Submitted by Engadget got the chance to sit down with Jonathan Schwartz, the pony-tailed CEO of Sun Microsystems. Being the gadget blog that they are, Engadget asked Schwartz about the long-missing JavaFX Mobile platform Sun has promised, Java on the iPhone, and competing with Microsoft as an open source vendor.
Jonathan Schwartz, the one quarter (Asian) Indian, one quarter Welsh (on his mother’s side), one quarter Hungarian, and one quarter Russian (on his father’s side) CEO of Sun, gained his position as CEO in 2006, replacing Scot McNealy. Schwarz was one of the first (and probably, still the only) high-profile technology CEO who blogs fairly regularly, an activity promoted within the company.
Engagdet believes that Sun is more into the ‘democratisation’ of mobile platforms, while the industry is actually moving towards more controlled, ‘end-to-end user experience’ platforms, such as the iPhone. Schwartz explained:
By definition free is a more accessible price than six hundred dollars. A beautiful six hundred dollar phone will almost by definition ship in lower volume than a slightly uglier but functional text phone for no dollars. I think if you look at the proliferation of gadgets in the world, the proliferation of devices, the world is filled with way way more simple phones than they are WiFi enabled devices that allow you to look at maps.
However, Schwartz stated that Sun is still working hard on porting Java to the iPhone. There are no technical roadblocks, but he did add that Apple’s SDK licensing agreement could cause problems. “But again, you know, it’s a big market, there’s lots of opportunity, so we’ll see.”
When asked if Sun would join one of the 3853 Linux mobile phone consortiums, Schwartz replied, “You know, consortiums don’t produce phones.” Take that.
… they couldn’t ask him about the $34 million loss and the 2500 jobs to be axed.
The US market from one side, the Linux and Google from other side makes Sun to lose a lot of it’s strength. The Core2 CPU from Intel makes Sparc CPU not so attractive, and AMD based solutions are lower on performance that equivalent Xeon CPUs. So most software goes on outsourcing and opensourcing as Sun and Novel does.
Swartz anyway has a lot of achievements from Sun like promoting Java, make it opensource, promoting Netbeans and make Eclipse project to attach to Netbeans foundation. Mostly, looking over the windows, you can see the sun, in freedom.
AMD still beats Intel in the PPC market segment. But thats going to disapear soon when Intel releases chips with Quickpath.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080430-ps3s-cell-cpu-tops-hi…
Sun has an excellent offering in a number of areas. For webservers, databases and file servers the T1000, and T2000 are ahead of anything else especially in terms of performance per Watt but in general any application where you need a lot of threads. With AMD they have a competitive HPC offering.
Such metrics are pretty meaningless overall. All CPU makers now, including AMD and Intel, are talking about putting more cores on a chip and doing more in terms of parallel applications and threading (corner cases for performance improvements really) when people really want to do a task twice the size in half the time and get more through – and the x86-64 processors will still always cream SPARC there. In the seven years since I seriously looked at Linux/x86 and Solaris/SPARC head-to-head, 4370 pystones/sec on an UltraSPARC versus 17,543 pystones/sec on a 1.4GHz Athlon was a pretty big no brainer, and that’s why lots of academic institutions in particular jumped off. I don’t see that the situation has improved.
Backing yourself into the ‘performance per watt’ bracket is a very tight and expensive niche:
http://www.imorphous.com/2006/08/17/evaluating-suns-sun-fire-t1000-…
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2006/08/15/sun-fire-coolthreads-t1000-…
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2006/08/15/sun-fire-coolthreads-t1000-…
Punchline:
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2006/08/15/sun-fire-coolthreads-t1000-…
It’s not even close. Some of the comments are the funniest thing about it.
Even worse, all of the benchmarks that Sun throws around for these things themselves require some fairly specific configuring of certain software on Solaris, and recompiling in Forte or Sun Compiler Studio (whatever it’s called now) as Sun reps have been telling you for years whenever a gcc query has popped up. Quite frankly, a lot of people decided that it all wasn’t worth the hassle years ago.
I don’t know why Sun continues to sell SPARC in this market segment, and they’ve been getting burnt for some time now. It gets eaten by any x86-64 machine in terms of performance, which Sun sell anyway, it doesn’t rake in any real energy savings versus the competition and it’s significantly more expensive.
