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Sun to Give Niagara Servers to Reviewers
abdulzis writes "Sun Micro's Jonathan Schwartz says that Sun is giving away free servers to bloggers who do a good job reviewing their servers. From the blog article: 'if you write a blog that fairly assesses the machine's performance (positively or negatively), send us a pointer, we're likely to let you keep the machine'" Mr. Schwartz, if you're reading this, feel free to send us one with "Attn: CowboyNeal" on the label.
In this day and age of super fast personal computers, what is to differentiate a server from a PC?
Is it the CPU architecture? That can't be the case because many servers run on plain old x86 motherboards.
Is it the OS? While you can say that we can delineate Windows servers into Windows Server and non-Windows Server versions, many places stick Linux on as the OS which blurs the line completely.
Is it the speed? A decade ago, we were looking at servers which weren't half as fast as our low end PCs today. If it is speed, do we have some magical cutoff which just keeps moving forward?
So I get a server from Sun. Does that just mean I get a fast computer with a shitty audio and video card? Limited expansion slots?
I'd rather get a PC.
I'm keeping my eyes on SUNW. I've been eyeing that stock for a long time now. Sun has a lot of valuable assets. Their intellectual assets and knowledge are first class. I think some analysts don't understand the value of it and count Sun out too early. They also have a ton of cash that give them a lot of time and resources to develop a good long term strategy and take risks like this. It's not as incredible/stupid as it sounds. This shows confidence in their own product. What is $5000 to SUNW? Say they send them to 100 reviewers (probably less since we tend to concentrate on a few popular sites) who basically help them get the word out. Sun losts $5mil. That's drop in the bucket, less expensive than a Superbowl ad but with more credibility among those who count. Their return will be many times that cost. More importantly, once a relationship with a customer is established, more products will follow. It's getting the floor in the door that's tough. My company is a customer and their reps are very willing to work with you, unlike some other vendors.
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I've been doing AIX admin work for years. IBM has long had a program to let people try out their stuff first that they thought was very compelling. Most people wound up buying rs/6000 gear because it simply toasted other unix boxes. IBM actually let a dot com I worked for try out a fully loaded M80 ($250,000), 2 B80s and an F80 and we bought the M80 and 2 B80s because their Java implementation and 64bit copper chips toasted Sun at the time and IBM was willing to put their money where their mouth was... Sun has to be very confident that this will generate much needed postive press and reviews for them.
Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be particular about who it makes friends with.
What we have here is an eight core CPU, running four threads on a single core. Total power consumption at peak? 80 watts. (CPU only, of course; the system itself will need more -- 220 to 400 watts, depending on the specs.) Clock speed is "only" 1 GHz or so. One floating point unit on the entire chip.
So for scientific work, or other stuff that's seriously hammering the FPU, it's going to be a dog. Sun has never denied this. You're not going to take weather simulations and throw them on this thing; it'd be a waste of money. But for other applications -- database; web server; maybe financial simulations -- there's a hell of a lot of grunt, for very little power consumption.
Sun has effectively opened up a new niche. Anything you have written for Sparc before will still run on this thing, but if you can manage to get a good degree of parallelism in your workload, it will positively fly.
In my opinion (not having seen one of these in action), it's going to be either a massive flop, or a massive win for Sun. My money's on a massive win. They've thought long and hard about common workloads, and have come up with a CPU optimised for those workloads, without too much overhead from making a "general purpose" CPU that can handle anything you throw at it reasonably well. I can't help but wonder how long it will be before we see similar designs out of IBM and Intel.
The other question I have is: what's the IO on these systems like? Poor IO would cripple it, but again, it depends on your workload. The T1000 has a single expansion slot (PCI-E), but four gigabit ethernet ports; the T2000 has three PCI-E and two PCI-X with four gigabit ethernet. On paper, it looks good; time will tell, though, if the systems live up to the expectations.