Sun Unveils 64-bit Server Line

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."

Comments

Suns have been 64 bit for a while now...

[allanc]

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).

Re:Suns have been 64 bit for a while now...

[mrbooze]

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.

Sun is not giving up on SPARC

[turgid]

Sun has a comprehensive roadmap for UltraSPARC going forward and combining forces with Fujutsu on SPARC64.

These new servers absolutely rock, and at superb prices.

I once had the pleasure of a 4-way Opteron v40z with a development version of 64-bit Solaris 10. It was a screamer, especially compared to our 4-way Dell P4 Xeon box, and 64-bit.

It was plenty fast enough to host 4 zones and several developers working on KDE, gcc and all manner of other stuff.

At last, Sun looks like it's turning the corner (despite the best efforts of some of its PHBs - no names mentioned).

Good luck Sun.

Re:And it's based on Opterons...

[bradleycarpenter]

There are not white boxes, they are in house boxes built from the ground up Andy Bechtolsheim. Supposedly sun is working on a 8 socket box...thus you could have 16 opterons cores running in one box. Very interesting future for Opteron and Sun.

No, no, no, no.

[Karma_fucker_sucker]

"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.

Microsoft Windows is fully supported by Sun, too

[assantisz]

Sun also offers full technical support for Microsoft Windows on their hardware. See this for more info.

Re:Let's hope they run better than the W2100z WS

[hkb]

Standard Slashdot Response:

You obviously don't know how to admin Linux you fucking cluebie, go back to Windows. Oh, Solaris? Sun sucks, use Linux.

+3 Funny