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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.
Sun to Give Nigeria Servers to Reviewers
hello my friend! i am a humble nigerian prince with millions of dollars and have selected you to....
Pinochet used to have this deal for journalists too - if you wrote an article that fairly reviewed the Chilean government, he wouldn't kill you.
paintball
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
They could get this participation just by asking for it [in #debian]. I bet what's going on here is Sun is hopping on the wagon of companies that are "reaching out" to The Community, just like Yahoo did recently by handing out those relatively obscure web programming tools. I'm not sure why this is a valuable thing to do.
I wonder what they'll send if someone submits a poor review (not just "negative") - a pre-paid return label and a ticking consolation prize?
The difference between a server and a PC is:
- A server is designed to serve data, and has nothing I don't need for it. That means that that damn video card that's not even hooked to a monitor can't break and take my website down with it's million dollars a day revenue.
- A server is designed to serve data reliably, and has enterprise class components. That means no cheap-ass western digital hard drives. If you don't think there's a difference, you've never used Enterprise hardware.
- A server is designed to serve data cheaply. This means low TCO, not low purchase price. Which means an OS that pushes the most bits per cpu, while requiring the least system administrator time. Is Solaris that OS? Debatable, since time has ensured that Apache is highly optimized for Linux. But if you can't run Linux on these yet, you will be able to soon. However, the CPU architecture on these is pretty highly parallel, and Solaris may work better than Linux. Sun is presenting some impressive numbers for these. And they're cheap (as servers go).
In other words, this may be a good time to buy SUNW, at least if you can grow a beard."He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Why do you need one for anyway? You've already gotten FP with what you've got.
import java.util.Date;
public class Benchmark
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
Date start, end;
start = new Date();
try
{
for (int x = 0; x 5000000; x++)
{
if (args[0].equals("DELL")) Thread.sleep(x * 2);
else continue;
}
} catch (Exception e) {}
end = new Date();
System.out.println(end.getTime() - start.getTime());
}
}
So where's my free hardware? (Tabs were killed by the compression filter)
1. Have high up person working for Sun talk about giving away hardware for free to geeks...
2. Get posted on Slashdot
3. Profit
If I were a Sun shareholder (which I wish I was) I'd be pleased.
me jumping with kites I make...
But you wouldn't be able to run World of Warcraft on it...
Please help metamoderate.
ok
SERVER *SUN;
char HappyNerd[1337];
HappyNerd = sendToBlog(*SUN);
.... :)
Don't forget the & on the other side
It also asks if you have a Solaris application, and whether it is multithreaded.
I don't think they were asking for credit information, though don't quote me on that.
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.
Yeah. Read the comments on the post.
If they decide not to let you keep it, which the agreement apparently doesn't say they will, you have 5 days to get the unit back to Sun at your own expense.
It's not unlike the trial magazine subscription where you get the first six months free, but can cancel just by sending the seventh issue back. They say they never got it, and stick you with a year's bill.
Here you'd have to pay through the nose to get insured, confirmation of delivery shipping back to Sun.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
https://www.sun.com/secure/servers/coolthreads/tnb /agreements/index.jsp
Try and Buy Agreements
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom (Great Britain), United States of America
What you did would not have sent a pointer. If "SERVER" was anything other than an integer-type, this wouldn't even have compiled under C. And if you did send "*SUN" to the "sentToBlog" function, there is no way that function could get the address, since using "&" there would just return an address pointing to the temporary copy on the stack, which is not what was intended.
....
What you meant was this:
SERVER *SUN;
char HappyNerd[1337];
HappyNerd = sendToBlog(SUN);
void sendToBlog( SERVER *s )
{
printf("Whoo-hoo! The pointer points to %p\n", s);
}
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Bummer... Sorry to hear that. My recommendation would be to first try going through the Sun Store (store.sun.com) 800 number. When you reach them, tell them you're looking for a local reseller.
Sun's model leverages partners for nearly all customers, especially for getting access to things like loaners.
I wonder if Sun would foot the bill to 'upgrade' slashdot to this new line of machines...
