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Sun Microsystems Hardware

Sun Releases New Servers, Blades & More 213

Posted by Hemos from the rolling-out-the-new dept.
desau writes "This Yahoo article gives some tidbits on Sun's new toys that are being released today. Looks like they're aiming their guns at intel based systems with many new blade offerings and several small to midrange servers. The article also points out that they're lowering their prices on other servers." Probably a lot more information will come out from the web view - that starts @ 12:30 PM EST - but I think it'll take more than blade servers to make a difference in the future.Removed the first part of the link - the DoubleClick part was my copying link location, and not checking it - it should be correct now.
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Sun Releases New Servers, Blades & More More

Sun Releases New Servers, Blades & More

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  • New lower prices mean... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10, 2003 @01:31PM (#5271619)
    I still can't afford one! Yeah!

    • Re:New lower prices mean... (Score:5, Informative)

      by jobeus ( 639434 ) <jobe-slash@@@jobeus...net> on Monday February 10, 2003 @01:34PM (#5271649) Homepage
      Hey, you can always buy used, if all you're wanting is a good play box. I got an Ultra 5 for $30 through the local "Bargain Finder" magazine. Go search ebay [ebay.com].
    • I would say that is affordable.
      • For a 450Mhz box with no monitor?
        I like the blades, but they're gonna have to come down in price a bit more for me to wanna buy one.

  • Doubleclick (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MCMLXXVI ( 601095 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @01:33PM (#5271638)
    What's with the DoubleClick link? Are we not even bothering to have the illusion that the stories are really ads in disguise?
    • It's a valid point. There is a problem with this story. I would say this is funny.

    • Re:Doubleclick (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Prizm ( 52977 )
      Yes, it's a shameless doubleclick advertisement. Coincidentally, Slashdot is also running a Sun banner advertisement proclaiming this new drop in prices. A bit odd to see a banner ad at the top of the page, followed promptly by a story about the same thing. Who would have thought...?

    • Re:Doubleclick (Score:1, Interesting)

      by johann909 ( 241219 )
      This is an OUTRAGE! Slashdot you have LOST a reader. I encourage everyone who opposes shady business that subtract from the integrity of the stories to file a complaint in post as I have.

    • Re:Doubleclick (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by Prizm ( 52977 )
      It's fixed, and without an official update! It was up for approximately 9 minutes. Looks like somebody's clever ploy ended up in embarassment. oops.
    • What's with the DoubleClick link? Are we not even bothering to have the illusion that the stories are really ads in disguise?

      Shutup and get back to consuming you filthy drone. They don't pay for your ad impressions to hear your opinion. :-/

    • See above: I removed the doubleclick, which was my fault for using the drag and drag URL thingie - and the update took longer to propogate.

      Wish I could feed the conspiracy more, but...

  • Forget it (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by TerryAtWork ( 598364 )
    They're screwed anyway.

    Unless they can come up with some HUGE reason to not go Intel/Linux the server market is lost to them.

    • Re:Forget it (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jobeus ( 639434 )
      Stability: tried, tested, and true. Also, the architecture is a lot more flexible, IMO. Intel's still got its problems.

      • Re:Forget it (Score:3, Insightful)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 )
        Any place where you use one low-end server, you usually use multiple low-end servers, for redundancy. A shitload of x86 systems is cheaper than a shitload of sun systems. This is why where I used to work we had ONE production solaris server and about thirty production linux servers (as web and chat servers.)

        Also low-end solaris servers are crap anyway, they're built essentially like a PC from dell. Why bother? They have a supposedly better processor but they get spanked by an Athlon XP, let alone itanium or the rapidly upcoming sledgehammer.

        • Re:Forget it (Score:3, Informative)

          by hackstraw ( 262471 )
          I disagree. I personally feel as though Sun's low end Netra's and the v120's (and company) are excellent. They are not that expensive (I get an edu discount, but I don't think they list that high otherwise), and as far as server's go "They just work" (Tm) And keep in mind that I've seen very few (read almost none) servers that are CPU bound. Servers serve. Workstations (CAD, etc) process.

        • Re:Forget it (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Blkdeath ( 530393 )
          Any place where you use one low-end server, you usually use multiple low-end servers, for redundancy. A shitload of x86 systems is cheaper than a shitload of sun systems.

          Therein lies the difference. Whereas a company would have to deploy "a shitload" of x86 servers, they would only require a small handful of Sun servers. This also reduces strain on the power feed, backup power systems, etc. and can significantly reduce the TCO. Initial purchase price isn't everything.

          Sun equipment is also generally more powerful and scalable than its Intel bretheren, and I for one hope cheap, commodity hardware never replaces proven server-grade hardware. That's a world I'd hate to administer.

      • What is unstable, untested, or "untrue" about x86 servers? I don't know where this argument comes from. My employer has used x86 servers for years in highly stable, high-use, high availability commerce applications for a very high traffic website.