Edited 2008-05-04 15:17 UTC
In my experience Sun gear beats x86 on I/O across the backplane, not on raw processing power anymore. Also Sun’s C compiler was (still is?) a factor of two faster than gcc on the same hardware (e450 with four Sparc), due to the very highly optimised math libraries Sun had made. For scientific work the Sun gear was extremely performant (although still far too expensive). Sun gear was also great as it failed very rarely compared to generic x86 stuff – which means something if you need reliability and don’t have the room to do a Google (deploy large numbers of x86 boxen).
Your ignorance is astounding.
Lets just look at raw performance here, both systems in the following configuration cost almost the same:
HP ProLiant DL580 G5
Intel Xeon X7350 Processor 2933MHz
16 cores, 4 chips, 4 cores/chip
SPECweb2005 = 40046
SPECweb2005_Banking = 71104
SPECweb2005_Ecommerce = 55552
SPECweb2005_Support = 36032
http://www.spec.org/web2005/results/res2007q4/web2005-20071203-0010…
Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220
Sun UltraSPARC T2 1400Mhz
8 cores, 1 chip, 8 cores/chip (8 threads/core)
SPECweb2005 = 41847
SPECweb2005_Banking = 70000
SPECweb2005_Ecommerce = 58000
SPECweb2005_Support = 40000
http://www.spec.org/web2005/results/res2008q2/web2005-20080408-0010…
Oh look! a single 8 core 1.4 GHz SPARC system is better than a 16 core 2.9 GHz Xeon System in raw performance.
In performance per watt the Xeon box will look like a joke. Each of the Xeons in that box take 130 Ws so 4×130 is 520 Watts for the cpus alone. The UltraSPARC on the other hand consumes 95 watts normal max 123 Watts.
Why does an Intel based system need 5x the power and 4x the cpus to produce worse results than a single UltraSPARC chip?
Doesn’t look like your ignorant statement ” the x86-64 processors will still always cream SPARC there.”
BTW Academic institutions are back. http://hpcvl.org/hardware/victoria-falls.html
“1. What is the cluster?
We are installing a new compute cluster that is based on Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 Servers. At the start, about half of these servers are available, one login node called vflogin0 and the compute nodes named vf0001…. We will add the other nodes as testing and configuration work is completed, for a total of 78.
Each of these nodes includes two 1.2 Ghz UltraSparc T2+ chips. Each of these chips has 8 compute cores, and each core is capable of Chip Multi Threading with 8 hardware threads. This means that each of the nodes is capable of working simultaneously on up to 128 threads. Once fully installed, the cluster, called “Victoria Falls” will be able to process almost 10,000 threads.”
Edited 2008-05-05 00:50 UTC
As a casual bystander, I can’t help but notice that while you were careful to point out a metric of raw performance and performance per watt, you carefully avoided talking about performance per dollar.
Edited the previous comment:
But here are the costs.
The Sun box costs $39K.
The HP box About $32K running RHEL and HP virtualization Citrix Xen.
VMware ESX is $13K more.
Edited 2008-05-05 01:12 UTC
Contrary to the current hype, all that extra (and expensive) software you gratuitously added to an otherwise economical machine is generally unnecessary. I configured it with just the RHEL 5 and it came to $19,000.
Taking your word on the Sun box:
$39000 – $19000 = $20000
So the HP performs similarly at less than half the price of the Sun. And at full tilt, and 10 cents per kilowatt hour, it works out to a $375 per year difference in electric cost.
So you’d come out ahead with the Sun box after only a little over 53 years of continuous operation.
Edit: FYI, after my initial post, I found a pretty serious error in my figures and have reposted with the correct numbers within the allowed edit period.
Edited 2008-05-05 01:36 UTC
That’s just wrong!
What was the hardware config? You can’t take the base single socket system and claim it is economical. Go look at the specweb2005 link where the numbers came from and configure a similar system.
Let’s compare the base systems for both:
The base proliant has a energy efficient 1.6GHz chip. The cheapest Sun box will blow it out of the water.
Base HP Proliant with 4GB memory and 2x 146GB sas drives. RHEL 9×5 support and the cheapest Virtualization ($299)
System price $10,622.00
Sun T5220 Base config
Quad-Core UltraSPARC T2, 1.2 GHz, 32 Threads
4 GB (4 x 1 GB DIMMs)
292 GB (2 x 146 GB) 10000 rpm SAS Disks
$ 10,995.00
Now let’s compare the systems that gave the best numbers on Specweb2005:
Taking base and adding 4 X7350 quad core Xeons brings the system price to:
System price $18,544.001
Adding 64GB memory ( same as the Sun Config and the config in the Benchmark for the proliant)
System price $25,167.00
Add two disks 146GB SAS ( same as Sun config)
System price $25,825.0
Adding software ( OS and Virtualization that comes as standard on the Sun box)
Just RHEL $2499
XenServer with 1 years supprt $4049
System price $32,373.0
The bottom line at roughly the same cost of acquisition the Sun boxes perform better and at a lower power envelope.
