Regarding mostly the 106 CPU Sun vs. Apple cluster comment: I still think there's a market for Sun and a market for Apple. The border may shift, but it's still there.
Where Sun shines - pardon the pun:) - is reliability and scalability.
I'd certainly buy a dual 2GHz G5 for my home desktop if I had the money - not a Sun Blade 2000. But I wouldn't buy a cluster of several G5's for a mail server backend cluster at work (I work for a major ISP).
Why?
I must be able to manage the mail cluster remotely, since I don't work in the huge underground machine room which is located several blocks from my office. It must run 24/7 and be able to monitor itself and give advance warning of possible failures, such as overheating, failing disks, etc. Such things as mirrored root disks and dual power supplies help with this.
The Suns have some neat features that Apples don't have. One is Lights Out Management: I can remotely power down a machine and still be able to manage it - run diagnostics, reset it, power it back up... Another is the ubiquitous serial console. None of our Sun servers have graphics cards. Instead, they're connected to a console server. If I have to get at the console of a box, I connect to the console server, select a serial line and do my thing.
Yet another issue, that often comes up with clustering, is that of storage. Can you hook up an external terabyte SCSI RAID box to a G5 cluster? (A serious question!)
Also, as load increases, I can keep buying (=having the company buy) bigger and bigger Suns, bigger and bigger disk arrays, bigger and bigger tape libraries... Money isn't as much of an issue as scalability and reliability, and manhours spent due to lack of same, because all those systems are making money. Therefore it's worthwhile to pay the price if it means we can keep charging our customers.
So, in the end, I welcome the G5 as a great desktop computer, while I continue to use Suns on the server side. Both have things in which they are good.
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Where Sun shines - pardon the pun :) - is reliability and scalability.
I'd certainly buy a dual 2GHz G5 for my home desktop if I had the money - not a Sun Blade 2000. But I wouldn't buy a cluster of several G5's for a mail server backend cluster at work (I work for a major ISP).
Why?
I must be able to manage the mail cluster remotely, since I don't work in the huge underground machine room which is located several blocks from my office. It must run 24/7 and be able to monitor itself and give advance warning of possible failures, such as overheating, failing disks, etc. Such things as mirrored root disks and dual power supplies help with this.
The Suns have some neat features that Apples don't have. One is Lights Out Management: I can remotely power down a machine and still be able to manage it - run diagnostics, reset it, power it back up... Another is the ubiquitous serial console. None of our Sun servers have graphics cards. Instead, they're connected to a console server. If I have to get at the console of a box, I connect to the console server, select a serial line and do my thing.
Yet another issue, that often comes up with clustering, is that of storage. Can you hook up an external terabyte SCSI RAID box to a G5 cluster? (A serious question!)
Also, as load increases, I can keep buying (=having the company buy) bigger and bigger Suns, bigger and bigger disk arrays, bigger and bigger tape libraries... Money isn't as much of an issue as scalability and reliability, and manhours spent due to lack of same, because all those systems are making money. Therefore it's worthwhile to pay the price if it means we can keep charging our customers.
So, in the end, I welcome the G5 as a great desktop computer, while I continue to use Suns on the server side. Both have things in which they are good.