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After a Lull, Sun Server Business Grows Under Oracle
itwbennett writes "For the first time since the 3rd quarter of 2007, IDC is reporting an increase in sales of Sun hardware. Oracle logged $773 million in server sales during the quarter, up from $681 million the year before, according to IDC's estimates."
In other words, IDC is reporting that Oracle raised prices. That strategy works for a quarter or two, maybe. But it's a going out of business strategy.
IDC can say what they want, but the only way Sun hardware sales are growing is because Oracle bumped up the price on the hardware, and companies are buying their last Sun gear to give a two-year buffer to migrate away from.
I don't know of a single company ANYWHERE that is actively growing their Sun server farm. Everyone is running away screaming as fast as they can from Sun/Oracle.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I just don't understand you then... I guess my question is: What are the advantages of a Sun workstation over a PC - on the desktop?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
What are the advantages of a Sun workstation over a PC
There is none.
But its way cooler then some no name PC.
I have to return some videotapes...
I thought it was Oracle's intention to kill the Sun name, as they've certainly removed it from OpenOffice and Virtual Box, and I seem to remember hearing about moves to sell sun.com?
I have to say, Sun had the best logo in IT that I've ever seen.
Sun not really had been pursuing the Workstation business actively the last 10 years before the Oracle merger. It was all about servers.
If they would have other support options then 24/7 premier support we would at least consider to continue buying Sun.
For our HPC we only need something like next-business hardware-only.
Depends. I need to write code that works on SPARC so it would make sense for me :P
Uh no. Some no name PC running Linux is way cooler than some Sun workstation because A) it's probably faster, B) it will certainly do more units of work per dollar spent, and now C) it has nothing to do with Oracle. Sun's good name was lost when Oracle bought them. They will forever after be known as that company that was in its death throes and was cannibalized by Oracle.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Thanks. I can now say "penis" in 5 languages!
Shouldn't that just be a compiler option? Of course the only cross platform developing I've done has been for microcontrollers, but still.. if you developed on OpenSolaris then I'm guessing there wouldn't be that much, if anything that needed to change to build for a SPARC server?
which is totally what she said
According to IDC, in the 4th quarter of 2010 Oracle/Sun had $883 million in server hardware revenue. Thus, on a quarter-to-quarter basis, Oracle was down substantially in the 1st quarter of 2011 (to $773 million). Oracle had what's called an "easy compare" -- very easy. I'd really like to see the unit shipment numbers, though, because I strongly suspect Oracle had to raise unit prices substantially to even make that $773M.
IDC also reports that IBM's System z mainframe hardware (only) revenue was $1.0 billion in the first quarter of 2011. From IDC's report it seems that counts only the z/OS machines and not the mainframes running other operating systems (e.g. Linux). Year over year, the IBM mainframe grew the fastest of any server type, up 41.1%. In other words, IBM's mainframe hardware business alone was about one third larger than Oracle's entire hardware business. Impressive and not impressive, respectively. I think IBM is more or less the Apple of the server industry, the only one left doing any substantial R&D and concentrating on qualities of service, which helps to explain why IBM mainframes contain 5.2 GHz CPUs, for example, when nobody else can get into the 4's. (Mainframe folks used to have to explain clock speed discrepancies, with justification. Now they don't even need to do that.) Sun used to be a big innovator, but, very sadly, that was long, long ago.
I know some companies had a hell of a time getting in large orders (over half a million $$). It was like Oracle didn't want money for their hardware. I'm thinking this was by design, so that one quarter would look better/worse than others.
"You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas"
Sen. Davy Crocket to US Congress, Nov. 1, 1835
Having recently had a hand in buying new Sun/Oracle hardware, I can attest that prices did not directly go up, BUT the discounts offered to corporations have gone down. For example (using fake numbers) we used to get a 20% discount on hardware purchases, but now only get 10%.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
They were selling almost nothing. 80 million more revenue per quarter wouldn't mean anything significant to IBM, Dell or HP. For Oracle it's about 10 percent growth.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Sun would probably still be around if Schwartz hadn't run it into the ground by trying to give away a whole bunch of stuff for free in hopes that someone was going to want to license a proprietary version of their software (which was never going to happen). McNealy was a fucking idiot for putting The Schwartz in command.
Sun would probably still be around if they had recognized Linux for what it was and embraced it earlier. They could have become a top-tier Linux vendor with Solaris as the step-up niche. Instead, Linux chipped away at their market driving Solaris in to a niche anyway. Eventually, Sun began to give away (more) things with strings attached - neither committed to being entirely proprietary or open. And they produced hardware that COULD have made them competitive in the Linux market if they had only marketed the damned things.
Sun screwed up but giving away stuff wasn't even the beginning of it.