        • Re:Okay, I'll bite (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Cirvam ( 216911 )
          Can you hot swap the CPU's or RAM modules on a x86 server while its running? Or can you have 512 (is that what they are at now?) CPU's all in the same system? I don't know of any x86 servers offhand that can scale to over 8 processors (maybe they have 16 now?) or that you can hotswap CPU's in. Also its just a recent development that x86 server could address the massive amounts of ram that Sun's have been able to for years. I mean if there are x86 servers which you can do this, I wonder how their prices compare to Sun's prices, obviously you don't have hot swap CPU's on your latest gaming motherboard so its not exactly a common item there.
      • Where I work, I'm seeing Athlon based servers outperform UltraSPARC III servers (v480s to be exact) by a factor of 2+. Physical compile time for new chip designs has been cut by more than half since the Athlon boxes were brought online, and Athlon stability hasn't been an issue at all.

        Sun has a major problem on their hands in the EDA world...and their actions and new product introductions aren't convincing me otherwise.

    • Re:Forget it (Score:2, Insightful)

      by o1d5ch001 ( 648087 )
      Unless they can come up with some HUGE reason to not go Intel/Linux the server market is lost to them.

      Huh?! What are you talking about! Sun is the largest producer of big unix boxes on the planet. Unless you are mom and pop shop, Sun has to be one of your finalists for new servers. Ever here of a little thing called TCO?! Solaris is way cheaper to administrate over a thousand servers than Linux/Winwhatever will ever be. Don't even get me started on managing multiple linux kernels!!
      • It's only a matter of time until the GNU community catches up with admin tools too.

        Also - When I said Linux I meant OpenBSD. Dunno what came over me.

        • " The Slashdot default score should be the median score of your last eleven moderated messages"

          Don't you mean "mean" or "mode"? With median, in a set of eleven comments, each being modded -1, with the 6th being modded 5, the default score would be 5, even though though the poster would seem to be a troll. With mean, the default score would be the more appropriate 0. With mode, the default score would be -1.

          Or maybe I'm wrong. I'm not aware of any other definitions of median, though. If I am wrong, I apologize.

    • Re:Forget it (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Ami Ganguli ( 921 )

      They're not dead yet. Agreed they've got some work to do, but they've turned bad situations in the past.

      Personally, I think they should get seriously into the server appliance business. They bought Cobalt, but they don't seem to want to do anything interesting with the company. Those little boxes were really handy and breeze to administer.

      They might well have picked the right time for Linux desktops too. Imagine a shrink-wrapped workgroup including a nice Sun box with Cobalt admin tools and a bunch of easy-to-administer Linux desktops. Great for school labs or company call-centeres.

    • Re:Forget it (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Billly Gates ( 198444 )
      Actually they do sell Linux x86 servers [sun.com].

      Sun will not sit back and let Linux and Intel eat up their market. I also have a friend of a friend who works for Sun and is beta testing Sun's new intel workstation line. Appearently they are noticing companies like Pixar and boeing switching to dell lintel and wintel boxes. They plan to make both 3d as well as software engineering workstations that both will run Linux. Wait until this summer or next fall for the announcment.

      Since their own distro is tuned for their own hardware it will be rock solid and stable. This is something thats traditionally an advantage to Unix over Linux. Corporations will love this as well as users.

    • I had moderator points, but cannot in good conscience use them because this is a thread about my employer. Still, this has to be rated as flamebait. The parent post is so full of shit, that I can't believe anyone not viewing at -1 should see it.
      The statement: "They're screwed anyway."
      Why are we screwed? Is investing in a proven platform such a bad idea? Should we all just give up and make Linux the only OS? Would that make everybody here happy? No M$, no xBSD, no MacOS, no OS390 and no Plan9. Who the hell needs any of them when Linux is so obviously superior in every aspect?

      The statement: "Unless they can come up with some HUGE reason to not go Intel/Linux the server market is lost to them."
      Did you read the article? They have x86/Linux blades announced today. Can you pull your head out of your rectal cavity long enough to read the posted stories BEFORE you hand out your elegant two line quip stating the emminent demise of a billion dollar a year company?
      Besides,isn't your two liner a lot like the hype about NT circa early 90's? Unix was dead back then. Look, I love Linux on my machines at home. I still have problems with it on my laptop, but that'll get fixed soon. It's great. It's free. Just remember, you don't always bring cost into the equation. My choice of surgeons has little to do with how much they charge. It's how well they can do the job.

  • How the Stack Up (Score:5, Funny)

    by Oculus Habent ( 562837 ) <oculus.habent@gm ... Nom minus author> on Monday February 10, 2003 @01:35PM (#5271659) Journal
    But how do the new Sun servers compare the to new Apple servers?!

    And how many lick does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie-Pop?

    The world may never know.

