That's right. Only the other day I heard of the CIO of a major bank choosing a different vendor to Sun for their multi-million dollar clustered Unix systems to run their securities software. The reason? He wanted to be able to take the keyboard home with him at weekends to use on his home PC. He was also annoyed that he couldn't fix a web cam onto the Sun servers either.
Check what a 4 way 16GB V440 costs compared to a 4 way Dell!
Lintel systems have fast CPUs, but no decent memory bandwidth. On the famous HPC Linux clusters everyone loves on Slashdot you'll see the first CPU running happily at 90% plus, the second sitting way below that - you're simply waiting very quickly for nothing to happen.
Opteron systems are another thing entirely though - that's why Sun are focussing a great deal on that platform. There are even a couple of reference architectures for Oracle on their site using the new V20z and Linux.
Oracle 10G will be out on Solaris x86 soon, so we'll see Sun promoting Opteron boxes with Solaris for situations where Oracle RAC makes sense (which isn't every Oracle implementation!)
You don't need to buy licences for Solaris, it comes with the kit. If you mean proprietary in the sense that Sparc doesn't have the largest market share, then Sparc is proprietary - in the normal sense of the word it's a lot more open than Intel.
Using an Oracle RAC cluster of Sun V440s would have actually been cheaper than clustering 4 way Dells - Sparc kit's a lot cheaper than it was. You'd also have had some decent 64bit capable boxes. Check out the TPC/E benchmarks - Sun boxes blow everyone else away in terms of price/performance on a real world database app.
I don't see how. If you want to run Linux in a business environment you can buy some new hardware to run it on, which would make much more sense than using your old VAX machine. Equally, what apps are of any use for Linux on a VAX? If the VMS layer you mention provides emulation of some sort, you'd likely have no support from your application vendor, so it would still be useless.
Apart from the fact that they sell x86 and Opteron hardware and would happily have you running Solaris x86, which has DTrace as well, or Linux, bought from Sun, on that server farm, with Sun's 24x7 support for the whole solution. That server farm's probably connecting to a Sparc Oracle database anyway, so you can get the whole lot from Sun.
Find out about what DTrace is, can do and what it means before simply referring to it as 'BS'.
One of the things technology changes is the ease with which things like this can be done. Take MP3 for example. Pirating music's been relatively easy ever since you could record your vinyl LPs onto tape. Ripping from CD to MP3 makes an old concept incredibly easy...
Copying documents to a USB drive is infinitely easier, quicker and above all more discreet than printing off 500 pages of a confidential document to the network printer.
To a certain extent, but the licensing fee you pay includes a hefty margin going to the partner selling the licence, usually around 50% for software. The services are then provided by the local partner, who also make margin on the support contract. MSFT also have numerous partners who are active in Iraq and Iraq is managed by MSFT's HQ in the UAE.
I think you're overstating the issue. They don't care who buys the oil or what software they use. As long as business is running along nicely, who cares?
Taking the example of selling MSFT products, the local organisations would be selling to a local MSFT partner, who will make plenty of money in providing the licences, services, etc, etc. Buying a MSFT product does not automatically equate to every dollar going straight to the US.
I'm sorry, but this has to be about the stupidest thing written in this whole thread! Get a tan? Grow a beard? Carry tonnes of weaponry with you? How exactly does that help you blend in when you're driving in a convoy of 4x4s escorted by private security contractors or US soldiers on your way to whichever govt site you're working on?
Whatever you do, it's going to be blatantly obvious you're not Iraqi and even if you are Iraqi, it's not going to stop you being a target!
What use is an assault rifle when someone's popping up from behind a wall and shooting an RPG at you?
Do you think any of the professional security guys protecting you are going to want some halfwitted gung-ho American armed to the teeth under their care?
Unfortunately even if you dress like the locals and speak the languages, you're still likely to get blown to smithereeens in Iraq. Many of the recent attacks have harmed Iraqis themselves. Also, as a networking contractor, you'll be driving around in convoys, living in contractors' accommodation, etc, etc, all of which make you a clear target.
