Sun Announces New x86 Servers

An anonymous reader writes "Sun announced the new V60x and V65x servers (1U and 2U respectively). The 1U has 2.8GHz Xeon CPUs and the 2U has 3.06GHz Xeon CPUs. They also announced a partnership with RedHat and Oracle running on these boxes. RedHat will also start shipping Sun's Java with their distribution."

wow

[banka]

is this a ditch effort by sun to stay alive? it seems as though they've just been slipping away in recent years; they had the "One" platform of ubiquotous distributed computing and then that sort of disappeared, are we going to see the end of solaris soon?

Sun is taking the same route as SGI

[mikael]

Remember when the x86 workstations began to eat into SGIs bottom line? They responded with building x86 workstations. The same thing is happening to Sun. Their SPARC servers are not keeping up with x86 servers, just as SGI IRIX/MIPS workstations began to lag in performance.

Now before the slashdot crowd begins to scream "But hey! The Sun Fire V480 is really fast!", remember that it is $19,995.00 in the base configuration. You'll get 10 IBM rack servers for the same price. In a clustered enterprise situation 20 3GHz Xeon will perform better than 2 900MHz UltraSPARC. Especially if we are talking Java.

Just as SGI was faster in the absolute high-end, so is Sun. The E15k is a monster. For some very specialized applications, this may be the only way to go. But for the very large majority of systems being purchased, a simple x86 server will do, especially if you can cluster it. This is where Sun is loosing the grip. Earlier you had to have a SPARC machine for advanced enterprise computing. These days are over, just as you had to have a SGI to run 3D software.

Now they are competing head to head with Dell in the x86 arena. This is a bold move. Wonder how long they will last.

sun becomes a commodity vendor

[havaloc]

Let's see. Sun decides to release commodity hardware with the option to take commodity software, and charge a non-commodity price. So what makes Sun better than say, Dell, HP or the many other commodity vendors? Sun will be finished at this rate.

Re:Sun is taking the same route as SGI

[BWJones]

Just as SGI was faster in the absolute high-end, so is Sun. The E15k is a monster. For some very specialized applications, this may be the only way to go. But for the very large majority of systems being purchased, a simple x86 server will do, especially if you can cluster it. This is where Sun is loosing the grip. Earlier you had to have a SPARC machine for advanced enterprise computing. These days are over, just as you had to have a SGI to run 3D software.

Actually, I am seeing a number of folks either 1) migrate to or 2) seriously consider Apple's Xserve for purposes sort of in-between. The Xserve runs UNIX, it is absurdly easy to manage, they are cheap, and give pretty good performance especially when code is optimized for Altivec. Add to that the power consumption (or rather lack thereof), and for large numbers of servers, the Xserve becomes even more attractive in terms of lower electricity and cooling costs.

Redhat abandons idealism ?

[vinodh]

Isn't this the same Redhat that refused to ship KDE because QT was not free software ?. When did java become Free Software ?

Re:Who'd have thought?

[MAXOMENOS]

This could be the combination that breaks the Microsoft desktop hegemony, if Sun and Redhat market it correctly toward that end.

Not in your lifetime. RH just isn't a good desktop distribution; Mandrake is much more polished and has fewer bugs. RH's real strength is in an enterprise envirionment. Similarly: Java is pretty weak for desktop apps (a survey of AWT, Swing and SWT should bear this out) but it's perfect for web interfaces and business logic.

The real fight is in the server world. Java + RedHat Linux is a winning combination, if they can get it right.

Re:Sun is taking the same route as SGI

[zrm8y5m02]

Sun has always been competing with itself - they are notorious for canibalizing its own sale with a new product. After all, it's not that surprising, considering that if they don't do it themselves, someone else will.

Might help get x86 into Sun-only shops

[djh101010]

I'm in a corporate environment where trying to get Linux or *BSD into the data center is an uphill battle. If the box comes from Sun, and runs Oracle, that makes that argument a whole lot easier for me. Even if it's more expensive than commodity hardware, they do have a deserved reputation for solid hardware, and I can use the logic that if Sun is willing to put their name on it, they're willing to back it up. I'm building a support system that's going to need it's own database; this box is worth looking into, for me.

YES!

[teeker]

Try this game:

Go pick out any piece of Sun hardware and set it in the same rack as any comparable (??? well...you know what I mean...) piece of Dell kit. Fire them both up in their stock configs. First machine to suffer hardware failure loses.

hint: don't put your money on the Dell.

Sun's reputation for fantastic hardware will come in handy here. If they can sell in the same price league (and they can), they will be able to compete.

Focus on bus speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuse any hardware ignorance in this post - I am a software guy...

I always thought Sun's big advantage was the bus speed. The article seems to indicate that they have a 533MHz FSB, though 800MHz are becoming available.

If I were Sun, I would find a way to exploit my core capability and market fast busses, beyond what can be obtained for ordinary PC hardware or for cheaper.

Re:Ahh, the final nail in the coffin called Sun.

[stratjakt]

Sun, like others, looks to be making the switch towards a more software and service oriented company, and less on the hardware. I've had no first hand experience, but from what I've heard, their support is second to none.