    Sorry, couldn't help myself.
  • http://ad.doubleclick.net/click;h=v2|2f40|0|0|%2a| v;5176750;0-0;0;7859018;9323-728|90;2305354|230362 5|1;;%3fhttp://www.sun.com/bignews

    You guys always yell at us when we do it, now we yell back :)

  • From the article (Score:5, Funny)

    by automag_6 ( 540022 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @01:39PM (#5271693)
    >>A high-end Sun[tm] XVR-4000 graphics accelerator, packaged with a workgroup Sun Fire[tm] system for high-performance visualization applications

    Alright, my next game box will be a Sun! Cost effectiveness be damned, it'll make up for it in cool points.
    • Yeah, and with all the games you have to choose from your friends will be lining up at your door!
    • It's hard enough to find games for linux [happypenguin.com]... I could just imagine finding games for Solaris... User: "Yay! I can play old LucasArts games [scummvm.org]!!"
    • Try lugging a V880 to LAN party though...
      • The great thing is you only need one server for every four people! The V880z server can be configured with 6 CPUs and two XVR-4000 graphics modules, which can each support up to 4 monitors. Of course since each graphics module had 4 MAJC-5200 processors plus a bunch of ASICs and 3 different kinds of memory it probably costs a fortune. But what price is too high to pay for a great game of UT?

    • Re:From the article (Score:5, Informative)

      by larien ( 5608 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @02:02PM (#5271912) Homepage Journal
      Unfortunately, visualisation != gaming...

      That said, it's one heck of a card; up to 1GB of texture RAM (!!) and it's got great connectivity to the RAM as it plugs into the main system bus on a V880 rather than being limited to PCI bandwidth.

      It's a niche item, but it'll do well in visualisation studios; for instance, we have a huge rendering server with real 3D capabilities (i.e. you need the glasses) running on an SGI; this might be able to replace that.

    • There is only so much one can play shareware Doom in one's lifetime...

  • single-system-image blades (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Twirlip of the Mists ( 615030 ) <twirlipofthemists@yahoo.com> on Monday February 10, 2003 @01:40PM (#5271715)
    Somebody needs to combine the high-density, inexpensive technology of blade servers with a scalable single-system-image design. I'd like to be able to take a single rack chassis, four units high or something, and put one CPU in it, or two, or fourteen, or whatever, but not have to dick around with clustering or load-balancing or something.

    SGI kind of went that direction with their Origin series (2000 and 3000, and now Altix), but they're overbuilt. It costs a fortune to buy an empty system, and a fortune to put processors and slots in it.

    Maybe somebody has done this already. I don't really keep up with the whole blade server thing very much. Anybody know?
    • SGI kind of went that direction with their Origin series (2000 and 3000, and now Altix), but they're overbuilt. It costs a fortune to buy an empty system, and a fortune to put processors and slots in it.

      This is a hard problem. As you say, it would be really nice, but what you end up with in practice is having to put high-end parts in low-end models and get killed on cost.
    • I agree entirely.

      Two weeks ago, I saw a private announcement of this technology that they talked about today. (signed the NDA and everything! :-) At that time, the blade servers they announced led me to think of two things:

      1) This heterogenous blade system is INCREDIBLY cool!!! You can have Intel blades, Sparc blades, encryption blades, network caching/acceleration blades, etc. etc. etc. all in one frame. The fact that Sun (late as they are) is the first out of the blocks with this idea is remarkable.

      2) I WANT CC-NUMA ON BLADE SERVERS! With all the mysterious hype Sun has given N1 (learning from MS, anyone?), I really hope that this is part of their upcoming plans. One OS instance across "n" computers, where n is a variable. Time will tell, I guess.
      • With all the mysterious hype Sun has given N1...

        You know, they announced it about 10 hours ago now, and I still have no fucking idea what it is. Pfeh.
        • Actually, they announced it a few months ago. Now they've finally given it some substance, although it's hard to follow.

          N1 is a low-administration, self-managing environment. It's a farm of servers and infrastructure that can dynamically reallocate themselves as needed for different loads, and do so intelligently. If your accounting server is getting hammered at month end, but so is your after-hours game server (hey, it's possible! :-) then the computers themselves will know to reallocate more resources to the accounting, as it's more mission critical than gaming. Similarly, it will allow for metered semi-automatic allocation of resources. Imagine being a CIO getting a page and an email one night: "Your webserver is running at 95% capacity, and serving 'x' pages per second. For $20,000, you can double your capacity. Please reply with "yes" or "no" in the subject line, to enable this feature or not as you want." Neat plan, eh? It's something that Sun talks about at any rate. It's feasible, with some work.

          DISCLAIMER: Since most of this is extrapolation from what I heard, I can't imagine that anything here violates my NDA, but in the off chance that it does, it's a lucky guess. :-)

  • This is great news (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Uhh_Duh ( 125375 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @01:41PM (#5271729) Homepage
    I really dig sun hardware -- it's extremely robust, but when it comes down to price, you can buy an awful lot of intel power for the prices Sun tries to get you to pay.

    This won't save Sun for one simple reason... Even if they lower their prices to a point where it's really "worth" the extra dollars to buy the Sun label (again, their hardware is far more robust than anything I've seen on the Intel side) customers aren't going to recognize that.

    Sure, bigger companies will still recognize the value of buying more robust hardware, but their mid-market business will dry up and Sun will buckle. IBM will step in to fill the high-end server role (with Linux) and in 6 years, Sun will be a distant memory.

