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Sun CEO On Razors And Blades
Kadin2048 writes "In an interview with BusinessWeek online, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy sheds some light on the company's new business model and future direction. In particular, he said that Sun's recent open source moves were part of a new strategy, where 'The software is the razor. The razor blades are the servers.' The move was called a huge risk by BusinessWeek, and it would put Sun at odds with the more traditional Microsoft-esque model with high per-seat or per-server software licensing costs and use commodity PCs and servers, which may not go over well with investors. But after having seen its stock slide and users flee for Linux and Windows, they arguably have little to lose. Perhaps the most interesting development to Slashdot readers is that in an effort to draw new developers to the platform, Sun is offering a deal that seems torn from a cell-phone company playbook: offering a "free" Ultra 20 Opteron workstation if you sign up for a $29.95/mo, 3-year service contract."
Actually its $30 a month (== $360 per year). Still a good deal.
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It would seem you buy the hardware first @ $360.00 then the rest is all gravy (software and such) @ $720.00. Retail, the system is probably about 800.00. Still not a bad deal.
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
Err, you don't seem to get the concept of the razor and razorblades model.
:p
Razor == cheap, Blades == expensive.
Or, in Sun-speak:
Software == cheap, Servers == expensive.
Which pretty much correlates with what Sun have been doing recently.
Amusingly, Sun also sell blades, of the server type
The cost is $1080 dollars, since it is ~30/month minimum of 3 years.
Second, an Ultra 20 Opteron does not mean 20 Opterons, it means a workstation model 20 with one processor.
So, while reasonable, not nearly incredible.
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Make sure you check the expiration date on your card before you order!
-Patrick
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
How do I choose RAID on any of those systems? How do I replace it with a faster hard drive? How do I change the software stack. I might be able to figure it out, but generally it seems like they don't get it. If they simply made their website better they would triple their revenue.
If your running Solaris, explore metainit for the RAID.
If you want bigger or faster hard drives, go out and get some faster and/or larger SATA hard drives and swap them out.
If you had problems with the web site, then I guess it hints at the problem. "Defective user, change user and then continue."
Troll. You're a complete troll, and you're not very good at it, I might add.
You cannot compare new items to grey/aftermarket for many reasons, not the least of which is because of warranty. There is not one liquidator or after-market reseller that will offer anything like a 3 year warranty on parts and software for an item which obviously is not theirs. (I'm quite sure that no aftermarket reseller is owned by Sun.) To put those units under a three-year warranty with Sun, it might have to be recertified, which is not free, depending on your local sales rep's time of the month (that's a joke, folks), and it will definitely cost more to put that system under a maintenance contract for three years. So, yes, you can buy it cheaper, but putting it under maintenance contract is much more expensive than just buying an Ultra 20 outright. You clearly do not work with Sun hardware in a corporate environment on a regular basis or you'd know this.
Since the warranty is the major selling point of the Ultra 20, your attempt to downplay the Ultra 20 has no merit.
Back to troll school with you! Go! Bad troll! BAD!!
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
The $3000 price is for instructor-led training, I don't see Red Hat, IBM, etc. offering that for free.
As for the teach yourself route, their online documentation at docs.sun.com is actually pretty good. You could also subscribe to the ACM for a hundred bucks or so, which gets you free access to a bunch of Sun's online training for Solaris, Java, and many of the software packages they're now giving away (see http://pd.acm.org/full_listing2.cfm ).
You should get your wakeup call on Tuesday, when Sun launches the Sun Fire T2000 which is the first system based on the UltraSPARC-T1 (aka Niagara) processor. There have already been public mentions in the press citing that the starting prices for T1-based systems will less than a few grand (i.e., under $3000).
As for the Opteron processor being faster than the Niagara, it depends on how you look at it. SPARC-based systems are traditionally about throughput, and the UltraSPARC T1 processor is no exception. If you have a single-threaded process, then the Opteron will be faster. But if you've got a scalable multi-threaded application, then a single Opteron isn't going to touch the T1. In most of my testing with such applications, the Sun Fire T2000 is able to outperform a V40z with four Opteron CPUs.
So pay up. If you've been through this before you should know that those instructors cost money too. And if you still wish to cut down on costs just follow some Web based training or even a Live virtual class. Its not as if there's nothing available, it just costs money. Big deal; those teachers deserve a living too you know.
Actually, I got the middle model (2.2GHz / 1G / 80G / nVidia NVS 280) for ~$1300, it's a nice box. The video card supports dual-head displays, 1G of memory (expandable to 4G) is tolerable, and the SATA drive is nice and quick. And the best part is -- it's quiet. It's probably just me, but my last box had noisy fans and drives. This thing, while not silent, is probably several orders of magnitude quieter (my guess is it's probably about 40dB).
:/
;), and deployments are quicker and debugging support is a little nicer (although the Eclipse debugger worked great with JBoss).
That said, if I had it to do over today, I'd get a 20" iMac. I'd get a slightly slower processor (2.1GHz PPC vs 2.2Ghz Opteron), half the memory, a much bigger drive (250G vs. 80G), a flat panel display and wireless (which I don't really need, but it might be nice). Oh, and I'd be able to sync my iPod with my own box and not have to borrow the wife's laptop...
Oh, but the Sun development tools are pretty nice. I was used to a hodgepodge of FOSS stuff (Eclipse / ArgoUML / JBoss / PostgreSQL) that worked pretty well, but not together. Now I can just use the Sun IDE and app server (and PostgreSQL
Just junk food for thought...