IBM Doubles Rewards For Ditching Sun

Taking advantage of the uncertainty surrounding Oracle's acquisition of Sun, IBM has doubled the monetary incentives they are offering to ditch Sun gear. Offering $8,000 in software or services for every Sun Sparc processor ditched for an IBM Power server, the program seems to be paying off. IBM has helped 1,640 customers migrate from other manufacturers' hardware over the last year. "The program applies to Sparc-based Sun hardware, such as the Sparc, UltraSparc, and Sparc 64 servers, and also to Fujitsu systems that run on Sparc chips. A customer that moves off a Sparc-powered system running, say, eight processors would be eligible for up to $64,000 worth of rewards."

Comments

Most of them...

[jellomizer]

I am wondering how many of them would have switched to IBM Anyways?
Or were going to go off Sun, and they saw the value discount.

Re:Most of them...

[YayaY]

Seems like the next anti-trust lawsuit.

Re:Most of them...

[Z00L00K]

Sun and Solaris are going to be a dead end soon. It's time for vendors to realize that you have to count more on Linux and Windows if you are going to release your software for mainstream use.

There are still vendors that are specialized in Solaris, even though they with little effort could be supporting at least Linux.

And even though Sparc has been an important processor architecture it's likely that it's going the same way as Digital's Alpha - a slow death. The next processor that's going down the drain is probably the Power architecture, even though it's backed by IBM.

And who shall we actually blame for this? Intel? No, it's more the traditional Unix vendors that weren't able to get their cards together but played them against each other instead of providing decently priced and functionally competitive alternatives to the pandemic of Windows.

Unix and closed hardware solutions are a dead end. Linux is today an alternative that is almost always more stable, secure and supported than any randomly picked Unix box.

And I suspect that if Apple hadn't been so protective about themselves disallowing clones during the 80's before Microsoft released Windows we would have had a completely different processor architecture as a base for many computers today - the Motorola 68k architecture instead of the Intel x86. And Microsoft would never been able to dominate completely with Windows.

Re:Most of them...

[p4ul13]

Huh wha? What about that is anti-competitive or monopolistic behavior? If IBM and Sun were the only source of servers out there, then I could understand the anti-trust comment. This is a bit ruthless, but it's completely legal.

Re:Most of them...

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM originally considered using hte motorola 68000 in their first PC, but went with intel due to concerns about availability.

Anyhow, PPC is semi-popular in the embedded world.

Re:Most of them...

[AvitarX]

It is pretty clearly anti-competitive.

This is the price for one class of people, this other price for a second class that uses a competitor.

As for the legality I would assume it is legal as IBM does not have a monopoly.

They would have some defense as a benefits consumers argument too.

Re:Most of them...

[Burkin]

It is pretty clearly anti-competitive.

In what way? How does it stifle competition?

This is the price for one class of people, this other price for a second class that uses a competitor.

How is that any different than a car dealer who takes a few thousands dollars off the price of a car when you trade in your old car? Is that also anti-competitive?

As for the legality I would assume it is legal as IBM does not have a monopoly.

They would have some defense as a benefits consumers argument too.

How would it be illegal even if they did have a monopoly?

Re:Most of them...

[Firehed]

It's as anti-competitive as trading in your used car when buying a new vehicle.

Re:Most of them...

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally wouldn't do it: IBM's support is expensive and useless.

Re:Most of them...

[Savage-Rabbit]

Unix and closed hardware solutions are a dead end. Linux is today an alternative that is almost always more stable, secure and supported than any randomly picked Unix box.

LOL

Re:Most of them...

[afabbro]

And even though Sparc has been an important processor architecture it's likely that it's going the same way as Digital's Alpha - a slow death. The next processor that's going down the drain is probably the Power architecture, even though it's backed by IBM.

That's a pretty sweeping statement.

Right now, if you want a commodity chip that does most things very well, you buy something x86 based. If you have a lot of flexibility and want very low power consumption, you might consider Sun's CoolThreads chips. If you want very high performance and have a lot of money, you buy the fastest chip...which happens to be IBM's Power.

The CoolThreads stuff is neat, but never really took off at the volume Sun was hoping. To use them, you had to be very multithreaded and while that's great for webservers, there are already plenty of cheap webserving platforms. Yes, Sun fanboys, I know - keep your shorts on. It's a nice product. But in a market that is dominated by Linux + Apache, just "it takes less electricity" apparently wasn't enough when you consider that running your Ruby on Rails or whatever on Solaris is more work than running it on Linux.

That's SPARC. As for POWER...there will always be people who need the biggest, fastest, baddest processor. A lot less people need them than they used to - x86 commodity keeps getting faster. But there will always be the top X% of the market that needs speed. That's why IBM sells POWER. And hey, while we're catering to them, we can also use it in our run-of-the-mill servers (AIX, AS/400, Mainframe, etc.)

I think POWER has a lot more staying power than SPARC.

Re:Most of them...

[gobbligook]

I disagree, if only it were that simple.

IBM is targeting SUN, they arn't targeting all computer manufacturers.

The equivelent would be: FORD giving everyone a discount on a new vehicle if they traded in a GM. The guy who owned a DODGE would be out of luck.

It's pretty clear here that IBM is trying to scoop SUN's customer base. This could have been the reason they wanted to aquire SUN in the first place.

Re:Most of them...

[Burkin]

IBM is targeting SUN, they arn't targeting all computer manufacturers.

So what? That has little bearing on the law. There is nothing illegal in the fact that they are targeting one company's client base.

The equivelent would be: FORD giving everyone a discount on a new vehicle if they traded in a GM. The guy who owned a DODGE would be out of luck.

Which would be neither anti-competitive nor illegal. To run with your analogy there is nothing in the law that obligates a dealer to give trade-in discounts to everyone.

It's pretty clear here that IBM is trying to scoop SUN's customer base. This could have been the reason they wanted to aquire SUN in the first place.

Well of course they are trying to take away Sun's old customer's. That's what you see between any competing companies.

Re:Most of them...

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems pretty clear the GP hasn't worked with Unix in some time.

Re:Most of them...

[TooMuchToDo]

Which isn't illegal. If I want to target customers of a certain company, I'm free to do so. Nothing illegal about it.

Re:Most of them...

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's time for vendors to realize that you have to count more on Linux and Windows if you are going to release your software for mainstream use."-- I'm pretty sure that typically the software written for these Sun systems are used for internal applications in corporations, and not "software of mainstream use" effectively invalidating your entire rant.

Re:Most of them...

[funwithBSD]

As always, the SA and his policies are a much bigger factor than the OS. Except WINTEL.

Sun N2 chip is really a screamer if you want multi-thread JAVA processing.

What would be interesting is if Oracle had SUN develop a DBA tuned CPU for their use. THAT would really a hit to IBM.

DISCLAMER: I work for one of the 3 companies involved here. Not the one you might think.

Re:Most of them...

[mcrbids]

IBM isn't going to re-sell the Sun hardware. Your car dealership nearly always makes a profit on the trade-in by selling them as used cars through a used car salesman on a lot with a different business name.

Still, it's not anti competitive. To be more clear: this is a textbook definition of what competitive means.

Re:Most of them...

[Anonymous Coward]

And even though Sparc has been an important processor architecture it's likely that it's going the same way as Digital's Alpha - a slow death.

That's a bombshell. To capture the essence of what you are saying you should title your posts "Sparc is dying...."

Re:Most of them...

[gfxguy]

IBM isn't going to re-sell the Sun hardware.

Huh...

I was tending to agree with the notion that it wasn't anti-competitive until I ran across this line.

If they are not going to resell it, then they are taking a trade in value that they cannot recoup. It's not quite, but it seems similar to dumping (lowering prices below your costs in order to drive a competitor out of the market).

I'm not saying I have a problem with it, but look at it this way... if I was disinclined to by an IBM before, and IBM offered to sell to me below cost (by giving a way overpriced value for a trade-in) in order to get me to switch, I think that'd be considered anti-competitive.

Re:Most of them...

[InfoJunkie777]

Where are the mod-up points when you need them. Nice post - succinctly put.

Re:Most of them...

[burnin1965]

Seems like the next anti-trust lawsuit.

I doubt it.

The only possible anti-trust issue is if IBM is suspected of "anti-competitive practices that tend to lead to such a dominant position".

Considering IBM still has some stiff competition from HP and there are other smaller competitors in the market it doesn't appear they are at risk of any other anti-trust abuses.

I wouldn't let my guard down with any corporation, but I don't see any signs yet of IBM violating anti-trust laws or acting in an anti-competitive manner. In fact this looks like down right brutal competition.

Re:Most of them...

[Bigbutt]

IBM (at least here in Boulder) has a crap-load of Sun hardware sitting idle in a warehouse. When I was working there, we all had Sun boxes under our desks along with IBM and our IBM laptops. Our team each had an Enterprise 250 under our desks.

[John]

Re:Most of them...

[Anonymous Coward]

How is that any different than a car dealer who takes a few thousands dollars off the price of a car when you trade in your old car? Is that also anti-competitive?

    The dealer buys your car and then later resells it. Making it a single transaction by just applying that payment for the old car to the new car cost makes that a weak analogy. That trade-in gets resold as a car or in rare occasions to a scrap yard. That car/parts are still in the car/parts ecosystem. You really think IBM is putting these Sparc systems on Ebay (or pushing them into the used marketplace) after you trade up to a Power? Paying to take your competitors product off the market is reducing competition in the market.

