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.

Comments

Should have never bought it

[argoff]

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.

Re:Sun is going down

[johnlcallaway]

Your statement about a 'truly scaleable datacenter' does not make sense. You say you've never seen one, but then you mention that Linux has delivered scalabilty beneifts Sun could never imagine. Please make up your mind which it is.

Myself, I have seen scalability. I've have seen applications start out on 2cpu $20K database servers and migrate to E15-type servers without any code change. I'm not saying Linux (or AIX) cannot do this, but this is scalability that Sun does provide at a competitive price.

Having priced the cost of multi-CPU server-quality x86 platforms, there is very little cost benefit to going there. Multi-CPU server quality x86 boxes cost almost as much as the same Sun boxes.

As for Java, since you did not mention any alternative, I cannot provide any response. However, since the application servers and web server provide enough bandwidth, there is no reason to switch to anything else. I am not ready to jump on the 'let's switch everything to Linux' bandwagon yet, but I am on the 'let's review it as we deploy new products or grow existing ones.'

I am sure Linux will migrate into our datacenter, and eventually support production applications. It just doesn't make any sense to replace what works and is proven with something else unless there is a clear cost advantage.