Sun Unveils 64-bit Server Line

SumDog is one of many to let us know, PC World is reporting that Sun is expected to reveal the first few of their new 64-bit servers at their quarterly product rollout. From the article: "Formerly code-named Galaxy, the Sun Fire X2100, X4100, and X4200 servers represent the company's bid to woo customers, particularly the financial industry sector, away from rival server vendors Hewlett-Packard and Dell."

Suns have been 64 bit for a while now...

[allanc]

The UltraSPARC chips have been 64 bit for quite a while now. A more useful article summary would have pointed out the actual newsworthy bit of this story, which is that they're rolling out 64 bit x86 servers (running AMD Opterons).

64-bitness

[hkultala]

All Sun's servers have been 64-bit for the last about 10 years. so why even mention the 64-bitness?

actually, it would be more a news if sun were to release a 32-bit server.

Re:Sun 10 years from now

[TweakMe]

Sun. Is. Fux0red. Where's the value add?

No, no, no, no.

[Karma_fucker_sucker]

"We weren't paying attention, we got distracted by all these people with pierced body parts and blue hair," he said. "We missed changes in the marketplace. It's very distracting to grow at 60 percent per quarter and very humbling to have it disappear. We're now paying attention to Wall Street again."

Where bold insert Customer

That's simialr to Digital's downfall. They built some of the best computers in the world, thinking if we build it they will come. But it wasn't what the customers wanted. The same goes for catering to Wall Street. They want short term quick earnings growth; not necessarily long term custoemr growth. That may not be be conducive to achieving a product line that will last and the customers will even want.

Re:And it's based on Opterons...

[bradleycarpenter]

Well, say you are a large corporation that only buys from Tier 1 manufactures. Sure joe schmo can go get one from random white box corporation, but in the corporate world they stick to specific suppliers that they have contracts and provide 24/7 support.

Re:Spells Death for the SPARC

[SiliconJesus]

Sun has had x86 servers for a while. It has had no effect on their SPARC sales, nor will it in the future. People who buy Sun will continue to purchace their SPARC servers until they discontinue making them. I'd be willing to say with the SPARC IV's coming out soon, that Sun is in no hurry to switch off their home platform.

Re:Suns have been 64 bit for a while now...

[jellomizer]

Well Slashdot readers in general are anti-Sun, Because they havent jumped head first in the Linux Bandwagon, but more like test the waters and take a step, and they also produce a competing OS to Linux, Which has some features and ability that is much better then Linux but we wont talk about those, which is not GNU compatible. So Sun has to be Evil. So what better way to post an article that makes Sun seem like a slow to react company then to say that they are just releasing 64 bit processors. While in truth they were one of the first.

Miracle machine!

[Bake]

This must be some miracle machine. From the linked article..
The two hard drives can be setup for RAID 0, 1 or 10 via the BIOS.

Now, it may be a few years since I took classes in college that touched on various RAID levels, but one thing that I DO remember is that RAID 10 requires a minimum of 4 physical drives...

Our sunfire was one of our worst investments.

[jidar]

I work at a small ISP, about 10k users.
We had a sunfire as a mail server for about 3 years then went to upgrade the disk space last year and a 75gb drive was $4000. Proprietary isn't worth it.

Re:Suns have been 64 bit for a while now...

[photon317]

That's a great reverse-reverse-psychology troll or something, but it's hardly insightful. I have always been a Sun supporter over the decade or so I've been working with Solaris on Sparc. I have always said that they were the best *nix thing going out there, compared to their competition. But I was also always a fan of Linux where it was applicable.

But the time came (some time ago now) to admit that Sun has in fact missed the boat on Linux. What made it especially frustrating was that, of all of the commercial *nix vendors, Sun was in the best position to capitalize on the Linux wave. They were already all about developing and promoting open standards (think NFS and NIS back in the day, among many others). They were already the best non-free platform to build and use open source software on. Hell starting with Solaris 8 they were shipping a good deal of open source software with stock Solaris. But some idiot(s) in charge of the company completely lacked the vision to make it happen. I can only imagine how much better a position Sun would be in (and how much better off all consumers of *nix would be) if Sun had re-centered themselves around Linux kernels going forward back in the late 90's or even 2001-ish. They could've turned their kernel engineering teams to work on Linux on Ultrasparc (and Opteron), and could've brought a lot of scalability and other enhancements with them to the Linux kernel in general to boot.

