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Sun's new UltraSPARC workstation: the Blade 1500
Roman Hauptmann writes "Here's a review of Sun's newest single-CPU workstation based on the UltraSPARC IIIi processor. According to the review, the system barely performs on the level of a P4 1.8ghz machine yet it sells for several times the price. Despite that, the Blade series still brings value to those who do visualization and imaging."
The great selling point of a Sun is that it seemes to maintain a "cool" factor much like Apple computers, not mass produced generic clones like Dell etc... whether that alone or with certain small scale contributions to server innovation is enough is unclear, other than that, I'll be ordering them for the next college term
Thanks
I'll post a more descriptive post when I've read up on the specs
How can it bring value to any market when you can do the job on a less expensive piece of hardware?
How many more SPARC processors will Sun release? Or systems designed around them? I have read many times that it is in their best interests to cut in R&D on their own and use other bases, to help them focus on designing the overall system...
Comparing Sun with x86 is a bit apples and oranges. Maybe on sheer performance it will be beaten by x86 however for crunching big data sets the UltraSparc is just more effecient. Also some software only runs on Solaris so for that this box is good. However I did wonder why it came with Solaris 8 rather than something newer Rus
CPanel + Root from $35/mo - 10% off with discount code SLASHDOT
The SunPCI III is the most innovative piece of computer hardware I have ever seen. Put simply, it's a small AMD-based computer built into a single PCI card
What's so innovative about that? Apple had intel cpu's on pci card for the original powermacs and Sun has had similar cards for awhile.
From the article:
"The proprietary 64-bit workstation market is dominated by Sun Microsystems, which sells more 64-bit machines than any other company -- their market share is over 60%."
I wonder how long this market domninance is going to last now that commodity hardware is going 64. (e.g. a 64-bit laptop for $1,549)
Stop thinking of computers in terms of speed. Think more of what works for the job. Sun servers can handle far more RAM then Intel machines making them perfect for large databases. They can handle more CPUs then Intel machines, perfect for when clustering isn't an option.
Just because this workstation has less gigahertz then another doesn't mean it's wrong for everything. Does Grandma need it? No, she'll be fine with an Intel or an AMD.
although it's quite long in the tooth at this point and it isn't even close to the same level of performance that you'd get from a comparably priced AMD64 machine -- or even a 32-bit Intel-based P4 or Xeon computer......It can't touch high-end 32-bit machines in terms of raw performance
And the funniest part of the whole article:
Sun hopes to make it their new bestseller
So you provide a machine with inferior performance that doesn't even support Linux/FreeBSD/The latest version of YOUR OWN Solaris Operating System and you hope it will become a best seller? Are the execs at Sun smoking crack? Sun has done some cool stuff, but maybe it is time to sell some of their stock....
You already have a network of Sun machines but want something faster and cheaper. No additional complexity. If you start introducing different platforms you begin dividing and conquering the skills and time of your IT staff.
In the same vein, a Windows monoculture would be a great idea if it wasn't for all the architectural and implementational disadvantages.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
It's never a suprised that people on slashdot just don't get Sun equipment. Much like Apple, companies (I'd wager extremely few people buy Sun's for personal everyday use) that buy these boxes are buying them for the OS and rarely for the groundbreaking hardware.
;)
They like the support that Sun provides with thier OS and how it's been grown to be rock solid. Yada, yada, yada. Cut to the posts here by people that probably have never seen a Sun box let alone owned/used one and I'm not shocked.
Disclaimer: This is not a troll.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
More like 99%.. for supposed nerds, you'd think more of them would have more of a clue about the various facets of computing.
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OK, I'll spoil it. The blades NEVER get used. They are a complete waste of money and space. Who want's to use their ancient desktop, when you can do most anything on a box with KDE, OpenOffice, and the most popular development tools?
The reviewer just doesn't get it. The reason you get a machine like this is so that you can run the same software, unchanged, on your big 32 or 64 CPU fridge-sized machine in the back room as you can on your desktop workstation. You run the same OS, the same binaries, use the same dev tools and you just know it will work. If it doesn't work, someone from Sun will be around to fix it, quickly.
As for going on about the "Restrictive" license surrounding Solaris. For fuck's sake, it's FREE (as in beer) to download and use - for Sparc and Intel.
And then there are automatic software updates that you have to accept? WTF? is he on drugs?
Sun have recommended patch clusters (AKA Service Packs) and individual patches that you are free to download and install as you choose. There's nothing compulsory about them.