Besides what they are doing is usually putting the customer something with an annuity ( software or reoccurring service). So you are having to buy a bundle and eventually IBM makes the money back.

   

Re:Most of them...

[Red Flayer]

Still, it's not anti competitive. To be more clear: this is a textbook definition of what competitive means.False. This is anticompetitive -- the goal is to reduce or eliminate competition in the marketplace. Textbook anti-competitive behavior. By shifting the credit to services, instead of a hardware rebate, they dance around it a bit... but the effect remains the same.

Whether or not this is actionable is a different story. If IBM had a seriously dominant position in the marketplace (or a true monopoly), then this would be actionably anti-competitive. Since Sun is a viable competitor already established in the marketplace, not so much.

The crux is, anti-competitive behavior is perfectly fine (since it is a form of competition), *unless* the behavior is done by a monopoly, trust, or hugely dominant player in the market.

Re:Most of them...

[Red Flayer]

Crap. Forgot to preview. Here it is with correct formatting:

Still, it's not anti competitive. To be more clear: this is a textbook definition of what competitive means.

False. This is anti-competitive -- the goal is to reduce or eliminate competition in the marketplace. Textbook anti-competitive behavior. By shifting the credit to services, instead of a hardware rebate, they dance around it a bit... but the effect remains the same.

Whether or not this is actionable is a different story. If IBM had a seriously dominant position in the marketplace (or a true monopoly), then this would be actionably anti-competitive. Since Sun is a viable competitor already established in the marketplace, with a market share close to IBM's, not so much.

The crux is, anti-competitive behavior is perfectly fine (since it is a form of competition), *unless* the behavior is done by a monopoly, trust, or hugely dominant player in the market.

Re:Most of them...

[Burkin]

Paying to take your competitors product off the market is reducing competition in the market.

So Sun is now unable to sell future SPARC machines because of this? If not I'm failing to see how this is reducing competition.

Re:Most of them...

[gtirloni]

Danger, Will Robinson! Trolls!

Re:Most of them...

[Anonymous Coward]

A few years ago I worked in a web development group of a company that was going under. The good coders and managers went off to large financial institutions and start-ups. The people that joined the team from outside IT, that had no coding background, that couldn't even describe what we were doing let alone do it, went to IBM Global Services.

Re:Most of them...

[BikeHelmet]

Sounds just like what happened with American ISPs. One undercuts by selling below cost, then as soon as the competition is dead, prices skyrocket to six times what they were.

Re:Most of them...

[Z00L00K]

I suspect IBM.

Unfortunately what accountants and managers look at are the price of hardware and also price of running the things.

And a service agreement may be a valid issue, but if you run off the shelf PC hardware a lot of the service agreement costs can be cut severely.

It doesn't matter that you may have the best solution in the world if you have competitors that are half as good at the tenth of the price.

Re:Most of them...

[Ramze]

It's just an incentive program. Perfectly legal. Also, discriminatory pricing is completely legal in most cases as well (think movie theaters... one price for kids, another for adults, yet another for seniors... and other discounts for college kids and military)

It's not anti-competitive. It's actually aggressively competitive. Sun could match the discounts for new equipment or even raise them. Some companies do this for old products... return your old one for a certain percent or flat rate off the next purchase.

Not only is it legal and clearly NOT anti-competitive, but IBM is also not a monopoly. This is a strategic move by IBM to claim market share... which is what companies do. Like survival of the fittest in nature, there is no mercy for the weak in business. IBM is taking advantage of a competitor's weakness and using their own strengths to gain new customers. That's how capitalism works.

Re:Most of them...

[mcrbids]

It would be anticompetitive if IBM had a monopoly... but they don't. Dumping in this sense is entirely legal and is, in fact, commonplace....

Upgrade from XXX competitor and we'll drop our price by 10%!

Re:Most of them...

[mcrbids]

PS: We did something similar for a while, until we realized that our cost structure was such that we could undercut our competition handily and still turn a tidy profit - so we made the "sale" price our regular price...

We charge only what our competitors charge for their annual service contract, and basically charge no initial contract price at all! At what point does competition end and "dumping" begin".

Re:Most of them...

[Anonymous Coward]

and IBM offered to sell to me below cost

Huh? they're not giving away 8k in hardware, they're giving it in software or services.

1. Kick out hardware competition.
2. Give away (near) free software/services.
3. ...
4. Profit!

Where 3 could be:
- Sell (more) complementing software
- Expand services activities
- Sell more hardware to run the software on
- Sell services to integrate the hardware with the software with the more hardware to run it on with the services that implement the....

Re:Most of them...

[ThePhilips]

DISCLAMER: I work for one of the 3 companies involved here. Not the one you might think.

There is only one company not mentioned in the thread which has something at stake here: HP.

Reading the mood in the industry, I'd say HP-UX would die sooner than AIX or (Open)Solaris. AIX simply has no chances of dying - IBM develops it completely in-house and uses it as private platform for all possible top-down solution. Solaris is way too vital asset, in several industries considered to be a standard OS: it would be dying (if ever) very very long time. HP-UX, though absorbed Tru64, due to lacking features, extremely slow development and generally poor management, lost it's traditional HPC customer base to Linux. SuperDomes are interesting, but few can afford them. Neither HP has strong software development. They are way too often H/W supplier and that's it - way too easy to replace.

Re:Most of them...

[RiotingPacifist]

Really with 50m people using xbox360s or ps3s i think the power architecture is far from dead

Re:Most of them...

[Ramze]

What the heck? There are half a dozen other posts saying the same thing I did and they're modded as "3" and "4" insightful. This wasn't a troll... it's perfectly true in the legal and business world in the USA. I hope whoever modded me as Troll gets their mod points removed permanently by meta-mods.

Re:Most of them...

[Ramze]

Sun could just as easily match the trade-in for services. Sun could even offer a trade-in for IBM's hardware or service contracts. IBM is being aggressive, but not anti-competitive. If IBM were a monopoly, then there might be anti-trust issues, but for right now, it's perfectly legal and not very uncommon. For instance, Cable companies often have deals where you can turn in your old satellite dish for money off your cable bill.

Re:Most of them...

[HardCase]

W00t for the company I work for: we make products for BOTH Sun and IBM servers. I guess it's a win-win situation for us!

Re:Most of them...

[ThePhilips]

The CoolThreads stuff is neat, but never really took off at the volume Sun was hoping.

It's way too Java biased.

My company did evaluation (C/C++ stack of applications) with only one result: disabling the CPU multithreading capabilities improves performance. Otherwise, sustained performance penalty makes the whole solution not worth its money.

But it would be interesting to see how they do Java applications. In our stack, Java has bits of business logic, but mostly (one of the) front-end(s) for customers to hook up their own applications - it's not performance critical thus was not evaluated.

As for POWER...there will always be people who need the biggest, fastest, baddest processor. A lot less people need them than they used to - x86 commodity keeps getting faster. But there will always be the top X% of the market that needs speed. That's why IBM sells POWER. And hey, while we're catering to them, we can also use it in our run-of-the-mill servers (AIX, AS/400, Mainframe, etc.)

I think POWER has a lot more staying power than SPARC.

I always had the opinion that IBM keeps POWER floating simply because it's pretty much always delivers profits. The POWER among architectures is like Linux among OSs: it scales from embedded systems to clusters to mainframes. IBM is pragmatical company and POWER apparently sells well: there seems to be undying demand for custom chips for all possible applications. Provided simplicity of POWER (some folks do implement PPC32 of FPGA) IBM can very quickly adjust it to requirements of a customer. If one market is slowing, other markets do support future development.

In contrast, SPARC to be profitable has to have a wider market: it's not that flexible accommodating various application fields. They are present in essentially one (huge) market: servers. Yes, it's huge - but highly competitive market. In past, the sole reason for people to buy SPARC was Solaris: good, stable - slow - yet best server OS. I'm not sure how that would play out after Oracle's take over. Seeing how now Oracle runs on Linux/x64, I have strong feeling that SPARC might be the first business unit sacrificed. Solaris/x64 (which Sun already produces) might be way too tempting for Oracle as a way forward.

Re:Most of them...

[Anonymous Coward]

What the heck? There are half a dozen other posts saying the same thing I did and they're modded as "3" and "4" insightful.

You're right, you should have been modded redundant.

Re:Most of them...

[mikael]

Every company does this to each other - they always give trade-in offers for their competitors last-generation technology in exchange for their next generation technology.
In particular they always take advantage of one company buying out another, and throw some FUD about how that hardware might not be supported in the future.

Re:Most of them...

[Zak3056]

The equivelent would be: FORD giving everyone a discount on a new vehicle if they traded in a GM. The guy who owned a DODGE would be out of luck.

The auto industry calls those "conquest rebates" and they do indeed use them. Beyond that, anti-trust (generally) involves the abuse of a monopoly position to stifle competition, and it's absurd to suggest that is the case here.

It's pretty clear here that IBM is trying to scoop SUN's customer base. This could have been the reason they wanted to aquire SUN in the first place.

What's your point? Business A growing market share by taking it from Business B happens everyday--it's how the market works.

Re:Most of them...

