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

Continued Support

[ohchaos]

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?

Re:Continued Support

[mcbridematt]

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?

Ease of use

[mocker]

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.

Someone didn't proofread their press release...

[Tet]

From the article:

Sun is strategically focused on delivering choice and performance to our customers, offering general purpose x86 servers that can run Solaris SPARC [...] operating systems.

An x86 machine that that can run Solaris SPARC operating systems? Clever... :-)

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.

not a surprise

[USAPatriot]

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.

Sun has released all code under BSD license

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Sun is going down

[johnlcallaway]

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.

Oh yes, I'll buy another Sun....

[carndearg]

Quite a few of my customers have used Cobalt Raq servers in hosting facilities. In my view they were a fantastic product, offering a very useful Linux box to me the developer and one of the best www based admin frontends around to my non-tech-savvy customers.

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.

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.