That would be news, but only if we knew what the price of the HPUX upgrade would have been. The fact they've done it suggests it made technical and financial sense, or at least one of the two. Sun's prices have come down massively recently, making them a lot more competitive on the server, at least, although they only have a single cpu lower cost workstation now.
Some of these speed increase quotes in stories are far from interesting. If they replaced the systems with the latest HP workstations, doubtless they'd see a great speed increase as well. It's not exactly newsworthy to read 'company upgrades systems with newer systems and they are faster than the old ones'.
I think you're exaggerating somewhat. Solaris is not getting 'killed' by Linux - both fit together well and Solaris for x86 is getting a lot of interest. Sun's x86 based servers are doing well, as are the low cost UIIIi based servers. At the high end, Sun's larger servers and Solaris still rule. Itanium is doing atrociously and Sun have made important announcements with AMD regarding Opteron, so it'll be interesting to see how things pan out.
I do feel the name 'Java desktop' is misleading. The push to make Java a brand name - see how it's getting its new logo everywhere - is a good one. Associating Java where it's not relevant is probably a mistake. Most techies won't bother reading up on what the JDS is and will just start moaning about Java being slow, so calling it something linked with Linux would probably have been wiser.
The only problems being that HPUX on Itanium has no applications, can't run 32 bit apps without emulation and still doesn't scale anywhere near Sparc and is also very hot and very expensive. Apart from that and the total lack of customers, they're really onto something.
Third could probably be software - get the ex Netscape/iPlanet/Sun ONE and now Java Enterprise System products out into the mid market, Exchange/Notes territory...
You need to brush up your knowledge on what Sun do, as your remarks are rather inaccurate. Not overpriced if you look at the kit which competes at the Intel layer. Of all the chips out there, Sparc is actually the least proprietary - www.sparc.org.
In future though, I'm sure Sun will defer to you on how they should use Open Source tools, as I'm sure that noone there realised that by working with Suse and creating a distro like many other companies do, they were actually 'stealing'.
The support is part of the licence price. If you had to deploy a standard desktop to 15,000 users in your department, you'd find it's handy to have an official line of support to refer to. Equally you can hire the services of the company who produce/maintain the product to implement it. A company with Sun's reach is able to provide such services on a large scale basis.
Cars do make quite a good analogy. There are plenty of firms, at least in the UK, which will sell you kits to let you build your own 1950s Porsche Spyder, Jaguar E Type and other vehicles.
They are pretty involved in free software already. OpenOffice.org, the Sun Java Desktop System (the Suse based Linux desktop), you can buy support for Suse and Red Hat's licensed products from Sun, plus there are things like the support for Apache and Tomcat projects, NetBeans, Sun Grid Engine, work on Gnome etc, etc. As for Linux on Sparc, I believe that kit is donated to help the people working on it.
It would be interesting to see a comparison with the paid for versions of Red Hat, as opposed to the 'support yourself' versions - the supportability of Solaris is important for many customers. That doesn't necessarily just mean bug fixes - having someone to call is important, particularly where it's hard to get decent sysadmins. Red Hat 9 is great, but Solaris offers predictability, support and so on and so forth.
Pricing should be different with the new kit that's out now, but I doubt that the Sun box was five times the price. Also, what kind of app was it? If it needed a lot IO and could scale well over multiple CPUs, then a Sparc box would probably have been better. Single threaded app with no requirement for scalability? Use an Intel box then, which Sun'll happily sell you as well.
Stuck its them up its ass?? Sun's marketshare in Unix systems is greater than IBM and HP's combined. In terms of putting effort into Solaris, Solaris is the leading Unix out there, more scalable than AIX and with vastly more applications with a great story to tell about the number of OSS apps which run on it.
You're not correct about the size of Sun kit - the RUs they use are comparable to IBM.
IBM's LPARs don't let you partition a cpu to run multiple OS instances. You can partition parts of the system to run multiple instances, but IBM recommend you use at least three cpus for each instance.
Check the pricing. Sparc boxes that compete with the 1-4 processor space are a lot cheaper now, comparable to equivalently priced PC, but high quality, beautifully engineered, with a 64 bit chip and OS that's rock solid.
Sun has a cluster in a uni in the UK - Durham I believe. They also sell pre-racked and integrated clusters for scientific computing based on the V60 Intel servers and the V210 UIIIi servers.
Solaris has no licensing fees. Any Linux box they bought would have a support contract too if they wanted it - there's nothing forcing them to have one for their Sun boxes either. Looking at kit like the V210, V240 or V440, the Solaris kit would cost the sameheaper than the Intel kit anyway.
