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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."

16 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Sun 10 years from now by AnonymousYellowBelly · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Do slashdot readers see Sun being relevant 10 years from now? Will they survive by selling 'mostly' software? I know they sell hardware, but they no longer control the full stack like IBM with POWER. Just a question.

    --
    Disclosure: I'm stupid
    1. Re:Sun 10 years from now by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 2, Interesting

      ``Do slashdot readers see Sun being relevant 10 years from now? Will they survive by selling 'mostly' software?''

      Actually, I do see them surviving (I don't know about the 10 years, it's a long time), but not selling software. Neither do they, otherwise they wouldn't have taken the decission to open source their OS and provide it as a free download. They seem to even be planning to give away their hardware.

      I think they are realizing where the real money is and moving to a subscription model. You get powerful hardware and one of the greatest OSes for free, and then you have a support contract for a year or more. This gives you support (which most organizations want), and it gives Sun a load of money.

      The above strategy should, at least for a while, put Sun ahead of the competition who still charge you for the initial hardware and/or software purchase, plus the support. Since Sun hardware and software has quite a good reputation, they won't suffer from the "it's free so it must be junk" line of thought as other vendors will. And since they make the OS and control the hardware, they can be expected to provide good support, too. Plus, with the OS being open source, it actually stands a chance of staying in the race with Linux, contrary to many other OSes.

      In short, organizations have every reason to buy into these Sun contracts.

      --
      Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
    2. Re:Sun 10 years from now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      > One admin told me that the only reason they
      > really still use sun is because it pipes
      > input and output thru the serial port from
      > the second power is turned on.

      If that was the only reason, they have now
      none left: Sun's Opteron servers have no
      serial, no parallel port and no PS2.

      Exit support for legacy hardware. Do they
      feel so strong with recent hardware?

  2. Sky banners by Chmarr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Sun are really tooting their horn on this one. They paid for (presumably) a aircraft-towed banner to fly around the SF Bay today.

    Haven't seen one of those in ages :)

  3. Spells Death for the SPARC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The new Sun servers run on Opteron, an implementation of x86-64. These servers spell D.E.A.T.H. for the SPARC implementations.

    The marketing talking head will claim that SPARC lives in Niagara and Rock, but note that Intel is now building a new x86-64 implementation that focuses on multicores just like Niagara and Rock. Given a choice between Niagara/Rock and Intel's/AMD's new multicore chips, most customers will prefer the latter.

    The only future remaining for the SPARC is in esoteric highend systems built by Fujitsu and destined for simulating weather, nuclear explosions, and overpopulation.

    1. Re:Spells Death for the SPARC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      These new Galaxy servers; x4100 & x4200 (x2100 was code named Aquarius and isn't an identical design to the Galaxy architecture) are mainly aimed at grids, we can put 32 of these dual socket, dual core servers into one rack and have a 128-way grid.

      When the Niagara based servers are released we'll have a 1 socket, 8 core, 4 threads per core server which in a 32 server rack gives us a 1024-way grid in one rack ...

      Now, the Niagara CPUs performance (specifically floating point performance) is lower than Opteron (Sun have made no secret of that) but for heavily threaded/moderate computation workloads, a grid of Niagara CPUs looks like a very interesting proposition.

      Rock is rumoured to be SMP capable so rather than building grids of these boxes running seperate OS instances you are able to build 1024-way (maybe more) SMP servers with significantly less power consumption and much higher performance/watt and performance/$ than existing SMP (from ANY company) in a footprint that is a fraction of the size of current highend servers and mainframes.

      I wouldn't say SPARC is dead yet, it might have been a bit ill for a while there, but it's on it's way back.

    2. Re:Spells Death for the SPARC by saintp · · Score: 1, Interesting
      SPARC == Alpha

      Sun has started down a long road of realization that their proprietary chips aren't worth the silicon they're printed on in a marketplace that values interoperability over nearly all else. HP realized this a while back, and have all but phased out their Alpha and PA-RISC lines.

      That said, there is a place for non-x86 chips. HP has replaced most of their Alpha and PA-RISC lines with x86 chips, but some of the high-end boxes went to Itanium. IBM is still pushing POWER -- hard. I don't suspect that SPARC will die, but I do strongly suspect that, in 5 or 10 years, Solaris on x86 will be the standard and Solaris on SPARC will be the rare beast, still grinding away in a handful of data centers on Wall Street, right next to an HP box running Non-Stop OS.

      However, depending on where Sun takes Solaris on x86, they could turn it into a huge market. They're already working on certifying most HP server hardware and, AFAIK, have their sights set on the server hardware of other major manufacturers as well. If Sun could make Solaris as easy to install anywhere as Linux or NetBSD (okay, so that's a bit of stretch), and if they keep giving it away for free, they could see sizable growth in their OS market.

      The problem, of course, is that it's hard to make money off of a free OS, but, if you've been listening to Sun's web expos over the past year or so, you know that they label Redhat, somewhat strangely, as one of their primary competitors. Sun is obviously trying to stress their free OS; my question is whether or not they're trying to go too many ways at once. Sun provides not only a free OS, but also tons of enterprise software for it, plus hardware based on two different processing platforms. They're competing with Redhat, Novell, and HP all at once, and that's tough to do without stretching one's self too thin.

      My prediction: if Sun is still a player in 10 years, it will be a very different Sun than we see today.