    • Re:This is great news (Score:5, Insightful)

      by HamNRye ( 20218 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @02:53PM (#5272374) Homepage
      "The blades will start at $4,800 and range up to $20,000." Umm, at an entry price of $4,800 they're not competing with Intel. Add to that their $200 keyboards, $100 mice, and $2,000 video cards, and they are still priced way the hell out there.

      We recently replaced the video cards, mice, and keyboards for 2 E450's, and the video card was an ATI rage 128 card ($295). We spent almost $1,000 outfitting our machines with peripherals. The next step up in video cards was $2,000.

      I would say that these exorbidant prices are worth it for Sun HW, but their $3,000 monitors have the life expectancy of a fruit fly. But hey, buy our pricey support agreement and we'll replace it free*! (*Free: n. How much Sun will charge you to replace a $3,000 monitor after they get $20,000 for their support contract.)

      There are darn few things which Sun is cost effective for anymore. Running a big DB, etc... But the word is Intel for file and print servers and smaller app servers as well. Choose a Linux box with commodity hardware and you could have that entry level blade for about $1,000. If you are worried about the reliability of commodity hardware, get a back up. You still saved half your money.

      Does Sun really think anyone is going to shell out for this hardware to run Apache?? If they can't get their foot in the webserver door, what hope is there for Sun ONE?? (Like there was ever hope, but still....) Starts to make you wonder if Sun even knows what they're trying to accomplish anymore.

      My SUN wish list:
      1) Better volume management without needing to buy Veritas. This is just another way Sun is too expensive. Having their Volume management on Par with AIX would be a start.
      2) Die CDE, Die! (Side note - Noone ever sees the desktop of our Sun boxes, noone cares, why not run a default TWM that consumes as little resources as possible.)
      3) Better Package management - Take a lesson from Debian.
      4) Better freeware access. Pre-compiled binaries are rareish, and downloading and installing gcc so you can use top (if it compiles) is just silly. Add to this my complaint about package management and you have a serious problem as far as I'm concerned.
      5) Stop being Microsofty about naming OS releases. I am tired of explaining to my boss that there were not 6 major upgrades to Solaris between 2.7 and 8. I am tired of explaining that the SunOS 3.5 we run downstairs is much, much older than Solaris 2.6. Bastards!

      (Boss, we need to upgrade from 2.6 to 8. - What, how do we know it will work! That's like upgrading WFW 3.11 to Win2000! The world will end! Can't we just upgrade to 3.5?? I hear we have that on one of our servers...)

      ~Jason

      • Re:This is great news (Score:3, Interesting)

        by antifun ( 648481 )

        There are darn few things which Sun is cost effective for anymore. Running a big DB, etc... But the word is Intel for file and print servers and smaller app servers as well. Choose a Linux box with commodity hardware and you could have that entry level blade for about $1,000. If you are worried about the reliability of commodity hardware, get a back up. You still saved half your money.

        Exactly right, and this is why I think they are doing themselves serious harm by still pretending like there is profit to be made in their vertical strategy. Linux hasn't hurt Sun that badly in the computer room, but it is eating its lunch in the network room and on the desktop. Who in their right mind would shell out twice or thrice the bucks for a Sun desktop box when they can get functional equivalence or better with a Linux/Intel one?

        Seems like I keep beating this horse...Sun is not going to be able to compete any more on the user end unless they join the commoditization parade. Period. They don't want to recognize this but they really need to. The no-alternative days that saw any corporation needing Unix run to one of the big vendors and forking over millions for end-to-end installations are long over. SGI has been down this path already; Sun won't be able to subsidize their desktop hardware with server revenue for much longer.

        You also mention another reason I hate Solaris -- the dearth of what have become common tools and features for an OS. Yes, I know that kickback from Veritas is nice, but volume management support is about six months away from becoming a throw-in. Oh yes, it makes perfect business sense to maintain an entire separate toolchain for things like 'ls' and 'grep'. Etc.

        And I really wish Sun would stop calling their shitty workstations "Blades", since that term has become accepted to mean something else entirely.

      • Re:This is great news (Score:2, Informative)

        by Cirvam ( 216911 )
        Ever check out sunfreeware.com [sunfreeware.com]? That kinda answers most of your packaging requests. As for CDE, couldn't you just use pkgrm to remove all the uneeded stuff (like the X-server, CDE, misc documentation, etc)?

        That shrinks your list down to 2 items if the above are new to you. Of course can't really fix the naming thing now, unless they decide to start over with the naming scheme.
        • Ummm, having freeware hosted by "some guy" with packages that are out of date compared to their Linux brethren is not my Idea of good freeware support. This is like saying that WindowsNT supports Shareware because of Download.com. Sunfreeware offers an important service to the community because Sun doesn't.

          Yes, Sun has recently been offering a CD with freeware, and I consider this to be like the NT resource kit. It is a marked improvement. But perl winds up in the "wrong" (hard to frikkin' find) place. etc., etc., etc....

          Their package system is still stone age. Yes, their patches are the quality you would expect from any big iron vendor, but the package management system is still arcane and tempremental. I manage one Debian system and 40+ Solaris systems, and apt-get never confuses, I don't struggle to remember syntax, and it's easy to find out what is on the system.