Even now that Sun has started to turn the corner on Linux from their previous stances (which were to ignore it, and then to marginalize it as a toy), their stance still smells a lot like, "Sure, run linux on our Sun-branded but otherwise whitebox-like and overpriced x86 and x86_64 hardware, but only for crappy unimportant edge devices. Leave all the real computing to a real operating system like Solaris." Meanwhile smart companies are working out strategies to transition off of the last remaining Ultrasparc behemoths they have left in the corner of the datacenter while the majority of their real computing is already happening on Linux today. Average not-so-smart companies will be doing this in a few years.

I don't hate Sun, and I don't think they're Evil. But I think someone fell asleep at the wheel there and completely failed to take advantage of the Linux wave like Sun should have. If anything, I feel sad for them, it's tragic to watch a great company go down like this. They could still turn it around, but I don't have much faith anymore that they will.

Galaxy? Does Sun have no organizational memory?

[winkydink]

The last project named Galaxy (at least the last one I remember), was when Sun decided to support multiprocessing in the early 90's. Asymetrical multiprocessing that it. There was a joke runniing around at the time thet went comething like:

"How do you make your Sun server run at 1/4 speed?"

"Add 3 more processors"

The Linux Boat?

[phliar]

Sun was in the best position to capitalize on the Linux wave....I can only imagine how much better a position Sun would be in if Sun had re-centered themselves around Linux kernels going forward back in the late 90's or even 2001-ish.

What "wave" would that be? Sun already had a Unix at least as good as Linux. Face it, the only thing Linux has going for it is support for all sorts of hardware. Other than that, Linux can be supremely annoying -- no manpages, for one thing. Add the Solaris 10 features like dtrace and Linux starts to look a little less appealing. And remember that in the late-90s, Linux was still a little more primitive than Solaris. They'd have been better off spending money on Solaris x86 back then instead of almost abandoning it.

Disclaimer: I run mostly Linux at home, alongside a couple of OpenBSD machines. At work, Linux and Solaris x86. IMHO what Sun should do is stop treating Gnu software like orphans and make all the Gnu tools -- not just gcc -- easy to install, preferably installed by default.

Re:Suns have been 64 bit for a while now...

[mrbooze]

I don't understand. Solaris is great, but Sun should have abandoned decades of work on their own engineered kernel and ported to Linux just because Linux is cool?

Why would the company with "the best *nix thing going out there" abandon that just to jump on the linux bandwagon?

It sounds like you're saying you wish they had done that so that they could contribute "scalability and other enhancements" to the linux kernel for the public, but what would that gain them? Hell, what if that alleged better scalability is based on the fundemental design of the kernel? Suns engineers may not be able to just write some "scalability modules" and plop them into Linux.

And if in fact their own kernel was already better than linux's kernel in that regard, again why would they want to abandon their own kernel? Just to say "Hey, look everyone, LINUX! LINUX! SQUAWK!"

None of this is a slam against linux, which is part of a perfectly fine OS as well. I just don't buy into the argument that linux is the ultimate end result of all OS evolution. Just because linux is good doesn't mean it's what everyone else has to be. Sometimes, different is even better than good.

Re:Our sunfire was one of our worst investments.

[foorilious]

As far as I know, there is not a single "Sun Fire" system ever made that didn't use bone-standard SCSI disks manufactured by IBM, Seagate, Fujitsu, or Hitatchi, etc (with 'proprietary' drive rails). That being said, the Sun-branded disks on their website are ridiculously overpriced, but there has never been anything technological to stop you from using whatever disks you please.

I really hate this "proprietary" phrase getting thrown around with regard to Sun. Forget that they're using AMD CPUs now (the whole point of TFA), and please go ahead and tell me how SPARC [sparc.org] is proprietary and Intel isn't. I'd love to hear this. Not to mention that Sun has probably done more for open standards and protocols over the years than any other single company that comes readily to mind. Open source is not necessary for open standards, which really, is what matters far more to me. But, even so, Solaris is now open source as well. But please don't let over 20 years of history and assorted facts stop /. folks from crying "proprietary!" every time Sun is mentioned in the news.