Edited 2008-05-05 01:43 UTC
No. Adding the extra memory and drive, which I was not including before, comes to $25,000. RHEL5 comes with Xen. That was the whole point of it being so late. You keep wanting to stack on useless and expensive software.
$39,000 is 56% more than $25,000. That is not “roughly the same cost”. Why don’t you send me $39,000 and then I’ll send you back $25,000 and we’ll call it even. OK?
For that matter, even using your figure, I’d agree to the exchange if I had to send back $32,000. I could use a quick $7,000.
BTW, you seem to have some emotional investment in this. People don’t usually throw around terms like “vile ignorance” regarding issues which they are viewing objectively. I don’t really care whether Sun or HP “wins” this contest. But the evidence is simply not on your side, even using your own figures.
Edited 2008-05-05 02:13 UTC
Also RHEL 5 only supports 2 processors. You need RHEL Advanced Platform (more $$$). RedHat’s product matrix is clear about this.
What? Configuring a box similar to the Sun boxes makes the HP proliant 32K. End of story. Your nitpicking isn’t going to change that.
I wouldn’t because I am not as short sighted as you are. Power and cooling costs alone would handily eat that margin over the life time of the system (typically 5 years) especially in a data center where there are hundreds of such systems in operation.
All versions of RHEL support 16 cores just fine. HP gives you a choice of a RH support contract or not.
No, it comes to $25,000 and a 56% difference in price is hardly nitpicking.
Surely you can handle simple arithmetic?
Work it out, figuring that it takes about 1 kwh of electricity to pump 3kwh of heat. It works out to about 500 per year difference in electrical costs. Even using your inflated figures for the HP, that’s 14 years assuming all cores are running full tilt the whole time. 28 years using my more accurate figure.
I ask again. Why are you so desperate to prove that that the Sun is not more expensive, even when your own skewed figures show it to be?
I mean, if it is, great; I don’t really care. I’m mainly curious what has you in such a tizzy.
You can’t contort the facts to make your point. This is getting ridiculous.
The cost for the Sun machine includes 1 year support. You have to price that in when doing a comparison for TCO. Period.
Wrong.
It appears you can’t. Where is the extra 425-407 watts of power the thing consumes gone?? I clearly said Power and Cooling. That is just the cpu alone. Obviously the HP box needs more power hungry fans to pull all that heat out of the box than the Sun box.
Here is a study by HP you might want to factor the info here into any future calucluations:
http://www.electronics-cooling.com/articles/2007/feb/a3/
“Using equation (1) for a 1U server (which, when fully configured, costs about $4,000 and consumes about 500 W) and a PUE of 2.0 results in a cost of energy of $2,628. This is almost as much as the server itself, but the reality is that in many cases the cost is much higher. In Japan, energy costs are twice as much, so this number would be double. To make matters worse, in data centers where the cooling design is poor (PUE = 3.0, for example), the cost of energy would be 50% higher.”
Assuming a PUE of 2.0 or 3.0 for example. Which fits very closely to the example above.
You are looking at close to roughly $2100 -$3200/yr more for the proliant which is a far cry out of the $500 your faulty arithmetic yielded.
So let’s see. The true cost using your data ( ignoring virtulization) is 10,500 or 16000 over 5 years.
It will cost that much more to run the HP box over 5 years. That is assuming only the extra power consumption of the cpu. If the HP systems power consumption as measured from the system perspective is worse than the Sun box by more that 407-425Ws the costs don’t look too good in favor of the HP box even using the inaccurate $25000 cost of acquisition.
“Unfortunately, the energy usage is not the only cost driver that scales with power. In 2005, fundamental research [6] was published showing that the infrastructure cost is a big portion of the TCO and quantified the real cost drivers in the data center, which included the amortized cost of the power and cooling infrastructure.
……..<ellided>……..
However, that discussion is beyond the scope of this paper. Again, looking at the 500 watts of power consumed by the 1U server and using equation (2) and ignoring the IT space the server occupies, the cost of infrastructure to support that server would be enormous at $11,000. The reality is that this cost would be amortized over 10 to 15 years so real annual cost of the infrastructure is $1,100 per year.”
So add anther $900 for the cost of the extra 407-425 watts.
That’s another $15,000 – $20,500 over 5 years.