          Right.... Disliking CDE means I want to rip out the entire XServer. Thanks. I do remove CDE and run most of my boxes on OpenWindows, but it would be nice if they had a streamlined WM for production boxes.

          None of the above were new to me, just none of them are solutions I consider acceptible. Not for the big money we pay for the privelage of using Sun. Everbody trashes MSFT for not being able to make a stable OS with billions, why can't we jump on Sun for failing to make a usable OS with billions. I understand all about commercial Unices, but AIX does a much better job of being "Industrial Strength - No Fluff" while Sun hides behind a marketing logo and pretty puce CDE.

          The funny thing is that Sun thinks of themselves as a Microsoft competitor... Ummm, not since 1991. MSFT ate their lunch on the desktop, with Windows95 of all things (shame), and is now gloating over their last few remaining soldiers in the server room. What MS doesn't do Linux will.

          Case in point: MS releases .NET, to great fanfare and controversy, an OSS clone is slated for Linux, books are written, countless articles about what it is and what it isn't. Sun.ONE, Sun's "Really, we're a Microsoft competitor" offering, is ignored. Where is the Sun.ONE client for Gnome?? That same Gnome that will someday ship with Solaris....

          So MSFT goes from NT3.51 to .NET server and we get SOS... Same old Solaris. At least it reigns in the need to upgrade....

          ~Hammy

      • Re:This is great news (Score:3, Insightful)

        by isaac ( 2852 )
        We recently replaced the video cards, mice, and keyboards for 2 E450's, and the video card was an ATI rage 128 card ($295). We spent almost $1,000 outfitting our machines with peripherals. The next step up in video cards was $2,000.

        Sun loves customers like you! Those bloated prices are pure profit on top of an already high-margin product. I have to ask, though, why the heck are you attaching framebuffers, keyboards, and mice to E450s in the first place? Was there really something you needed (crappy, slow) local graphics for, instead of just using X across the network? I mean you already said:

        (Side note - Noone ever sees the desktop of our Sun boxes, noone cares, why not run a default TWM that consumes as little resources as possible.)

        So what gives? Why not just use a serial console when you need to touch the machine directly (rather than over the network)?

        -Isaac

      • Re:This is great news (Score:5, Informative)

        by Darren.Moffat ( 24713 ) on Tuesday February 11, 2003 @01:12AM (#5277144)
        1) The product formerly known as Disksuite but now much enhanced with many of the features that used to be used to compare with Veritas: Integrated as a core Solaris 9 feature (lvm).

        2) See last weeks news, Sun has already started shipping GNOME 2.x packages for Solaris 8 & 9.

        3) WebStart Wizards + SVR4 packaging is a lot more powerful than most people realise. Please don't confusing the power of the package system with a nice easy download thingy. Remeber also that Sun does real patches not just upgrade everything to the latest bits. Our enterprise level customers need this - minimal change.

        4) We ship a full CD worth of stuff including gcc and top already compiled and in SVR4 package form (gets installed into /opt/sfw by default).

        5) The reason for dropping the "2" from Solaris naming is that there are no plans for a Solaris 3.x line (that would be SunOS 6.x). That one is all down to marketing - I hated it when I first saw it but it actually makes a lot of sense.
      • "If you are worried about the reliability of commodity hardware, get a back up"

        This is not applicable in many situations. If you have 1TB of data it is going to be a PITA to recover that from tape.

        You need mirroring and if possible data replication in a different machine or machines (each one of which has the data mirrored) if possible in different locations.

        Backups must be your last resort once all the other preventive measures have failed.

        If your data is really important then you owe yourself to do more than rely on slow tapes (starting with good quality systems perhaps, those 2 or 3 thousend bucks that you "saved" may come to bite you later when you face downtime. There are not blanket solutions, sometimes commodity hardware will do, other times you must use other solutions).

    • I think Sun will continue to lose, both marketshare, overall sales, stock value, everything. They do a lot of neat stuff, but the one that pays the bills is getting hammered by cheap Intel/Linux solutions. There's less and less need for enterprise class servers these days as the cheap stuff gets more powerful, and that business will go to companies offering the best service -- probably IBM. Since IBM is best able to continue Sun's work on this front, IBM is a natural buyer to step in at the last minute to save Sun's ass. Not to mention that IBM is already as big a Java player as Sun itself, and could benefit from Sun's talent. How soon will this happen? I'd say give it a couple of years, maybe three...

  • From the article... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ChimChim ( 54048 )
    "Most of the industry's growth over the next few years is expected to come from servers using Intel chips and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system. These so-called Wintel systems are generally cheaper and offer a wider range of chips."

    A wider range of chips under Windows? They dropped the Alpha, so the only chips are Pentiums and Itaniums, right? I suppose you could argue that you have a lot more clones of Intel systems, plus options for Xeons, PIIIs, and such, but it's not really anything like the BSD or Linux systems' idea of "wider range of chips."

