I'm not sure that Sun's in such a bad position that they might need a buyout.
Things aren't great right now. They've been cash flow positive for a while up until 2008. That was a big deal considering the beating they've been taking.
They have a decent amount of cash. Some of their acquisitions may take time to pay off. MySQL, I'm not too sure that was worth 1Bln.
The strategy Schwartz has takes a big investment and will take time to realize the financial benefits. Right now, with everything going on, it may take longer to realize the financial benefits, but the same conditions also make the acceptance of open source platforms more attractive so it could help spur developer involvement with Sun technologies.
They may not buy the support or the high margin hardware right now, but in a year or two as the company starts realizing the benefits of using Sun's open source stack, they might pick up support contracts and hardware. Maybe even some of their consulting services. If not, then they become a success story they can use in marketing.
Sun's big margin customers seem to be in the financial sector and we all know how that sector is doing. Their lower end servers have much lower profit margins. In that space, they have to compete with Dell, and they do pretty well on price. But if you need to scale vertically, you don't have as many options. If you want a big box for your application you also want Solaris on it too. It's the only OS on midrange servers that's worth looking at IMO.
I'm not sure Sun needs to be bought, but whoever does, if they handle the merger properly, would be getting one hell of a deal.
HP doesn't have a good track record with mergers and I don't see the deal going well. Oracle I don't see wanting to get involved.
Cisco on the other hand has been wanting to get greater data center market share. Solaris is a good OS for building general purpose appliances and the Crossbow project can be used to build a virtual router within your server. Not sure if this is something Cisco would kill.
If anyone is courting Sun right now, my money would be on Cisco.
Eclipse has its issues and feels like it was built by a committee consisting of competitors.
That nails it. I've never seen it described as accurately and succinctly as you just did. That's exactly what it feels like.
Eclipse is just good enough but to do real work well in it, you have to buy some plug in or another. I and others have used eclipse without commercial plugins but it's not as good as Netbeans which gives you what you need for free.
If Netbeans wants to build something into the base, they don't have to worry about commercial vendors arguing that it will kill their business.
You do realize that that is just a list of projects they contribute too. It gives no indication of the level of contributions. A lot of those contributions are patches to make sure the projects can work with IBM hardware and software.
Not saying there contributions are meaningless, but I don't think anyone can reasonably argue that IBM has contributed more to open source than Sun.
IBM might open source a less powerful version or maybe a pet project, while Sun will go out, buy a company and open source the technology.
That's a big deal, especially considering the relative size and financial power differences between the two.
Sun has open sourced more of their own code than IBM has. Actually, Sun probably has open sourced more lines of code than anyone for that matter.
For large organizations, such as Sun and IBM, that have licensing agreements for parts of their technology, open sourcing a closed source project is not a trivial matter.
There's still a bit at Sun that was supposed to be open sourced that hasn't. Will IBM continue this? Will they put the same amount of effort into Sun's current open source projects? This is what worries me. Some of Sun's important open source projects compete with IBM's open and closed products.
The acquisition of Sun would have to transform the mindset of IBM. The open source gameplan that Jonathan Schwartz outlined in his video blogs seems like a good one, but if they get eaten up by IBM, I don't know if that plan will be able to be set in motion. It seems that when IBM acquires someone, the acquired company becomes more like IBM and not the other way around.
It's not just about open source though. Sun has been creating a lot of great hardware. The CMT chip based servers are awesome. The Ranger super computer is a great example of what you can do with their massive infiniband switch.
The billions of dollars they would spend to acquire sun would be worth it just to get Andy Bechtolsheim in my opinion.
The current economic crisis has made Sun a great bargain for those that can afford to acquire it.
Netbeans/Eclipse is going to be strange and I really hope that Netbeans doesn't die.
AIX/Solaris seems easy. IBM would be stupid to kill Solaris. AIX would likely be put on legacy support. Solaris may even become the default OS for IBM's new mainframes.
Power/Sparc would have to consolidate and with IBM/Sum/Fujitsu working together you might see some even more impressive risc servers coming out.
OpenOffice.org will continue because IBM uses it as a base for Lotus Symphony. StarOffice may die or get wrapped up in Symphony.