Oh, and there's no.... RESET BUTTON!
I dunno about anyone else who uses Solaris out there, but I've _never_ seen a Sun machine lock up hard, such that a Reset Button would have been the solution...
Stick to reviewing your latest 0verclocked AMD with peltier and watercooling and neon casemods...
- k
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
That's local storage. Think about where this is going to be used.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
There are a couple reasons behind SUN's success in research that have nothing to do with individual price/performance.
First, just look at the name. SUN=Stanford University Network. Mmmkay. Check.
Second, look at their pricing structure. You can fill an entire academic division with SUN equipment for what I spent outfitting my home office with a modestly huge stack of x86 boxes. They have DEEP discounts for academic research.
Third, their servers are huge and if you can bundle up a stack or workstations and thin clients with your PO for your servers and have an uniform operating environment are you going to run and buy a stack of DELLS and then try to shoehorn in some slapjob of an authentication system? Uhm, no.
Last, if you spent years in academic research and then shuffle off to whore yourself off to corporate IT, who are you going to call?
It's precisely the same marketing strategy MS and Apple have been using since day one to get the general user on their platforms. No mystery here.
The Sun Blade computed at nearly 3X the speed of the Pentium 4.
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If it rans three times faster what's the problem? Also, are you sure you should be the one writing these computational programs? I don't know how you could with a statement like "due to FP instruction sets not being available". What program are you in?
- I have the Solaris 8 Intel and SPARC source CD's sitting right here. They were available to purchase for around $40 from sun.com a year back or so. This offer was open to everyone. I'm just a hobbyist dude, not a governmental organisation, eductaional institution -- i.e., I certainly stand no chance in hell of getting the Windows XP source code.
- The entire section on Licencing is just meaningless crap.
The conclusion gets it spot on::wq ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I lost any faith in this guys capability to do a serious review when I noticed he was using a Java based SpecInt benchmarking tool. The Spec scores suck on just about any risc cpu. Take a look and you will see according to spec scores a sunblade 150 wastes a 4 way IBM P-Series machine.
So not only is the benchmark worthless he benchmarked Java's performance.
This machine is meant to replace all of the 7-8 year old Ultra 5's and 10's still in production, not play quake 3 or whatever the latest is out there.
I'd second the idea that the reviewer doesn't entirely understand the target audience for this machine.
The article also includes a link to the product's PDF datasheet. Please read before you bash.
But just in case you don't feel like skimming through the PDF, the relevant points seem to be that it:
To me, this looks like a box intended to do hugely accelerated 3D graphics in a unixish environment. That's it's niche. I'd bet it's 3D rendering performance is nothing short of stunning.
Remember - big companies have marketing departments, entire sections of the building dedicated to answering the question "what should we charge for it?" For someone who needs a machine like this I'll bet that it's worth every penny.
Saying that it sucks because it's dhrystone score is as low as a box 1/5th it's cost is like complaining that a hammer makes a lousy screwdriver. You're not using the tool for its intended job.
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I never could figure out how (Ultra)SPARC was considered proprietary. You can license the specs for it at http://www.sparc.com/
Heck, Fuji did an independent-from-Sun implementation of the UltraSPARC V processor.
I would say that Intel and AMD are more proprietary than SPARC. Or is there some place I can license the 'code' to the Pentium 4 that I don't know about?
Heck, Suns even use PCI now (previous Suns used to use SBUS).
From the article: The keyboard and mouse (which add $25 to the cost of the machine) can best be described as "painful." Extremely painful. I couldn't use them for more than five minutes without my wrists hurting, and it is impossible for me to imagine anyone using these 80s-era throwbacks
I like this. Sun peripherals have always been able to give me the feeling that says "Listen punk, these machines are not made for fun, they are made for working. If this would be a pleasant experience, it wouldn't count as working, would it?"
Take a closer look at the revision number of the Solaris 8 that ships on this system, its the Hardware revision 5/03, (May/2003) Its been updated, and support made specifically for Solaris 8 for this machine, its about as 'old' as Solaris 9 is.
I havent used , I've only had the oppertuity to use 8 on intel, and have a older sparc here and will install 8 on it when I set it up, either way, 8 is not old (useless), and I would assume there is less OS overhead on the system being it is a little older (age) then 9 has. But again, thats only an assumption.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Trust me, you can spend 5x's as much trouble shooting old software on new systems then it would have cost for "equal" performance if you had spent 3x's as much on the hardware in the first place...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Look, I'm a long time solaris admin and I actually like to run most of my home systems on sun hardware with openbsd (can't wait to try freebsd soon; linux just doesn't work right on it yet). I love to remote console in. In the end, I have to agree with some of the author's disappointment.