  • EDITORS, remove ad.doubleclick link in main story (Score:3, Insightful)

    by freuddot ( 162409 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @01:44PM (#5271756)
    Editors,
    this is unacceptable.

    Link in story :
    http://ad.doubleclick.net/click;h=v2|2f40|0|0|% 2a| v;5176750;0-0;0;7859018;9323-728|90;2305354|230362 5|1;;%3fhttp://www.sun.com/bignews

    And I'll even post with karma bonus, even though this is offtopic.

  • >>Welcome to Sun's first Web-based mega-launch

    Wow, they are selling *computers* on the *internet*, I guess that's proof that they are ahead of thier time. I shouldn't poke fun at that, but for me, when I hear that kind of marketing fluf as the first sentence in an article, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

  • Sun equipment... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Junta ( 36770 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @01:47PM (#5271786)
    Sun is really backed into a corner and this move I don't see as really fixing much....

    I have worked at places that use Sun equipment. All but one were using them for legacy apps as they phased them out. The other place used them for everything, but went under because they couldn't recoup the investment.

    Sun hardware is nice to work on, and you can do a lot to Sun equipment without interupting it. They are a pleasure to work with, but they are not worth the price premium they charge.

    Nice x86 boxes which can do most of the things a Sun can do in terms of uninterrupted operation during maintenance can be had for cheaper than Sun equipment. Even in the cases of downtime, a lot of places are finding that failover clusters of x86 boxes are more cost effective and reliable than Sun offerings. Also, planned downtime isn't *that* bad...

    Couple this with the rather lackluster performance of their offerings in the face of rapidly developing x86 processors, and you are seeing why Sun is in such financial trouble. In the 90s and earlier, Sun was kicking all kinds of ass and was truly worth it for the businesses that used them. A 10-year old piece of sun equipment still beat a brand new PC in about 95 and 96 (my personal experience), but now, a brand new Sun Workstation is nothing special...

    • Re:Sun equipment... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by hackstraw ( 262471 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @03:32PM (#5272722)
      a brand new Sun Workstation is nothing special...

      I really don't think that there servers are that much special either. When I saw the headline, I thought that Sun was going to announce some competative hardware (faster CPUs and higher memory bandwidth), but this was about blade servers (that you can get just about anywhere) and a 12 processor box (how many people need one of these?).

      I coadmin a Sun cluster (I think its like the biggest in the northern hemisphere), and admin an Alpha cluster. And although the hardware is excellent in terms of reliability and overall craftmanship, but they are too damn slow. At least for scientific computing. I've done some benchmarks on brand new 280s with the 900MHz processors (retail about 20k), and they perform as well or worse than an 800$ low end Dell (about 8 months old). Take a look at the Itanium2's performance. These guys are awsome. Memory bandwidth out the yazoo! 64bit addressing, nice machines. We're getting 3 of em soon :)

      I loved this line from the article: Sun's been criticized heavily for sticking to its own Sparc processors and Solaris operating system.

      Umm, so if they don't do this, then what do they do? Become an integrator or a reseller? One thing I will give Sun, is Solaris is pretty damn nice.

      I will give one thing to Sun's boxes/Solaris. They might not be fast, but then again they never really slow down. I've seen Sun boxes that are almost completely out of memory and have a load of like 10 or 20 (maybe higher, don't remember on a 1 cpu box), and they are completely usable! Compared to my dual Alpha's running Linux, if they are paging hard and the load is about 4-6 it can take a couple of minutes just to log into one of em.

      All in all I like Suns, but they look like they are setting themselves up to be an orphaned division of some other company.

    • Re:Sun equipment... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Usagi_yo ( 648836 )
      Yea, and the world is full of people and software capable enough to build and support x86 failover clusters that have 24/7 operation ... right.

      Oh, I guess not ... once you get past the technojocks who think networking 4 x86 systems with linux is clustering.

      The fact of the matter is, once you've hired the right people to do this alternative, then invested in the premium hardware (What? Not buying cheap clones for your companies critical apps?), then arrange for Software and software support ... guess what? You've just gone to 4 independants and paid more for what you could have got just by going to somebody like SUN for a one vendor solution.

      On top of that ... Where are your consultants going to be around long? Or are they just a traveling snake oil salesman?

      Linux is cool, no doubt. Intel platforms are inexpensive, no doubt. Linux programmers, Linux support and intel System engineering all combined together for building, deploying and maintaining mission critical apps is not. So the time you took and the money you spent and the money you are going to spend on support ... you'll find is just as expensive as going to a top notch vendor like Sun.

      As for Windows? Pftttt, Windows is a toy. Look how much effort Microsoft is putting into the home entertainment market. They see their future quite clearly.
      • Well, if a company really had the need, you can bet your ass they can get that support at a reasonable rate from Red Hat. The difficulty associated with complex clustering configurations is mostly in the software, and RedHat is dying to show their stuff. The hardware requires some consideration, but any decent vendor provides the hardware needed (Dell, IBM, HPaq). If you are buying Sun equipment, you are generally expected to have a proficient Solaris administrator on staff to take care of those babies. That Solaris administrator would cost about the same as an administrator with the capability of dealing with two vendors (hardware and software), and knowing how to glue things together.