StarOffice comes out in regular, supported editions, much easier than managing a large deployment of various OpenOffice versions with noone to fall back on for advice.
Not true. Sun's UNIX business is larger then HP and IBM's combined. Unit shipments of first quarter 2004 up by 26+, more than any other Unix vendor.
Chips are always late - which version of Power x Itanium were we supposed to have now?
Sun are also simply not losing the market in the high end. IBM's performance looks great when you read all those TPC/C benchmark results which don't translate to any kind of real world performance, in addition to which UIV is showing up to double the performance on key applications.
First you say Sun is dead unless they dump all of their investment in Solaris and move to Linux. Then when Sun start to promote and work more with Linuix you say that Sun are trying to muscle in and kill Linux. Then you say Sun should dump all of their investment in Sparc and adopt Opteron. Then when Sun position Opteron well, you say that they are trying to kill Linux and should invest in Sparc.
Sun then settle lawsuits to allow them to invest in products rather than lawyers, which is clearly a sign that Linux is to be killed by Sun, although Sun are aggressively marketing and selling Linux.
Whilst all this happens you ignore the fact that IBM talk the Linux talk, but happily promote AIX whenever they can, whilst Red Hat and Suse turn their licensed versions of Linux into equivalents of commercial Unix implementations which come out at slow regular intervals and can't be played with for fear of losing support, making them exactly like the Unix OS versions they were supposed to replace as those Unix OS versions are slow to develop.
They're not dropping an architecture - the architecture's still the same - Sparc.
UltraSparc has not been solidly beaten - UIV is out there now and doing well in the market. It's what follows it that will be jointly developed with Fujitsu, which will operate alongside the forthcoming Niagara and Rock multicore CPUs. Hardly a case of abandoing anything.
The fact that there's another company investing in and developing their own Sparc CPUs validates the whole architecture in the first place.
I agree with you that the strategy makes sense - low end with the 'i' range and Opteron Solaris/Solaris x86/Linux, with Solaris/Sparc for the mid to highend.
Why 'give in' to Opteron? It fits in well with the Sparc kit and Sun are already aggressively marketing Opteron.
Sun are capable of having a strategy that can move with the market, as well as dictating to the market, as appropriate. I get tired of people on Slashdot claiming one company or product is 'dead' just because it has a competitor.
Sun also aren't particularly 'losing', as you put it. Unit shipments were up 26% for the first quarter of 2004, with the UIIIi systems selling extremely well - and they're positioned directly against the Xeon based stuff that Slashdot readers tell us is going to take over the world.
Maybe you ought to find out a bit more about JDS before making your comments. You could also check out the share prices of some other companies that made a lot of money out of the.com boom and decide how well they're doing.
JDS is based on an existing Linux distro. Sun do partner with existing distros and support them on their existing x86 and Opteron servers. Sun clearly do understand the market well - why do you think they're creating these products in the first place. They're not aimed at Slashdotters trying out a new distro every week, they're interested in the business desktop.
...by hooking up a few homemade Intel boxes and putting Linux on them, using the same mythical Slashdot architecture that appears to apply to every other kind of computing problem discussed here?
I know, I was only joking really. Any time anyone mentions Google on Slashdot, it's usually making the case that since Google run their business on thousands of broken 386s running Linux, everyone else should be able to as well.
Wouldn't it have been easier just to have put up a couple of racks running traditional Unix Big Iron, instead of wasting all that money on lots of crappy little Intel boxes?
It really irritates me when people describe anything that isn't Intel as 'proprietary'. Being the most widely sold processor, doesn't make something non-proprietary.
Java Desktop System is aimed at businesses, not the average Linux fan's desktop. I work at promoting Java Desktop to various companies, but wouldn't recommend it if you're the kind of person who's heavily into Linux, updating, fiddling, installing, etc. It's a great business package though.
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What applications are you suggesting be run on this hugely expensive mainframe?