First, it should be noted, you're a newbie or sucker if you're paying the retail price listed on the web site. Start your negotionations for the price by knocking of 1/3rd. This applys more for bigger systems, but it's close for small ones too. About support, skip it if this is your only system. I've found their warrenty support just fine and very helpful. However, if you're a medium sized shop, consider getting the platinum support. I've called all the big boys under super-boffo support accounts. HP has trouble just picking up the phone. IBM: we'll call you back when we found someone whom we think is who you want. Cisco: we sell that? Sun: two rings, serial number, knowledgable person opens case and starts working on it while getting [storage|OS|kernel|hardware|etc] expert on the phone, and in the mean time, the field engineer has already contacted to courier to get the new hardware there in under and hour, at three in the morning. I'm not exagerating either. Yes, this level is support is DAMN expensive, but it's comparatively cheaper than their competitors. The difference is that when you buy sun's deluxe support, they really mean it. For every other vendor, it's the same support faster.
Second, I am tired of them selling low quality workstations to their loyal users. The blade150 is flimsy and flakey; especially to those who remember the sparc2s. They were like armored pizze boxes! This new blade just looks like more of the same. The 150 has no normal way to play cds (for example). Why, oh WHY did you go with USB ports if you don't fully want to suport usb devices. The authors right about the keyboard and mouse quality. Well, it's not THAT bad - I consider the apple ones worse. But for the price, it should be much much better. Or better yet, fully support standard keyboards and mice. Map the sun keys to something else. Help bolthole.com make the mouse wheel work better. I just got the lowest end hp-ux workstation. It comes with dual scsi, and it could be considered similarly priced. IDE has always been chinzy. Serial ata would have been a great comprimse. My next work station? Mac.
Third, you're not SGI, and stop making your hardware look like it. Get over it. Frankly, pixar and other grapics outlets aren't in love with you anymore. Let it go. Move on. All the bioinfomatics I talk to are going apple.
Forth, clean up your packages, and MAKE PATCHING WORK RIGHT!!! HP and AIX - stick in a cd, reboot. BSD - painless. MS - automated. Even linux is better. Anyone running a large installation sun shop will tell you; sun patching sucks. Take a clue from bsd, linux or aix or even MS; make your systems easy to set up and administer, and you gain the respect and approval of the geeks who sign off on the tech side of the decision. I've lost trust and trust my solutions to patching much better than live update (at this point).
Last, what the hell is it with your cheap ass sales people. Is the sun logo so expensive that you can't afford to give out tshirts, cups and other good will crap to your biggest customers. Pizza?!? WTF! HP gave the whole department some of the best vendor shirts we've ever had. IBM gets us drinks and cigars. EMC tooks us to the matrix the day BEFORE it opened. I can go on and on. Instead, as one of your biggest clients in the region we get bad pizza and bad patches?!?
Ok... I got it out of my system. Thank for that.
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
I think many responses to this review have missed the point of this system. This is NOT a machine intended for users running benchmarks that demonstrate how much slower it is compared to a similarly priced x86 machine. These machines are targetted at the EDA/CAD/CAM/visualisation clients that spend much more money on Software Licenses than they do on Hardware.
So, what do you think the priorities of these customers are? Performance? Maybe, but only compared to other machines that offer a similar level of *RELIABILITY*.
This topic of reliability never gets touched in the article, but is probably the most important aspect of this machine.
Ask yourself, if you have 20 2-year software licenses that cost $750,000 total, will you skimp on the reliability of the hardware running that software? The extra cash is paid out to protect that large investment in software.
Are these machines more reliable than comparable (and less expensive) x86 systems? I wouldn't know, and the article makes no mention of this. I'd venture to guess that a company like SUN with a substantial R&D budget produces a better verified and more reliable system than a home built win-x86 system that scores 23000 on 3Dmark2001 (sometimes) and runs circles around that new SUN POS (assuming no crash to desktop or worse).
Companies that sell UNIX systems (IBM, SUN, HP, SGI) see hardware as a vehicle for selling a software stack and services. And if the software isn't their own, then the selling point is the reliability of the underlying hardware system.
To shrug off this system based solely on performance is to ignore the most important aspect of this system and others like it: RELIABILITY.