        In the .com days, where competent administrators were gold, the value Sun added with their turn-key solutions and support were well worth the price. Now with pay rates no longer in the stratosphere for good administrators, the value is diminished...

    • Re:Sun equipment... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      1> you can do a lot to Sun equipment without interupting it.
      2> but they are not worth the price premium they charge.

      Unless you need #1. In which case #2 is wrong.

      3>Nice x86 boxes which can do most of the things a Sun can do in terms of uninterrupted operation
      3>during maintenance can be had for cheaper

      Unless you need the things they can't do. Then X86 isn't cheaper. Cheaper doesn't count if it can't do the job.

      4>Even in the cases of downtime, a lot of places are finding that failover clusters of x86 boxes
      4> are more cost effective and reliable

      Unless your application doesn't cluster, or is too expensive to cluster. Then X86 isn't cheaper. There are also applications / problems that will only run well on a large box. X86 doesn't do large well, although Opteron should change that in time.

      5>Also, planned downtime isn't *that* bad...

      A. Unless its $1,000,000/hour down time. Then it is bad.
      B. Unless you are trying to get a product to market to beat the compeition. Then it is bad.
      C. Unless dozens, hundreds, or thousands rely upon the provided service. Then it is bad.

      5>Couple this with the rather lackluster performance of their offerings in the face of rapidly developing x86 processors,

      If the application runs there. If X86 can handle the load (oooh, sorry, its a 4.00001Gb process). If X86 benchmarks OK in the application. (Some actually suck compared to others.) If the X86 operating system supports the job type/ size/ requirements. (Benchmarking & prototyping should be your friends. They have to be if you want to avoid expensive "white elephants." I have no Sun white elephants, I do have a big Dell thats now a sort of joke. "Sill no use for it?")

      6>and you are seeing why Sun is in such financial trouble. .com := .boom

      7>In the 90s and earlier, Sun was kicking all kinds of ass and was truly worth it for the businesses that used them.

      In may respects, little has changed. Sun's CPUs weren't the fastest then, they aren't the fastest now. Sun was innovative then (NFS, NIS, etc. etc.), they are innovative now (Java, N1, Sungrid, Solaris N..N+!). Economies go through boom/bust cycles. I expect that the economy will improve, and so will Sun's position.

      8>A 10-year old piece of sun equipment still beat a brand new PC in about 95

      I remember PC magazine panning the new SparcLX (Classic?) in a Unix shootoff about that time (Maybe a couple of years earlier). Sun was expensive then, they are expensive now. But for some things, its worth every penny.

      Some things are only free if your time has no value. A cheap box that can't do the job isn't a good value.

  • Sun Blades are Awesome (Score:5, Funny)

    by LordYUK ( 552359 ) <jeffwright821@noSPAm.gmail.com> on Monday February 10, 2003 @01:51PM (#5271818)
    I had a level 11 fighter with a Sun Blade once...

    nothing like twirling the sword around yer head to blind/stun/destroy undead with Sun Rays...

    Sheesh, how is this "news that matters"? Any second rate geek worth his 6 siders knows about Sun Blades...

  • heh (Score:3, Funny)

    by DarkHelmet ( 120004 ) <mark&seventhcycle,net> on Monday February 10, 2003 @01:57PM (#5271866) Homepage
    I always find the name Blade servers amusing considering typically How the admins who run these systems [detonate.net] commonly appear.

    Of course, no one on THIS site appreciates my sense of humor.

  • Issue is Channel (Score:2, Interesting)

    by salesgeek ( 263995 )
    I've always hated the Sun channel - it is considerably more difficult to buy and sell Sun that PC gear. I wonder where Sun would be if they had a really good open channel...

  • Question (Score:4, Interesting)

    by IWantMoreSpamPlease ( 571972 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @02:07PM (#5271943) Homepage Journal
    I would love to have a Sun box, and each new offering from Sun looks better and better.

    But they continue to shrink in marketshare, and the non-hardware related news items coming from Sun make them look, well, stupid.

    Are the engineers and PHBs even talking to each other any more?

  • Important, actually ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by theProf ( 146375 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @02:17PM (#5272035)
    Actually, this is quite important.

    I do not think Sun is going away. They build good
    kit. It lasts, its reliable and its not power hungry. Solaris has been around a long time. Its stable, scales extremely well and is well understood. Its is also very network aware. It does cache filesystems for instance.

    The N1 idea is a pearl. Admittedly they have a way to go in implementation but you can see the point where they completely virtualise storage and hardware. If you read the docs for the blade stuff (computer on a card with standard connectors) you see that they are already offering automatic drop out & replacement from pool of failed gear. That is really very impressive. And they will do Linux. You try and do this at home ...

    PS

    For some reason these forums now seem to attract a huge amount of vacuous posts. No reasoning, just kneejerk "X company are dead cos they dont do linux/wintel".

    A very large base of the open source software you all now use was created on Sun gear. If SMCC had not survived 12 years ago I really doubt there would be a Linux. Show some perspective.
  • is a some hip young guy to do TV ads.