      --
      Another one bites the dust
    3. Re:Spells Death for the SPARC by ValourX · · Score: 2, Interesting

      AMD64 may outperform SPARC at a lower price when you're talking about a 4-CPU system, but how many 128-CPU Opteron servers do you see? Only POWER and UltraSPARC can do that as far as I know. Maybe low-end SPARC workstations will die out, but high-end servers will always need serious superscalar RISC processors.

      -Jem

  4. Review over at Anandtech by Rufus211 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Anandtech has a quick review of the X2100 up. Fairly standard, but well designed server it looks like. The big news is the entry level one for only $745. True it doesn't come with a HD, but that's still a hell of a deal for a true server (not a dell desktop box lets call it a server).

  5. Re:specs available? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Most Fortune 500 companies use IIS webservers

    Care to show any statistics to back that up?

  6. K8SE by StupidApe · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The all-new-sun-designed product is actually the Tyan K8E with a couple of parts removed.

  7. How about 64 bit java? by wheelbarrow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does this mean that Sun will get serious about supporting a good 64 bit java for these systems? Java systems application design could change radically if somebody can provide a 64 bit JVM that can process efficient garbage collection across very large java heap spaces.

  8. I love the bit in the article by multiplexo · · Score: 1, Interesting
    where one of the Sun execs says that Sun got disttracted by the dot.com boom and all of those people with blue hair and piercings. Nice try at revisionism coming from someone who works for a company that at one point claimed to be the dot in dot.com. If you were to put hardware companies on trial for hyping the dot.com boom then Sun would be number one in the dock.

    The biggest problem I foresee for Sun in competing with Dell is simple, Suns don't run Windows and they don't run Linux. Dell makes nice, solid boxes, they're not imaginative by any stretch, but they work well and reliably and perform decently. One of the nice things that Dell does is that they quote you the price of the service contract in the initial purchase price for the system. Compare and contrast this with Sun and HP who basically say "service, hey, you bought it, the check cleared and if it stops working then come see us about a service contract (which we will charge you up the wazoo for)".

    But back to that Windows thing, it's nice to be able to take a Dell and repurpose it from being a Linux system to a Windows system or vice versa. This helped me out this year with a project I was working on, the project was delayed and one of the Windows admins I worked with needed a new box PDQ. So I gave him my quad proc Dell which he put to good use right away and he ordered me a replacement off of his budget. In a mixed environment, which we're all working now, being able to do this is a major plus. If I buy a bunch of shiny new Suns not only am I locked into Solaris (which is painful to use after working on Linux for so many years) but I'm also locked into that hardware. If you have Suns already and want to stay with them then perhaps these systems make sense, but if you've started bringing Linux into your environment then why are you going to go back to Solaris?

    --
    cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
  9. Local Windows admin was impressed by WidescreenFreak · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This isn't surprising. These systems really aren't more than a souped-up x86 server that are tweaked to Sun's specifications. But realistically, this can give Sun a broader appeal even to non-Solaris people as well as a larger installation base.

    For example, one of the Windows admins here got a 1U loaner Sun box running Windows {something} Server. (I don't remember which specific version.) He was very impressed by the speed and stability(!!!) of the system. Being a Sun admin for over 10 years, I, of course, had to bust his chops about the Sun logo on the box and "upgrading to a better operating system." That's when he told me that it ran Windows.

    They have a great marketing opportunity: a highly-optimized system that can run not one, not two, but three operating systems! Not only that, it will run all three of them well! Sun also gives a three-year warranty on their hardware. Most of the other systems that I've seen require you to pay extra for a 3-year contract.

    Although I know that many will look at this as "moving to the Dark Side", I don't see a problem with this personally. It gets Sun in front of people that otherwise would not have looked at their hardware. Maybe - just maybe - that will help to broaden Sun's customer base, which can only help in the long run if Sun plays their marketing cards correctly. After all, their current business model is to sell the hardware, but they'll be glad to throw in the OS for free. So, they're not looking to make money off the Windows install. They're looking to make money because they got a sale that otherwise would have gone to HP/Dell/other.

    Who knows? In the future as hardware progresses such admins might say, "Well, we have this Sun box that doesn't really do anything now. Let's download Solaris and see what it's like." Of course, I'd rather have them say, "Hey, you want this? We don't use it anymore..." :)

    --
    The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
  10. and they'll be running Windows... by Banishedwun · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A friend of mine who works for Sun said they got the internal message this morning that this was on the way and that they'll come with Windows on em. "Why?", I asked, to which he replied that the talk around the office is that Sun will be focussing on application software versus OS and Hardware. He also said that airplanes with banners would be circling the skies of Austin this afternoon. Either way I'm curious.

  11. Healthy competition by shawn_f · · Score: 2, Interesting

    We bought 5 of the V20z as soon as they appeared, and have loved them. I am impressed with them, even though I have heard that Sun did not build them. Running the latest linux kernel from SuSE, and have yet to make them break a sweat. I think it is about time Sun got exited about something. Even if they give up ultraSPARC, they hired the guy from AMD who helped develop the Opteron x86-64, and would seem to me that it would be in their best interest in capitalizing on the investment. It would be nice to see someone other than Dell and HP in this arena. Remember once again, the Sun was one of the first with 64bit technology, and they were also one of the first, if not the first, to offer Opteron servers.

    Maybe they will lead again...

    Go ahead, Toot your horn Sun!!! Keep making these good decisions!!