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Sun-isms Debunked
Newman writes "We're all aware of the hole-ridden arguments that Sun executives Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz use to attack Linux. This guy at NewsForge really grilled them at the Solaris launch party last Monday, and actually got some straight answers out of them. At the end of the article, both execs have some specific words for Slashdot readers."
Just because you hear something from Schwarz today doesn't mean he'll say the same thing tomorrow. Today: we're going to give the hardware away and charge for support! Tomorrow: we're going to "open source" the OS, give it away, and charge for hardware.
The vultures are circling, and I, for one, can't wait until *something* happens to Sun. Get bought, go bankrupt, develop a *real* open source strategy, just something. I'm tired of the bullshit.
look at linux but have a hard time switching from solaris because once you realize the cost of, for example, RHE3 support and it's about the same and solaris is a much more mature OS. The linux kernel has some things to iron out still. Plus with solaris you have one vendor to deal with for hardware and software. There are very valid reasons why solaris is still alive.
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
We're all aware of the hole-ridden arguments that Sun executives Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz use to attack Linux.
Sun is not anti-Linux, Sun sells Linux, Sun will even sell you a full rack of x86 servers all running Linux. Get over it, Slashdot!
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
If a tenth of the money spent on making the x86-64 crap work were spent on optimizing the SPARC systems, we'd have have ultra-cheap SPARC CPUs for the commodity market.... SPARC has been 64-bit for a long time now. The x86 is a johnny-come-lately to this arena, and is still playing catch-up.
Oh, it's "squeeze", by the way.
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
While it made sense 5 years ago to drop ~$500k on an E10k box to get reliability and support, nowadays you can get that same reliability for much less by using piles of clustered Intel hardware and a fairly-competent Linux or BSD admin.
Sure, that's why all those sites survive the slashdot effect.. oh wait, no they don't. We have a mix of Intels, Suns, and xserves. About 50 servers in total, the sun boxes are still the most reliable and powerful. We have 8 year old E220s that can still handle 512 simultaneous mysql threads and 1024 apache processes. The mysql process alone uses 2 gigs of ram.
The last time our main webserver was rebooted was for Y2K patches.
Yes, Intels and xserves make good servers, but we do lose harddrives and ethernet cards on them. We don't worry about the sun hardware.
SUPPORT.
BLAM. That's IT.
You pay half a million for your box breaking to be SOMEBODY ELSE'S PROBLEM.
That money makes your box Sun's priority. Period. They'll FIX IT. Software or hardware. They'll roll you custom Solaris patches, because you're paying for it.
You're paying for a COMPANY to give you some LOVE. Not some snotnosed Admin whose first-line defense is an O'Reilly bookshelf.
There's a definite market for this kind of service. Just because you're not in it doesn't mean it isn't there.
feeding the offtopic troll here buuuut... for many things a 350mhz machine is just fine for daily use. You can do work processing, play music, browse the web, d/l music, etc on it. The machine at home that I SSH into from and other places school to run my (much of the time legal) bittorrent d/ls and to allow secure connections to the web and such from wireless networks is a 350mhz machine (running debian btw) that chugs along quite nicely. It doesnt take much power either, unlike my main desktop with pulls down power like a dog. My old laptop which I still use on occasion is a 300mhz machine and runs fine for most non-games things. so yeah, 350mhz machines are fine. And running gentoo might give it a boost to the preformance of like a 400mhz running something else due to optomization of software (though not a gentoo use myself I dont know).
ok, I'm tired and ranting about the usuability of old computers to feed a troll, I think I'll go to bed now....
--Anubis
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Oddly enough, while "AD" is a proprietary technology, none of its components are.
Active Directory is a pretty standard LDAP database. The MS-specific stuff is even passed via option fields in queries; that's why my Linux clients can authenticate to an Active Directory domain and receive settings about networking, access control on network resources, etc. from them.
You can't apply GPOs to Linux boxes, obviously, but you can have them in the domain -- and have them work normally.
