Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
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.
Oxford Dictionaries Online
Scott M. keeps making expensive blunders like this, but nobody seems to hold him accountable. Very disturbing.
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.
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 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