[ClosedSource]

Of course, IBM was investigated for a decade for anti-trust violations. Unlike MS, however, they were up-to-date on their protection payments, so they never got caught.

Re:Most of them...

[Nefarious Wheel]

I think it's about preservation of their non-Linux mainframe segment. Sun had the only CICS emulator out there, to my knowledge.

Re:Most of them...

[Nefarious Wheel]

IBM's support is expensive and useless.

Not to IBM. There is nothing quite as expensive as a free offer. Ask any junkie, auto mechanic or IT services salesman.

Re:Most of them...

[Anonymous Coward]

In what way? How does it stifle competition?

How would it be illegal even if they did have a monopoly?

All you need is enough money to kill your competitor. more money == no competition. It doesn't get any more obvious than that.

I wonder why people so quickly defend huge corporations. It's not like few excessively big ones are better for us customers.

Re:Most of them...

[Anonymous Coward]

does Netcraft confirm it?

Re:Most of them...

[danielsfca2]

I wonder if the current IBM employees know that they'll be required to store up to 4 more Sun servers under each desk now because of this new program.

Re:Most of them...

[fluffernutter]

I have to second your LOL.. I don't think this guy has even had experience with a web hosting environment; never mind being across the chasm at a real corporate datacenter. It seems to me there are three groups of people when it comes to this kind of thing: a) people who have used/developed applications b) people who have experience in web hosting environments c) people who have experience in large corporate environments groups a) and b) are almost all windows and linux fans. In group c) Windows is almost always despised and Linux is an amusing toy.

Re:Most of them...

[Reservoir Penguin]

Software companies do it all the time, offer discounts for their own programs if you provide proof of purchase of competitors software.

Re:Most of them...

[eihab]

DISCLAMER: I work for one of the 3 companies involved here. Not the one you might think.

Then your "disclaimer" is useless because it adds nothing to your post and hence should have been omitted.

- If you were a Sun employee then your disclaimer might support your claims about N2 and Java performance (hey look, at least he's being honest about the fact that he may be biased).

- Ditto for Oracle

- And finally if you were an IBM employee, your disclaimer might get you fired (or promoted).

The Death of SPARC?

[eldavojohn]

Is this the death of SPARC?

I would have said murder but I'm not interested in a hardware flame war. I mean, I know Fujitsu and some lesser known companies are using it but I'm not sure in what capacity. Is this the end of SPARC?

Can any hardware experts comment on whether or not this is the end of this architecture? Or does it have some niche market/capability like PowerPC?

I guess OS support could have been a cue that it was on the way out but is there any reason to be concerned that it's apparently done?

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[andyfrommk]

Is this the death of SPARC?....Or does it have some niche market/capability like PowerPC?

The OpenSPARC certainly serves a niche market, those with fab plants who are able to fabricate enough cpu's so that the per-cpu cost is cheaper than buying them from $cpu_mftr

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[teflaime]

SPARC was a dying hardware platform anyway. Sun was shipping far more Intel product than SPARC. It's too bad. SPARC was pretty good for the level it was designed to operate (mid-range area). IBM and HP have somehow convinced everyone that P5/6 and Itanium somehow fit in that environment, but they are really out of the price range and overpowered for those needs.

I'm just hoping Solaris survives the Oracle take over. I still like Solaris better than Linux for webservers and such, personally.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[Tibor the Hun]

capability like PowerPC?

You should have your RDF receptor re-calibrated, friend.
PowerPC has no capability! Intel is 32 X faster!!!

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this the death of SPARC?

I would have said murder but I'm not interested in a hardware flame war. I mean, I know Fujitsu and some lesser known companies are using it but I'm not sure in what capacity. Is this the end of SPARC?

Can any hardware experts comment on whether or not this is the end of this architecture? Or does it have some niche market/capability like PowerPC?

I guess OS support could have been a cue that it was on the way out but is there any reason to be concerned that it's apparently done?

ROFL, could have fooled me.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[jellomizer]

Oh come on that is not in the Spirit of Open Source. Free is Free no matter what the real overhead it.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[fm6]

Sun was shipping far more Intel product than SPARC

I work at Sun on x64 products (both Intel and AMD) and this just isn't true. The x64 products are doing well, but our sales are still predominantly SPARC. The long-term strategy has always been for Sun to place more emphasis on x64 products, but not to the exclusion of SPARC systems. And so far, x64 hasn't even achieved parity with SPARC, or anything like it. Why? Not something I'm going to comment on in a public forum.

A lot of Slashdotters seem to think that Sun has turned into a kind of white box server vendor. Even if we we totally abandoned SPARC, that's not going to happen. Our market niche is high-end computing, and always has been. In the x64 world, it means that in order to compete we have to do stuff that white boxes can't. This includes fancy lights-out remote management, really high computer density (anybody else have an 4U system with 8 processors and a half-terabyte of RAM?) and a greener machine with few plastic parts and a lot of power-conserving measures. These things require a lot of clever engineering, and are the only reason we have any successful x64 systems at all.

I have no idea what Oracle has in mind for Solaris. Contacts with them are, if anything, more circumscribed than they would be under normal circumstances. But in my own inexpert opinion, it's not a coincidence that we've been acquired by one of the few software vendors that's still serious about Solaris/SPARC application.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[Mister Whirly]

What I thought was funny was how after years and years of touting the PPC superiority over the X86 chips, as soon as Apple switched to Intel, they were bragging about how much better and faster their new Intel chipped products were over their old PPC systems. I guess in the end processing speed of the CPU does mean something after all!

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[ILongForDarkness]

At my work we have a couple dual socket T2 sparc servers (T5140) that we are using as fileservers for 30 disk arrays, 150TB of disk space. We went with them because we liked SAMFS (Sun's hierachial storage management system), and the T2 chips have 8 cores X 8 way threaded for a total of 128 simultaneous compute threads in a 1U server.

They can push a lot of I/O(60GB/s of I/O bandwidth per chip) but I wouldn't want it for compute intensive stuff because they only have 1 FPU per core, and 2 integer units per core (ie 8 threads have 1 FPU and 4 threads have 1 ALU). Anyways the current generation seemed to be targeted at I/O intensive stuff especially highly threaded protocols(eg. samba/NFS).

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[TheSunborn]

If you work for sun can you give the inside story for the UltraSPARC T1 chip?

Was T1 really a x86-64 chip until sun bought the company that designed it and converted it to Sparc? And if so WHY?

If sun had taken the x86 version of T1 given it an hyper transport and sold it to third parties(In the same way that Amd and Intel sell their chips)
it might have taken a good part of the server world. Now it's just yet an other effective but far to expensive chip that can't beat Intel/Amd in $/performance
for any workload.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[Burkin]

they were bragging about how much better and faster their new Intel chipped products were over their old PPC systems. I guess in the end processing speed of the CPU does mean something after all!

You mean except the fact that the Core2Duos/Quads they sell are usually of a lower stock clock speed than the ridiculously shitty P4s they used to compete against? Yes, these new Intel CPUs are faster but it's because they are multicore and have a better IPC performance not because of raw gigahertz speed.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[Anonymous Coward]

(anybody else have an 4U system with 8 processors and a half-terabyte of RAM?)

The IBM p575 with the Power6 processor is a 2U node, containing 32 processors at 4.7 GHz, and 256 GB of RAM.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/575/specs.html

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[afabbro]

I work at Sun on x64 products (both Intel and AMD) and this just isn't true. The x64 products are doing well, but our sales are still predominantly SPARC.

More importantly, the profits came overwhelmingly from SPARC. Selling high-end proprietary kit to big businesses is always going to be more profitable than selling volume x86 white boxes to the masses a per-dollar basis.

The long-term strategy has always been for Sun to place more emphasis on x64 products, but not to the exclusion of SPARC systems. And so far, x64 hasn't even achieved parity with SPARC, or anything like it. Why? Not something I'm going to comment on in a public forum.

Post anonymously.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is 384G and 64 processors in 4U of space acceptable?
While super micro's twin2 systems don't quite squeeze in as much RAM....

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[fm6]

I don't work in the microelectronics division, so I'm as much an outsider as you when it comes to this stuff. This is the first I've ever heard of the T1 being designed by an acquisition. I was always under the impression it was in-house from start to finish. Could you point me at any sources for this story, beyond the usual blog rumors?

I could speculate as to the truth of this story, but now that I've IDed myself as a Sun employee, I'd get in a lot of trouble for doing so.

I have to strongly disagree with this statement:

If sun had taken the x86 version of T1 given it an hyper transport and sold it to third parties(In the same way that Amd and Intel sell their chips)
it might have taken a good part of the server world.

Not a bloody chance. There is simply no room for another player in the x64 component marketplace. AMD is just barely surviving; even with a grossly superior product, Sun would have to spend huge amounts of money just for the hope of becoming another minor player. And in the process, ruin our relationship with two companies that have helped us turn out a lot of profitable hardware.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[Anonymous Coward]

SPARC was a dying hardware platform anyway.

How so?

It may have less of the pie in relative terms than 5-10 years ago, but there's a lot of kit still shipping.

The UltraSPARC-T chips are also very good and very efficient. If you have parallel work loads, and don't have to worry about FP, then one CoolThreads(tm) server can do as much more as a gaggle [L|W]intel machines. The x86 options may be cheaper per unit, but they take up more space and use more power.

