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The End of Sun's Cobalt Servers

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the they-were-so-cute-too dept.

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.

10 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. The raq3, 3i, and 4 *were* AMD machines. by TheBeardIsRed · · Score: 2, Informative

    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).

  2. Sun has released all code under BSD license by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Just a clarification by weebler · · Score: 1, Informative

    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 ;)

  4. Cobalt was dying anyway by VJoseph · · Score: 3, Informative

    Netcraft has some information about a decline in the number of sites running on Cobalt servers, and about Sun discontinuing them.

    http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/12/19/sun _d iscontinuing_cobalt_linux_servers.html

    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.

    1. Re:Cobalt was dying anyway by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      2 billion in stock, when the stock was $60. Now it is $4. so they "paid" how much, again? Less than the capitol they acquired from Cobalt. Itls Cobalt that got the short end of that one.

  5. Another info point by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    There's more in this eWeek article, especially stuff implying that the Cobalt acquisition might not have been all peaches and cream for Sun.

  6. the summary is a bit mis-leading by the+melon · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  7. Qube 3 Sourcecode by mcbridematt · · Score: 2, Informative

    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

  8. Re:Continued Support by mcbridematt · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Qube 3 and RaQ 550 Source code was released to the Cobalt Users Group of Japan under a BSD-link license.

    Since their server is down, this is the google cache

    Did you know that Cobalt has the biggest market share of on-line Linux servers after Redhat?

  9. Re:Sad is how much they paid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    2 B in stock @ $60. Now it's $4. So they paid about $130 M. Good math skills.