So these things are competitively priced, and if they come with useful support by people who actually know what they're selling and building (unlike Dell who no doubt has those moronic interns answering the phone), then they could definately make a go of it.

But the writing on the wall is that all of these specialized architectures are doomed to obsoletion. Commodity hardware is ever faster, fast enough to handle what were previously 'big iron' chores.

They don't care that Sun Java is non-free?

[epukinsk]

Correct me if I am wrong, but Sun Java is non-free, right? They don't make source releases and their license certainly isn't OSI approved. I thought Red Hat was all about squeezing non-free software out of its distro? From their mission statement:

"Red Hat believes that software infrastructure should be free. To that end, we are sharing our infrastructure technologies with the intention of establishing a common, open standard platform for software developers." [1]

Is Java really a free, open software infrastructure?

Erik

[1] http://sources.redhat.com/mission.html

Could Java be to blame

[jefmsmit]

Its interesting to think that it could be Sun's Java that is to blame for the demise of Sun hardware to some extent. Many server sales are now for people needing servers for J2EE applications which tend to scale out instead of up. Why spend significantly more on Sun hardware to scale out when you could just throw more X86 cluster nodes at the problem and achieve similiar results for less money.

Re:They don't care that Sun Java is non-free?

[Wesley Felter]

Red Hat only cares about open source for their regular distribution; for Enterprise Linux they're willing to make an exception. I wonder if they're going to continue to include IBM's JVM in RHEL, though.

Re:Sun is taking the same route as SGI

[CatOne]

The IO on the box is already amazing, for large file transfers/etc. And if you want disk speed, hook up an Xserve RAID and run a 7 disk SCSI 5 array. Benchmarks are showing 210 MB/second *sustained* for reads and writes.

Re:1 word

[oldmanmtn]

OK, let's assume for a second you actually can build a rackmount server with exactly the same specs for less. Can you build 200 of them?

Sun isn't getting into this market to sell individual systems for people to run in their bedroom / offices. They are in the market to sell these in multi-rack installations to run the web servers that are attached to the clusters of Sun Fire 4800 app servers, which are attached to the failover-capable pair of 15Ks running Oracle on the back end.

Now, lets see you whip up a 72-way 576GB machine with over 100 GB/s of local memory bandwidth.

Re:But how could this be???

[stox]

I must have been hallucinating, then, when I had AT&T System V/386 boxes all over the place, Sun 386i's, and Altos's. Well, that was the 1980's, and I guess SCO can't remember back that far..

Re:Might help get x86 into Sun-only shops

[crotherm]

I work for a rather large aerospace corp whose name name starts with a B, and we still do not have a real linux road map. With SUN putting its name on low cost servers, hopefully this will make it that much eaiser for me to get linux in here and stop the windows server advance in the machine room.

Competing Solaris against Linux

[HighOrbit]

are we going to see the end of solaris soon?

Absolutely not the end of Solaris. Sun is shifting some of their focus (if not most) from producing hardware to being a software and services company. Although this was announced along with the Red Hat deal, this is actually an attempt by Sun to compete Solaris against Linux at the low end. Sun is basically admitting and re-acting to what people have been saying for months (if not years) - Linux has been eating at Solaris by replacing high-cost sparcs with low cost x86.

The Red Hat deal is an obfuscation. The real aim here is to co-opt Linux by having current Solaris shops stay with Solaris. Lots of these shops that would have replaced the Sparc/Solaris platform with Linux are now going to be induced to stay with Solaris on x86. Sun figures that it is better to sell Solaris services without Sparc than to sell nothing at all.

Up until now, Solaris on x86 was always a "redheaded stepchild" at Sun. The hardware support was terrible and limited (very few video cards, for example). Hopefully, Sun will now give x86 good hardware support.

I'm looking at buying one of thse v65x boxes...

[smkndrkn]

...in order to move a small production machine off aging hardware. The price is in-line with other 2U rackmount servers from Dell and IBM and probably a better deal than sparc hardware with the same specifications. The fact that we'd be running Intel + Linux on this machine as opposed to sparc + solaris is a huge benefit. That coupled with the Sun support services (which I think are prett good. Just like all support programs there are problems but as a whole its worth having) makes these new servers VERY attractive.

Now I have to convince my department to try this out...shouldn't be much trouble considering its $8,000.00

Sun 386i

[dprice]

Back in 1988, I remember seeing x86 based Suns running SunOS. It wasn't called Solaris back then. SPARC RISC based workstations weren't available then. The bulk of the Sun workstations were Motorola 68xxx based. Sun came out with an 80386 workstation called the 386i.

I had the opportunity to touch one when they first came out. A coworker was all excited that they were moving all their CAD software to the 386i, and he took me to their lab to show me the new machines. I wiggled the mouse, and it immediately crashed. That was the extent of my exposure.

As far as I can tell, the Sun 386i flopped. Linux was not around yet. SPARC came along a couple years later, and Sun migrated totally to SPARC. Perhaps their first attempt at x86 was a good idea, but poorly executed.