    Dude, your're getting a Sun???

  • The real problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) <akaimbatman@gmaYEATSil.com minus poet> on Monday February 10, 2003 @02:57PM (#5272408) Homepage Journal
    Personally, I love Sun hardware. Intel hardware still can't break the 4 gig barrier and Itanium isn't looking promising. Plus, Solaris gracefully handles just about any emergency situation you can throw at it. Too many threads? I hadn't noticed. Too much traffic through the network card? Huh, hasn't seemed too bad. Compare that to Windows were suddenly terminal services die, processes get locked in place, and things just generally spin out of control. The ONLY problem I have with Sun right now is their propensity for undercutting you on memory. Every time I try to configure a machine, it comes with about half the memory a machine its size should have. So I try adding it, and BAM! the machine is suddenly 10x more expensive. If Sun would just stop skimping on the memory and fill these boxes out, the Sparc platform would start to look *way* more attractive. I mean, how are you supposed to get the message across that your machines are powerful if they have half the memory of an Intel machine?
    • Every time I try to configure a machine, it comes with about half the memory a machine its size should have. So I try adding it, and BAM! the machine is suddenly 10x more expensive.

      Two words: third-party memory. As always, cost vs. risk, but the risk is generally very low as long as you don't get bottom-of-the-barrel RAM.
      • Yes, you can always get extra third party memory, but how does that help customers perceive Sun better? Quick Answer: It doesn't. The plain and simple fact is that off the shelf Sun hardware (the stuff that comes in a shiny plastic case that you should never, ever have to do anything more than plug in) is heavily underpowered for what it does. And the worst part of it is that filling out the boxes with some serious memory shouldn't affect Sun's bottom line all that much. That is, unless a Sun Engineer is hanging around somewhere and can tell me the critical point I'm missing.
  • ..is that 64 bit desktops are really on their way now. So Sun has to pre-emptively promote its hardware in the areas where 64bit personal computers could be effectively deployed in the data center. IBM's power4/5, AMD and Intel's 64 bit offerings are going to blow Sun off the map and they know it. This will enable robust RAM addressing space that's good enouguh for enterprise-level servers. When 64bit chips start arriving in quantity (late 03 early 04) we can all kiss Sun's licensing and pricey hardware goodbye.
  • Sun's CPU offering is simply not competitive. On commercial workloads it gets apprxomiately half the performance of its peers. This is for two reasons: 1) the design is bad, leading to lower performance at a given clock speed, and 2) the manufacturing process is very old, leading to low clock speeds. (double whammy).

    It would be very difficult for Sun to sell competitive boxes when their CPUs are half-speed. How are they going to sell an 8-way box for the same price as a 4-way commodity Xeon 3GHz?

    What Sun has to do is: GET THE HELL OUT of making CPUs. It costs them tons of money, and they can't do it well, and the failure is crippling them. Everyone likes Solaris; everyone likes Sun's reliability features; everyone HATES Sparc's performance.

    My advice to Sun? PARTNER WITH FUJITSU!! Fujitsu currently makes a Sparc chip that's almost twice the speed of Sun's! Sun should just drop their own CPU development and buy Sparc CPUs from Fujitsu. This would save Sun the $400M they currently spend on CPU development, drastically lowering their prices, and would double their performance. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
    • This is not true. The top end commercial systems suppliers all run within 90% of each other when comparing apples to apples. 50% less is a notion you pulled out of the sky.

      What is true. Sun is not at the bleeding edge of processor development -- a place primarly for scientific computing. They are however at the leading edge, along with many others, and because of that they produce very stable, very productive, very scalable commercial application servers.

      Oh, and please do have a visit to Sparc Consortium [sparc.com] and check out the many other who contribute to sparc development.

  • Sun: Apple 2? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by qa'lth ( 216840 ) on Monday February 10, 2003 @05:36PM (#5273952)
    Here's an interesting thought I've been having for the last 20 minutes:

    Why doesn't Sun pull something like Apple did? Make a high-end workstation, running Solaris with some much, much better UI over top of it - something akin to Aqua.. Could call it Solarix, heh, or Solaris X or something. Possibly dump X11 in favour of a proprietary display engine, similar to Apple/QNX/NeXT/etc, but keep X11 compatibility availble in the system. Start getting stuff like Photoshop and the big 3d apps, Maya, Lightwave, Softimage|XSI, ported over. It'd probably take a serious expenditure of capital to bribe the companies into supporting the OS/architecture.. but it could be done. The SPARC processor would likely stay, of course, but they'd have to get better 3rd-party video hardware support going to really get this to play nicely. DDR memory would be necessary, too, maybe even AGP graphics. Almost a complete reworking of existing SPARC motherboards, I'd think.

    Then you get high-end SPARC servers, and midrange, class workstations equivalent to Apple's best, and, if they design the OS properly, usable by new users as easily as OS X is now.
    Pipe dream, maybe. Could be worthwhile for Sun to look in to this sort of thing.

    What do you guys think?

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