Shouldn't that just be a compiler option?
I haven't programmed SPARC in a decade, but one of the differences I remember between SPARC and x86 is that SPARC was big-endian; that didn't matter in most cases but if you had some manky C code doing weird things with pointers it could be a problem. It did cause a few issues when I was working on a mix of SPARC and Sun 386 workstations years before that.
SPARC is big endian, x86 is little endian. Misaligned loads / stores on x86 incur a performance penalty, they crash on SPARC. SPARC64 is 64-bit and often has different type sizes to x86 and x86-64. SPARC has register windows and passes parameters in them, so some tricks with va_list that work on x86 won't work on SPARC (on x86, va_list is usually just a pointer into the call frame on the stack, on SPARC it may reference some registers). SPARC will generate an illegal instruction trap if you call a function that returns a structure using the calling convention for functions that return a scalar, x86 will just do some subtle stack corruption that you might miss (but malware authors probably won't).
That's just off the top of my head. There are probably some other differences.
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Where I work we run oracle, since we run Oracle, we've got an Oracle rep. our Oracle rep has been calling us nearly once a week asking if we want to buy a server, we keep telling him no. My manager is getting angry at them, and has asked them several times to stop calling.
Having wasted over a *month* in getting support on a less-than-one-year-old server the beginning of this year, and that included being handed off to an engineer in Chile for two weeks, whose manager kept putting him on other jobs, so that frequently it was a day or two or three before he could respond to my emails, I would NEVER advise buying Oracle/Sun to anyone... and I've joined my manager and my co-worker in that attitude.
Wait till Oracle dumps Sun, the way they've dumped some of Sun's OSS projects.
mark
The title is misleading. People are not switching because they love Oracle. I bet you the majority of customers are those who cut back on I.T. from 2007 and just tried to squeeze the existing equipments' life until 2011. This is just pent up demand as Oracle and Sun customers had 2002 era machines that need to be upgraded that are dying. So they purchase newer Oracle servers and maybe update their Java 1.3 software with a java 6 while they are at it too while the companies have cash to burn. IBM, Intel, and even Microsoft are seeing growth too mostly from existing customers updating their very old servers and desktops as well.
Nothing else to see folks move along.
http://saveie6.com/
How to say "penis" in five languages:
1. English: Larry Ellison
2. Spanish: Larry Ellison
3. French: Larry Ellison
4. German: Larry Ellison
5: Chinese: Rally Errison
That is all.
You've lost that looovin feelin, Oh that loovin feelin.. ...
Gone, gone, gone.
Organization? You must be joking..
You can actually *test* the code that comes out of your cross-compiler. I've written opensolaris code that was ok on x86 and exploded on sparc, (at time was setjmp/longjmp issues and the way gcc handled them). or you might have unknown endian sensitive bug.
That actually was a joke at a place I once worked, "did you even check if the code you gave me worked? *shrug* "it compiled ok". Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups.
What is this "Sun workstation" of which you speak? There is no such thing. Sun hasn't made or sold desktop SPARC for a couple of years, now.
What is this "Sun workstation" of which you speak? There is no such thing. Sun hasn't made or sold desktop SPARC for a couple of years, now.
I thought it was the amount of registers on the Sun processor. With the amount of registers available, more primitive variables didn't need to be swapped into memory and function calls would need to store the outer scope in memory as frequently.
According to press reports, Sun didn't accept IBM's best and final offer, which was only a couple pennies per share below Oracle's eventual winning bid. With hindsight, it appears IBM smelled a rotting corpse. Sometimes losing honorably is the big win.
I think IBM is more or less the Apple of the server industry, the only one left doing any substantial R&D and concentrating on qualities of service,
It's really sad that you think that.
You've been taken in by the marketing, Apple develop very little themselves (Thunderbolt == Intel, Retina == LG) and their customer service is crap (_I_ have to go to a an apple store where they might look at it... some time next week). Seriously, MS and Red Hat do a lot more R&D then Apple does. Not even considering the amount of stuff that comes out of Google, the difference being Google, Red Hat or even MS wont patent the crap out of everything they invent, let alone the stuff they didn't invent (like rounded corners and a grid of icons)
IBM is the complete opposite of this. When I buy an IBM X series server, I know I can depend on it and in the off chance it does fail, I can depend on IBM. I describe the IBM X3650 as the Aston Martin DB9 of x86-64 servers, well worth the extra $K or 2 you pay over a Dell x64 server. They are fast, powerful, functional, reliable and an absolute pleasure to work with, IBM tapes all the important info you'd need to work on an X3650 to the lid of the server.
That sort of openness, adaptability and user friendliness is the antitheses of Apple lock down policies.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Do you know what this means? PHB's are still idiots! Stop the presses!