Java optimizations?

[nsushkin]

Does anyone know if Java for solaris/x86 is better optimized than Java for linux/x86?

I know that Java for solaris/sparc has some specific garbage collection options.

Re:Competing Solaris against Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Up until now, Solaris on x86 was always a "redheaded stepchild" at Sun.

It's very unfortunate that Sun spent the late 90s selling E10Ks to dotcoms instead of noticing the Linux threat.

Had Solaris x86 been taken more seriously in 1998-2000, there probably wouldn't be a RedHat right now. Or at least RedHat's salesmen wouldn't be in the boardroom. Hell, even Sun's fanboys diss Solaris x86.

Sun made the same mistake that SCO did. People wanted a cheap Unix to run basic network services like web and mail. None of the System V club would deliver, but Linux did. Now Linux is eating into the Oracle and ERP markets and Sun&SCO are scared shitless.

This is only for RedHat Enterprise Linux

[miniver]

If you look at Sun's press release about Red Hat [sun.com] you'll see that Red Hat will be including the JVM with their RH Enterprise Linux distributions ... not with Red Hat Linux, and that Sun will only be supporting RH Enterprise Linux. Why? Because Sun still won't license the JVM for redistribution. I'm not saying that Sun is wrong here (it's their toy, they get to choose the license), but this is what has been slowing the acceptance of Java on Linux with many developers. (Except for corporate Java developers -- they love it, and thus, so do I.)

Sun's trying to balance control of Java against market acceptance, and Solaris against Linux. Sun obviously thinks that anyone who wants Java for Linux will go to the effort of downloading it from Sun, while at the same time they get to differentiate Solaris from Linux by including Java. On the other hand, Sun could hardly sell & support Linux on Sun servers without also including Java; this agreement gives them what they want without letting go of their (perceived) control of Java.

Re:Competing Solaris against Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Up until now, Solaris on x86 was always a "redheaded stepchild" at Sun. The hardware support was terrible and limited (very few video cards, for example). Hopefully, Sun will now give x86 good hardware support.

I don't think they will. That's what the RedHat deal is for. Sun's story is pretty simple: If you want the latest/greatest/cheapest hardware, run Linux. If you want high reliability/cost, run Solaris86 on "approved" x86 hardware (Sun's or HP or Dell). If you want maximum reliability, run Solaris on SPARC.

Re:Routeness

[SLot]

Sun has an x86 rackmount business, SGI does not. Though I often wonder how serious Sun is about this business. I've noticed that people who were customers when it was a separate company called Cobalt are not happy with the new management. And you'll notice that Sun has two or three Sparc rackmount models for every one x86 model.

While I know you are talking about the Raq's, a lot of the earlier models from Cobalt are still around - Raq2, Qube2 & 2700. And you were right, I got so sick of waiting on patches after Sun bought Cobalt, I did the only thing I could. I put debian on my Qube2 and quit caring about what Sun did. :) Of course, this [shon.org] guy went with NetBSD, but hey, either way, whatever Sun does or doesn't do is what Sun does or doesn't do. I don't care anymore. :) And if you are interested in what I did with my qube, poke around in the forums on my website.

Re:wow

[willtsmith]

Can you so SoLinux? How about SolarNux?????

Sun, more than ANY OTHER company is getting their ass kicked by Linux. It's simply no longer necessary to have a SunStation to drive a web server. Standardized PC hardware running Linux is MUCH, MUCH CHEAPER!!!!!

Sun's largest liability may be it's persistance in producing it's own CPU architecture. It may be VERY, VERY fast, but the marketplace for such a specialized platform is quickly evaporating.

Sun has created a sizable market for workstations in higher education environments. However, that could VERY EASILY ERODE with next generation purchasing. The push to standardize on hardware that can run EVERYTHING could very well doom Sun.

Sun needs to create an environment that their legacy scripts/software can run on PCs running Linux. Call it Solarnux if you will. That way they can sell Sun boxes that will fit easily into their traditional environments. At the same time these workstations could plausibly run Lindows to host Windows applications.

Similarly, their are lots of data centers out their that run on Sun hardware. Sheer cost decisions might force a platform switch. Linux keeps Sun in the game. The alternative is Windows2003 which puts Sun out of the ballgame. Why by a Sun box to run Windows2003?

At the higher end, Sun needs to seriously consider whether to keep making SPARC processors. A switch from SPARC to say ... the new IBM PowerPC 970 may seem painful. But losing their high end business is probably EVEN MORE painful. Doing so would free up a lot of $$$ and perhaps make Sun more of an ally with IBM and perhaps even Apple.

A switch of processing platform could bring a license to allow SunPPC workstations to run OSX apps. It could also bring an alliance to provide core services to creative shops that run OSX instead of Windows. In a way their fate is kinda linked.

Regarding SGI:
SGI better become a PURE SERVICES company or face certain extinction. LucasArts decision to buy Dell instead of SGI sounded the death bell for SGI. Their hardware business has been commoditized and they can no longer justify selling $25,000 workstations when a $3000 workstation with an nVidia Quadro card will do the same job.