Personally I think Sun has done quite a good job satisfying a major niche in the server world. If it doesn't fit your problem space, than there are other options available, but I like it that at least one chip vendor is doing something different than ramping up clock speed.

How if only Rock would ship already.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea what that means. I have no idea what it's trying to mean.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[fm6]

Anonymous posts are pretty pointless. They could be me, or they could be some stupid troll.

SPARC products do indeed have a higher margin. And I suspect there will always be a market for them. But there are good reasons for Sun needing to grow its x64 market share. I'm going to have to assume everybody knows what they are, because certain people will give me a hard time if I start commenting on our marketing strategy.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[moeinvt]

"PowerPC has no capability! Intel is 32 X faster!!!"

Am I missing a joke here somewhere? The Power6 runs at speeds up to 4.7GHz and it's 2 years old! Does Intel have a chip running at 150.4 GHz that I didn't hear about?

Power 7 comes out in 2010.

32X ? LOL

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[rbanffy]

If Solaris/SPARC is dead, then so is AIX/POWER.

If I ditch either of them, it will be for lower-end x86s. If the workload can be run on commodity hardware, that's certainly the way to go.

That said, POWER and SPARC have some very specific advantages over x86.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[Anonymous Coward]

(anybody else have an 4U system with 8 processors and a half-terabyte of RAM?)

The IBM p575 with the Power6 processor is a 2U node, containing 32 processors at 4.7 GHz, and 256 GB of RAM.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/575/specs.html

No, it has 32 processor cores.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[andyfrommk]

Oh come on that is not in the Spirit of Open Source. Free is Free no matter what the real overhead it.

I'm not denigrating it, I would love to run Linux or OpenSolaris on an OpenSPARC but I don't have the time to solder that many transistors together, anyway the OpenSPARC documentation is in a hardware description language not the traditional logic-gated schematic that I was expecting.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just built a 1U system with 8 cores, 32GB of ram and 8TB of space. All for less than $2500. maybe not half a TB of ram, but for the cost and the size... cant beat it.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[TheSunborn]

Sun bought "Afara Websystems" which were designing it. Sun finished the design. See for example
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39154430,00.htm

But all the articles I could find say it was a sparc chip, even before sun bought the company. This is strange because I remember reading a long
article about how the chip designers developing niagara were unhappy because sun changed the instruction set for the processor from x86-64 to sparc. (But they could at least keep using their current tools, even if it was not the tools that sun normally used to design chips).
But maybe someone(Me??) mixed up chip names.

And there might not be room for an other x86-64 player, but I think there are more room there then in the sparc space.
So I think a x86-64 Niagra+transitives sparc->x86 emulator would make a winner because sun could recover some of the extra costs by selling of excess Niagara chips. (Something that is really difficult as long as they are sparc).

But we will newer know.
 

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[turgid]

I used to work for Sun too, just about the time they acquired Niagara from Afara (IIRC). Tremblay left Sun to found a startup which designed multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs, and they came up with Niagara, which was basically 8 very simple UltraSPARC cores on a chip, each core capable of holding 4 thread contexts which could be switched in and out to hide memory latency.

This is how things used to work at Sun. Every so often, very clever people with "lunatic fringe" ideas would leave to found startups with VC money to realise the ideas, and Sun would buy them back when it looked like it might work.

Sun's in-house CPU design is pathetic, which is why UltraSPARC started to lose out to x86 in the late '90s. Given the size of AMD's team and their complete lack of funds compared to Sun, Sun should have had much better CPUs than Opteron/AMD64, but look what happened. Fujitsu did much better with SPARC64.

Buying MySQl was a bone-headed decision which finally killed Sun. They tried to buy a name for over $1bn and got nothing. As always happens with these take-overs, the lead developers left. Remember the Cobalt purchase? What about StorageTek? Are any of them left?

There were many opportunities Sun should have taken but didn't. For example, they should have bought AMD right when Opteron came out (but Not Invented Here! - and it took some pretty loud shouting to get the Solaris prima-donnas to get Solaris on Opteron) and given AMD the task of developing UltraSPARC along side Opteron. Heck, some of us wondered, if a 64-bit x86 can be made to go so fast, what would it be like if the x86-translation layer was replaced with a SPARC-V9 translation layer? BIG HINT.

Now, calling GNOME the "Java Desktop System" was suicide. Potential customers were saying, "Why would I want a desktop written in Java?" Marketing PHBs, I hope you have learned a lesson!

Why did they ditch a bunch of the standard applets and rewrite less featured and slower ones in Java? I remember seeing a 1-pager proposing to write an MP3 player in Java for the JDS. Meanwhile we were shipping xmms on the Companion CD!

Java, Java, Java, Java, Java,..... Blah!!!!

PHBs, you may be interested in Java, but that was not Sun's core business, despite what you wanted to think, and all it did was alienate the millions of dedicated Unix people who used Solaris and Sun gear.

So I bought some Sun shares in the employee discount scheme. When the takeover stuff was announce, the shares almost went up enough that if I sold them next year when I don't have to pay any tax on them, I'll only have lost about 25% of my money.

I could have run that company better... Every year, buy some other companies with a few thousand employees, have a RIF and get a write-down against tax. Great strategy guys.

Phew, I needed that. End of rant.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[raftpeople]

Intel wins, but Power will take longer to die than Sparc because IBM has larger overall market share (unix, mainframe, etc.) to spread the cost of Power over the long haul. Mainframe isn't using Power yet, but it will.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[Anonymous Coward]

And so far, x64 hasn't even achieved parity with SPARC, or anything like it. Why? Not something I'm going to comment on in a public forum.

Could it be because you put god-awful LOMs on your x86 boxes, so people that want to remote admin a box that don't really need the extra power plump for the nicer SPARCs?

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[PitaBred]

...you do realize that "faster" is RARELY related directly to clock cycles, right? I mean, if it does 1 op per cycle, a 4.7GHz chip will be smoked by a, say, 2.3GHz chip that will do 64 ops per cycle. But hey... why let that reality shit get in the way of being a fanboy? I'll bet you still think that PowerPC Macs are faster.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[fm6]

Sun's in-house CPU design is pathetic, which is why UltraSPARC started to lose out to x86 in the late '90s

That might have been part of the reason, but I think the industry-wide shift away from chips that weren't Wintel-compatible might have had a bigger role. How many non-x86 CPUs are widely used? POWER? Not outside of IBM. MIPS? Not even what's left of SGI uses them; outside the embedded market, they are history. Itanium? Not even Intel could get people to buy them!

Whatever the merits of your critique of Sun's management decisions (you'll understand if I keep my opinions on this to myself) I think you're overestimating the impact of the decisions you list. For example, even if MySQL turns out to be a $1 billion mistake, a single gigabuck writeoff is not enough to kill Sun. It's a lot of money, of course, but it's a onetime cost. The things that kill a company are more systemic than that, or any of the other things you mention. These are things like margins, marketing strategy, product focus.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[Kymermosst]

The IBM p575 with the Power6 processor is a 2U node, containing 32 processors at 4.7 GHz, and 256 GB of RAM.

You might want to put the crack pipe down for a bit. The very web site you link to has the system frame physically described as:

79.5"H x 29.5"W x 60.0"D (201.3 cm x 75 cm x 152.4 cm); weight: 3,650 lb (1,656 kg)

That's a bit bigger than 2U. Here on planet Earth, anyway.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[Kymermosst]

Addendum: I get the definition of "node" as IBM puts it. But, you make it sound as if you can stick a 32-core 2U P6 box in any old rack. You can't.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[fm6]

Sun has made a lot of acquisitions over the years. Possibly some design firm got bought out that had originally targetted x86. That's much like what happened with the company that created the HotSpot VM, which was originally meant for Smalltalk runtimes, not Java.

My first thought was that you were confusing Afara with Montalvo, which was an x86 company. But that only happened last year, and Montalvo was already defunct — we just bought their assets, which probably included some juicy patents.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[TheGratefulNet]

sparc IS dead.

the t1, t2 and other 'core multithreaded' (cmt) boxes are NOT NOT NOT sparc.

at least not sun4u sparc. they call them sun4v but they are NOT sparc. if you've done a build on the old true sparcs vs the new 'i/o fast' boxes, you'll know that sparc really is dead ;(

the new boxes are good for i/o thruput but they are dogs in terms of general purpose computing; something the old sparc was GOOD at.

RIP.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[fm6]

No, it contains 32 cores, not processors. As does the Sun system I was talking about.

Though 2U is still much smaller. Still, the IBM system is POWER, while the Sun system has a commodity CPU.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[rackserverdeals]

I thought he was talking about Montalvo too. I've been wondering what might happen from that acquisition.

Apparently Montalvo's chip design was touted as the x86 Cell processor.

I don't know if the plan is to release the chip Montalvo was working on, or to integrate it with other tech and you likely can't comment on it.

I think the best solution would be to offer to license some of the technology to Intel and AMD as well as implementing some of it in the SPARC line.
If the goal is to build a competitor to IBM's cell, I think Intel or AMD would have a better chance.

The concept of asymmetric cores seem interesting but I'm not sure that it is that good a design in as many applications. The x86 world is about general purpose performance. What Intel is doing, building the ability to overclock a single core to increase speed when necessary and other cores aren't being used, seems to a better method.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[ThePhilips]

PPC largely remains inferior (performance-wise) to Intel offering. (*)

But.