So all else being equal the extra power the Xeon chips consume increase the TCO of the proliant to
$40,000-$45,500 Using your inaccurate $25000 number and $47000-$52,5000 using $32K
All this is assuming that energy costs and inflation in the next 5 years will remain constant or decline. Hmmm, I wonder where energy costs and inflation are headed???? Starts to look even worse for the HP box doesn’t it?
Think long term. Your responses have been blithely short term which tells me you don’t really know what running a data center entails.
Why are you in such a tizzy to prove the Sun solution isn’t cheaper. You really haven’t shown me accurate data.
Your approach so far has been:
Wait if i have less cpus and no disks or enough memory the HP box is cheaper.
Wait if I have the cheapest unsupported OS the HP box is cheaper.
If I randomly take some number as a cost of cooling and power costs I can prove the HP is cheaper.
Edited 2008-05-05 03:32 UTC
It’s figured in. I assumed that you were smart enough to figure out that the cooling cost is in addition to the original heat generated:
520W – 123W = 397W = 0.397kw
0.397kw * 24hr/day * 365 days/year = 3478 kwh/year
At $0.10 per kw, that works out to about $350 per year. Add another 33% for cooling and that makes about $466/year savings. That represents a couple thousand over the 5 years you set as the useful life of the server. A fraction of what you need to “handily” make up for the exorbitant price of the Sun box. Of course, if that money had been invested elsewhere, accruing, say, 10% per year instead of being tied up in an overpriced server it would have made $8500 over that 5 year period instead of a couple of thousand.
If you would like to waste more time in a futile attempt to prove… whatever it is you are trying to prove, be my guest. It’s your time to waste.
To be honest, I was really just curious to see if you would really spend all night trying to save a lost cause that really doesn’t make any difference in the grand scope of things… except, I suppose, to you.
Don’t expect Sun to recruit you for their sales force anytime soon, though.
Edited 2008-05-05 03:53 UTC
No I am not willing to anymore.
It appears now one cares to discuss with any cognizance anymore.
Read my previous post in detail, understand it before you ludicrously make up numbers.
I used my calculations using industry standard research done by HP. Using those real and accurate numbers for the extra power the HP boxes is exorbitantly overpriced. End of story. Point is made.
It occurs to me that I have focused on one tree and momentarily forgotten about the forest. I would like to correct that because I feel that this is an important point that should not be allowed to fall through the cracks.
We have been arguing about the performance per kw in purely monetary terms: this month’s electric bill. While it is true that this is what most businesses would be interested in, we should not forget that there are many other important reasons that a more energy efficient server is desirable.
Dependence upon foreign sources of fuel is something about which many of us are concerned. Conservation of remaining fuel reserves is also something which should be of concern. And whether one believes in global warming as a threat or not, few would take the position that burning fossil fuels is not damaging to the environment for reasons which go beyond the effects of greenhouse gasses.
For all of those reasons, the electric bill is only a small part of the actual cost of a less efficient server. In the long term, these are reasons which should be significant to the businesses in question. But even if they are not, we are all in this together. The next door neighbor who drives a needlessly inefficient SUV affects us all. Likewise, the business that uses less efficient servers affects us all.
I seem to have developed a bit of tunnel-vision earlier in this thread, which the above should rectify.
Edited 2008-05-06 18:16 UTC
Thanks for that well written post. I develop tunnel vision all the time in heated debates. Hey we are only human after all.
I forgot to mention that the Sun T5220 is a 2U server and the HP is a 4U box so space and power and the environmental impact call for more efficient servers. If you want more power in the same 2U package Sun has a 2way T2 based server which still consumes less power than the HP box. But HP has nothing more powerful and Sun sells the same Xeon based config.
I think the computer industry is moving in a direction to improve efficiency per watt. intel is movie towards multi-core chips soon and hope fully that will make server more power efficient in the future.
Edited 2008-05-06 20:13 UTC
I do have an emotional investment. The Anti-Sun troll sedgnum for the past 2 years has been posting idiotic arguments without any real data to back his claims. Time and time again he posts wildly untrue statements and never backs it up even when asked for data. For example, his claim that Sun x86 systems make up for 3/4 of all systems it sells and SPARC only makes for 1/4 of the revenue and thus is dead weight. I have asked for data to back it up. Let’s hope he will oblige.
Evidence is clearly on my side. To match the perfomance a single Sun T5220 system an equivalent HP proliant Xeon box is niether economical or power efficient. So the TCO over the life span of the system is in favor of Sun.
I really hope all Sun customers have your kind of faith. Really. I do.
Repeating and regurgitating Sun’s own benchmarks, verbatim, counts for very little.
