Oh come on, you really are spouting now! First off, why should any business do something out of 'altruistic' intent. Half the people here are moaning about Sun's stock price and saying that's justification, of all things, for shutting down the company, now you're complaining that Sun didn't do stuff out of altruistic intent. Imagine what that would do for the stock price. As for the inability to do effective development in house, who do you think created the code that was open sourced for OOo in the first place, does 95%+ of the work on it and markets it effectively?
Anti trust suits that are designed to allow them to continue to compete and do business, which ended with a good settlement for Sun. Way to embrace Linux, one of which you then mention - Java Desktop - as well as releasing x86/Opteron boxes and support for Red Hat and Suse, as well as porting all the JES stuff to Linux and reinvesting in Solaris for x86.
What else is supposed to be happening? Sun seem to be doing all the things you are whingeing about.
You're pretty out of date. The Sun prices are a lot lower now - check out the V440 for example. Not to mention that on top of that you have a 64bit OS and tonnes of commercial apps. Not everyone's can get aways with Apached and a bit of Samba. And if you need a cheap x86 box - Sun will sell you that too.
Fair enough. For the record it's only with the newer 900MHz and up that you'll be able to mix. The bumph I've read always states that the interconnect was always designed, as with earlier Sun architectures, only to be maxed out by the following generation of CPUs - so the current Sun Fire Internconnect was designed with the end of the UIV range in mind. So, by the time you're running out of oomph on that interconnect, you'll be buying a whole new box.
You've been bleating about not being able to scale bandwidth - I've outlined a situation which clearly shows the value of Sun's approach, which you don't seem willing to address. Fair enough.
Taking an example of a 1280... You have a system bandwidth of 9.6GB/s, which is higher than anything IBM have. You purchase it today, with 8 UIII CPUs and in a year you find you need more power. You can then upgrade with four extra UIV CPUs, withouth taking the machine down, whilst making use of the latest CPU tech.
With IBM you'd have to pay a premium for old CPUs or buy an entire new machine...
LPAR come nowhere close to what Sun's domain offer and IBM have nothing to compare. HP can't do dynamic domains as Sun can either. An LPAR needs at least 3 CPUs to work well, if the hypervisor goes down you've lost the lot and there's a lot of overhead in keeping it all running. It is a long way away from 'kicking Sun's ass'.
As for Sun Fires flying out the door, sales figures are excellent - look at the success of the V210, V240s, V440s, etc. All selling very well.
"Speakerphones might be an answer, but I don't think so."
Please God, no. I live in Dubai, where people are starting to bellow into their Nokia bricks in various languages, including when sitting in the cinema. It's awful!
As for speaking loudly, nine times out of ten there's no need to do that nowadays with today's phones.
I heartily agree. Quite how settling a lawsuit and comments such as 'we'll continue to compete hard' translate into such nonsense as Sun 'cozying up', 'selling out', 'giving in to.net', etc.
So happening to know someone's Slashdot nick, or following up on what they post to mailing lists is more chilling than making someone go through a qualified psychologist providng an educated analysis and profile?
Should have added that if you want to get all the OSS stuff installed easily on Solaris, you can easily download it from Sun.com, or better still use pkg-get, an apt-get style tool for Solaris. Do a search on Google for pkg-get and it'll pop up. It's excellent.
Hmmm. Sun's Unix business is larger than HP and IBM's combined and grew recently after the dotcom horror fallout which affected pretty much everyone - so careful about bandying about claims of 'losing so much market share':)
As for your problems with the Ultra 2, I've never experienced anything like that and I've installed Solaris 8 and 9 on all sorts of kit over the last couple of years. SunScreen is a nightmare to administer though, I have to agree.
The Zones mentioned here are sun's software partitions. Dynamic system domains are Sun's hardware equivalent of what you're talking about. You can adjust them on the fly, no reboot required, which I believe you can't do with Tru64. You certainly can't with HPUX.
AIX and HPUX have been able to do similar-ish stuff for a while, but with severe restrictions. IBM's LPARs require a mix of hardware and software and IBM recommend a minimum of three cpus. There are other restrictions regarding sharing I/O boards, etc, etc. You can't dynamically resize an LPAR without a reboot, for example.
With the mix of software 'zones' and Sun's hardware oriented dynamic system domains, you have something that's a lot more powerful than IBM's LPARs.
HP can do what I believe they call VPARS, which are like Sun's system domains - carving a server up into separate hardware separated servers. They have no dynamic capability though - if you want to allocate more cpu and memory to your Oracle batch job overnight, you have to make the adjustments and reboot the server for the changes to take effect. A Sun box with domains will take care of the changes on the fly.
