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Sun Unveils 64-bit Server Line

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the long-overdue dept.

SumDog is one of many to let us know, PC World is reporting that Sun is expected to reveal the first few of their new 64-bit servers at their quarterly product rollout. From the article: "Formerly code-named Galaxy, the Sun Fire X2100, X4100, and X4200 servers represent the company's bid to woo customers, particularly the financial industry sector, away from rival server vendors Hewlett-Packard and Dell."

5 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Suns have been 64 bit for a while now... by allanc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The UltraSPARC chips have been 64 bit for quite a while now. A more useful article summary would have pointed out the actual newsworthy bit of this story, which is that they're rolling out 64 bit x86 servers (running AMD Opterons).

    1. Re:Suns have been 64 bit for a while now... by photon317 · · Score: 4, Insightful


      That's a great reverse-reverse-psychology troll or something, but it's hardly insightful. I have always been a Sun supporter over the decade or so I've been working with Solaris on Sparc. I have always said that they were the best *nix thing going out there, compared to their competition. But I was also always a fan of Linux where it was applicable.

      But the time came (some time ago now) to admit that Sun has in fact missed the boat on Linux. What made it especially frustrating was that, of all of the commercial *nix vendors, Sun was in the best position to capitalize on the Linux wave. They were already all about developing and promoting open standards (think NFS and NIS back in the day, among many others). They were already the best non-free platform to build and use open source software on. Hell starting with Solaris 8 they were shipping a good deal of open source software with stock Solaris. But some idiot(s) in charge of the company completely lacked the vision to make it happen. I can only imagine how much better a position Sun would be in (and how much better off all consumers of *nix would be) if Sun had re-centered themselves around Linux kernels going forward back in the late 90's or even 2001-ish. They could've turned their kernel engineering teams to work on Linux on Ultrasparc (and Opteron), and could've brought a lot of scalability and other enhancements with them to the Linux kernel in general to boot.

      Even now that Sun has started to turn the corner on Linux from their previous stances (which were to ignore it, and then to marginalize it as a toy), their stance still smells a lot like, "Sure, run linux on our Sun-branded but otherwise whitebox-like and overpriced x86 and x86_64 hardware, but only for crappy unimportant edge devices. Leave all the real computing to a real operating system like Solaris." Meanwhile smart companies are working out strategies to transition off of the last remaining Ultrasparc behemoths they have left in the corner of the datacenter while the majority of their real computing is already happening on Linux today. Average not-so-smart companies will be doing this in a few years.

      I don't hate Sun, and I don't think they're Evil. But I think someone fell asleep at the wheel there and completely failed to take advantage of the Linux wave like Sun should have. If anything, I feel sad for them, it's tragic to watch a great company go down like this. They could still turn it around, but I don't have much faith anymore that they will.

      --
      11*43+456^2
    2. Re:Suns have been 64 bit for a while now... by mrbooze · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't understand. Solaris is great, but Sun should have abandoned decades of work on their own engineered kernel and ported to Linux just because Linux is cool?

      Why would the company with "the best *nix thing going out there" abandon that just to jump on the linux bandwagon?

      It sounds like you're saying you wish they had done that so that they could contribute "scalability and other enhancements" to the linux kernel for the public, but what would that gain them? Hell, what if that alleged better scalability is based on the fundemental design of the kernel? Suns engineers may not be able to just write some "scalability modules" and plop them into Linux.

      And if in fact their own kernel was already better than linux's kernel in that regard, again why would they want to abandon their own kernel? Just to say "Hey, look everyone, LINUX! LINUX! SQUAWK!"

      None of this is a slam against linux, which is part of a perfectly fine OS as well. I just don't buy into the argument that linux is the ultimate end result of all OS evolution. Just because linux is good doesn't mean it's what everyone else has to be. Sometimes, different is even better than good.

  2. No, no, no, no. by Karma_fucker_sucker · · Score: 5, Insightful
    "We weren't paying attention, we got distracted by all these people with pierced body parts and blue hair," he said. "We missed changes in the marketplace. It's very distracting to grow at 60 percent per quarter and very humbling to have it disappear. We're now paying attention to Wall Street again."

    Where bold insert Customer

    That's simialr to Digital's downfall. They built some of the best computers in the world, thinking if we build it they will come. But it wasn't what the customers wanted. The same goes for catering to Wall Street. They want short term quick earnings growth; not necessarily long term custoemr growth. That may not be be conducive to achieving a product line that will last and the customers will even want.

    --
    Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
  3. Re:And it's based on Opterons... by bradleycarpenter · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Well, say you are a large corporation that only buys from Tier 1 manufactures. Sure joe schmo can go get one from random white box corporation, but in the corporate world they stick to specific suppliers that they have contracts and provide 24/7 support.