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The End of Sun's Cobalt Servers
knighten writes "Sun Microsystems has taken the last of its Cobalt line of server appliances off the shelves in favor of the AMD based Sun Fire line." The article makes note of several relevant bits of history regarding Cobalt, the Appliance Server market, and Sun's Linux strategies.
But then we do get the new AMD chipped servers.
but the upcoming new Sun Opteron systems look pretty sweet! :-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
This will be yet another good test for the opensource concept. As sun ends support for these devices, will someone else pick up the ball (be it in a commercial sense, or a free sense) and continue providing updates (at least security updates....) for these now orphaned linux-based products?
As someone who maintains Cobalt servers on a daily basis I can say that this has been coming for some time. Sun has been very poor about releasing patches for exploits on the Cobalt server. These are fun servers to play with when you get the hang of it, but newer control panels (Plesk, CPanel) pretty much make them obsolete.
An x86 machine that that can run Solaris SPARC operating systems? Clever... :-)
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I am finding it difficult to see Sun's position in the market more and more each year. The best thing to have happened to this company was free downloads of solaris 9 x86. It is virtually impossible to convince my manager to buy Sun anything nowadays.
For high end stuff we have AIX. It comes with LVM and other critical stuff. It has ridiculously stable support for fibre channels and just the most outstanding support.
For middle to low end we have PCs with windows and linux.
I can't seem to see where Sun (with or without their cobalt server) fits in today's market anymore.
The article reads like the cobalt was the only true "server appliance" left. As I see it this forgets all about blade servers, network attached storage and a nifty box I saw from IBM that allowed you to stack multiple servers to form a larger one footprint box. They have even moved into the consumer space with media servers and firewalls. The author obviously knows nothing about what is or isn't a buzzword.
We migrated from a Cobalt server we had, It's good to hear that that abomination of nature will no longer be with us : )
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Still...they just don't have the Kawaii factor of the Cobalt cube. I want one but I can't spare the money, dammit.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I know I'm gonna get nailed for this, but the fact is that Sun should have never bought them. In a way, Sun was unworthy - Sun's CEO was too jealous of Microsoft to ever make a service based approach work, or at least be competitive price wise.
:)
From a data center perspective, yeah its true that Sun boxes can do some things better than x86 boxes running Linux, but I can't tell you how many times I've seen companies buy 100K worth of Sun servers to do services that I know darn well could just as well by an x86 box or two. It always amazed me to see the salesman talk "scalable" for systems that were really farmable. Yeah, experience with high end Sun boxes was great for my resume, thanks, but I wanted my career to have meaning too - and having a bunch of overpriced toys just for the sake of ego seems a little shallow, don't you think. (Sorta like Sun's CEO,
IMHO, the Sun just needs to set. Now that 64 bit Opetrons are out, they will have almost nothing to offer in the midrange. The lost the lowrange a long time ago, but are still in denial. And in the high range, the IBM and HP can beat them out in all categorises.
Anyone recognize the niche as that of Cobalt, before Sun took them over? Did those do well enough that this can be popular?
Unfortunately, as an operator of a Cobalt RaQ for many years, I found it to be very limiting once we did figure out how to really use it and how little the custom interfaces allowed, but it was great for people who just wouldn't learn that stuff.
I hope no one thinks these are patch-proof though,. Our Cobalt needed patches and even with them had trouble avoiding a few compromises since patches were so delayed. Now it runs Debian and I couldn't be happier with the little box.
Slashdot Moderation: From positive to terrible in 2 "insightful" posts.
The cobalt raq3 and 3i used AMD K6-2 350mhz i586 chips and the raq 4 used a K6-2 450. It would seem that sun is just re-kindling old business partnerships held between cobalt corp and AMD (before sun bought cobalt).
Sun has been very generous and released ALL the code from the Qube 3 and now the RaQ 550 under BSD license. See open.cobaltqube.org for more info.
They originally paid about 2 Billion, yes with a B for the company and basically have nothing to show for it.
Poster says "in favor of the AMD based Sun Fire line" ;)
This means some products in the Sun Fire range, with Opterons. The poster's line sounds like all SF products will be sold with Opterons and the UltraSparc will be EOLd -- Not the case! You wont see a SF15k with Opterons any time soon
Netcraft has some information about a decline in the number of sites running on Cobalt servers, and about Sun discontinuing them.
n _d iscontinuing_cobalt_linux_servers.html
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/12/19/su
It's kind of sad that they puchased Cobalt for $2 billion, not too long ago, and now they're discontinuing the Cobalt line. That's $2 billion down the drain. When Sun is making business decisions like this, it's hard to image them being a major force in the computer industry for much longer.
I know that Sun paid well too much for the company and that perhaps in a post-dotcom culture the market for server appliances may have contracted somewhat, but it surprises me that there was aparently no money to be made from selling Cobalts. I have met more than one hosting provider desperate to source more Raqs over the past year.
In my view Sun have damaged their reputation in my sector of the marketplace. Fair enough they're dropping the range, so I guess they expect customers to be happy to migrate to equivalent Sun kit. But how can I trust to buy a replacement Sun brnaded server from a company whose idea of support for a range of web server appliances was to stick with PHP 4.0.6, a rather aged piece of software that simply doesnt run everything these days. Leaving people like me to either compile our own or scour the web for install-and-pray packages would be fine for a geeks-only free distribution but is not what you expect from a product you pay good money for.
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I wonder what my hosting provider plans to do about this. I should ask them.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Scott M. keeps making expensive blunders like this, but nobody seems to hold him accountable. Very disturbing.