I don't know if they can do a sofwtare only zone-type thing. I believe they can't.
My colleagues had no problems on an x86 laptop or Ultra 10. Don't bother with the installer, just boot off CD1, if it's anything like Solaris 9/9. The installer is just a pretty front end that ends up adding ages onto the install.
Bash has been around since Solaris 8. SSH came in with Solaris 9. I agree it's a pain, but Sun have a responsibility to make sure everything works... I suppose that's why it takes a while for things like this to appear. Solaris 9's got tonnes of stuff in there now, including wget, Samba, etc, etc. Sun also provide a great resource of precompiled OSS stuff to use. There's also the excellent pkg-get tool that works like apt-get, but for Solaris. www.bolthole.com/solaris/pkg-get.html
Don't forget that Sun does x86 and AMD Opteron, with the choice of Solaris x86 or Linux to address precisely this market. The new UIIIi CPUs are also aimed at the 1-4 proc market and have been astonishingly successful for Sun. There's nothing that says Sun has to make the same products they were making 5 years ago. Companies are allowed to change strategy to address current market trends.
But what apps are you running on those OS's? Sun can split up into dynamic system domains that can change the hardware available to the Solaris instances on the fly, plus Solaris has plenty of apps to choose from. HPUX for Itanium, RHE for Itanium and Windows on Itanium (does it even exist yet?) have what?
Itanium clearly isn't where it was expected to be.
This article from the Register sets things out nicely -
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/34405.ht ml
Let's also compare this figures to another relative 64-bit newcomer - Sun Microsystems' UltraSPARC IIIi. This processor took just about as long as Itanic to come to market and has been on sale for but two quarters.
Only counting two of Sun's products with the chip, Sun shipped more than 24,000 of its V210 and V240 servers. Over two quarters, that means Sun has out-shipped the entire Itanium ecosystem by about 2.5x and done so with just two servers. And this is a struggling company, just like AMD.
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Oh come on, you really are spouting now! First off, why should any business do something out of 'altruistic' intent. Half the people here are moaning about Sun's stock price and saying that's justification, of all things, for shutting down the company, now you're complaining that Sun didn't do stuff out of altruistic intent. Imagine what that would do for the stock price. As for the inability to do effective development in house, who do you think created the code that was open sourced for OOo in the first place, does 95%+ of the work on it and markets it effectively?
Anti trust suits that are designed to allow them to continue to compete and do business, which ended with a good settlement for Sun. Way to embrace Linux, one of which you then mention - Java Desktop - as well as releasing x86/Opteron boxes and support for Red Hat and Suse, as well as porting all the JES stuff to Linux and reinvesting in Solaris for x86.
What else is supposed to be happening? Sun seem to be doing all the things you are whingeing about.
Pardon? If UltraSPARC is an architecture whose time is running out, what are you suggesting we use instead?
You're pretty out of date. The Sun prices are a lot lower now - check out the V440 for example. Not to mention that on top of that you have a 64bit OS and tonnes of commercial apps. Not everyone's can get aways with Apached and a bit of Samba. And if you need a cheap x86 box - Sun will sell you that too.
Still confused and I'm English...
Fair enough. For the record it's only with the newer 900MHz and up that you'll be able to mix. The bumph I've read always states that the interconnect was always designed, as with earlier Sun architectures, only to be maxed out by the following generation of CPUs - so the current Sun Fire Internconnect was designed with the end of the UIV range in mind. So, by the time you're running out of oomph on that interconnect, you'll be buying a whole new box.
What a mature response.
You've been bleating about not being able to scale bandwidth - I've outlined a situation which clearly shows the value of Sun's approach, which you don't seem willing to address. Fair enough.
So what exactly is the problem?
Taking an example of a 1280... You have a system bandwidth of 9.6GB/s, which is higher than anything IBM have. You purchase it today, with 8 UIII CPUs and in a year you find you need more power. You can then upgrade with four extra UIV CPUs, withouth taking the machine down, whilst making use of the latest CPU tech.
With IBM you'd have to pay a premium for old CPUs or buy an entire new machine...
LPAR come nowhere close to what Sun's domain offer and IBM have nothing to compare. HP can't do dynamic domains as Sun can either. An LPAR needs at least 3 CPUs to work well, if the hypervisor goes down you've lost the lot and there's a lot of overhead in keeping it all running. It is a long way away from 'kicking Sun's ass'.
