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- maverick97008, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16Low power, open source solaris, support for windows and very reasonable costs. They have very appealing servers now.
- Blazeix, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10...or has the Sun come out from behind the clouds?
- jamessavik, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10I respect Sun a lot. They've been a powerhouse in the UNIX community for a long time. There was a time when a Sun workstation on your desk was a status symbol.
One of the things I've always liked about Sun is that they always seem to find a way innovate and stay within industry standards (without writing their own like another tech giant that shall remain nameless [and shameless]). - vanadaar, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10maverick is right, Sun is making huge strides to reduce overhead costs. Kale, Sun uses AMD chips in their x86 lines. Those lines along with the niagara chips which have some really neat power saving technologies. My shop has everything from Blade 100's all the way up to an f25k and f20k. Zones also make life simple, One high availability machine can run many low usage servers. And I have to say, Thumper is awesome. 24 TB in a 4U space.
Machines: http://www.sun.com/products/index.html
Zones: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-1592/6mhahuoo3?a=view
Thumper: http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4500/
Watch out for Thumper. It's a whopper. I can't wait til we have one. - ZachPruckowski, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9One quarter does not a trend make. That said, I'm glad Sun's sticking around. Between Java, OpenOffice, and OpenSolaris, the community would lose a lot if they went bust.
- bollingj, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7I have been using Sun boxes for better than 12 years now. Now that they’re Open Source and their hardware is reasonably priced; it makes them a player in the end user market. Their Ultra series workstations are very affordable and well built; I just bought a new one. Their servers are nice also; I have an 8-processor Enterprise box and love it. But don’t take my word on it…. Try one
- avocade, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Sun is starting to innovate very fast. They're becoming the Apple of the Engineering side of things. Just look at the ZFS file system (***** that's cool, Apple take notice and implement in 10.5!) and their new high-performance-per-watt servers. You even get a tax-deduction in California if you buy one of those, since it fits in their anti-global-warming strategy.
- finalmillenium, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Actually performance per watt, the AMD Opteron won. But it was close enough for margin of error to even it out. The guy who did the review stated that he would keep the AMDs because of heat issues. Then again Sun does sell AMD based servers now.
- suckafree, on 10/12/2007, -5/+9Is this more about a Sun resurgence or the downfall of Dell? Maybe a little of both?
- seti, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Sun's AMD Servers have an awesome architecture and heat management, and they bet on AMD 64 bits processors three years ago so they have that advantage to rest.
In addition, as said above Niagara servers T1000 & T2000 are unique in their class and provides one of the best (if not the best) price/performance ratios out there.
They are moving their Niagara technology to their high end servers and at our shop we are looking forward for them.
@vanadaar
And yes, Thumper rocks!!! Did you check on the New Blades and the 16 cores Opteron box? - ChrisGilliard, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5@axle
The niagara chip uses less than 70 watts and has 8 cores (32 threads of execution).Each core runs at 1 gHz+. I don't have comparisons to AMD in front of me, but that gives you an idea how power efficient these systems are. You can also get a big rebate from PG&E for the energy savings if you are located in California (on the order of $1000) for buying Niagra based server. - saleens281, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3if you RTFA, it's about Sun's rise. Notice HP/Dell/IBM all had losses, Sun was the only one to gain market share.
Personally I have a feeling a big portion of this is customers who left them for cheaper x86 systems. Sun has always had outstanding service, and always has made great products. When they don't have the tools to get the job done though, you have to look elsewhere. I'm sure there's plenty of shops out there excited they can finally standardize on one vendor instead of having to buy the big iron Sparc from Sun, and then go elsewhere for x86. - yummybbq, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I tend to agree, but the momentum is nice to see. Here is the Motley Fool's perspective (which I always value because they seem pretty objective). http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2006/mft06082312.htm?ref=foolwatch They seem to point out that the real winner/star here is AMD and Opteron chips. They also point out that "Nevertheless, Sun still isn't making money and isn't expected to record a profitable year before June of 2008. That's two years -- an eternity in the tech business..." Gulp. I am gulping because I own Sun stock...Here's hoping one quarter *does* make a trend :)
- paulmdx, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4"Ever since Dell agreed to bundle Google crapware on their systems, Dell has gone downhill."