Now, to performance:
On both workstations you can get XVR-600 which is lightning fast and extra high quality. It's a Wildcat 4 chip (3D Labs) with 10-bit pixel precision and dedicated texture ram. The least expensive card like this for the PC is around $1K5 (Wildcat 4 7110) Also you can't get Linux drivers for it yet.
As for the P4/1.8GHz story try this for a test : Install MySQL on your linux PC and create a database with a table of about 5-6GB. Run alter table on it. Wait for it CRUMBLE TO DUST as it hits past 2GBs. Then get a Sun.
Opteron might be the only challenger to sparc (which is why Sun is pushing for opteron-based servers), but it's main faults are :
Still has no real applications ported to it.
Can't scale beyond 8-cpu's. If you don't need that - well... Plenty people do - in servers at least. This isn't a workstation issue, but is a server one.
Integrated memory controllers are a bitch on multi-cpu systems if you need one cpu to access all memory, while the other is still doing something. This is the main reason why sun still sells Blade 2000, now that Blade 2500 has hit the market.
As for true workstation features check out Blade 2000 (2 cpu's, UPA graphics, FC-AL disks), or Blade 2500 (2 cpu's, scsi disks). Both more expensive (especially Blade 2000 which uses Ultra III CPU's without integrated memory controllers, but with a real crossbar switch instead), but they are still A LOT less expensive than their SGI or IBM counterparts. Sun isn't competing with the PC's with this WS, it's just for the people who need a cheap ws for home, remote work or something like that. As the author of the article puts it "make no mistake: this is a workhorse, not a pony or a racehorse"
Ok, so I thought when J2EE stuff is your everyday work, some Solaris know-how would be nice. Bought a Sun Blade 100.
Well, Solaris was interesting software at least. The Sun Blade was nicely documented and stuff, but it was awfully slow and in fact the cheapest-built hardware I've ever put my hands on. Even those supermarkt-pcs were alot more silent and felt more robust.
And that machine cost ~ $1500 when I bought it. Incredible.
Sun servers were a completely opposite experience for me, built for eternity, great support.
Never, ever again Sun on the desktop.
Every some troll posts an article like this, the slashdot ignorati line up to chat about how fast their wintel/lentel machines are in comparison.
Well your intel box runs exactly 0 binary applications that require this OS and arcitecture. That's a significant loss in MIPS/clockspeed/whatever...they just won't run on your intel box.
If some high end engineer/engineering group has special apps, developed and massaged over decades, that do something that simply must be done and done fast and with a minimum of fuss, $5000 is typically nothing for that person/group.
Demanding a port to wintel/lintel OTOH could be nightmarish--huge cost, all new set of bugs, etc.
The 8MB version of the drive costs, at most, $10 more than the 2MB drive. Considering the performance boost you'd get from such a small expenditure, why cut corners there?
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
It's a matter of matching the software to the hardware. If you run commodity software designed for commodity systems, you're going to get better results from the dual x86 box. If you run a software environment designed for Solaris and UltraSPARCIII, you're going to see significant speed advantages... and you're already seeing a 3x speed bump in your application on a platform it's not optimized for.
Still, if that's not enough extra oomph, look into Fujitsu's SPARC clones. They can outpace Itanium and Alpha systems, and are less money than Sun-branded boxes. Sun's contracted with Fujitsu for future SPARC development, so the performance gap will be widening. The systems will still be ludicrously expensive. Whether the investment in bigger iron will be worth it depends on how parallelizable your code is. Sometimes two big CPUs trump a bunch of teensy ones (Amdahl's law and all that)... sometimes a grid application running on a hundred different systems in the office as a screen saver will do the trick.
SoupIsGood Food
Isn't that like Atari w/o Noland Bushnell, Apple w/o Steve Jobs, SGI w/o Jim Clark...
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I take care of Sun kit at work, and I can't possibly imagine why anybody is buying these. The place where sun sets themselves apart is in their large machines - dozens of CPUs, piles and piles of SCSI channels, etc. If you're buying high-end sun stuff, you should see if you can do better by clustering cheaper boxes, but sometimes you can't, and the big huge behemoths are a reasonable choice.
If you're buying SunBlades, though, you need to visit your psychiatrist and have him help you with your white-box phobia. $5k will get you an Opteron box that will run rings around this thing all day long.
Anyone who pays full price for any Sun gear is getting ripped off! The price on these boxes are always negotiable. You'd be surprised how cost competitive Sun solutions can be when you start talking business with the sales guy.
Needless to say, being a huge public university helps too.
Sun has not made cutting edge hardware?