A few years ago, I attened an SGI conference in Las Vegas. Didn't lose too much that time either... Anyway, the point of this conference was to communicate the SGI vision going forward. This was right about the time SGI got done getting their ass kicked in the win32 / Intel space.
Sgi said they needed to return to their roots too, just like Sun is saying now. For SGI this meant, taking their best tech forward while cutting costs on everything else. Good message, seemed the right thing to do.
Well, how are they going to cut costs? Enter the chief scientist, an Asian GUY Goh, I believe. Very personable, very smart, very excited about --- Linux and OSS.
The SGI plan was very simple. Keep IRIX doing what it does best. At the same time, begin working on Linux. SGI learned they had to accept the community as a partner. This means if they submit something and it gets rejected, they either don't do it that way, or submit again, or maintain it as an add on, until the community catches up with them in that particular area. The idea being that either their solution would be accepted, or the community would evolve one that SGI could use.
(This does have to do with SUN, bear with me!)
So, SGI did go back to their roots, worked with the OSS community, and ended up once again able to do what they do best; namely, low latency, NUMA supercomputing. They are 2nd on the top 500 again, for now, and their flagship machine runs Linux!
At the time, I thought: "uh Oh, there goes SGI..." You can say what you want about IRIX, but it does what it does very very well. Linux looked impossible at the time. But it worked, and worked very well for them. SGI lost a lot of smart people, but obviously kept the ones that mattered. There was one other significant thing: After the banquet, I got a chance to talk with Bishop. Very interesting fellow in that he is totally geeky, but has solid business sense, and a direct line to NASA... He told me SGI was going to commit to this new course no matter what. Half way was not going to cut it. SGI makes the lions share of its money making powerful systems that do things that are near-impossible to do. Anything else would only prolong the death spiral. That meant getting rid of the baggage in measured steps, then build again lean 'n mean.
So, now we look at Sun.
All of SGI was committed to doing one thing, well actually two: Building their Linux / Itanium platform while doing everything they can for IRIX / Mips. To this day, they have not deviated from this vision at all and it is now paying off, just like Bishop said it would.
Sun? Lots of infighting, no core vision to drive forward. Until they fix that, they are doomed to fail because nobody is going to pay for 'almost the greatest' solutions, which is what Sun is selling right now.**
**Please don't flame for that. Sun makes good stuff, but they don't have clear niches where they are the absolute best and where there are few to no alternative solutions.) Massive SGI NUMA, mixed with graphics, insane I/O, and big low latency memory machines solve a class of problems that nothing else solves. There are only a few players, none as mature as SGI is. Ok, back to my points...
Sun needs to cut the baggage. Carrying Solaris forward is not going to be the answer. The cool hardware features, redundancy, hot swap, etc... can be solved in other ways. That means Solaris really does not have anything the market must have and that's the key to this whole thing.
SGI realized this with IRIX. However, some bits were needed on the Linux side, such as their XFS filesystem. The few bits we are clamoring for, Sun wants to keep tight hold of and this is a mistake. The market is not going to rebuild onto Solaris, all the work done with Linux, just to get Java, or redundancy, for example. Instead, they are going to just figure out how to do it with Linux, just as they have everything else.
The SGI approach at least got their technology in wide us
Blogging because I can...
Why not? - for every useful feature that Sun adds in, someone in Linux-land will eventually see that feature as a good thing and work will be done to port that feature to Linux. The porting to Linux of an existing Sun feature can be done faster than Sun can think up and build new features, and as Linux pushes more and more into the enterprise, the focus will become more and more on replicating Sun's advantages in Linux.
That is presuming that realizing that feature will not require redesigning the linux kernel to implement it. (No chance of that happening quickly until IBM can sucessfully fork linux.)
- to a very large extent, you can achieve uptime by scaling "wide" i.e. throwing more boxes at the problem. It's absolutely not a panacea to all uptime issues, but it's an approach that fits particularly well with Linux/Intel due to the low incremental cost of the hardware. Whatever "uptime smarts" Sun can add to their OS, I and many others can achieve the same results (in pure uptime terms) by bolting a bunch of new Intel boxes into a rack
The key to that strategy is that everything Sun can do with its upscalable platforms can be matched by linux running on another box. That is just not the case. You're enhancing reliablity by adding another point of failure? It may be possible to add redundancy to improve uptime, but that doesn't come without a physical cost. And how are those boxes going to consume less power than an integrated server?