Glassfish might be tough. Competes with WebSphere and IBM has been more behind Apache's Geronimo app server I think.
I think Sun's blades might be very appealing to IBM.
As for Java, I'm more comfortable with it being under Sun than IBM. For all the press IBM has had over the SCO trial, I don't see them as good of an open source company as Sun. I can't remember the details right now, but there were some Apache projects, as well as OpenOffice.org where IBM wasn't really sending stuff upstream. The license in those cases didn't require it, but I still think it says alot, especially considering the financial benefits IBM has received from those projects.
Since 5.0 Netbeans has made tremendous improvements and now the combination of Glassfish and Netbeans is a powerhouse for J2EE development. That is real competition for Websphere Studio which costs a heck of a lot of money.
With EJB3, using EJB's even for smaller projects, using the full J2EE stack is reasonable. The complexity and performance overhead of EJBs is no longer a problem and it makes it very easy to deploy restful web services.
There's a great video on the matter from an independent developer at CommunityOne east recently. You can see the video here. When you get to that page click on the link for Video: Netbeans 6.7 and Glassfish v3. It's the third video.
My favorite quote was about which one is better, Netbeans or Eclipse. The answer was IdeaJ but it's not free:)
i dont need to remind you that how big a momentum does the new 'online communities' concept that are built on mysql has nowadays, and the domineering place they are gaining in our online social interaction.
You say that as if it means something. IBM doesn't make money from people sending tweets or whatever the next thing will be.
Sure, the servers survived the quake, but what of the datancenter itself ? I would not be surprised if THEIR power mains or network uplinks went to shit after such a rumble.
The box is the center. The only hookups are hot and water lines, ethernet and power.
A KVM is a device that allows you to use one one keyboard, video display and mouse and switch across multiple computers.
A pushcart is a frame on wheels that you can put stuff on and push around.
A KVM pushcart is a KVM switch, monitor, keyboard and mouse on a cart that you can push around to bring to different racks to use the KVM without having to have a KVM setup in each rack with dedicated connections to each server.
You had all the drives set up as one raidz2 array? From what I understand, that's not the best way of doing it. I can't find the link but there was an entry on blogs.sun.com about how it's better to use a number of raidz's in a pool than have the pool consist of a single raidz array. Here's an example of that zfs configuration. And here's one that discusses performance and MTTDL.
I was under the impression that the boards use the same type of daughter card that the TYAN server boards use. Raritan makes an IP KVM card for those boards. Have you tried contacint Raritan to see if you could use that instead?
According to this article on the modular datacenter it seems like they started doing better after they changed their name. Guess even a big company needs to worry about SEO?:)
The coolest (literally I guess) was where the put 50 of these in an abandoned mine in Japan. The mine had a constant, low temperature which would reduce cooling costs.
They mention 4 other customers in that article which is over a year old. There are probably more.
The nice thing is that you can also get Sun remote monitoring of the boxes. So if they detect a fault, they can alert a local non claustrophobic service provider to swap out a drive or whatever. Though your IT staff might miss having a NASA like command and control center.
There's no room for a KVM pushcart in the Sun Modular Datacenter.
All sun servers, new ones anyway, have an integrated lights out management card (ILOM) that you would use instead of a KVM switch. It allows you to connect to the server, even if it's powered off.
If you were putting this in a seismic zone I would assume you would install some rack drawers if you would have small objects such as jewel cases so you wouldn't have them just laying around. The design of the unit doesn'nt seem to have any shelves, or things you could use as a shelf to put these items on anyway.
The racks are put in the container sideways and there is a side panel. The rack slides out into the aisle if you need to service anything in the rack.
I posted a link to this video on the previous thread on the new Internet Archive Data Center that used one of these modular data centers. I guess someone found it interesting and didn't notice how old it was.
one would assume that something like this does regular off-site back-ups, which must add up to a hell of a-lot, could someone with experiance in such matters shed a little insight into the logistics of backing up such a vast system
Sun has more information and an Interactive tour of the Internet Archive modular data center on their site.
The total raw capacity of the container is 3 peta bytes. In reality it's going to be less than that. First, 2 disks are likely to be setup in a mirrored pool for the system disks. I believe the root pool only supports mirrors, not raidz. Not sure if this has changed.