POWER != PowerPC. POWER can PowerPC, but PowerPC can't POWER.

Frankly, I'm too at loss when it comes to defining what is POWER and what is PowerPC. I had impression that with actual generation - POWER6 - IBM simply unified/merged PowerPC/64 to its existing server architecture. (Or unified their marketing.) So now there is only POWER or Power Architecture.

Though they still sell heck of 4xx CPUs which are (1) PowerPC/32, (2) dirt cheap (3) (relatively) fast (4) power efficient and (5) dirt cheap. Also everybody buy them because they are dirt cheap.

(*) IBM/Apple divorce had little to do with PowerPC underperforming. IBM pushed hard Apple to invest more into PowerPC R&D. Apple refused. There were problems with power consumption of newer workstation chips too. And IBM failed several dead-lines, making Apple's PR look bad. As performance goes, some math applications are still faster on PowerPC than they are on Intel. It's just generally, Intel market has much more cheap solutions, compared to proprietary PowerPC architecture, designed especially for Apple. E.g. video encoding can be much faster on PowerPC, yet on Intel it is faster because it is simply more and better optimized. It's not black and white. Intel wins hands down mostly because there are so many people using the CPUs.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[ThePhilips]

IBM POWER's main power is that they can do custom designs. It's part of their business. IBM is quite different from the rest.

Intel is making only few designs per year and expect them to sell in volumes to turn profit. Same goes to Sun's SPARC: they have to turn good volumes to be profitable. And as some knowledgeable commented above they do.

As long as Oracle doesn't screw up management, there will always be a place for tightly integrated vertical business model like SPARC's. (Otherwise, Lintel/*BSD/x64 would have already taken over the markets.) IBM btw uses AIX/POWER in the way: they sell vertically integrated stack of H/W, OS and business software (+ their SAN). Oracle is only need to follow their footsteps and sell vertical stack of H/W, OS, SAN and DB/etc software. And it would sell. There is a market for such integrated solutions.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[Anonymous Coward]

sparc IS dead.

the t1, t2 and other 'core multithreaded' (cmt) boxes are NOT NOT NOT sparc.

at least not sun4u sparc. they call them sun4v but they are NOT sparc.

T1, T2 are most definitely SPARC; SPARC is an instruction set; the T-series run each of many single threads about as fast as the UltraSPARC-II generation, i.e., slower than the fastest single threaded SPARCs but faster than the first SPARCs. A T2 (confusingly, in the T5xxx series servers) is roughly equal to the E10K monster boxes of ten years ago.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[dbIII]

But, you make it sound as if you can stick a 32-core 2U P6 box in any old rack. You can't.

You can do something similar - there are 1U systems with 2 eight core machines (Dual Xeon) side by side sharing the same power supply. Get a couple of those and you have 32 cores in 2U, the difference is that it is four seperate computers. For some applications that works well. Since such things have been around for a couple of years there may be denser things in a reasonable price range now.

It's funny, as well as a few of the above toys I'm running a Sparcstation 10 of all things for some legacy software - I wonder would IBM would say if I asked for $16,000 to replace that 18 year old two cpu machine :) It's mainly still in use because some software that runs on it to plot an odd image type is faster on that old machine than a more recent bit of windows or linux software that is running on something with more than fifty times the CPU power. When Virtualbox runs solaris for sparc well enough on x86 I can retire the thing.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[Antique Geekmeister]

I remember the Cobalt's. Even Sun's own tech support no idea of how those things loaded kernels, so running your own performance optimized kernel was out of the question. They were a great idea with a few critical missing bits that made them impossible to sell in bulk when I supported them.

This was common to Sun products. Too bad Java turned out the same: those missing bits only became fixed when Sun actually open sourced it. I have to assume that there was some tier of management at Sun where people rose to their level of incompetence and poisoned the next round of development because this _kept happening_ with different Sun product lines. Heck, Sun couldn't figure out how to name its software products! JDK, J2EE, JRE, J2RE, JSDK, etc, etc., etc., and the several times revised numbering scheme make figuring out which Java toolkit to install a nightmare. And don't get me started on that "wrapper an RPM in an installer that breaks things" that they provide for RPM based Linuxes.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[fm6]

Hmm, come to think of it, I might know something about this. But yeah, I'd get in big trouble if I leaked any of it. I can point out that we've only owned the remnants of Montalvo for a few months, which is way too soon for the kind of they-wrecked-my-product rant that TheSunbeam describes.

This article is instructive on the dangers of entering the x86 market based only on a cool idea:

http://venturebeat.com/2008/06/23/post-mortem-the-real-story-of-how-chip-startup-montalvo-went-down-in-flames/

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[Anonymous Coward]

We're talking about Apple marketing. There's no room for facts here!

(yes, you are indeed missing the joke)

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[teflaime]

Our market niche is high-end computing, and always has been. In the x64 world, it means that in order to compete we have to do stuff that white boxes can't.

My experience always had IBM P5 (now P6) for the real high end applications, except for big Oracle servers. We primarily used SPARC for mail, Oracle, and webservers, or the specific telecommunications app that required Sun. On the other hand, I know the defense department still has a lot of high end SPARC, due to trusted Solaris.

I really hope SPARC does survive,and, as I said, I still prefer Solaris as a Unix OS. But I would like to see it as more than just an Oracle niche support market. I'm just not convinced that it will happen. Especially given the crap outsourcing that Sun has taken to for their support contracts. Hell, I know more about their new hardware than most of the CEs that have been sent out to support the limited Sun hardware at the currently company I work for. And that crap support is the reason that there won't be much more Sun coming in here.

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[fm6]

My experience always had IBM P5 (now P6) for the real high end applications, except for big Oracle servers.

I think that's correct. But note that there are a lot of Oracle servers out there!

Re:The Death of SPARC?

[moeinvt]

"...you do realize that "faster" is RARELY related directly to clock cycles, right?"

I realize that "performance" of a system isn't always directly proportional to the clock speed of the CPU, what with other bottlenecks in the overall architecture, but the OP said "faster" without qualifying the term. When you say "speed" in the context of "Intel vs. Power" I think the association to "clock speed" is only natural.

" . . .if it does 1 op per cycle, a 4.7GHz chip will be smoked by a, say, 2.3GHz chip that will do 64 ops per cycle."

How do you make a chip perform 64 operations in a cycle? i.e. unless you're talking about 64 2.3GHz cores vs. one 4.7GHz core, which obviously isn't a valid comparison. The processor instruction sets I'm familiar with take one cycle per operation (RISC) or an integer number of cycles per operation (CISC).

Ditching Sun servers

[OolimPhon]

Does this mean that there will be a market full of cheap(ish) second-hand Sun servers your average geek might be able to make use of?

Re:Ditching Sun servers

[SalaSSin]

No, this means that you should gather your second hand SPARC servers you have laying around, and cash them in.

Re:Ditching Sun servers

[Rakishi]

No, the opposite probably. IBM is likely sending those servers straight to the junk heap (or recycling heap nowadays).

Re:Ditching Sun servers

[andyfrommk]

Does this mean that there will be a market full of cheap(ish) second-hand Sun servers your average geek might be able to make use of?

Yeah,SUN ENTERPRISE 450 DUAL 300MHz SERVER WITH WARRANTY
A snip at £1,695.00 (although prices on Sun hardware do seem to have come down a bit)

Re:Ditching Sun servers

[blueskies]

No. There is going to be a rush on cheap second-hand sun servers so people can trade them in for $8k a pop. (ebay has sparc20s for $140 buynow price).

Re:Ditching Sun servers

[ToasterMonkey]

I'm pretty sure this is only for trade-ins for P-series, which are not cheap.
This is no different than trading in a car for a new one. They're still taking your money, one way or another.

So go ahead, buy a bunch of second hand SPARC systems, I'll get a better deal on ebay down the line.

Re:Ditching Sun servers

[bsdaemonaut]

Lol, you can pick those up for $200, maybe less. I have one sitting right here that I use to teach kids about other architectures. Whoever that is is hoping for an idiot to come walking along. You can get a much, much nicer system for that kind of cash.

Re:Ditching Sun servers

[SnarfQuest]

No. This means that the average selling price of sun equipment on ebay just jumped.

Re:Ditching Sun servers

[AKAImBatman]

I've seen the 3000 series with 8 procs or so go for prices near that. Plus you can get similarly configured Sun workstations for less money. (I inherited a two processor 4GB Ultra 60 myself.)

Check out http://www.anysystem.com/ sometime. You can get REALLY cheap Sun hardware there.

Re:Ditching Sun servers

[Anonymous Coward]

This listing will _never_ sell. You can get a much, much, much nicer SPARC server for less than that. It's like the lsiti

Re:Ditching Sun servers

[Achromatic1978]

They're not just giving you thousands of dollars for SPARC systems. They're giving you $8,000 worth of consulting services for every IBM server you purchase to replace a SPARC box. Not quite as exciting.

Re:Ditching Sun servers

[blhack]

The only logical thing to do in this case is raid the recycling heap.
Or make a media fiasco out of IBM not allowing a bunch of starving geeks the opportunity to put a bunch of garbage to good use.
BAD, IBM, BAD!