As for Sun Fires flying out the door, sales figures are excellent - look at the success of the V210, V240s, V440s, etc. All selling very well.
A quad V440 with 16Gb would come in at well under 19K from Sun... It's very well priced.
"Speakerphones might be an answer, but I don't think so."
Please God, no. I live in Dubai, where people are starting to bellow into their Nokia bricks in various languages, including when sitting in the cinema. It's awful!
As for speaking loudly, nine times out of ten there's no need to do that nowadays with today's phones.
I heartily agree. Quite how settling a lawsuit and comments such as 'we'll continue to compete hard' translate into such nonsense as Sun 'cozying up', 'selling out', 'giving in to .net', etc.
Because he needed root access to do the work for which he was hired?
So happening to know someone's Slashdot nick, or following up on what they post to mailing lists is more chilling than making someone go through a qualified psychologist providng an educated analysis and profile?
What do you develop in the OSS and closed source world?
Should have added that if you want to get all the OSS stuff installed easily on Solaris, you can easily download it from Sun.com, or better still use pkg-get, an apt-get style tool for Solaris. Do a search on Google for pkg-get and it'll pop up. It's excellent.
Hmmm. Sun's Unix business is larger than HP and IBM's combined and grew recently after the dotcom horror fallout which affected pretty much everyone - so careful about bandying about claims of 'losing so much market share' :)
As for your problems with the Ultra 2, I've never experienced anything like that and I've installed Solaris 8 and 9 on all sorts of kit over the last couple of years. SunScreen is a nightmare to administer though, I have to agree.
The Zones mentioned here are sun's software partitions. Dynamic system domains are Sun's hardware equivalent of what you're talking about. You can adjust them on the fly, no reboot required, which I believe you can't do with Tru64. You certainly can't with HPUX.
AIX and HPUX have been able to do similar-ish stuff for a while, but with severe restrictions. IBM's LPARs require a mix of hardware and software and IBM recommend a minimum of three cpus. There are other restrictions regarding sharing I/O boards, etc, etc. You can't dynamically resize an LPAR without a reboot, for example.
With the mix of software 'zones' and Sun's hardware oriented dynamic system domains, you have something that's a lot more powerful than IBM's LPARs.
HP can do what I believe they call VPARS, which are like Sun's system domains - carving a server up into separate hardware separated servers. They have no dynamic capability though - if you want to allocate more cpu and memory to your Oracle batch job overnight, you have to make the adjustments and reboot the server for the changes to take effect. A Sun box with domains will take care of the changes on the fly.
I don't know if they can do a sofwtare only zone-type thing. I believe they can't.
My colleagues had no problems on an x86 laptop or Ultra 10. Don't bother with the installer, just boot off CD1, if it's anything like Solaris 9/9. The installer is just a pretty front end that ends up adding ages onto the install.
Bash has been around since Solaris 8. SSH came in with Solaris 9. I agree it's a pain, but Sun have a responsibility to make sure everything works... I suppose that's why it takes a while for things like this to appear. Solaris 9's got tonnes of stuff in there now, including wget, Samba, etc, etc. Sun also provide a great resource of precompiled OSS stuff to use. There's also the excellent pkg-get tool that works like apt-get, but for Solaris. www.bolthole.com/solaris/pkg-get.html
Don't forget that Sun does x86 and AMD Opteron, with the choice of Solaris x86 or Linux to address precisely this market. The new UIIIi CPUs are also aimed at the 1-4 proc market and have been astonishingly successful for Sun. There's nothing that says Sun has to make the same products they were making 5 years ago. Companies are allowed to change strategy to address current market trends.
But what apps are you running on those OS's? Sun can split up into dynamic system domains that can change the hardware available to the Solaris instances on the fly, plus Solaris has plenty of apps to choose from. HPUX for Itanium, RHE for Itanium and Windows on Itanium (does it even exist yet?) have what?
Itanium clearly isn't where it was expected to be.
t ml
This article from the Register sets things out nicely -
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/34405.h
Let's also compare this figures to another relative 64-bit newcomer - Sun Microsystems' UltraSPARC IIIi. This processor took just about as long as Itanic to come to market and has been on sale for but two quarters.
Only counting two of Sun's products with the chip, Sun shipped more than 24,000 of its V210 and V240 servers. Over two quarters, that means Sun has out-shipped the entire Itanium ecosystem by about 2.5x and done so with just two servers. And this is a struggling company, just like AMD.
Wasn't Sun co-started by an Indian?