./configure; make; make install with it doesn't make it bad. And how cute... you spelled windows, windoze.
Quite frankly in recent years in the workstation market, no, no they haven't. They switched to PCI/IDE years ago for workstations. A majority of the Ultra series was PCI and not S/bus. The current Blades are more powerful than Ultra boxes. Sun is just behind the development curve of x86 (and PowerPC even for that matter) and they don't look to catch up anytime soon. Anyway, I can't really tell if you're defending old Sun hardware and blasting the new or if you're just trying to tear down my statement.
Would you please enlighten me?
Yes, I would.
I've got no idea why someone would want one of these blades. If you have software that has not been ported over to GNU, you could just use x86 Solaris or purchase a real Sun used.
That is a hugely humorous statement. You wouldn't. Companies that have applications that run on Sparc like having workstations of the same architecture for debuging purposes among others. And if you think that all applications _should_ be ported over to a GNU system, you should have your head examined as that's a very closed way of thinking. Many corporations don't see a need to port their (in many cases) proprietary software from something that already works just fine. And the last part of that statement, x86 Solaris is a joke and not compatible with binaries from Sparc Solaris (obviously) which doesn't help at all when debugging and/or using commercial applications. But the kicker, "purchase a real Sun used", um, these are real Sun's.. they even have the magical logo. Did you realize that a used Sun which I'm assuming you're going for an S/Bus Ultra with an UltraSparc IIe is dog slow compared to the UltraSparc III in that Blade. If you're so worried about disk performance, just put a SCSI PCI card and disk in it and shut up.
If Sun's goal is to comoditize thier hardware, they need to ditch the AMD windoze hunchback and embrace free software.
No, they don't need to embrace free software. Closed source, Proprietary, well supported software is just fine when it works well. Just because you can't feel special because you can't
They could steal most of the Xenon server market if they did this.
Huh? By making Solaris open-source they could steal most of the Xenon market? I have no idea what you're talking about.
Yes, it's very difficult to get data from the cheap XP box to your nice Sun.
Oh yeah, FTP, NFS, CDROM even... super hard.
The answer is to convince people that a GNU box works better than an XP box for any and all work related computing. Then they have their pick of ssh and all the traditional Unix networking software.
What? We have to convince people to use Linux instead of Windows XP... Um, this isn't even relevant to what we're talking about.
To sum up, you're pretty mixed on several things. The primary thing I was trying to educate you on in the parent post is that, these boxes are not for you. They're for research, development, and mission-critical applications. You will never have a need for it. Corporations on the other hand do for various reasons.
Ever time somebody brings up Sun, everyone goes "THOSE SPECS SUCK, KILL KILL KILL!". Sun equipment isn't about the specs. It's about the OS mostly and the support you get for that OS to run your extremely important applications. We can debate all day long about how they should've put SCSI in there instead of IDE or what have you but that's not the point of my posts. Sun has made some poor decisions in regards to their hardware but I really don't think that will stop customers (read: companies, not you) that already have Sun equipment from switching. It certainly won't gain them customers, but thats another debate.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
It's not so much buggy as that the Win 32 system is not really build for Java. The multitasking and process handling just don't fit right. I've never seen JRE bugs on MS (not including the MS port, which was fast but broken).
Sun and TI better get their dam act together.
I sense another Motorolla going on here. TI see's only short term costs to upgrade their chip fabrication plants and is screwing Sun. Meanwhile they are losing sparc sales because fustrated customers are switching to lintel and AIX.
Perhaps sun is testing waters and will likely dump TI if the Sparc IV's and V's which both were supposed to be out by now, are not out soon.
Perhaps they will use AMD64's for all their systems.
Sun could use the processor but custom build their high end back planed motherboards and multiple buses known for their servers.
HP is doing this for their superdome with Itaniums.
I would be royally pissed if I were Scott McNealy right now. Customers will not upgrade unless newer systems perform significantly better.
If sales do not go up, McNeally could lose his job. Merryl Lynch already tried to can him last quarter.
http://saveie6.com/
This guy has no idea what he is talking about.
...humvee is the way to go.
First things first - sun does not compete on speed. It competes on reliability and stability. Yeah my athlon 1800+ is way faster than my sun blade 100...but if you check the number of reboots, sun wins hands down with 0 in over 2 years.
Incidentally, I get more work done on the sun m/c.
Now to the article:
"...The 350w power supply is made by Samsung, and I would consider it barely adequate for this kind of computer....If I were designing this workstation I would have used a more robust power supply..."