Re:Ditching Sun servers

[bberens]

They're giving you $8,000 worth of consulting services

So... basically they'll let me call the 1-800 number and listen to a 30 second pre-recorded message?

Re:Ditching Sun servers

[andyfrommk]

A similar system to the one in my OP
Yes they are cheaper but still way overpriced compared to commodity x64 hardware and I don't know what preformance gains you get from 4x450Mhz over 1x1.8Ghz.
I'd love to try out Solaris on SPARC and get geek points for having obscure hardware but not at those prices.

Re:Ditching Sun servers

[Skuld-Chan]

Not from IBM, but I noticed Sun hardware on ebay goes for really cheap. Looked up an enterprise 4500 - which we had racks of running oracle on ebay - there's one going for 50$ - back in the day I believe they cost over 25k each.

Even a newer machine - which I had on my desk at my last job - Blade 1500 you can get for 100$ - that was an 8000$ machine 2 years ago.

I think honestly anyone running sun hardware that doesn't need to (there are a lot of proprietary apps I supported that only ran on Sun hardware...) should take up ibm on this offer.

Re:Ditching Sun servers

[swordgeek]

Nope. Tradition dictates that the IBM geeks who are friends with shipping and receiving there will get a chance to grab some of these for home. The rest will get crushed.

Re:Ditching Sun servers

[Nerdfest]

... especially since when IBM says 'service', it generally involves you being bent over a desk.

Cheap

[ultrabot]

Sun may not the friendliest company around (CDDL and all that), but still, this seems like a cheap trick from IBM's side. What with all the generous contributions by Sun to open source movement (OpenOffice comes to mind)...

Re:Cheap

[ultrabot]

Since slashdot doesn't allow editing your previous message - perhaps there is a bit of bad blood w/ IBM and the failed buyout attempt. In that case, this makes perfect sense.

Re:Cheap

[blitzkrieg3]

These are two computer companies trying to make the most of it in tough economic times. They have an obligation with their shareholders to try to make money. Goodwill in the community frankly doesn't matter.

Re:Cheap

[Sir_Lewk]

The CDDL is an OSI approved, Free Software, Copyleft license. It may be incompatible with the GPL but I'd hardly cite it as a reason to not like Sun.

Re:Cheap

[D Ninja]

Sun may not the friendliest company around (CDDL and all that), but still, this seems like a cheap trick from IBM's side. What with all the generous contributions by Sun to open source movement (OpenOffice comes to mind)...

I don't know why you would consider it a cheap trick. It's business. The Oracle/Sun merger is full of doubt at the moment and IBM is taking advantage of that doubt. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Re:Cheap

[dimeglio]

all the generous contributions by Sun to open source movement (OpenOffice comes to mind)

What is the difference between what IBM is doing to Sun vs what Sun is doing to Micrsoft with OpenOffice? Is that also unfair competition?

IBM is just being smart and try to capitalise on the uncertainty around Sun's future. It's an easier sell to the manager who bought Sun. Gives them an incentive to switch vendors and not lose face.

Re:Cheap

[rackserverdeals]

IBM is just being smart and try to capitalise on the uncertainty around Sun's future. It's an easier sell to the manager who bought Sun. Gives them an incentive to switch vendors and not lose face.

IBM isn't trying to capitalize on the uncertainty around Sun's future, they are trying to create the feeling that there is uncertainty in Sun's future and they have been doing so for some time.

IBM's always had the message of Linux/x86 is killing Solaris/SPARC so migrate to AIX/Power. Huh? While some of the Solaris/SPARC migrations have been to Linux/x86 by IBM, the salespeople push you to AIX/Power but the Linux base eats it up and applauds IBM as their hero.

Oracle isn't going to buy Sun and kill off the largest revenue generating and highest margin products that most of their own customers use.

Like someone else posted, this just makes IBM look scared and they're trying to grab up more Sun customers before the dust settles and people realize Solaris/SPARC isn't going anywhere.

Same old story

[Anonymous Coward]

The dangers of IBM are that they are highly unstable requiring an enormous investment when things go wrong. e.g. MQSeries, SP2, OS360.
Just about anyone who has written about how software fails was an engineer working for IBM.
What IBM really wants is a cut of your business. it seriously doesn't want to sell you a machine and support. It wants its cut or its machines value to your business model.
They really put the machine first rather than the people who use them as a tool.

Re:Same old story

[earlymon]

Just about anyone who has written about how software fails was an engineer working for IBM.

So, are you saying (in your loud exclusion of Sun):
a) Engineers working for Sun didn't produce failed software or systems?
b) Engineers working for Sun didn't write about their failed software or systems?

You've made the case for IBM's engineering incompetence. Are you making the case that Sun engineering is pure genius or are you making the case that Sun is obfuscating scum?

It rather seems to me that you're making an entirely different case, but I'll keep that opinion to myself.

Re:Same old story

[bsdaemonaut]

>>The dangers of IBM are that they are highly
>>unstable requiring an enormous investment
>when things go wrong. e.g. MQSeries, SP2, OS360.

Seriously? You support your argument with three technologies, one close to 40 years old and the newest being 7 years old?

I promise, IBM does very much want to sell you a machine and support -- you just made a lot of salesman cry. :P

Great news!

[TheRaven64]

I have four SPARCstation4s in my attic. With one CPU each, I could switch away from all of them. I wonder if I could get $32,000 of software and services from IBM...

Re:Great news!

[David Gerard]

If you have a camera, please get a few good photos for that Wikipedia article!

Re:Great news!

[seanadams.com]

I have four SPARCstation4s in my attic. With one CPU each, I could switch away from all of them. I wonder if I could get $32,000 of software and services from IBM...

Sure, if you're going to buy four of their boxes at list price. But don't expect to sell those "software and services" on ebay for $32,000.

Re:Great news!

[exhilaration]

lol, me too - I have a Sparcstation IPC serving as a monitor stand.

IBM, where's my $8,000???? I have a 25 Mhz CPU I'd like to trade in!

Re:Great news!

[aoheno]

I have four SPARCstation4s in my attic.

Tough machines. Temperatures can swing over 100 fahrenheit up there, not to mention birds nesting in enclosures, rats feeding on cables, snakes feeding on rats, and Bear Grylls feeding on snakes.

Make sure IBM guarantees the same level of durability.

Re:Great news!

[alexborges]

Sure you can. At their rate, youd get about three hours worth of support.

Re:Great news!

[Anonymous Coward]

hmms a 10 cpu e4500 should give me some nice hardware. I might let them take 4x e3500 with 4 cpus each to.

should be enough to get a decent box =)

Did IBM really want to buy Sun . . . ?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

I never really believed it. But the "due diligence" gave the opportunity for IBM to take a peek at what Sun has underneath its fingernails.

Sun is down on the ropes, and IBM would like to give it a knock out.

Yeah, IBM might have wanted to control Java, but the hardware . . . they've got enough hardware of their own.

$64,000 worth of Linux!

[droidsURlooking4]

What a deal!

Re:$64,000 worth of Linux!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol @ whoever modded parent insightful. Linux is free.

Re:$64,000 worth of Linux!

[huge]

Lol @ whoever modded parent insightful. Linux is free.

What!?! Are you saying that I have been paying SCO for nothing?

Wow IBM,

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Way to put your money where your mouth is. "Software or services" dollars are pretty much weasel dollars, aren't they?

Re:Wow IBM,

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Yeah, I'd be more impressed if that was redeemable in hardware. What are the IBM consultants really going to say "Good job ditching Sun! Now ditch Oracle for DB2!"

Re:Wow IBM,

[raftpeople]

Way to put your money where your mouth is. "Software or services" dollars are pretty much weasel dollars, aren't they?

The goal isn't to "put their money where their mouth is", the goal is to provide an incentive to switch to IBM hardware at a time when more companies would consider it due to the unknown future regarding Sun hardware. The reason it's "weasal" dollars is because hardware is down and they don't want to show a bigger drop in hardware, so the money is given away from the services part of the business where profits are high and thus the financial statement still looks good at the end of the quarter.

Re:Wow IBM,

[TheGratefulNet]

I was at a large (in its day) unix workstation vendor, not sun but one very similar and close by, many years ago.

we were doing network management and some vendor wanted us to yank out what we had and install their stuff instead.

I think it was some pig pkg like tivoli or CA unicenter. some gigantic pig of an 'app suite'.

they said they'd give us a million dollars in software credit if we switched entirely over to them.

that, in itself, pretty much gave their intention away. it was to sell us HUGE support contracts and that 'million dollars' was fake money measured in bogus or not-needed software pkgs and 'consulting'.

I leaned there, that any one who offers that kind of 'incentive' has some evil stuff planned.

we never did use their software (we used MY software, 100% locally written and supported) and we basically told the vendor 'sorry, not interested'.

Re:Wow IBM,

[Red Flayer]

The reason it's "weasal" dollars is because hardware is down and they don't want to show a bigger drop in hardware, so the money is given away from the services part of the business where profits are high and thus the financial statement still looks good at the end of the quarter.

Which makes sense, since the hardware is pretty close to just being a loss leader for the services anyway.

It's kind of cute that they're portraying this as the services side being a loss-leader for the hardware (i.e., we'll give you free services if you buy our hardware), when in reality it's more like "We'll give you the hardware at cost, as long as you sign this support contract..."