That leaves you with 46 disks for data. Maybe they partitioned part of the root pool to include in the data pools, not sure, but zfs works better with whole disks.
In the interactive tour, they weren't clear on how they set up the pools.
Side note. Maybe I'm cynical, but if this was the other way around, with linux servers replacing sun/solaris servers that probably would have been the headline.
Pretty neat to find out that the internet archive is powered by Java too. The wayback machine is java as well as the crawlers.
JBoss has been pretty good at penetrating the corporate data center. I think Glassfish will do well also since it's backed by a company that already has a presence in many corporate data centers.
Since Liferay is a J2EE app, it should be a little easier since most corporate customers are already using the J2EE stack. Liferay also offers "enterprise support" if that means anything.
This might be a good time to call a Sun rep and give them your requirements and tell them you want an open source solution.
There was talk of Java Enterprise System being open sourced but I don't think that ever happened. If that's a more palatable solution for management, it might be cheaper.
Sun isn't very popular on here but they're good at getting open source into the enterprise... with support.
I remember when was it, 3 years ago or so, when ZFS was first introduced, people kept saying it's no big deal, and just a matter of time before Linux comes up with something equivalent or better.
That kind of attitude bugs me. You read about early pc history and while there's some rivalry, there's also quite a bit of collaboration and mutual respect that seems to be lacking today.
Maybe it was a myth, but it would still be nice to see more of it.
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I'm not sure that Sun's in such a bad position that they might need a buyout.
Things aren't great right now. They've been cash flow positive for a while up until 2008. That was a big deal considering the beating they've been taking.
They have a decent amount of cash. Some of their acquisitions may take time to pay off. MySQL, I'm not too sure that was worth 1Bln.
The strategy Schwartz has takes a big investment and will take time to realize the financial benefits. Right now, with everything going on, it may take longer to realize the financial benefits, but the same conditions also make the acceptance of open source platforms more attractive so it could help spur developer involvement with Sun technologies.
They may not buy the support or the high margin hardware right now, but in a year or two as the company starts realizing the benefits of using Sun's open source stack, they might pick up support contracts and hardware. Maybe even some of their consulting services. If not, then they become a success story they can use in marketing.
Sun's big margin customers seem to be in the financial sector and we all know how that sector is doing. Their lower end servers have much lower profit margins. In that space, they have to compete with Dell, and they do pretty well on price. But if you need to scale vertically, you don't have as many options. If you want a big box for your application you also want Solaris on it too. It's the only OS on midrange servers that's worth looking at IMO.
I'm not sure Sun needs to be bought, but whoever does, if they handle the merger properly, would be getting one hell of a deal.
HP doesn't have a good track record with mergers and I don't see the deal going well. Oracle I don't see wanting to get involved.
Cisco on the other hand has been wanting to get greater data center market share. Solaris is a good OS for building general purpose appliances and the Crossbow project can be used to build a virtual router within your server. Not sure if this is something Cisco would kill.
If anyone is courting Sun right now, my money would be on Cisco.
Eclipse has its issues and feels like it was built by a committee consisting of competitors.
That nails it. I've never seen it described as accurately and succinctly as you just did. That's exactly what it feels like.
Eclipse is just good enough but to do real work well in it, you have to buy some plug in or another. I and others have used eclipse without commercial plugins but it's not as good as Netbeans which gives you what you need for free.
If Netbeans wants to build something into the base, they don't have to worry about commercial vendors arguing that it will kill their business.
You do realize that that is just a list of projects they contribute too. It gives no indication of the level of contributions. A lot of those contributions are patches to make sure the projects can work with IBM hardware and software.
Not saying there contributions are meaningless, but I don't think anyone can reasonably argue that IBM has contributed more to open source than Sun.
IBM might open source a less powerful version or maybe a pet project, while Sun will go out, buy a company and open source the technology.
That's a big deal, especially considering the relative size and financial power differences between the two.
There's one important feature Netbeans has that no other IDE has.
The "Hi. My name is Roman Strobl" screencasts!
More importantly, what has IBM open sourced?
Sun has open sourced more of their own code than IBM has. Actually, Sun probably has open sourced more lines of code than anyone for that matter.