Yeah sure. If you could you'd put in a nuclear reactor over there!!! Ever heard of power efficiency? Those guys had a good enough reason to stick with a 350W power supply...and trust me, those engineers are no idiots.
"...I wish it had a drive activity indicator LED and a reset button, which would add a lot of convenience for very little added cost..."
Reset button ? Sun ? get off your windowz box and work on a sun box for a year. Tell me if you *ever* need to reboot it. (for those who dont know - very few patches require reboots)
"... You're also subject to automatic software updates which may include further license restrictions. But at least there's no product activation, so it's not as bad as it could be...."
automatic s/w updates ? Solaris 8 ?
The "reviewer" is totally unqualified. He has no idea of the intended use of Sun machines. Nor does it seem he has ever worked on one. Comparing it with 32bit desktops is like comparing a car with a humvee.. Sure the former beats it in speed [hummer goes max ~80mph)..but in real life, especially when you are being bombarded
Out of the fortune 500, who needs a 64 or 112 processor system? Nobody.
This seriously has to be the stupidest post I have seen in a long time. Who do you think DOES need that kind of equipment? Just Industrial Light and Magic? Universities?
Fortune 500 companies have tens of thousands of employees and have custom designed statistical software processing data on every conceivable aspect of business.
Modern financial corporations are BUILT upon statistics. Investment firms will be analyzing millions of financial transactions all over the world every single day. Insurance companies also have very complex risk analysis tools with huge data sets.
Those are just two examples. The other fortune 500 companies are going to be companies like GM. Do you honestly think that a company like GM does not use the most sophisticated simulation software imaginable? They have been using
What do you think the entire IT industry is about? just simplifying data entry? The real benefit is the analysis of the data which aids in management decisions.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
One thing to bear in mind is that this is a Blade.
The Blade is Sun's low-end series of machines. They are not fast. They are not reliable. I've seen a fair number of the SunBlade 100s overheat and die. I've had one Blade die over and over and over again. They have low-grade IDE hard drives, and the rest of the system is of comparable quality. There isn't any Sun magic in there to prevent the industry-standard low-end IDE drive or low-end PSU from failing, and the Sun components of the system are of comparable quality (in some cases, of comparable quality to an eMachine). Anyone who tells you otherwise is either clueless or trying to sell you something.
A high-end x86 machine will blow away these Blades on almost every benchmark, and cost a lot less. This model Sparc has higher IPC than an x86, but not 3x higher, and more than 3x lower MHz.
The reliability advantages of the Sun's come on higher-end machines. The throughput advantages come on higher-end machines. All of the standard advantages people have cited in this forum come from higher-end machines. Someone mentioned large databases -- the Blade 1500 only supports 4GB of RAM, and beyond that you're swapping to IDE. No performance boost there.
These machines are engineered for cost -- not speed, not reliability, not network throughput, not memory bandwidth, not upgradeability, and not anything else. We've bought Blades for just under a grand. When you consider how much more it costs to have your own custom-made CPU, motherboard, chipset, case, etc, without the advantages of mass-production, that's very, very cheap.
However, sometimes you need a Sun. Over here, we have some very high-end Suns (64 CPU machines, etc.). We have a lot of custom software that only runs on Suns. A lot of mainstream engineering applications do not have GNU/Linux ports, and we really don't want to be touching Windows. Having the network standardized to the same type of machine, and having everyone standardized to the same software helps a lot. This is one place where the low-end Suns fit in. You don't buy them because they are faster or better than an x86. You buy them because the high-end suns are faster and better than an x86, and it's often convenient to have matching low-end machines on your network.
"Leveraging" just reeks of Marketspeak (tm). "Building on the core technologies," maybe, or "Working with the existing core technologies." But "leveraging" brings to mind synergizing with the creatives and helping push On-demand opportunities to potential market base. I'll just task you with a few actionables, and hopefully we'll come out of the opt-out with a win-win! ON-DEMAND!
It runs kind of OK I guess, about as fast as a 1.8GHz Pentium 4, which for comparison no-one would consider buying for a new PC these days. The Blade 1500 is faster than the Blade 150, but then again so is my Palm PDA. If your vendor still hasn't ported your application to Linux, then this workstation might make some sense while you wait for them to do it. If you're not a Sun shop, this won't interest you. If you *are* a Sun shop, then this will be an adequate last Sun workstation for you before you head off into the x86/Linux arena in 2005/2006.
Take a loving look at your SparcStation 20 you've got stashed away in the basement...they don't make them like they used to.