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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."
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
No, the opposite probably. IBM is likely sending those servers straight to the junk heap (or recycling heap nowadays).
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
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.
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.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
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.
root 10956 5164 0 Oct 22 - 0:23 sendmail: rejecting connections: load average: 70 (isn't sendmail just too kind)
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.
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.
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.
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.
.. 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.
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.
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.
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.