For large organizations, such as Sun and IBM, that have licensing agreements for parts of their technology, open sourcing a closed source project is not a trivial matter.
There's still a bit at Sun that was supposed to be open sourced that hasn't. Will IBM continue this? Will they put the same amount of effort into Sun's current open source projects? This is what worries me. Some of Sun's important open source projects compete with IBM's open and closed products.
The acquisition of Sun would have to transform the mindset of IBM. The open source gameplan that Jonathan Schwartz outlined in his video blogs seems like a good one, but if they get eaten up by IBM, I don't know if that plan will be able to be set in motion. It seems that when IBM acquires someone, the acquired company becomes more like IBM and not the other way around.
It's not just about open source though. Sun has been creating a lot of great hardware. The CMT chip based servers are awesome. The Ranger super computer is a great example of what you can do with their massive infiniband switch.
The billions of dollars they would spend to acquire sun would be worth it just to get Andy Bechtolsheim in my opinion.
The current economic crisis has made Sun a great bargain for those that can afford to acquire it.
Netbeans/Eclipse is going to be strange and I really hope that Netbeans doesn't die.
AIX/Solaris seems easy. IBM would be stupid to kill Solaris. AIX would likely be put on legacy support. Solaris may even become the default OS for IBM's new mainframes.
Power/Sparc would have to consolidate and with IBM/Sum/Fujitsu working together you might see some even more impressive risc servers coming out.
OpenOffice.org will continue because IBM uses it as a base for Lotus Symphony. StarOffice may die or get wrapped up in Symphony.
Glassfish might be tough. Competes with WebSphere and IBM has been more behind Apache's Geronimo app server I think.
I think Sun's blades might be very appealing to IBM.
As for Java, I'm more comfortable with it being under Sun than IBM. For all the press IBM has had over the SCO trial, I don't see them as good of an open source company as Sun. I can't remember the details right now, but there were some Apache projects, as well as OpenOffice.org where IBM wasn't really sending stuff upstream. The license in those cases didn't require it, but I still think it says alot, especially considering the financial benefits IBM has received from those projects.
Since 5.0 Netbeans has made tremendous improvements and now the combination of Glassfish and Netbeans is a powerhouse for J2EE development. That is real competition for Websphere Studio which costs a heck of a lot of money.
With EJB3, using EJB's even for smaller projects, using the full J2EE stack is reasonable. The complexity and performance overhead of EJBs is no longer a problem and it makes it very easy to deploy restful web services.
There's a great video on the matter from an independent developer at CommunityOne east recently. You can see the video here. When you get to that page click on the link for Video: Netbeans 6.7 and Glassfish v3. It's the third video.
My favorite quote was about which one is better, Netbeans or Eclipse. The answer was IdeaJ but it's not free :)
i dont need to remind you that how big a momentum does the new 'online communities' concept that are built on mysql has nowadays, and the domineering place they are gaining in our online social interaction.
You say that as if it means something. IBM doesn't make money from people sending tweets or whatever the next thing will be.
Solaris 10 and ZFS according to the article.
Sure, the servers survived the quake, but what of the datancenter itself ? I would not be surprised if THEIR power mains or network uplinks went to shit after such a rumble.
The box is the center. The only hookups are hot and water lines, ethernet and power.
There is an ArcGIS Java SDK and some ArcGIS applications developed with it if you want to look into it.
A KVM is a device that allows you to use one one keyboard, video display and mouse and switch across multiple computers.
A pushcart is a frame on wheels that you can put stuff on and push around.
A KVM pushcart is a KVM switch, monitor, keyboard and mouse on a cart that you can push around to bring to different racks to use the KVM without having to have a KVM setup in each rack with dedicated connections to each server.
I just ran across this link that shows where sun modular datacenters have been deployed. Looks like a couple dozen. Dosn't give much information on them thouhg.
You had all the drives set up as one raidz2 array? From what I understand, that's not the best way of doing it. I can't find the link but there was an entry on blogs.sun.com about how it's better to use a number of raidz's in a pool than have the pool consist of a single raidz array. Here's an example of that zfs configuration. And here's one that discusses performance and MTTDL.