That's right. Only the other day I heard of the CIO of a major bank choosing a different vendor to Sun for their multi-million dollar clustered Unix systems to run their securities software. The reason? He wanted to be able to take the keyboard home with him at weekends to use on his home PC. He was also annoyed that he couldn't fix a web cam onto the Sun servers either.
I agree! I used to use this guy's site with IE on Windows simply because it was much easier to use than the 'official' site.
If there's ever a book on 'how not to build a commercial website', Odeon will happily serve as a great example of what not to do.
Check what a 4 way 16GB V440 costs compared to a 4 way Dell!
Lintel systems have fast CPUs, but no decent memory bandwidth. On the famous HPC Linux clusters everyone loves on Slashdot you'll see the first CPU running happily at 90% plus, the second sitting way below that - you're simply waiting very quickly for nothing to happen.
Opteron systems are another thing entirely though - that's why Sun are focussing a great deal on that platform. There are even a couple of reference architectures for Oracle on their site using the new V20z and Linux.
Oracle 10G will be out on Solaris x86 soon, so we'll see Sun promoting Opteron boxes with Solaris for situations where Oracle RAC makes sense (which isn't every Oracle implementation!)
Oracle will always lead with a recommendation for Linux in most cases these days.
You don't need to buy licences for Solaris, it comes with the kit. If you mean proprietary in the sense that Sparc doesn't have the largest market share, then Sparc is proprietary - in the normal sense of the word it's a lot more open than Intel.
Using an Oracle RAC cluster of Sun V440s would have actually been cheaper than clustering 4 way Dells - Sparc kit's a lot cheaper than it was. You'd also have had some decent 64bit capable boxes. Check out the TPC/E benchmarks - Sun boxes blow everyone else away in terms of price/performance on a real world database app.
I don't see how. If you want to run Linux in a business environment you can buy some new hardware to run it on, which would make much more sense than using your old VAX machine. Equally, what apps are of any use for Linux on a VAX? If the VMS layer you mention provides emulation of some sort, you'd likely have no support from your application vendor, so it would still be useless.
Reading the article would help you find out.
Apart from the fact that they sell x86 and Opteron hardware and would happily have you running Solaris x86, which has DTrace as well, or Linux, bought from Sun, on that server farm, with Sun's 24x7 support for the whole solution. That server farm's probably connecting to a Sparc Oracle database anyway, so you can get the whole lot from Sun.
Find out about what DTrace is, can do and what it means before simply referring to it as 'BS'.
You're right of course, but...
One of the things technology changes is the ease with which things like this can be done. Take MP3 for example. Pirating music's been relatively easy ever since you could record your vinyl LPs onto tape. Ripping from CD to MP3 makes an old concept incredibly easy...
Copying documents to a USB drive is infinitely easier, quicker and above all more discreet than printing off 500 pages of a confidential document to the network printer.
To a certain extent, but the licensing fee you pay includes a hefty margin going to the partner selling the licence, usually around 50% for software. The services are then provided by the local partner, who also make margin on the support contract. MSFT also have numerous partners who are active in Iraq and Iraq is managed by MSFT's HQ in the UAE.
I think you're overstating the issue. They don't care who buys the oil or what software they use. As long as business is running along nicely, who cares?
Taking the example of selling MSFT products, the local organisations would be selling to a local MSFT partner, who will make plenty of money in providing the licences, services, etc, etc. Buying a MSFT product does not automatically equate to every dollar going straight to the US.
I'm sorry, but this has to be about the stupidest thing written in this whole thread! Get a tan? Grow a beard? Carry tonnes of weaponry with you? How exactly does that help you blend in when you're driving in a convoy of 4x4s escorted by private security contractors or US soldiers on your way to whichever govt site you're working on?
Whatever you do, it's going to be blatantly obvious you're not Iraqi and even if you are Iraqi, it's not going to stop you being a target!
What use is an assault rifle when someone's popping up from behind a wall and shooting an RPG at you?
Do you think any of the professional security guys protecting you are going to want some halfwitted gung-ho American armed to the teeth under their care?
