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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.
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
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.
I don't have much AIX experience, but there is one reason why I suggested Sun for our data center servers, binary scalability. Sun servers scale from 1U/1CPU lower cost servers (5K) and developer stations to clusters of over 300 CPU servers, all with full binary compatiblity. I have yet to not be able to take software off a 1CPU low-end sun box and not be able to run it on the top-of-the-line servers without any recompiling.
This provides the capability to develop on low-end boxes without the headaches associated with recompiling on production servers and shortens our development cycle.
I will admit though, with most of the development moving into the Java world, maybe this doesn't make as much sense. However, we have still found it useful to do some of the development work on smaller Sun boxes for performance benchmarking and forcasting performance when something goes into production.
I've stayed away from IBM because of past bad experiences, providing quotes that are not complete solutions resulting in server cost overruns or software that is not yet written. (They once replied to a quote for a automated-failover system, and provided an neat OS2 solution. When pressed on how the failover worked, they finally admitted that once we ordered the system, they would write it.)
If IBM costs have come down, and their ability to fully respond to quotes has improved, maybe they are worth another look. But if not, Sun is still my server of choice for critical production systems.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
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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