:-)
Maybe. All CowboyNeal really needs to do is order a free machine for a test drive and write his review. If the marketeers like it, he gets to keep it at no charge. If he doesn't want it, he can return it with postage paid. If he still wants it anyway, he can fork over the cashola and enjoy his new server upgrades. From where I'm sitting, it sounds like a win/win situation.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Well, all the better for you. I don't think CmdrTaco will get one as /. is about as fair and balanced as Fox News.
Tabs were killed by the compression filter
From mucho experience posting code to the Slashdot filter, you also need to use an " & l t ; " ["left tag escape character" or whatever - oh, and lose the spaces] so that your less-than sign " < " doesn't get mis-interpreted as the beginning of an HTML tag and thereby deleted:
I'll be only too happy to give Sun's customer service a piss-poor review!
We ordered one of Sun's new Galaxy servers and after nearly 4 months, it still hadn't shown up, with nothing resembling an adequate explanation, coming from from Sun. I had to chase them to get them to promise new delivery dates that they then failed to follow through on. So we cancelled our order and we went and ordered a couple of boxes from a competitor! We wanted a hardware support contract to go along with it, but if they can't deliver the box itself in nearly 4 months, how can they be expected to support the box in a timely fashion if something goes wrong?
If that's the way Sun treats it's customers, they deserve to go titters. A few blogs I've read on the subject tell me I'm not the only one to have this experience either!
BTW the other boxes we ordered only took two weeks to arrive.
You're using her as bait, Master!
The main cost driver for SCSI/Fiber drives is testing. WRONG
Before leaving the factory, the platters on every single enterprise class drive receive extensive testing. That is why SCSIs still have a 5 year warranty from Seagate, because every single drive has been tested and meets certain criteria.
ATA/SATA drives are not given the same testing.
Several drives per batch might get an indepth screening, but the rest get a relatively quick scan and then they're out the door.
Your Ignorance Is Showing.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Oh, *Niagara*... my bad! :)
You may care very much about the expansion slots in a server if you need a lot of telephony cards (and this seems to be an application where the Niagra design would excel).
There are differences in the hardware of mainframes, unix/as400 servers, pc servers and pc's. Most differences surround reliability (redundancy etc.) and parallel processing (multiple CPU's, multiple specialized processors controlling IO, etc. etc.) Here are a couple examples:
IO controller cache with error correcting checksum in memory and redundant power supply to ensure zero loss of data short of taking a sledgehammer to the thing.
Mainframe CPU - parity checking with automatic transaction rollback on error detection at the hardware level (on the CPU). This is why banks use mainframes, so they know the transaction completed, or didn't, no in between.
"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?"
I'm not sure what you consider a server, but even the low to midrange servers I deal with (including the 10 year old ones) blow away any PC in transaction volume and data throughput. You have no idea how much hardware exists in these servers (mainframe, as400 and unix) aside from the CPU to do all of the tasks required to get good performance in a multi-user business application/database environment.
Free N1_agra click here!
The advantage you get from the Niagara servers depends very much on the workload you put on it. Remeber, this is the first stop on the move into "Throughput Computing", with the Niagara architecture being "network facing", while the subsequence Rock architecture will be "Data facing".
What this means in practice is that Niagara has blistering performance for stuff which is basically integer intensive, but ain't so exciting for anything which is floating point intensive. But for the right workloads, a single Niagara socket can produce performance similar to a quad Xeon system, in a fraction of the space, and using a fraction of the power.
Now, how significant is the power saving? Well, I've been into datacentres where the owners have invested heavily in blade technology in order to optimise the space only to find that the power and air-conditioning requirements mean they can only half fill their blade enclosures. The problem for datacentre managers now tend to be not space, or weight, but power and cooling. And for systems in colocation facilities, it's not unusual for power to cost as much as (GBP)1,000 per month for a 30A feed (at 230V), so if you can get may times the data throughput for the same amount of power then it's exciting news.
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
Niagara isn't designed for a single highly parallised workload, it's designed for where you have hundred or thousands of autonomous threads which can be horizontally scaled - think Google, or eBay, or Wikimedia. If your current architecture needs dozens of middleware and web servers, Niagara is likely to massively reduce the amount of power needed for this function, here and now. Some of the most striking results have been for web facing middleware running on top of a JVM, as so many of these things do, without any significant modification.