Don't be shocked if five years from now, PC's aren't used at server farms. Why have thousands of PCs running linux, consuming all that electricity in computing and air conditioning, and physical space? Instead, have 5 "Sun Server Bazillion"s. You need more computing power, slap in a hotpluggable CPU, rather than another PC machine. No need to implement a networking grid for all those PCs. The only networking needed is the server to the outside world router. Have two-four overpaid sysadmins or a battery of employee salaries to maintain a battery of PCs
In piecemeal ways, webserver companies are already moving this way with low powered CPUs and fiddling with "blade" machines. A smart marketing team with a smart engineering team could easily bring Sun back into the server market. Not the mom & pop ISPs, but the AOLs and Verisigns of the world. Their problem is that their hardware is not quite designed to hotswap CPUs and memory like hard drives, they haven't configured a software product to realize this vision, their OS is still relatively esoteric, and they margin themselves out of profitability. But none of those things are impossible to correct.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
In the corporate world there is no such thing as "natural allies". Especially not with competing products. But generally, when a business man/woman shakes your hand, you can bet his/her other hand is behind his/her back, holding a dagger.
People, this is not Tolkien, where the elves are your natural allies for eternity, and the orcs are your natural enemies. In Tolkien's world you know where you stand. It's a simplified world. That's why we like to escape to phantasy worlds: they're a refuge from the madness of the real world.
Real world is nowhere near that simple.
In the corporate world, there are no heroes in shiny spandex, and no villain cackling over death ray blueprints. There's only a bunch of greedy people trying to make a buck. Your buck.
Throughout the history of computing, as little of it as we have, one thing stayed a constant: whoever is in the lead wants proprietary stuff and tries to lock you into their incompatible formats. Whoever is losing badly wants open standards and generally a fair chance to have a go at the big guys' locked-in customers.
Then the wheel turns, companies go from top to bottom and viceversa, and they switch the tune without missing a beat. And things stay the same. The ones who are now winning, try to lock you in, the ones at the bottom suddenly become open-standards evangelists.
That's why IBM and the rest are supporting Linux nowadays, for example. That's why Sun would even give away OpenOffice, even with sources, to try to break MS's file format lock-in.
There are a lot of has-beens in this industry. People who once owned the market, but were too stupid to keep it.
E.g., PCs once had to be "IBM Compatible", then it was "Intel Compatible", while nowadays it's "MS Windows Compatible". Intel doesn't single-handedly decide new architectures any more, but has to beg MS for support in Windows. (And just got refused recently!) IBM had its ass handed to it a longer time ago, when the PS/2 microchannel architecture was basically rejected by everyone else. The company that created the PC was no longer in control of its architecture. Novell once owned the network server market, but thought it could ignore NT and stick to charging outrageous prices. Prices for which you could buy not only 2 NT server licenses, but also 2 high end PCs to run them on. Etc.
And when they still were at the top, neither of them has acted any better than MS does. E.g., although nowadays "FUD" is synonimous with Microsoft, once it was synonimous with IBM: In fact, it was _invented_ by IBM.
Now all those has-beens are suddenly pro-Linux and pro-open-standards, to get their righteous vengeance against MS. But if either got back on top, they'd start doing the same shit all over again.
And Sun is the prime example. Sun is somewhere in the middle, and can't decide if it's losing, or still has a chance of being king. As soon as it thinks it's losing, it starts being a Linux zealot. As soon as it thinks "hey, maybe everyone will convert to Solaris if we port it to the Opteron", it starts openly trying to kill Linux.
And as management perceptions and sales figures fluctuate, pushing them a little up or a little down from that middle position, Sun flip-flops between the two extremes several times a month. Or sometimes even within the same day.
Sad.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.