On raw performance? Four Xeons versus one SPARC, all at twice the clock speed (not that that counts for much as a comparison)? Errr, no. But you keep telling yourself that. One SPARC would never keep up with one Xeon in a month of Sundays, and the sorts of target workloads that Sun seems to be using would have to be so parallel and so concurrent as to be totally unrealistic. Not everything is or can be, and even in the article I linked to the UltraSPARC couldn’t even outperform the Opteron on that.
I’m sure Sun can find lots of other completely arbitrary, moving target units of measure such as ‘performance per watt’ to make SPARC look better. Whether that is really enough, we’ll have to see. Something tells me that Sun hasn’t learnt from what happened after the dot com boom.
Right on cue. Speaking of arbitrary units of measure…… You can’t just tot things up on Sun’s power calculator on their web site and expect that to answer a real world question.
It doesn’t. It would help if you actually looked at what the results tell you, and it would also help if you actually knew what the power consumption cost of a Xeon was. You balance that versus the raw performance, and you could halve the CPUs to two and halve the performance of a Xeon to cut power right back (a more realistic test) and its raw performance would still be better.
What people are looking at is whether it is worth spending the money to get any future power savings, versus having the raw performance per cycle. Nobody cares about Sun’s theoretical performance per watt. Fact is, compared to an Opteron box, the guy worked out that his UltraSPARC would have to be at least twice as power efficient to feel the effect of cost savings over a period of several years for Coolthreads to be worth it. Sorry, but that scenario doesn’t add up.
Hate to break it to you, but the raw performance of SPARC has lagged behind x86 for a very, very long time.
I’d laugh if that wasn’t so sad. Why do you think they left in the first place? I’m sure Sun gave them a nice deal and some new toys to play with ;-).
The issue here is how much of each thread can be completed per second (is it better to get more threads and work through each second, or is it better to have more of them?) versus the initial cost of the machine versus the time it takes for the power cost savings to outweigh the initial cost. That’s what matters.
Coolthreads (and multiple cores in general) is simply a tough sell for people wanting to complete more of the same tasks in less time following Moore’s Law, and that accounts for the majority.
Stick to the point.
Are you just daft? HP and Sun both submitted their respective results to Spec. It doesn’t get any more objective than that.
Your ignorance is even more telling. Cpus consume more energy at higher clock rates and dissipate more heat.
Your article was ridiculously out dated. SpecWeb is an industry standard benchmark. Prove your point with some real data not FUD.
Again, specweb is a real benchmark for web services ( the target market for the Sun box) and and single Sun chip out classes 4 of the latest Xeons.
More vile ignorance. Real world datacenters are constantly looking for ways to reduce their cooling and electricity bills. Gee I wonder why virtualization and server consolidation is big in the REAL WORLD.
I forgot that you don’t live in the real world.
It doesn’t? Say what? that doesn’t make any sense.
The Xeons X7350 are 130W parts. HP’s and Intel’s websites say so. Can’t you read and comprehend?
Even if you reduce the cpus to 2 you get 260Ws for the cpus alone vs 95 watts or at max 123Watts for the SPARC cpu box. The SPARC box is still lower power but can now deliver twice the performance of the HP Xeon Box.
Eh? The Sun box and the HP box cost almost the same and the Sun box uses significantly less power.
Oh you are still stuck like a broken record on that article you posted.
I think HP and its engineers tuning the hell out of their setup and submitting a result that show cases the best performance number on SpecWeb2005 and Sun doing the same counts for a lot more than a blog post from 2 years ago.
HP and Sun have the only two results in the 40K range on SPecWeb2005. So we are comparing the very best submissions from the respective companies.
You can’t possibly be implying that HP doesn’t know how to tune and get the best performance out of their systems, could you? Especially when they are trying to post the highest number, or so they thought, for their own customers to see and the sales staff to use as material sell those systems.
You certainly can’t be that daft , can you?
Got proof? The cool threads server’s perfomance throws a wrench soundly in that statement.
Please don’t show your stupidity any more than you have to.
More nonsensical gibberish. Read and comprehend first. Then do some research and come up with some real data to the topic at hand. Some up to date data would be very useful.
I wonder why the coolthreads systems are doubling in revenue YoY.
Edited 2008-05-05 02:10 UTC
You’re tripping sweetheart. What matters to people is what work gets done in that clock cycle for the amount of power they use and what they paid. It really is that simple.
Yer, because that’s a potential Sun customer (you know, money?), and that’s what matters to him. As it is, he’s looking at performance per watt per dollar and the raw figures just aren’t there. Specweb justifies nothing to him.