Unfortunately even if you dress like the locals and speak the languages, you're still likely to get blown to smithereeens in Iraq. Many of the recent attacks have harmed Iraqis themselves. Also, as a networking contractor, you'll be driving around in convoys, living in contractors' accommodation, etc, etc, all of which make you a clear target.
StarOffice comes out in regular, supported editions, much easier than managing a large deployment of various OpenOffice versions with noone to fall back on for advice.
Not true. Sun's UNIX business is larger then HP and IBM's combined. Unit shipments of first quarter 2004 up by 26+, more than any other Unix vendor.
Chips are always late - which version of Power x Itanium were we supposed to have now?
Sun are also simply not losing the market in the high end. IBM's performance looks great when you read all those TPC/C benchmark results which don't translate to any kind of real world performance, in addition to which UIV is showing up to double the performance on key applications.
It's simple...
First you say Sun is dead unless they dump all of their investment in Solaris and move to Linux. Then when Sun start to promote and work more with Linuix you say that Sun are trying to muscle in and kill Linux. Then you say Sun should dump all of their investment in Sparc and adopt Opteron. Then when Sun position Opteron well, you say that they are trying to kill Linux and should invest in Sparc.
Sun then settle lawsuits to allow them to invest in products rather than lawyers, which is clearly a sign that Linux is to be killed by Sun, although Sun are aggressively marketing and selling Linux.
Whilst all this happens you ignore the fact that IBM talk the Linux talk, but happily promote AIX whenever they can, whilst Red Hat and Suse turn their licensed versions of Linux into equivalents of commercial Unix implementations which come out at slow regular intervals and can't be played with for fear of losing support, making them exactly like the Unix OS versions they were supposed to replace as those Unix OS versions are slow to develop.
They're not dropping an architecture - the architecture's still the same - Sparc.
UltraSparc has not been solidly beaten - UIV is out there now and doing well in the market. It's what follows it that will be jointly developed with Fujitsu, which will operate alongside the forthcoming Niagara and Rock multicore CPUs. Hardly a case of abandoing anything.
The fact that there's another company investing in and developing their own Sparc CPUs validates the whole architecture in the first place.
I agree with you that the strategy makes sense - low end with the 'i' range and Opteron Solaris/Solaris x86/Linux, with Solaris/Sparc for the mid to highend.
Why 'give in' to Opteron? It fits in well with the Sparc kit and Sun are already aggressively marketing Opteron.
Sun are capable of having a strategy that can move with the market, as well as dictating to the market, as appropriate. I get tired of people on Slashdot claiming one company or product is 'dead' just because it has a competitor.
Sun also aren't particularly 'losing', as you put it. Unit shipments were up 26% for the first quarter of 2004, with the UIIIi systems selling extremely well - and they're positioned directly against the Xeon based stuff that Slashdot readers tell us is going to take over the world.
Maybe you ought to find out a bit more about JDS before making your comments. You could also check out the share prices of some other companies that made a lot of money out of the .com boom and decide how well they're doing.
JDS is based on an existing Linux distro. Sun do partner with existing distros and support them on their existing x86 and Opteron servers. Sun clearly do understand the market well - why do you think they're creating these products in the first place. They're not aimed at Slashdotters trying out a new distro every week, they're interested in the business desktop.
...by hooking up a few homemade Intel boxes and putting Linux on them, using the same mythical Slashdot architecture that appears to apply to every other kind of computing problem discussed here?
I know, I was only joking really. Any time anyone mentions Google on Slashdot, it's usually making the case that since Google run their business on thousands of broken 386s running Linux, everyone else should be able to as well.
Wouldn't it have been easier just to have put up a couple of racks running traditional Unix Big Iron, instead of wasting all that money on lots of crappy little Intel boxes?
It really irritates me when people describe anything that isn't Intel as 'proprietary'. Being the most widely sold processor, doesn't make something non-proprietary.
Java Desktop System is aimed at businesses, not the average Linux fan's desktop. I work at promoting Java Desktop to various companies, but wouldn't recommend it if you're the kind of person who's heavily into Linux, updating, fiddling, installing, etc. It's a great business package though.