Sun Announces Its First Laptop

boarder8925 writes "Enterprise computer maker Sun Microsystems announced its first-ever laptop yesterday, saying the machine was designed to let engineers and scientists perform demanding computer tasks away from their desks. Sun, which has seen sales fall for the last four years, said that it was also lowering prices for some of its computers by up to 40 percent."

Comments

Partnering with Sun?

[XorNand]

Running my own small VAR/intergrator shop, Sun has really piqued my interest recently. Right now, I'm kinda in limbo as far as aligning myself with a server vendor.

I can't stand dealing with HP on a number of levels, one being how they've handled the Proliant brand of servers. Dell couldn't possiblity have a decent channel partner program since their whole business model is focused on direct sales. IBM is an option, but it's apparent that they're trying to get out of the hardware business and further into the more lucrative services biz. The (obvious) alliance between IBM Global Services and IBM's hardware divisions would make me feel like I'm sleeping with the devil. The big selloff to Lenovo was the real wakeup call for me. And rounding out the bunch: Toshiba seems to only be half interested in playing in the space, and their lackluster offerings reflect that.

Sun interests me because they have brand recognition and seem to be increasingly investing in the market. Until rather recently, I didn't even know that they sold wintel boxes. However, news such as the release of this notebook further shows their intent on being a contendor. My biggest concern is that Sun gear tends to overly pricey, but if they're addressing that I might just start buying from them. Does anyone have experience with partnering with Sun on the hardware end of things? What kind of reputation do they have? Or can anyone suggest another server vendor that I could investigate? I realize there are a thousand white box vendors out there, but I'm more interested in a mature partner program: coop marketing opportunities, top-notch support resources, etc.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

My biggest concern is that Sun gear tends to overly pricey, but if they're addressing that I might just start buying from them.

While Suns tend to be pricey, it's because their built like tanks (both in terms of chasis/frame, and from CPU and internal layout). Like Macs, they're designed to work well, and you have to pay the designers.

A while ago AnandTech had a review on Sun's V40z.

You could also call up Sun and ask them for a loaner. They frequently let let people try out machines for a couple of weeks to run them through their paces. You can get either Solaris or Linux installed. BTW, make you open the box up and look at the internals: they're very well designed from a space, air flow, and maintenance point of view (part of the cost).

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[ryanov]

Sun has been disappointing, to me, in recent months. Being that I attended a lot of the Solaris 10 brouhaha in NJ, I was pretty excited about the prosepects of what it could do, and I had 4 V20z boxes to try it out on.

Come to find that Sun's own support for Solaris 10 and indeed for Solaris x86 is sad to say the least. Many of their management apps/tools do not support Solaris x86 or Solaris 10 yet. Major issues with, say, disk drives... patches are out for 9, but not for 10 yet. C'mon, folks, get with the program.

Their hardware's been OK, but frankly, that doesn't make up for the rest of the hell that is dealing with them. Don't get me started on their documentation.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[Jim_Maryland]

I'm sure we could all point out cases where one vendor or the other failed more often in our labs. For servers in my labs, I have a mixture of Sun's, SGI's, Dell's, IBM's (PC, not mainframe), and HP's. Out of all of them, I've had to contact Dell the most for failed hard disk, power supplies, and even the motherboard in one. The Sun's, SGI's, and IBM's seem to have the lowest failures (I'll admit though that many of the systems are over 3 years old so maybe the newer equipment fails more frequently but even on the few new ones, I haven't had any problems in my labs).

I'll bet that every system administrator here will have a vendor that has let them down and you'll find other system administrators who will swear by that equipment. Me, I still prefer the Sun boxes for UNIX and I'm sort of neutral on the Win32 vendors.

They fucked up Java

How so? My group does a fair amount of development in a variety of languages (C/C++/Java/VB/C#/and various scripting languages) and by far, the developers prefer Java. I guess I don't see how Sun messed up Java as you indicate.

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[andyr0ck]

being a sys admin in a place where Solaris/SPARC is the platform, i've seen the quality of the machines go down in the last year or so. with the advent of Linux becoming a viable platform, Sun have felt the pinch of cheap x86 boxes and have responded with their own commodity boxes. you can see some of them (sunfire v240 for e.g.) have ALI chipsets in them, etc and other stuff you'd expect to see in x86 kit. i can't say we've had many, if any, components fail in them but we haven't had them longer than approx 18 months so maybe we'll hit the curve soon :-)

for real Sun engineering, you need to look to the older models, like the sunfire 280R. we run those too and you can see the difference when you open them up. and in the performance.

my point being; if you look at any of Sun's webcasts, you'll see Jon Schwartz go on about 'the era of commodity computing'. cheaper boxes is Sun's response to that trend. dunno 'bout this laptop, though!

Re:Partnering with Sun?

[xdroop]

Here's some counter-annecdotal evidence.

We purchased 40 V60x servers (the 1U equivilent to your V65x) 18 months ago; we also have one V65x, which is statistically uninteresting. We also don't care about RAID.

Of the 40 V60x servers, I've had one failed mainboard and one ethernet jack that doesn't hold onto its ethernet wire properly. That's it. Oh, and Sun sent a guy to fix the mainboard for me. Regular warrantee, no extra service.

Of course, since I'm Canadian, I might be more special than you Americans.

What really annoyed me is that we bought into these computers, and then Sun goes and EOLs them for the Opterons, which are not immediately suitable for what we are doing with them. We are looking at the Opterons, but these V20z systems are rebadged computers, not Genuine Sun Things. (For the record, yes the V60x computers are also rebadged computers, but they work pretty well.)

Sun laptop? Isn't that an oxymoron?

[caryw]

Sun has never been super keen on the design aspect of the computer world, not that I agree there should even be a design aspect in mind when it comes to computers. I hope they don't expect to put an E450 in a backpack and call it a laptop.

Any guesses as to how much this behemoth is going to weigh?
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