DB2

[wonkavader]

Does this mean every one of those customers ditched Oracle in the process, or is there an IBM POWER version of Oracle?

I don't see one on Oracle's standard downloads page.

Re:DB2

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle have an Power/AIX version

Anti-trust

[Twillerror]

Intel just got in trouble for providing incentives to not offer a processor.

This is definately a bit different then that, but does this not seem like an anti-competitive type of move?

Any tech lawyers read slashdot?

Re:Anti-trust

[Anonymous Coward]

These are two different things. Intel got in trouble for trying to block consumers from purchasing AMD products. Nothing in IBM's incentive program prevents people from staying with Sun or even leaving IBM for Sun. Now, there are anti-trust laws about price wars. Can't say how those would come in to play

Re:Anti-trust

[Burkin]

but does this not seem like an anti-competitive type of move?

No, it sounds like a very highly competitive move on IBM's part. Exactly what in this offer is anti-competitive?

Re:Anti-trust

[justinlee37]

IANAL, but it should be legal if the end result is not selling the hardware for less than it's production cost. Which is entirely possible, considering that $8,000 of IBM products doesn't actually cost IBM anywhere near $8,000.

a reward

[nimbius]

naturally implies there is some type of punishment for not upgrading to IBM servers...

WHOOPS!!!! Yes, they do have one.

[wonkavader]

Should have looked further down the page. Oracle does indeed have a "Linux on Power" download.

not a good year for McNealy

[rs232]

We love Linux, we love community development and we love open source," McNealy told The Register in an interview. "We just don't like Red Hat.'

"We think we are the good guys. Who has donated more code than us? IBM keeps donating end-of-life code - remnants of roadkill they've bought .." Oct 2004

"a year ago is when Sun and MS bought licenses from SCO and SCO filed its lawsuit against IBM. And in March a year ago, SCO sued IBM, while Ballmer and McNealy had a round of golf and discussed how to work together. What a coincidence"

IBM licenses

[mugnyte]

  Anybody want to reveal the license costs for comparable IBM products? 'Cause I sure don't them see doing it. This is sour grapes.

  IBM rakes us over the cost/performance coals. We're rushing to get out.

Back to their old tricks eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't sell your hardware? (I haven't seen an IBM piece of hardware I'd want to buy in 10 years), so now you try and buy your way in???

yeah... like that will help...

IBM's pSeries, xSeries so far as I've seen / personal experience pretty well bite...

who wrote this BS

[rs232]

"The dangers of IBM are that they are highly unstable"

Dangerous, how ,who, do the engineers spontaneously self combust if put under pressure?

"Just about anyone who has written about how software fails was an engineer working for IBM"

That's a positive, as they should be good at spotting bugs by now.

'What IBM really wants is a cut of your business"'

Best stick to Open Source and third party hardware and your own in-house support people!

Is this legal?

[Anonymous Coward]

While certainly not a moral way to do business, is this kind of incentive legal? Could Sun sue for anti competitive practices?

Re:Is this legal?

[FlyingBishop]

So long as the end result is not selling the servers for less than the production cost, it should be perfectly legal.

Re:Is this legal?

[SnarfQuest]

What's immoral about it? Why should it be illegal for IBM to buy SUN products? SUN already got money for selling it the first time.

If you buy a new car, they will offer you some money for your old one, no matter who made it, and that is normally considered legal. This is the same thing.

Re:Is this legal?

[Burkin]

While certainly not a moral way to do business,

What is immoral about their offer? Is it also immoral for a car dealership to offer you a discount on your purchase if you trade in an old car? Because what IBM is offering is no different.

Re:Is this legal?

[Colonel Korn]

So long as the end result is not selling the servers for less than the production cost, it should be perfectly legal.

Unless Microsoft were doing it, of course.

Re:Is this legal?

[GuyverDH]

If you buy a new car, they will offer you some money for your old one, no matter who made it, and that is normally considered legal. This is the same thing.

only if you consider trading in your car for 8k worth of cabin-air filters, or oil-changes/tire rotations...

they aren't offering 8k worth of ibm hardware for sun hardware...

not the same.

Re:Is this legal?

[Huh?]

Bad choice of business for your analogy. Somehow, a car dealer being on the right side of moral discussion just seems......well, wrong.

Re:Is this legal?

[Burkin]

Somehow, a car dealer being on the right side of moral discussion just seems......well, wrong.

While the car dealer himself may be immoral, there is nothing immoral (or anti-competitive) in a trade-in discount which is all this is.

Re:Is this legal?

[howlingmadhowie]

what if one particular manufacturer, let's say Ford, because they're the only big american manufacturer that doesn't seem to be going down the pan atm, offered at every dealership double trade-in discounts for chrysler while keeping the same trade-in discounts for all other manufacturers? would you call that immoral?

as it is, cars are a bad example because customer retention isn't as strong. if you have all your information stored on solaris on sparc, migrating to ibm power would be a major undertaking. deciding to buy ford instead of chrysler the next time is not so difficult to implement.

I'm not switching...

[Anne Thwacks]

We use excludively OpenBSD on UltraSParc servers for our financial transactions processing. I am not switching - I want uptimes of a year and I certainly dont want to port our software to another OS or hardware. $8k wouldnt go near that. (We have over 20 CPUs, but porting is not going to happen while my Sun kit works). I have never paid Sun a penny for support. Their kit is reliable.

Re:I'm not switching...

[xdor]

I'll second the OpenBSD + UltraSparc combo

Re:I'm not switching...

[teknopurge]

3rd'd.

Re:I'm not switching...

[Anonymous Coward]

For all those folks switching to IBM:

8K would be easily recovered by IBM when you need to hire that IBM GS consultant for a 2 FT days.

It's a bait-n-switch, doesn't everyone already know that's one of many typical IBM strategies?

Re:I'm not switching...

[Migala77]

I have never paid Sun a penny for support. Their kit is reliable.

I'm beginning to see Oracle's business case

Re:I'm not switching...

[Anonymous Coward]

4th'th

Re:I'm not switching...

[Zak3056]

I want uptimes of a year

While your other points are good ones, the above is easily achievable using commodity x86 hardware, running Linux or even Windows. We're not in the early 90s anymore.

Re:I'm not switching...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow! A whole /year/? That's incredible.

Re:WHOOPS!!!! Yes, they do have one.

[aixguru1]

Why is it people assume you have to run Linux on Power hardware for Oracle? AIX fully supports Oracle RDBMS solutions, including combining them high availability products such as HACMP. You buy Power hardware for the reliability and performance in mid-large scale computing. Someone that can afford to put Oracle on that kind of hardware usually runs AIX vs Linux.

So they'll give me

[mongolian]

$16k for the old sparcstation 2's I found to buy some IBM crap?

Re:So they'll give me

[swordgeek]

Yep. They will--if you buy enough new IBM crap.

Not many years ago, Sun was paying about $2k for 1995-era HP 700-series workstations. We cleaned out a storage closet and saved a good chunk on new gear.

Business as usual

[raftpeople]

This is not a cheap trick, just normal competition. The term "friendly" should not be considered when thinking of any of these companies or transactions, it's all about money.

the cost of IBM

[jeffc128ca]

Based on the rates IBM charges, these customers will need it. $8,K will get you a round of golf with one IBM consultant for the afternoon.

Re:the cost of IBM

[PolygamousRanchKid]

What? $8K for an afternoon? Is that Elliot Spitzer call girl working for IBM as a consultant?

Linux runs very nicely on both SPARC and Power chi

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux runs very nicely on both SPARC and Power chips. I've loaded SuSE into an LPAR during a week of IBM training on LPARs. It feels odd at first, then very nice as everything "fits together."

On SPARC, I tend to use Niagra systems and use "containers" to reduce the overhead involved with each OS instance. That is unless I need more power ... then larger servers are the answer and linux probably doesn't fit anyway.

Well that's very easy

[JamesP]

It's no problem for IBM to shave 8k in their overpriced sw or services... It's a drop in the bucket comparing to the usual amount you'll get charged...

Re:Well that's very easy

[JSBiff]

Yeah, whenever I see substantial discounts being offered by *anyone* - whether it's software, hardware, cars, or cell phone service, it just makes me realize how much I was being ripped off *before* the discount.

Taking advantage? Seems more like desperation...

[DragonWriter]

Taking advantage of the uncertainty surrounding Oracle's acquisition of Sun, IBM has doubled the monetary incentives they are offering to ditch Sun gear.

If I have to double the bribe I'm paying to get somebody to abandon a competitor's product from what I was previously offering, that doesn't sound like there is uncertainty in the market that I am taking advantage of, it seems like I've suddenly become desperate that if I don't convince people to leave right now I'm never going to be able to.

And it makes sense: Oracle with Sun, once it finishes integrating its product lines, is going to have a lot more capacity to compete with IBM in offering complete solutions than pre-Sun Oracle or pre-Oracle Sun on their own could.

Solaris has been a good buddy...

[dogsbreath]

.. but most freaking industrial apps are essentially single threaded and the best speed I can get on SPARC is 2.6 G or so ( for mucho $$$)... and Sun is not going anywhere with the h/w research. IBM meanwhile has P6 cpus at 4.7 GHz and much higher in the works. Sun won't survive on Jave, DTrace, and sentimentality.