He has indeed pointed out a mistake, and I misread his correction. So much for my promising career as an editor.
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There's more in this eWeek article, especially stuff implying that the Cobalt acquisition might not have been all peaches and cream for Sun.
the SunFire line is not only comprised of AMD based x86 machines. Mostly it is SPARC machines, but the first x86 SunFire was the v60x and the v65x. Both are based on Intel Xeon DP chips.
screaming, while i clutch the pizza box! they took commodity hosting to a great level.
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Poor SlashChick. She must be sad by now..
Slashdot community, please notice: I am looking for a girlfriend.
Nave H. Weiss
Umm, Sun is very actively selling their new Xeon based systems currently as well. I actually just installed a V65x last Monday in our cluster.
:)
Of course we won't mention that these machines are just OEM'ed from Intel... I know this because I bought the equivilent of a V60x directly from Intel this fall... for much less then what Sun charges.
Maybe we'll be able to get Qube cases for our
sff motherboards..
After admining many of these machines and becoming an expert of sorts, I can rebuild one of these after an intrustion in a few minutes and have it patched.
.pkg files, I have built and released quite a few internally for customers in need of patches now, not when Sun/Cobalt felt like it.
I know all about them
I know how to get a borked interface working again, all the tell tale signs of an exploit, placating customers as they plead and ask why their was an intrusion as they patch it the minute Cobalt releases a patch.
The hardware in the raq3 and 4 servers look like a modified laptop design minus video.
Actually I'm probably wrong about this, but laptops have better performance for the same spec processor.
On the units with SCSI why are the drives IDE?
What exactly is the PCI slot for?
I have seen so many fail right out of the box, sometimes 2 out of the carton of 5 with the rest failing over the next 6 months.
The perl scripting was totally horrid, the web interface runs as root, why isn't dns in the postgres database, why does it have it's own unique flat file.
All the commands and tecniques I used were unsupported, the backup through the web interface was broken for sometime before they fixed it, tho I fixed the mangled backup and made them work anyway. These machines were unsupported if you wanted them to actually work correctly, the interface fell short in so many areas as to be useless. Let's not forget the main webserver authenticating through PAM by default......why??
I can go into many more reasons why I hate these machines, they certainly don't fail safe, fill the disk up with logs and watch as the machine borks all of it's conf files.
Bad engineering all around.
I am glad to see them go, while Sun may not be perfect, these little bastard appliances gave Sun a black eye in my view.
I thought Sun might be able to put them back on track, they did by disco'ing them.
A Cobalt rep (pre Sun) paid us a visit to show fail-over in a demo....it just failed...I asked her if they were designed in someone's garage, she said basicly yes.....2 Billion dollars later this realization hits Sun.
The first 2700WG (the original Qube model) I ordered arrived DOA, so I went through the RMA process and returned it for a replacement. When no replacement showed up I called them again and the Cobalt rep told me they'd credited my Amex card for the purchase price (I'd returned it for a replacement, not a refund). I told him I wanted a replacement server, so he sent one out, but they never charged my card for it again.
That free server is still running on a shelf at work, albeit with much more RAM and a 30GB drive.
Putting moderation advice in your
The Qube 3 sourcecode was released to the Cobalt Users Group of Japan at open.cobaltqube.org (down at the moment) :(
What a sad ending. I am still drooling over this sexy Cobalt Qube 2 advertisment
That's either a drag queen or a degenerate 38 year old barfly hiding in a dark cloud of cig smoke. You need to upgrade your tastes in both women and computers.
I read the link you supplied, and the article makes not one mention of a single debian user (much less thousands) switching. What it does say is:
"While the other distros still aren't quite as polished as Debian when it comes to package quality and administrative ease, they have gotten a lot better - good enough anyway to suit a marketplace that favors technical mediocrity coupled with slick marketing."
Which seems to not quite be the same as your opinion of the advantage of RPMs over debs and apt.
Having been in a position where I was required to work on cobalt servers, I can only say, its about damned time.
;)
In their day, I am sure that these little toys were great for a small business looking for a simple end to end solution, and I must admit that the user interface for hosting customers was great, not to mention the fact that a rack of the Cobalt RaQ servers just looks damned cool in a dark server room, but, they were and are an incredible PITA to work on.
Upgrading the software was difficult, installing your own software was difficult since Sun placed things in odd locations, and when one of these things developed problems, you were pretty much left with the MS solution: Shut Up and Reinstall.
So, thank god... besides, now maybe I will be able to snap one up cheap on ebay for my home. I need a new mp3 server
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When they came out, pretty cool. One shop I worked at had one. Made it simple for the non-UNIX people to administer (pretty much everybody but me) but if you poked around at all under the web GUI you broke stuff. And you waited forever for patches, a security hell mitigated only partially by the fact that our Qube was a MIPS (a lot fewer script-kiddie hacks for anything non-x86). Our boss said not to compile stuff for it, void warranty, yadda yadda.
I still wanted a MIPS one for home, once NetBSD got ported to it. Finally, a real, supported OS on it. Then mini-ITX for factor machines coming everywhere. The Qube was a pioneer, never kept it's lead.
With the exception of building out a linux box and manually configuring the myriad of services that are integrated into a Qube does anyone know of some good, simple to use, alternatives to the Qube 3? I have one of these in a small business now and would like to swap it out for something better but I am having a hard time finding something that would work. Any leads?
It is not enough to succeed, others must fail. - Gore Vidal
If it is really that popular, why in hell did sun shut it down. I mean those servers were extremely expensive for the hardware they used so their must have been a good margin there.
Hmmm... Pie...