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IBM Doubles Rewards For Ditching Sun

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the go-for-the-jugular dept.

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."

59 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Most of them... by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Most of them... by YayaY · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Seems like the next anti-trust lawsuit.

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    2. Re:Most of them... by Z00L00K · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
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    3. Re:Most of them... by p4ul13 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Paul Lenhart writes words!
    4. Re:Most of them... by AvitarX · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

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    5. Re:Most of them... by Burkin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

    6. Re:Most of them... by Firehed · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

      --
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    7. Re:Most of them... by afabbro · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

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    8. Re:Most of them... by gobbligook · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    9. Re:Most of them... by Burkin · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    10. Re:Most of them... by mcrbids · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
    11. Re:Most of them... by gfxguy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.
    12. Re:Most of them... by Bigbutt · · Score: 3, Informative

      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]

      --
      Shit better not happen!
    13. Re:Most of them... by ThePhilips · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.
    14. Re:Most of them... by ThePhilips · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.
  2. The Death of SPARC? by eldavojohn · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:The Death of SPARC? by andyfrommk · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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

    2. Re:The Death of SPARC? by teflaime · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:The Death of SPARC? by fm6 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:The Death of SPARC? by ILongForDarkness · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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).

    5. Re:The Death of SPARC? by afabbro · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
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    6. Re:The Death of SPARC? by fm6 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    7. Re:The Death of SPARC? by moeinvt · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "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

    8. Re:The Death of SPARC? by turgid · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Stick Men
    9. Re:The Death of SPARC? by fm6 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  3. Ditching Sun servers by OolimPhon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Ditching Sun servers by Rakishi · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

    2. Re:Ditching Sun servers by AKAImBatman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
    3. Re:Ditching Sun servers by Achromatic1978 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Ditching Sun servers by blhack · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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!

      --
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    5. Re:Ditching Sun servers by bberens · · Score: 2, Funny

      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?

      --
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  4. Re:Cheap by ultrabot · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  5. Great news! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Funny

    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...

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    1. Re:Great news! by aoheno · · Score: 2, Funny

      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.

      --
      Her lips were softer than a duck's bill, but her quacks ...
  6. Did IBM really want to buy Sun . . . ? by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!
  7. $64,000 worth of Linux! by droidsURlooking4 · · Score: 5, Funny

    What a deal!

    1. Re:$64,000 worth of Linux! by huge · · Score: 2, Funny

      Lol @ whoever modded parent insightful. Linux is free.

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

      --
      -- Reality checks don't bounce.
  8. Wow IBM, by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2, Informative

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

    1. Re:Wow IBM, by raftpeople · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

  9. a reward by nimbius · · Score: 2, Funny

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

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.
  10. Re:Cheap by blitzkrieg3 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  11. WHOOPS!!!! Yes, they do have one. by wonkavader · · Score: 3, Informative

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

  12. not a good year for McNealy by rs232 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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"

    --
    davecb5620@gmail.com
  13. Re:Cheap by Sir_Lewk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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)
  14. Re:Anti-trust by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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

  15. who wrote this BS by rs232 · · Score: 3, Funny

    "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!

    --
    davecb5620@gmail.com
  16. I'm not switching... by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  17. Re:WHOOPS!!!! Yes, they do have one. by aixguru1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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)
  18. Business as usual by raftpeople · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  19. Well that's very easy by JamesP · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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 /. fixes commenting on Chrome?
  20. Re:Is this legal? by Burkin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  21. Taking advantage? Seems more like desperation... by DragonWriter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  22. Solaris has been a good buddy... by dogsbreath · · Score: 3, Insightful

    .. 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.

  23. What a load of old Cock & Bull by RotateLeftByte · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  24. Re:I beg to differ by 0xABADC0DA · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  25. Re:Talk about vindictive by HikingStick · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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...
  26. Re:So they'll give me by swordgeek · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  27. Don't have any Sparc hardware? by dougmc · · Score: 2, Funny

    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.

  28. Yes, very immoral by raftpeople · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.