Everyone has different tastbuds, but I think beer's lovely. Men tend to be bigger fans than women... No other alcoholic drink provides the mix of a feeling of wellbeing, happiness and general downright comfort than beer does!
I live and work in the Middle East, where the way things work in general astonished me when I first arrived from the UK - in the West it's efficient to introduce automated procedures and use computers. In many cases here, it's actually far cheaper to use people for jobs that computers would do in the West. In many cases computers would actually do the job far better, but when a year's salary is less than the price of a computer solution, things will stay as they are! At some point it'll become more profitable to buy a PC with an accounting and inventory package, but for now most small businesses are far better off, at least on paper, looking at the short term, by sticking with manual processes and lots of people. It can make selling IT systems quite hard:)
Sun's Sun Cluster can do it, on Solaris of course. There's a supported agent. The new cheapo V440 and V250 would be ideal for this, although they won't be certified for Sun Cluster for a bit. The V240 is certified though.
It's actually pretty cheap now and has been for a while. Check out the pricing and spec for the V240, 210, 240 and 440, along with the new Intel boxes.
So what do you call all the work Sun has done in Open Source - OOo, Sun Grid Engine, work with the Apache team and loads of other stuff? I'm a bit confused abot your attitude - are you expecting Sun not to work to give itself marketshare? How exactly do you expect companies to function? How would large corporates using Sun's desktop stuff not give Open Source market share?
So what's the difference between a Red Hat or Suse making a Linux distribution? Are Sun not allowed to do anything with Linux that might meet some of their customers' requirements? Do people have to ask you permission first to get permission to use free software?
Sun contributes to Gnome and also created OOo. Sun doesn't send millions of dollars to SCO - where did you get that from?
Also, if you bothered to read up a bit on what Sun are doing, you'd see that this release isn't filled with Java desktop apps.
So Sun are exploitative 'sleaze buckets', yet you're happy to use OOo? Who do you think donated the code and does most of the work that makes OOo possible in the first place?
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If you buy an F15K the licence comes with it, there's no separate charge.
That would be news, but only if we knew what the price of the HPUX upgrade would have been. The fact they've done it suggests it made technical and financial sense, or at least one of the two. Sun's prices have come down massively recently, making them a lot more competitive on the server, at least, although they only have a single cpu lower cost workstation now.
Still it is a good story!
Some of these speed increase quotes in stories are far from interesting. If they replaced the systems with the latest HP workstations, doubtless they'd see a great speed increase as well. It's not exactly newsworthy to read 'company upgrades systems with newer systems and they are faster than the old ones'.
I think you're exaggerating somewhat. Solaris is not getting 'killed' by Linux - both fit together well and Solaris for x86 is getting a lot of interest. Sun's x86 based servers are doing well, as are the low cost UIIIi based servers. At the high end, Sun's larger servers and Solaris still rule. Itanium is doing atrociously and Sun have made important announcements with AMD regarding Opteron, so it'll be interesting to see how things pan out.
I do feel the name 'Java desktop' is misleading. The push to make Java a brand name - see how it's getting its new logo everywhere - is a good one. Associating Java where it's not relevant is probably a mistake. Most techies won't bother reading up on what the JDS is and will just start moaning about Java being slow, so calling it something linked with Linux would probably have been wiser.
Solaris 9 supports Gnome out of the box, Gnome and KDE have been available via Sun for Solaris for a couple of years now.
The only problems being that HPUX on Itanium has no applications, can't run 32 bit apps without emulation and still doesn't scale anywhere near Sparc and is also very hot and very expensive. Apart from that and the total lack of customers, they're really onto something.
Third could probably be software - get the ex Netscape/iPlanet/Sun ONE and now Java Enterprise System products out into the mid market, Exchange/Notes territory...
You need to brush up your knowledge on what Sun do, as your remarks are rather inaccurate. Not overpriced if you look at the kit which competes at the Intel layer. Of all the chips out there, Sparc is actually the least proprietary - www.sparc.org.
In future though, I'm sure Sun will defer to you on how they should use Open Source tools, as I'm sure that noone there realised that by working with Suse and creating a distro like many other companies do, they were actually 'stealing'.
The support is part of the licence price. If you had to deploy a standard desktop to 15,000 users in your department, you'd find it's handy to have an official line of support to refer to. Equally you can hire the services of the company who produce/maintain the product to implement it. A company with Sun's reach is able to provide such services on a large scale basis.