They've made a bet that this sort of workload will increasingly be the norm - for example, as more and more stuff has RFID tags in it the amount of shovelling and processing of small bits of data will mushroom.
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
Too bad the newer SAS SCSI drives don't have a proper RAID controller yet. The company I work for was just about ready to get one until I found out you need a 10k storage array, worth more than the whole server.
Sun to Give Nigeria Servers to Reviewers
hello my friend! i am a humble nigerian prince with millions of dollars and have selected you to...
It came accross to me as "Sun to give Nigerians Servers" and I shrieked in horror at the empowerment Nigerian scammers were about to receive.
Then I realized that they just had fallen prey to one of those emails.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Could someone please tell me how to set up a blog ASAP?
Register the editry.
I thought it was "To Serve Man".
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
But luckily sun has changed and you get one for free upto 60 days to test your application on.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
You get a LOANER server. At the end of 30 days, you have the option of buying it, or mailing it back, insured, at your expense, or taking the chance they like your bribed-for review. For 99% of the people that read Slashdot, that means you're out $60 bucks. That's a *long* way from getting a free server.
In Soviet Russia, servers keep you.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
What happen to support when IBM sues Sun for role in teh fiaSCO?
I am the bastard of base minus 12! Turing was the ejaculate of my complete machine!
May the Schwartz be with you!
Sadly I'm not in this blogging program BUT I have had the opportunity to test one of these T2000 and I have to say that I have been BLOWN away.
(T2000, 1.2Ghz, 32G Ram, 2x72Gig HD)
I work for a company which trades stocks (no, you probably haven't heard of it, it's a private company). We have branches all over the world and about 1000 full time traders. We've got about 10 Sun V880 servers, a few 480s and another 10 420s. Most of the V880 servers are dedicated to streaming and parsing all the quote data from various exchanges around the world as well as risk protection and trader management.
Like many of you we have this equipment at a data centre, and like many of you we've been told that we have reached the limit for power consumption and heat. They specifically told us NO MORE.
The T2000 is our saviour.
Our one quote feed application generally ran at 30-40% CPU utilization on a V880 with 8 1.2Ghz UltraSparc III processors.
On the T2000.. 3%
Total power consumption is around 300W.. FOR THE WHOLE BOX.
I'm probably wrong but I think the power requirements for the V880 is around 1500W...
All of this from a 2U unit.
One rack with 5 of these things would be 10x more powerful (with our application) than our 5 racks of V880s.
The FPU issue is a problem though, sadly we cannot run our reporting software on this box but if the FPU utilization is low you won't have a problem.
Sun has seen a problem (space, power, heat) and solved it. We don't have a large web farm here but anyone who does should VERY SERIOUSLY look at this box. And even with the FPU issue you can just buy a more powerful "traditional" Sun (or other) server to handle any back end floating point calculations and leave the T2000 to serving web pages.
Simply blown away.
... is only 1 facet of a server's purpose. Matter of fact, serving data may only be an incidental purpose. Generally, processing data and requests are usually the forte of servers. It all depends upon what purpose your servers are put to. (If you doubt this, think about the number crunchers or search sites robots, not everything is about serving static web pages)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I can see you're using a pentium to do your math.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
I bet it would run a WoW shard pretty well. How many instances of Blackrock Spire could one of those puppies handle?
hmm, i think you need to have your review on a blog to get the free machine, not sure a posting on /. will work...
I've been tasked with re-writing this document so that it describes Java concurrency in terms of JSR 166 instead of the more primitive thread management currently described. It only took a little research to convince me that I'll not be able to do more than scratch the surface. It's a huge topic. What I plan to do is guide the reader to a simple use case involving caching in a ConcurrentHashMap. (I still haven't figured out what to cache: it has to be resource-intensive enough to make the example realistic, but not too complicated. Ideas, anyone?) Then I'll point people to several thick, dense books such as this one, this one, and this one. After which they're on their own.
Sweet, I'm starting my new tech review blog right away, it's called Niagra For Me, and it's hosted at http://niagraforme.blogspot.com/. Everybody go visit it and leave a comment so it will look popular and get me a Niagra server!
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