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HP Baited With Cutouts of Founders
eastbayted writes "According to InfoWorld.com, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz boasts in his public blog that his company has bought a life-size cardboard cut of the HP rival's founders, William Hewlett and David Packard, for $6,000. Sun staffers then went on to bedeck and photograph the dual portrait in pro-Sun paraphernalia. As a parting shot at HP, Schwartz notes in his post how popular a download Solaris is for HP server owners. Taking the bait, HP VP of Marketing Eric Kintz responds in his own blog that Sun's actions were 'a nice stunt' and that 'I never met Bill or Dave, but I bet neither of them would have approved paying thousands for representations of themselves.' He also cites an IDC report about how HP-UX dominates the Unix market over IBM and Sun." Update: 08/28 04:43 GMT by Z : Fixed confusing headline.
Reading comprehension fail it... Slashdot's editors are unpaid volunteers, right?
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As I type this, the quote at the bottom of the Slashdot page is:
Go placidly amid the noise and waste, and remember what value there may be in owning a piece thereof. -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"
File this under "things that make you go 'hmmmmmmmmmm...'"
as were DEC, Compaq, Tandem, and everybody else absorbed by HP and Sun,
but they represent the 1970s and 1980s computer booms and the late-90s servers.
For this decade's cardboard cutouts, we need Web 2.0 figures, bloggers, and user-created-content wranglers, and I say who better than our own CowboyNeal!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
...in the meantime our entire VMware infrastructure runs on Dell because they are actually busy making sales calls and setting up meetings with my VP ;)
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In 2004, the management at Sun Microsystems terminated any more development on high-end processors and high-end servers. According to an article by The Register, Sun now sells re-branded Fujitsu servers as Sun's high-end servers. Fujitsu is an OEM for Sun.
Sun engineers still work on low-end multi-core processors, but Fujitsu designs and builds all of Sun's high-end processors. The processors that battle IBM's Power5 are Fujitsu SPARC64's.
The hardware division of Sun is now a shell of its former self. Sun management is seeking to close its Sunnyvale campus, which is the location of all of Sun's (former) processor development.
They could have done something better with those cutouts: Stuck a copies of "The HP Way" under their arms, painted tears on their cheeks and propped them up on Page Mill Road outside HP's HQ. Well that's what I would have done.
- an ex-HP employee
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
I agree. At some point it's best not to exploit the dead, and this is well beyond that point.
Sun just got their name in front of damn near everyone the tech community for $6000. That kind of publicity campaign would cost millions of dollars otherwise.
:-P
So, they did it by making fun of HP. BFD. Everyone makes fun of HP. HP's nothing more than a printer-ink-delivery company any more anyway, after Carly got through with them.
And if you have a problem that requires a few hundred gigs of RAM, that needs to be worked on by a hundred or so CPUs, and can't be partitioned so a cluster isn't a solution, you need one of those big SMP boxes from Sun, IBM, or HP.
And according to some HP engineers I know, almost no one buys the big iron from HP to run as an SMP box - they partition them into a bunch of 4-CPU domains and run Windows on them.
There must be some serious footnote action in that IDC report as well, because I don't see how HP-UX could be the leader unless they were counting "the Unix Market -- of servers in broom closets only in government facilities named after Mickey Mouse". If anything, from informal stats gleaned from looking at job listings over the past decade or so, I'd say the current state of affairs regarding demand for commercial unix is something like Solaris first (and far in the lead), followed by AIX, followed distantly by HP-UX. (Of course these days Linux outnumbers all of the commercial unixen put together.) I guess you might argue for spot statistics that perhaps there's just higher turnover in the Solaris admin space (e.g. if Sun was doing something irritating), but it's a trend I've noticed for quite a while and honestly one unix admin gig is about like any other (or at least, doesn't vary that much based on the OS used so I doubt that would be the rate determining factor on turnover).
Disclaimer: I happen to be an IBM employee
True everyone sells similar stuff nowadays at the commodity level (putting aside HP's itanium, Sun's Ultrasparc, and IBM's power systems, which makes things more complicated), however my experience certainly shows IBM to be capable boxes without need of Windows for everything, with few exceptions. The e325/e326/e326m are out of place and may be subject to your criticism. I don't think of those servers as a sufficiently serious Opteron effort. The x336/x346/ and blades seem pretty good to me, and the IPMI 2.0 based rack mount systems allow SOL in a sane way. The wave of Opteron servers coming are a much more serious effort and work well in general compared to e32*.
My job is exclusively Linux, never ever booting Windows on any of our servers (though admittedly there exists hard drive firmware updates and a few other esoteric updates that are still DOS boot CDs or floppys, however the more common BIOS, BMC, and Diag updates have very good linux support without using DOS at all). In the past they did do goofy things with a powerquest image being written to a linux filesystem with PC-dos and booting into that, and the BMC updates used to require moderately aggravating IBM drivers, but that has been dropped in favor for updates that are self contained (BIOS, diag) or use OpenIPMI drivers (BMC).
All the systems nowadays have similar manageability, ILO is nothing special compared to Dell's, Sun's, and IBM's BMCs nowadays. Everyone sells IPMI compliant management and at least IBM I know implements it well and provides all features I could think of for remote management save for remote video console (but who needs that when you have linux/SOL) without additional cost. RSA cards are there for the people who need remote video console and a fancy web interface. I'd wager everyone's BMC implementation is on par and nowadays manageability is not as much a discriminating factor...
IBM I admit could donate more hardware to some open source efforts, but they do contribute a significant amount of developer work to open source projects, which helps offset the hardware issue some.
Anyway, in summary, IBM may have in the past been subject to that criticism in the x86 space, but in my job experience it has improved greatly.
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