Slashdot Mirror
New Hopes From Sun's Idea Factory
UltimaGuy writes "While it's way too soon to say Sun is back on track, the return of Bechtolsheim, aggressive improvements in products and a healthy dose of humility among Sun's executives mean the troubled company and its investors have more cause for optimism than they've had in years." Of course, Sun's problems are still out there - dealing with projects like Geronimo for some of their base infrastructure, and of course other companies promoting Linux as the solution.
No, positive cash flow, debt reduction and PROFITS, as well as MANAGED growth mean a company is back on track to investors. You can have great growth and lousy financials, or vice versa so one area alone does not mean a company is "back". There are several different theories and models to determine based on the financials what the "target" stock price should be fora firm with given performance in a specific market. A "good stock price" is a result of the investors willing to buy/sell at higher prices due to thier models (or gut feeling) telling them the data indicates the price will increase due to the firm making (more) profits, the market growing, or the firm capturing more market share. Ideally, all of these occur at once and the stock "breaks-out" and the price goes up rapidly.
I'm pretty sure the DoD singlehandedly props up Sun.
Then you'd be wrong. Sun's biggest customers (and thus their bread and butter) are the Telecom companies. Sun makes no secret of this.
As a developer I find Sun/Solaris a complete paint-in-the-ass to work with.
Really?
Impossible to find binary versions for most packages
I assume you're referring to the Open Source Software that Sun Freeware provides binaries for, and not the commercial software? Because I can't say I see much Solaris software in binary form.
endless back-and-forth dealing with version dependencies
You mean patch levels? Bah, that's easy. Sun tells you which patches you need for a package up front, then provides you with all of them. Try keeping an RPM system up to date sometime. Now THAT is pain and anguish.
and ordering a server that didn't come with a CD drive, DVD drive or video card?
Whoever ordered that server must have explicitly not wanted a drive. AFAIK, all Sun servers have CD or DVD drives by default. Otherwise you'd have a hard time installing all that software that Sun sends with the machine.
Then the admins blindly install Sun updates and we all get to be Sun's gunieapigs learning side-effects.
This differs from MSCEs, how again?
Maybe we want to know more about Geronimo before deciding to download it.
AFAIK, the banks and telecom companies are still buying mad quantities of Solaris on SPARC. Why in their right minds, would sun switch their primary platform, and thus alienate all their loyal customers, who would then be put in the position of having to choose a new platform (which might or might not be provided by Sun).
Plus sun has some pretty revolutionary SPARC stuff coming out in the near future, Niagara and Rock being the two best examples. I have a funny feeling SPARC is here to stay for quite some time.
Plus did I mention that sun has about 40% of the Unix server market, which if I'm not mistaken is about four times the size of the Linux server market?
They are trying to take on Dell in the lower end, thru to the SMP "big iron" machines as well.
1) ROCK solid hardware. I've literally seen a Sun machine (A rather big and heavy SunBlade 2000) be dropped down a flight of stairs, and still boot up and run no problem. I've also seen 10+ year old Sun sparc32 systems still in use today with almost clear maintinance logs all the way back.
... Sun to the rescue..
.... take that for what it's worth .... .. just off the top of my head .. I'm sure I'll think of half a dozen more in the time it takes slashdot to post this comment ...
2) Very good vendor-side support in terms of faulty hardware or spare parts. Can be expensive at times, but you get more than what you pay for.
3) With Sun's hardware/software stack (stuff like ALOM, for example) you can do neat stuff you simply cannot do with any other platform. Might not be the easiest to click your way through installing, but once its up and running nothing can compete.
4) Need to take that hard drive out of your 1 CPU e250 server and shove it into a big 64CPU e10k and have it boot/work? Need to hot swap some CPUs? Need the speed of internal FC-AL hard disks? Cant live without that 24gb of ram?
5) Sun is one of the VERY few vendors to provide a software stack certified for use "in the operation of a nuclear facility"
ordering a server that didn't come with a CD drive, DVD drive or video card? Puhhleeeze.
Video card? Buh. Serial consoles. Dragging a keyboard, monitor, and mouse around the datacenter sucks.
ordering a server that didn't come with a CD drive, DVD drive or video card? Puhhleeeze.
Serial console. You can mount a CD or DVD with NFS to a workstation. These are *servers* we're talking about here. Not workstations.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Their strongest products?
Sun Fire x2100 - dirt cheap 64bit 1U server
Sun Fire x4100 - cheap enterprise class dual socket 64bit server
Sun Fire x4200 - slightly more expensive, more expandable dual socket 64bit server
The 3 servers above are some of the best rackmount servers in the x86 industry.
Of course Sun have decent SPARC products as well, Dual Core UltraSPARC-IV+ (72 CPU sockets, 144 processor cores) at the high end and cheap 1U's at the low.
Then there are upcoming products: Niagra (32 threads of execution on a 1.4Ghz chip, rumoured to under test by eBay and Google), Rock (multi-thread high end chip being developed with Fujitsu), Honeycomb (storage device), Linux Application Environment (run linux apps on Solaris x86 with no special command).
And... Solaris. It's been Suns best product for a long time.
Over the past few years, we have lost a few well-designed platforms (Alpha, PA-RISC, PowerPC) to the x86
Who said POWER is dead? Netcraft?
Just because Apple drops PPC doesn't mean that the architecture is dead or dying.
Then you need to put down the kool-aid....
IBM was the leader in worldwide Unix server revenue with 31% share, while HP and Sun were statistically tied for the number two position, with 30.0% and 29.5% share, respectively.
The Linux market was $1.4 billion. Sun have 29.5% of a $4.3 billion market, which if my maths serves me correct is less than the Linux market.
As for why switch from SPARC? Price/performance is the main thing. Being able to use any x86 manufactuer with Linux is more flexible than Sun (or Fuji at a push) as a SPARC supplier. Niagara would be good for quiet web servers, but for any sort of real performance it isn't going to be there yet. Rock maybe more interesting, but that is sometime away yet. Sun's sales are currently declining too (and have done for a few years), so it isn't like SPARC is selling that well.