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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."
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?
My work here is dung.
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?
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.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
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.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Seems like the next anti-trust lawsuit.
Votator.com implements a fair voting scheme (free
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
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.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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...
how long until
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.
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.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
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.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
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.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
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.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
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.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.