The T series rock for web and other // processing needs, and they are low power (relatively) but most times I'm better off looking at RH and a Dell.

So... Sun h/w is dying, the Solaris o/s ain't so special anymore (kudos to linux and BSD flavours), and Sun has just been bought by a company headed by a bigger freak than Scott McNealy. And: Oracle doesn't speak o/s or h/w development.

A lot of our vendors are tied specifically to Solaris and SPARC. We're telling them to find another mainstream platform: Linux/x86 or AIX/P. Oracle has a window of opportunity while a lot of apps are still tied to Solaris but those apps are more and more available on alternate platforms or specialized industrial apps without much market effect.

Sad, but Sun and the SPARC/Solaris products are in various stages of death.

Almost makes Nortel look good.

Re:Solaris has been a good buddy...

[swordgeek]

Ignoring how very cool the Niagara chips are, I still disagree.
"but most times I'm better off looking at RH and a Dell."

Dell, maybe. Sun's AMD/Intel hardware is still nicer, but may cost more--depending on who you are and how much you buy.

But RedHat? No. Unless you have an application that doesn't run elsewhere, Linux still isn't a great server OS, and isn't a patch on Solaris.

Solaris/X86 is almost universally a better solution--AND, code written on Solaris/SPARC can be recompiled without any porting. I can't imagine pushing vendors _away_ from Solaris.

What a load of old Cock & Bull

[RotateLeftByte]

I work on MQSeries and have been involved with message queueing systems since 1982.

WMQ is very reliable and has been since V5.1 came out. Pretty well every large financial organisation in the world uses it to move trillions of $$$, ££££, Yen, Euros around their companies & beteween them on a daily basis without error.

Please backup your statement with a list of 'Showstopping' bugs in WMQ.
And no (before you ask), I don't work for IBM.

Re:What a load of old Cock & Bull

[ishobo]

Ah, the MQseries. Pure shit! Let me count the ways:

1) Must be installed as root.
2) Pollutes /usr - cannot install it anywhere else.
3) Cannot move the bits to its own directory because file paths are hard coded.
4) Must run as the mqm user
5) It has no problem starting itself. When stopping, you have to wait until all processes except the listener are no longer running, then you can manually kill the listener.
6) Zombies everywhere.

Now compare that experience with the SwiftMQ, which was a dream on warm, fluffy clouds. This was a few years ago, when I worked for a forex platform. UBS forced us to use MQserver for their integration. Thankfully, they acknowledged it was shit and were going to move off it. Of course, when a bank says it is planning to change technology, the completion of that change is measured in decades.

Re:What a load of old Cock & Bull

[unity]

I have no experience with MQseries; but it appears to me that every issue you listed had to do with unflexible installation and difficult administration.

But the person you replied to said, "WMQ is very reliable" and
"beteween them on a daily basis without error."
and asked, "Please backup your statement with a list of 'Showstopping' bugs in WMQ."

None of the issues you listed really addressed those comments.

Re:What a load of old Cock & Bull

[ishobo]

You are indeed correct, although better administration makes operations easier in fail-over/debug scenerios. I was making a general statement about the package. I had to approach it from a release management and operations angle. When somebody brings up IBM MQ, the hair on my neck stands up and I start sweating.

Re:What a load of old Cock & Bull

[Anonymous Coward]

Please backup your statement with a list of 'Showstopping' bugs in WMQ.

Not the original poster, but I'll take that challenge. We've opened 3 critical show-stopper MQ7 PMRs this year alone, resulting in one APAR so far (and hopefully two more soon). We've been pretty astounded at what's been broken in MQ7 that worked fine in MQ6. Go look at the MQ7 APAR list -- it's huge.

Off a quick email search, here are just two other bugs that really put the hurt on us:

IZ18598 cripped a number of MQ clients
IY65789 crippled the C++ runtime.

I beg to differ

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I agree on the userland side, the Linux kernel is plain trash. I must be able to expect at least multi-year uptimes and rock solid sailing that proper microkernel architectures provide. Dealing with Internet facing systems that are being constantly targeted with 0day vulnerabilities commonly found on Linux kernel, no thanks.

I'll stay old school Unix, tested and true. I'll get back to Linux when the project doesn't choose obscurity over security in vulnerability handling. Also a proper architecture would be a nice bonus.

Re:I beg to differ

[fprintf]

Also a proper architecture would be a nice bonus.

Andrew Tannenbaum, is that you?

Re:I beg to differ

[ultrabot]

I must be able to expect at least multi-year uptimes and rock solid sailing that proper microkernel architectures provide.

I'll stay old school Unix, tested and true.

See the contradiction? It's hard to tell whether this is a well-crafted troll, or sheer ignorance.

Re:I beg to differ

[0xABADC0DA]

It's not necessarily a contradiction. You can have a microkernel architecture without the memory protection for instance. It would be essentially the same as a stable ABI for drivers. Solaris has a stable ABI for drivers.

Troll or not, the linux kernel does have more problems than most unix (it also has more features though). Take for instance the recent problems with kernel ftrace, which destroyed e1000(?) bios and bricked cards around 2.6.27 or so; I don't remember anything similar to this with solaris dtrace and it's doing far more. The reason is that solaris has actual paid engineers, code reviews, and controls in place.

I see a lot of uninformed people assume the linux kernel is always awesome for no other reason than because it's linux. After doing a bit of kernel programming for 5+ years now I see that there are some parts to linux that are actually really bad. Take [di]notify for instance. It's hard to come up with a worse API for being notified of file changes. Both Microsoft and Apple for about a decade now have had much better file notification than current linux has now.

Re:I beg to differ

[Anonymous Coward]

I see a lot of uninformed people assume the linux kernel is always awesome for no other reason than because it's linux. After doing a bit of kernel programming for 5+ years now I see that there are some parts to linux that are actually really bad.

Scalability of Linux - the ability to run lots of threads efficiently on many cores - is also a joke; there are good reasons that Oracle bought Sun and this may be one. Running web servers is one thing; databases and other big transactional workloads are a completely different and much tougher proposition. Linux sucks for this kind of workload on a big system.

Re:I beg to differ

[dirtyhippie]

since when does solaris have a microkernel?

Talk about vindictive

[Theovon]

Ok, so IBM isn't a monopoly and the should compete in the market. But this seems like a really pissy thing to do after the Sun deal went sour. They're just trying to be jerks about this.

Re:Talk about vindictive

[turgid]

It's nothing poysonal, it's just business.

Re:Talk about vindictive

[HikingStick]

I don't think they're trying to be jerks. I think they wanted Sun's business. Period. They first hoped to gain it through and acquisition. That failed, so now they are resorting to an older tactic: offering incentives to lure customers away from the competition.

The reason I believe many people don't like the sound of this deal is due to the relatively high value of the incentives. If you consider what these companies pay for IBM and/or Sun gear, however, those incentives are a drop in the bucket. It's not an inconsequential amount by any means, but it's not a retirement account in the Bahamas either.

Re:Talk about vindictive

[swordgeek]

IBM has been doing this for a long time--so has everyone else. "Competitive Upgrades" have been around in the Unix landscape for over a decade. We used to get sheets from Sun showing us what hardware would give us discounts towards new purchases.

Re:WHOOPS!!!! Yes, they do have one.

[dranga]

But how long will that last? Since Oracle now owns a hardware platform, they might spend most of their efforts there, and other platforms might not have the most recent (or most supported) versions of Oracle available.

Re:WHOOPS!!!! Yes, they do have one.

[aixguru1]

I don't see it ending any time soon. IBM currently holds the largest market share for UNIX servers and Oracle would rather see their DB on those rather than DB2. As long as there is still a good market share in the high end server market, then Oracle will continue to provide it just as they do for HP and did for Sun before buying them.

Don't have any Sparc hardware?

[dougmc]

No problem!

I've got a Sparcstation 20 with two cpus that can be yours for the low low price of $4000 -- that $4000 spent will get you a discount of $16000 off the price of IBM software and services!

If you need more, I can also provide several Sparcstation IPXs and LXs for $2000 each, which will provide a discount of $8000 each.

WTH - IBM Was Going To Buy Sun

[ryanisflyboy]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123896664697090681.html

How did IBM go from seeing enough value in Sun to buy it, to claiming that Sun isn't worth it? IBM thinks that Sun is worth at least 7 billion dollars, that's a fact. It sounds like some IBM executive leadership got their panties in a bunch when they were rejected by the McNealy faction, and want bloody revenge. I would to if you turned around and found out Oracle swiped the deal right from under you. And it only cost Oracle song and a dance more than IBM was offering. Larry wins, Sam looses. Larry was always better at this game. Maybe Sam should go back to playing sax.

Yes, very immoral

[raftpeople]

I also don't use coupons at the grocery store, or buy 1 get 1 free from Domino's, and especially I don't ever use my frequent flyer miles that I accrued using my visa because it's immoral.

UNIX war

[countach]

The UNIX war has been interesting. SGI and HP committed suicide via Itanium. Sun has been slowly slipping into nothingness, and now is disappearing into Oracle. Seemingly IBM is emerging winner, with Linux taking the low end...

But wait... Apple is shipping more UNIX systems than anybody else bar none. Sooner or later those with big UNIX investments may realise that it is actually Apple who is going to be their natural ally.