Cars do make quite a good analogy. There are plenty of firms, at least in the UK, which will sell you kits to let you build your own 1950s Porsche Spyder, Jaguar E Type and other vehicles.
They are pretty involved in free software already. OpenOffice.org, the Sun Java Desktop System (the Suse based Linux desktop), you can buy support for Suse and Red Hat's licensed products from Sun, plus there are things like the support for Apache and Tomcat projects, NetBeans, Sun Grid Engine, work on Gnome etc, etc. As for Linux on Sparc, I believe that kit is donated to help the people working on it.
Don't know what the plans will be with the Opteron machines, but the V60 and V65 are standard Intel boxes and as such happily run Windows.
It would be interesting to see a comparison with the paid for versions of Red Hat, as opposed to the 'support yourself' versions - the supportability of Solaris is important for many customers. That doesn't necessarily just mean bug fixes - having someone to call is important, particularly where it's hard to get decent sysadmins. Red Hat 9 is great, but Solaris offers predictability, support and so on and so forth.
Pricing should be different with the new kit that's out now, but I doubt that the Sun box was five times the price. Also, what kind of app was it? If it needed a lot IO and could scale well over multiple CPUs, then a Sparc box would probably have been better. Single threaded app with no requirement for scalability? Use an Intel box then, which Sun'll happily sell you as well.
Stuck its them up its ass?? Sun's marketshare in Unix systems is greater than IBM and HP's combined. In terms of putting effort into Solaris, Solaris is the leading Unix out there, more scalable than AIX and with vastly more applications with a great story to tell about the number of OSS apps which run on it.
You're not correct about the size of Sun kit - the RUs they use are comparable to IBM.
IBM's LPARs don't let you partition a cpu to run multiple OS instances. You can partition parts of the system to run multiple instances, but IBM recommend you use at least three cpus for each instance.
Check the pricing. Sparc boxes that compete with the 1-4 processor space are a lot cheaper now, comparable to equivalently priced PC, but high quality, beautifully engineered, with a 64 bit chip and OS that's rock solid.
Sun has a cluster in a uni in the UK - Durham I believe. They also sell pre-racked and integrated clusters for scientific computing based on the V60 Intel servers and the V210 UIIIi servers.
Solaris has no licensing fees. Any Linux box they bought would have a support contract too if they wanted it - there's nothing forcing them to have one for their Sun boxes either. Looking at kit like the V210, V240 or V440, the Solaris kit would cost the sameheaper than the Intel kit anyway.
Everyone has different tastbuds, but I think beer's lovely. Men tend to be bigger fans than women... No other alcoholic drink provides the mix of a feeling of wellbeing, happiness and general downright comfort than beer does!
I live and work in the Middle East, where the way things work in general astonished me when I first arrived from the UK - in the West it's efficient to introduce automated procedures and use computers. In many cases here, it's actually far cheaper to use people for jobs that computers would do in the West. In many cases computers would actually do the job far better, but when a year's salary is less than the price of a computer solution, things will stay as they are! At some point it'll become more profitable to buy a PC with an accounting and inventory package, but for now most small businesses are far better off, at least on paper, looking at the short term, by sticking with manual processes and lots of people. It can make selling IT systems quite hard :)
Sun's Sun Cluster can do it, on Solaris of course. There's a supported agent. The new cheapo V440 and V250 would be ideal for this, although they won't be certified for Sun Cluster for a bit. The V240 is certified though.
It's actually pretty cheap now and has been for a while. Check out the pricing and spec for the V240, 210, 240 and 440, along with the new Intel boxes.
So what do you call all the work Sun has done in Open Source - OOo, Sun Grid Engine, work with the Apache team and loads of other stuff? I'm a bit confused abot your attitude - are you expecting Sun not to work to give itself marketshare? How exactly do you expect companies to function? How would large corporates using Sun's desktop stuff not give Open Source market share?
So what's the difference between a Red Hat or Suse making a Linux distribution? Are Sun not allowed to do anything with Linux that might meet some of their customers' requirements? Do people have to ask you permission first to get permission to use free software?
Sun contributes to Gnome and also created OOo. Sun doesn't send millions of dollars to SCO - where did you get that from?
Also, if you bothered to read up a bit on what Sun are doing, you'd see that this release isn't filled with Java desktop apps.
Your post is hilarious.
So Sun are exploitative 'sleaze buckets', yet you're happy to use OOo? Who do you think donated the code and does most of the work that makes OOo possible in the first place?
It's not Java based, it's written in C and C++.