You’re making a huge assumption that Specweb is actually saying something because you have no data yourself, and you’ve proven yourself totally incapable of explaining it or discussing what’s happening.
When you’ve come from nothing doubling is easy. Once again, no exact figures from Sun ;-).
Lay off the crack pipe please.
BZZZT! Smugmug is a Sun customer and has since posted very positive feedback about Sun.
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/02/07/server-analysis-sun-victory…
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/12/13/companies-that-listen-sun/
No more straws???
No you have proven incapable of understanding simple data like two graphs that handily disprove your own statement. Hilariously, what’s more you provided the data to support your claims. I would laugh if your feeble attempts at comprehension weren’t so sad.
IBM doesn’t break down numbers by product lines either. Your point?
IBM makes 50%+ of their revenue from their consulting business. Their power server make a fraction of thier total product revenue. I don’t see you calling power dead weight.
Edited 2008-05-05 02:46 UTC
Well, I have no idea what you guys are banging on about, but as a result of following your discussion I’ve come across SmugMug.com, which looks like an excellent photo hosting website, especially for a semipro photographer like myself!
Thanks and keep on arguing!
Doesn’t address what was written in the article, or how he would justify a SPARC Coolthreads server.
Depends on the workload. The fact that the sales are doubling YoY for the coolthreads server means that the market is finally embracing a revolutionary technology.
Sun sells both SPARC and x86 boxes to meet the different needs of thier customers. A fact you can’t seem to grasp. For certain applications a UltraSPARC T2 chip blows away 4 or the latest Xeons. For certain other tasks the Xeon blows the T2 away. A point Sun clearly indicates on the website. The coolthreads servers are troughput servers for web facing apps.
But get this Sun’s competitors don’t have the T2 or anything similar but Sun has the Xeons to sell!
Edited 2008-05-06 16:09 UTC
Cool threads technology in T1000 and T2000 servers are for applications like web servers, file servers, mail servers any application that is integer intensive with a large number of concurrent requests on a resource. It is an in order design so it uses less power because out of order is not necessary. So you get a CPU which is designed for lots of threads where no one thread needs to be particularly fast or require much floating point. Current main stream CPU designs are focused on being all things to all people hence they don’t compete at the tasks the T1000 and T2000 target.
Sun’s partner Fujitsu is being relied on to provide high performance single thread and floating point CPU where the application demands it. But the CPU design named “The Rock” is supposed to be revolutionary. It does something called a scout thread which runs ahead optimising the execution order. It basically forgoes the need for normal out of order execution. We’ll see if it lives up to the hype in 2009.
But right now Sparc leads for certain types of applications.
Indeed. That would have been a more pertinent and interesting question, rather than getting bizarre and totally meaningless answers about the iPhone (Sun has a fixation about being Apple for some reason), as well as asking Jonathan how he intends to solve those problems. It’s like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic while the band plays some nice ragtime tunes. However, I suppose the interview displays Sun’s current status: “What the hell are we going to do?” Novell has much the same problem.
I find it amusing, and not so amusing for the employees themselves, that Sun simply doesn’t know how to do redundancies:
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/08/silve…
The golden rule of redundancies is to itemise everything that you need and don’t need, get the relevant people told as quickly as possible, and above all, make sure you do it once, and once only. This constant round of layoffs that Sun has every year, or every few months, is destroying the ability of the people left to get any work done. Drip feeding layoffs, quite apart from any other problems you have, can destroy a company itself. Would you work under that? Even funnier, Sun is one of those daft companies that fires people that they eventually realise they need to do some work twelve months later. Comments by some ‘anonymous’ people here:
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/05/01/sun_q3_down/comments/
Sadly, Sun still believes that its multi-billion dollar revenues and spending from the 90s and around the dot-com boom are sustainable – if only they can fire a whole load of people. For a company with their revenues, a $34 million loss or a $67 million profit is woeful. They’re barely breaking even as revenues fall. Getting rid of people isn’t enough, as it’s pretty clear that their expenses are just far too high. Daft purchases such as MySQL and Innotek are partly to blame, but they’re not the whole story.
I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader, and Jonathan, to work this one out, considering that by various metrics a good three quarters of the servers they manage to sell are x86, and of those, probably a good 70% – 80% have Linux specified as their OS. Unless they can get some returns on their spending on SPARC and Solaris then it’s all just dead weight.
Do you have any data for that ludicrous statement?