To be fair, none of our Dell rackmount servers came with "Google crapware". :-) - robb.monn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3the performance per watt comparison that was dugg earlier was for the Sun running Ubuntu linux. When running Solaris the performance per watt for several industry standard benchmarks is better, the T1000 and T2000s have the best in many benchmarks by a big-ass margin.
- uidzero, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Yup. When Sun came out with their sub $1000 x86 servers I was going to buy one. I still may when I move to a co lo. Full redundancy in the hardware. Tons of expandability and I'd be running linux on it anyway. I think I priced it at $850. Quite a deal :)
- tmolini, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6seems the tide has turned....
- technique, on 10/12/2007, -6/+8If Dell is going down, all will be better for everybody.
- lwatcdr, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4IBM has the Power line, the Opteron line.
HP has the Opteron line and the Itanium line.
Sun has the Opteron line, UltraSparc, and Sparc Niagara.
Dell is only the Intel X86 line. Yea someday they will have the AMD Opteron but they are still coming soon at Dell.
X86 servers are a commodity. Everybody has them. AMD Opteron servers are also a commodity and everybody but Dell offers them.
The other members of the big four offer big iron solutions that go past what Dell can offer.
What does Dell offer that IBM, HP, and Sun do not? Service? HP, IBM, and Sun have as much or more experience with Enterprise level service as Dell does.
Cost? Well maybe but we are talking servers here. Competing on price alone means lower profits per sale.
Dell offers fewer choices than the other vendors. No wonder there sales are going down. - Kale, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4I know they use AMD, I was referring to the performance/watt of their AMD vs. their 8-core chip (niagra?) in their systems. I remember performance being close enough to not be statistically different.
- BrainInAJar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"I just wish that they would port it to linux world too"
Why should they? For one, it'd be engineering costs that they would see no benifit for, and for two, it'd be helping out the competition.
Not to mention that sun's really helpful to other companies that agree to their licensing terms (they helped the FreeBSD crew & apple out porting ZFS & dtrace, mcnealy's come out and said that if apple ever wants the solaris kernel for OSX, Sun'll foot the development bill)...
GPL is viral, and sun doesn't want to be forced to GPL all their code (they prefer CDDL, an MIT license) - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I know the entire point of your post was to spam your domain, but damn that was dumb.
Wow! A whole 2 million pages served in an entire year! Why, that's 0.06 pages per second -- or 3.8 pages per minute! It's so amazing that a piece of hardware can handle such a load! - saleens281, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2They were only even because it was on a linux platform. Try it with solaris10 and some coolthreads optimized code:
http://cooltools.sunsource.net/coolstack/index.html
VERY big difference ;) - axle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@ChrisGilliard
I've done some testing here on a T2000 vs a Solaris opteron (2.5ghz dual core) machine. The test I ran involves many (30+) independent threads and is CPU bound (integer math). The AMD machine was about 5-10% faster in my test. I believe the latest dual-core AMD chips use about 90 watts. Benchmarks can be skewed one way or another, so that's why I said "probably comparable" in terms of performance per watt. Based on my testing, that's the case. I'm not trying to knock the Niagara here. I think it's a fine chip. - yaosio, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It's easy to grow in market share when each sever costs 10,000% more than your competiters. Just sell one and you've won.
- inimeg156, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You left a major one out - OpenSPARC.
- opus3, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The ZFS file system is way cool... , But I never liked admintool
- BrainInAJar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"It's so amazing that a piece of hardware can handle such a load!"
*shrug* it wouldn't be terrible performance for a colour printer.. not the best, but reasonable - axle, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3Sun uses AMD chips in many of their servers, so yes, the performance/watt is the same as AMD. They also introduced the niagara (aka T1 chip), which may be what you're thinking of. I'm not sure how it compares in terms of performance/watt. I think they are probably comparable.
- inimeg156, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I think that SUN has a great set of technology products coupled with commitment towards society.
Spelled by the conscious efforts to come up with green servers, a long existing drive to keep pushing new technologies into opensource.... i feel these people are contributing to society in a good way. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2I'm sorry but Sun had nowhere to go but up.
- Athens101, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2Three years ago we moved Athens101.com from a white box to a U10. 2,000,000 pages later it has not blinked!
- Kale, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2While they are low power, isn't the performance/watt the same as AMD? I was thinking there was a previous digg that compared the two chips.
- Escamillo, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2Seems like its more evidence of Dell's decline rather than Sun's resurgence.
Ever since Dell agreed to bundle Google crapware on their systems, Dell has gone downhill.
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