I was under the impression that the boards use the same type of daughter card that the TYAN server boards use. Raritan makes an IP KVM card for those boards. Have you tried contacint Raritan to see if you could use that instead?
Thats pretty fast! I figured I had the calculation wrong.
I've seen someone calculate truck bandwidth before when trying to decide whether to transfer backups over the wire or by wheels.
We should get rid of wires all together and have the internet run on trucks. :)
According to this article on the modular datacenter it seems like they started doing better after they changed their name. Guess even a big company needs to worry about SEO? :)
The coolest (literally I guess) was where the put 50 of these in an abandoned mine in Japan. The mine had a constant, low temperature which would reduce cooling costs.
They mention 4 other customers in that article which is over a year old. There are probably more.
The nice thing is that you can also get Sun remote monitoring of the boxes. So if they detect a fault, they can alert a local non claustrophobic service provider to swap out a drive or whatever. Though your IT staff might miss having a NASA like command and control center.
There's no room for a KVM pushcart in the Sun Modular Datacenter.
All sun servers, new ones anyway, have an integrated lights out management card (ILOM) that you would use instead of a KVM switch. It allows you to connect to the server, even if it's powered off.
If you were putting this in a seismic zone I would assume you would install some rack drawers if you would have small objects such as jewel cases so you wouldn't have them just laying around. The design of the unit doesn'nt seem to have any shelves, or things you could use as a shelf to put these items on anyway.
The racks are put in the container sideways and there is a side panel. The rack slides out into the aisle if you need to service anything in the rack.
I posted a link to this video on the previous thread on the new Internet Archive Data Center that used one of these modular data centers. I guess someone found it interesting and didn't notice how old it was.
Speed limit is 65mph, 3024GB going 65mph = 1965560GB/h or 3276GB/s That's pretty fast.
one would assume that something like this does regular off-site back-ups, which must add up to a hell of a-lot, could someone with experiance in such matters shed a little insight into the logistics of backing up such a vast system
Dude, the Internet Archive IS the offsite backup.
At least mine anyway. Tape drives be damned.
Sun has more information and an Interactive tour of the Internet Archive modular data center on their site.
The total raw capacity of the container is 3 peta bytes. In reality it's going to be less than that. First, 2 disks are likely to be setup in a mirrored pool for the system disks. I believe the root pool only supports mirrors, not raidz. Not sure if this has changed.
That leaves you with 46 disks for data. Maybe they partitioned part of the root pool to include in the data pools, not sure, but zfs works better with whole disks.
In the interactive tour, they weren't clear on how they set up the pools.
Side note. Maybe I'm cynical, but if this was the other way around, with linux servers replacing sun/solaris servers that probably would have been the headline.
Pretty neat to find out that the internet archive is powered by Java too. The wayback machine is java as well as the crawlers.
The new datacenter is only 3PB. I guess the total storage, with the old data centers is 4.5 PB.
So 48x63 gives you 3PB of raw storage. I'm guessing there using less because I can't imagine them running it in raid 0.
I don't think that's right. Sun's site has a video tour of it. Haven't finished it yet but it's here.
Here's a video tour of one if you need it for reference.
Don't forget to turn off the water and unplug the ethernet cables. Just be very careful with the power cords.
JBoss has been pretty good at penetrating the corporate data center. I think Glassfish will do well also since it's backed by a company that already has a presence in many corporate data centers.
Since Liferay is a J2EE app, it should be a little easier since most corporate customers are already using the J2EE stack. Liferay also offers "enterprise support" if that means anything.
This might be a good time to call a Sun rep and give them your requirements and tell them you want an open source solution.
There was talk of Java Enterprise System being open sourced but I don't think that ever happened. If that's a more palatable solution for management, it might be cheaper.
Sun isn't very popular on here but they're good at getting open source into the enterprise... with support.
I remember when was it, 3 years ago or so, when ZFS was first introduced, people kept saying it's no big deal, and just a matter of time before Linux comes up with something equivalent or better.
That kind of attitude bugs me. You read about early pc history and while there's some rivalry, there's also quite a bit of collaboration and mutual respect that seems to be lacking today.
Maybe it was a myth, but it would still be nice to see more of it.