Well, I know you want to nitpick without addressing the crux of the arguments, but I’ll bite.
http://tweakers.net/reviews/649/last/database-test-sun-ultrasparc-t…
There should be some reasonable data in there for you to digest. The crux is that Sun’s x86 Opteron servers are outselling SPARC by a wide margin. It’s a question of volume, and that’s why Sun had to move to it. Having their SPARC be outperformed and still be more expensive in the same target market isn’t helping.
http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,s…
Given that Linux has traditionally been installed on x86 and that’s where Sun’s SPARC lunch was eaten, that’s fairly logical. It’s difficult to justify Solaris under those circumstances.
In all honesty, that doesn’t surprise me. If the opposite was true, the Solaris folks would be trumpeting it from the hills. They’re not.
That’s the long and the short of it, and alas, there isn’t much cheer to be had. Sun have some good stuff, and with good leadership they could be doing very well, but due to inertia and poor management decisions that isn’t going to happen.
You are beyond hope at this point. Your reading and comprehension skills seem to be non existent.
Look at the charts. The chart on the left is Total Server shipments. On the right x86 shipments.
Q406
Total Server: Approx 100,000 units.
X86 servers: 30,000 Units.
Sparc Server (total – x86) = 70,000 units
Doh!
Sun sells more SPARC systems running Solaris than all the x86 systems combined. See above.
But the opposite is true but your feeble mind can’t comprehend it. Sorry try again.
You are grasping at straws making silly statements with no real data to back them up.
Edited 2008-05-05 02:33 UTC
It doesn’t show that at all. What it shows is a yearly growth comparison. Sorry, I really don’t know what it is you work on, or what interest you have in this, but you simply cannot read. Did you not read the article, or did you just spin in your chair?
This was actually written about in the article:
You can’t read a simple article. See above.
You’ve been presented with two articles that say otherwise. Failing to read the first article in order to see what you want to see, and then completely ignore the second because you saw what you wanted to see in the first is……….a pretty damn sad thing to do in all honesty.
Goodbye.
Edited 2008-05-05 20:16 UTC
Read the damn charts again. The y axis is units in thousands and x axis is quarters. The chart is pretty simple.
You are just daft. All that means the growth rate of SPARC servers is less that x86 servers. For example, Say last quarter Sun sold 200 SPARC and 12 x86 boxes and this quarter sun sold 250 SPARC and 24 x86 boxes. The growth rate for SPARC would be 20% but x86 would be 100%.
That does not mean Sun sells more x86 boxes than SPARC. Astounding level of ineptitude.
Your articles disprove your own claim. Seriously I can’t argue with such a difference in intellectual capacity.
You absolutely, cannot read sweetheart, as you have ably demonstrated.
Those two graphs showed server unit growth, versus how much their x86 sales are growing. What they did not show was total units sold as you think that they do. From TFA:
That’s it.
What does the ServerUnits (thousands) on the y axis mean?
From the charts it is obvious that Sun sold a total of 100,000 in q406 servers out of which close to 30,000 were x86.
The 14% growth number is growth from q405. If you look at the chart q405 has less than 100,000 units if the chart were bigger we could easily see that the difference in q405 and q406 in total server shipments would be 14%. Indicating a growth.
Same fort the x86 chart. Q406 close to 30,000 and q405 close to 21,000 or so. So 83% growth.
The statement Sun sold more servers is true because they sold 14% more server YoY. The sale of SPAC systems seems flat to slightly more. if in Q405 Sun sold 90,000 units and in q406 they sold 100,000. In Q405 they sold 21000 x86 boxes and q406 they sold 29,000. then they sold 2000 more Sparc boxes than before.
Sun sells an order of magnitude more SPARC boxes than x86. Your claim that x86 systems make up most of the sales for Sun is just plain wrong and the fact that your point to charts that disprove your own claim is just astounding.
Sun sells more than Niagara boxes. In 2006 Nigara based boxes were only 2 models. 2 Models selling 100 million worth with the year they were introduced is a good thing. Your assumption is that Sun’s only SPARC offering was niagara and that is how you erroneously concluded what you did.
If you do want to bash Sun at the very least familiarize your self with the products.
Did you even attend high school? Seriously. This is a simple exercise in comprehension.
Edited 2008-05-06 16:43 UTC
You’ve just described the point of why I posted that article (growth of shipments). It illustrates the point within the context of this thread:
Sun are funding an entire hardware platform that was totally outgrown and outperformed both in growth and overall revenue by their x86 business, and what they ship each quarter.
SPARC sales are declining. x86 is just taking up more of the whole, and they’re accounting for close to all of the growth, if any, that Sun gets each quarter.
