eventually surpass just about anything, that or a fork of Linux or another open source project. But as it stands now, Sun Solaris is still one of the major UNIX operating systems in the market, and will remain so for years to come.

Re:aka if you can't beat 'em, join 'em strategy??

[wukie]

Considering the cost of some of the Sun boxes, sounds like Sun is doing better profit wise!

Re:Which Linux developers participated in the scam

[eggnet]

I know, don't feed the trolls...

Out of the huge code base that is Linux, there *may* be 80 lines of *copyrighted* (i.e. not pantented) code? Do you have any idea how trivial it will be to rewrite that code once it is identified?

That is precisely why SCO wants to drag out divulging that information as long as possible... assuming it's true that is.

Linux powerhouse?

[Ayanami Rei]

Fuck that. It'd be something bigger than that. (Bigger than linux... GASP!)

It's too bad anything that's more powerful than

[Ayanami Rei]

an modest 2 or 4 x86 cpu based system costs $10,000 or more.

THAT's why we don't buy many Suns any more. THAT's why Sun is starting to sell low end 2 and 4 way Xeons.

Don't fool yourself into thinking...

[Ayanami Rei]

your SCSI or FC-AL disks are magically connected to the crossbar. They have to go through the PCI bus, just like the rest of the joes around these parts.

Of course, most decent Suns have 3 or more seperate PCI-X buses so there's no lack of bandwidth. ^_^

6) Solaris x86. tee-hee!

How about dual Opteron with AGP?

[Ayanami Rei]

Yes virginia, it exists
And it's not just SuSe, RedHat has AMD 64 too (unofficially)-
ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/redhat/r edhat/linux/previ ew/gingin64/en/iso/x86_64

BTW, you don't want quad opteron with AGP, AGP just wastes a hypertransport and makes it all assymetrical. Maybe once they up the HT clock.

Sun rarely achieves 24x7

[msobkow]

Most internal data centers go through system updates and "just in case" reboots over the weekend.

Even without the reboots, my experience has been that Sun hardware has far more failures of CPU cores and memory modules than IBM or HP. That's purely anecdotal evidence, but I've just had way too many encounters with flaky Sun hardware to consider them viable for a 5-9's environment.

Maybe their very biggest boxen are better, but I've yet to run into their top-tier hardware at any banks, telcos, or semi-private businesses. IBM's big boys have been pretty common (I still drool over the time I got to take over an 8-processor F-series for a couple weeks. That was some serious power to work with!) HP used to be pretty popular with some telecos, but I haven't seen any new HP hardware in years -- just crufty "still working" boxes that need software enhancements.

Fuzzy memory

[msobkow]

Maybe that was a G- or H-series AIX box. It was brand spankin' new about 4 years ago, one of the first from the factory.

Linus Torvalds is from Finland ... your point?

[wukie]

Linux is not a U.S. product.

Linux was not started in the U.S.

The majority of the work on Linux was done in Europe.

Left to Americans, we'd all be stuck with Windows and other proprietory OS's at any price the companies choose.

Well said ...

[wukie]

You forgot to mention the thousands of users who will upgrade their hardware for existing applications they have been using for years.

My experience with applications on Sun/Sparc has consistently shown that the hardware/OS has always been by far the cheapest part of the equation.

Some companies have $40k per year support contracts just to maintain a single application. Suddenly $100k for the hardware starts to look very cheap!

No one is unhappy with the performance of Sun boxes, only these benchmark jockeys ... there's geek and then there is annoying geek.

Sun strategy

[panurge]

If you read the blurb, you will see a lot of references to "edge of network". The Sun concept seems to be to offer everything from the big boxes in the server room with lots of processors, out to the little boxes at the network edge doing low cost things. To compete on price over the whole site, the network edge boxes can run Linux on commodity hardware. The attraction becomes a unified adminstration system across everything from the big database server to the smallest print server and remote office email box. And I thought that was what Sun was working on.

The companies that are very skilled at scalability, reliability and networking (Sun and IBM) have one asset compared to Microsoft: their knowledge tends to flow from the top down rather than the bottom up. As IT becomes completely commoditised, that could be a big advantage in corporates. Ask youself the question: would you prefer to have your sewerage system designed and installed by the utility company or by a clerk from Home Depot? Microsoft, in these terms, is like a maker of pedestal basins who is trying to move into the big sewer market. Sun is like the sewerage company thinking about making pedestal basins. They are having to learn not to over-engineer, but they start off knowing the system requirements. They have a greater chance of getting everything to fit properly. At the moment, the maker of pedestal basins keeps experiencing leaks each time he tries to connect downstream. This is causing a certain amount of customer dissatisfaction. Perhaps they're even saying "when we buy our next house, I want to be sure the utility company did the plumbing".

Re:I call bullshit

[maitas]

Well... actually the Software department has their biggest R+D headcount (even more than Solaris and SPARC conbined), something like 5000 souls...

So SUN licensed with SCO huh?

[psgalbraith]

That's consistent with their FUD campaign. But I wonder how selling an allegedly tainted version of Linux fits into this.

Peter

Relating Sun, IBM, and MS

[solprovider]

Sun attacks MS since the Sparc workstation has been competing with MSWindows since before there was MSWindows.

IBM attacks Sun since IBM knows that they are a hardware company, and Sun has always been just behind IBM.

MS attacks the consumers because it knows they have money. It also attacks other companies, but only to make certain the consumers have no options.

IBM and MS did team to attack Sun on the Web Services security issues. MS wants to hurt Sun to give .net a better chance. IBM just wants to take Java away from Sun, because that will hurt Sun. Since their goals were very different, the attack has not been very strong.

I do not know why Slashdotters do not like Sun.
- Sun has always made good hardware, and their OS has always been one of the best Unixes. IBM may make better machines, but they are more expensive and use proprietary OSes.
- All of the hardware vendors (Sun, IBM, Apple) try to lock their customers into buying upgrades from them. In the 90s, Compaq wanted customers to buy their upgrades from Compaq, so they used gold contacts for their RAM when everybody else was using tin-alloy contacts. Yes, gold was better (50 year life instead of 12 years, as if it matters), and putting tin contact sticks in gold sockets gave a chance the motherboard would melt, but Compaq was charging for gold contact memory about four times the price of generic RAM.

- Sun gave us Java, while making certain that MS and IBM do not make it proprietary. Java is ALMOST community property: Sun's never-used veto power keeps the wolves caged.

Today, Sun is confused. Many of the best applications in Java are not from Sun, so they have difficulty making money from it. Advances in hardware technology mean many tasks that required mid-size or mainframe machines 10 years ago can be done with Intel (or AMD) servers, so they are losing marketshare. They are a good company, and good innovators, but their business model is obsolete and they have not found a new one.

Sun may not survive, but they deserve our sympathy.