Sun simply can’t afford to hang on to that and expect to compete with their own x86 servers that they sell either in terms of growth, revenue, margins or the costs that they incur.
Their SPARC business is going to continue to decline unless they can put SPARC where IBM’s Power is or pull their fingers out and give SPARC the raw power of x86 to attract people. Neither looks likely.
Don’t backpedal. Your statement was that about 3/4th of sun’s sales came from x86 systems and SPARC was dwindling and dead weight.
Not what the data says. Seriously, give up already.
They are not competing with thier own servers anymore than IBM and HP are. Why on earth would HP publish a Xeon result as a cream of the crop for SpecWeb2005 when it sells PA-RISC and itanium boxes.
See above at how stupid that sounds. The UltraSPARC T2 handily outperforms Power bases systems in web services at a fraction of the cost.
Everytime I see ‘job cuts’ and ‘economic slow down/recession’ – I have to ask, do these management types see that their actions are actually creating the self fulfilling prophecy of the recession on the horizon? I don’t want to turn this into a thread over business but what they should be doing during an economic down turn is pumping money into product investments, increase their product portfolio, hire more engineers and so forth. When the economy does swing up – and customer start demanding more software and hardware – the said company is in a good position to provide those goods and services demanded in a growing economy.
As for OpenSolaris, Java and so forth; its happening gradually, and personally, I’d sooner see it take time to form than trying to rush things out (like we see in the Linux world) of distributions being pushed out to meet a deadline which are riddled up the wazoo with bugs and issues. There is a fine line between wanting to be on the cutting edge and getting out the latest technology – and just being plan stupid when it comes to incorporating things that are damn risky (SELinux, Fedora and numerous driver issues anyone?).
They are incompetent idiots
And this just sucks:
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/16/2337224
That story serious misrepresents what Sun is actually doing. MySQL was proposing to release ADDITIONAL optional components that would probably be closed source. Sun would potential go back on this plan and make them open source anyways. Someone got a whiff of the issue and blew it out of proportion and basically turned it on its head. Sun is NOT planning to close source MySQL, they are not turning their backs on open source.
I’d be inclined to agree. Sun has done alot for open source. OpenOffice, Netbeans, Java (yes, with a little proding.. lol), ZFS, Solaris, Dtrace, the list goes on, i cant imagine them removing an open product from the market.
I can, however, see them making closed source extensions, addons and such….like (the now defunct) Star Office, or (the now defunt) Forte/Sun One studio…and of course (the not so defunct) Solaris.
This is a GOOD thing, Sun can then license technology from commerical companies and bring it to the mysql community.
Star Office is defunct?
He is talking about the Sun One Studio/Forte, not StarOffice or OpenOffice.
He does actually mention Star Office …Why, however, I don’t know as I’ve never used it!
Wow, Sorry, I didnt realize Star Office was still around lol I was sure it died around version 6 lol The point still stands, but its nice to have facts straight too lol
My favourite company! Why a loss and why sack people? Nooo! I hope it isnt because SUN is the only company who had changed strategy to open source everything and giving away everything? At SUN you dont pay for the software, you pay for support. Is this the wrong way to go, to give away everything? I dont know of any other big old proprietary IT company open sourcing everything? Not IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, etc has done it. Maybe within 10 years it turns out that SUN should have instead closed everything and force customers to pay? Maybe this is the beginning of the end for SUN? Or? Should SUN close everything and charge, now that SUN has a huge customer base? Or? Why can a crappy client OS that is “collapsing under its own weight” sell good, but not SUNs superior technology; ZFS, DTrace, etc?
Look at this magic PHP example with DTrace (it is doable with Java too):
http://blogs.sun.com/bmc/entry/dtrace_and_php_demonstrated
the sun will come out tomorrow. You can bet on it.
The fact the former Lighthouse Design Inc., NeXT software House CEO buried all the software in the merger with Sun or the fact he thinks that pony tail is cool.
I can use the original solutions for NeXTSTEP/Openstep, but it would be nice to have Cocoa/OS X versions to use. At NeXT we extended the hell out of them and they were used in many in-house processes and made my job much more productive.
It seems that some people are just stating things about SPARC and x86 as facts, without proving it with the hard numbers? They have no substance in their words, no hard figures, no proof?
Opinions are like assholes; everyone things everyone else’s stinks. The reality is that one shouldn’t take benchmarks all that seriously; look at the information and make the decision yourself – don’t rely on so-called experts or benchmarks because most of their time they’re wildly distorted to what reality is.
That applies more to posts like this one.