Why is Sun in business?

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aquaticaquatic
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
http://store.sun.com/catalog/doc/Bro...ml?catid=77642



Look at their "best" config there. No gigabit Ethernet. Half the max RAM. Firewire and USB 1. Much less CPU. Much less applications. Not too much more cache per CPU. and um....$15,000. How come they stay alive! Maybe Apple could buy Sun and take Java further. And make it less compatible with Windows...umm I mean "fix it" on Windows.

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  • Reply 1 of 19
    mark_wilkinsmark_wilkins Posts: 154member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Aquatic

    http://store.sun.com/catalog/doc/Bro...ml?catid=77642



    Look at their "best" config there. No gigabit Ethernet. Half the max RAM. Firewire and USB 1. Much less CPU. Much less applications. Not too much more cache per CPU. and um....$15,000. How come they stay alive! Maybe Apple could buy Sun and take Java further. And make it less compatible with Windows...umm I mean "fix it" on Windows.





    Well, for one thing they have a full 64 bit CPU and a full 64-bit OS. Their clock speeds are not that far off from the Opteron, and Sparc CPUs are extremely efficient per-clock.



    I'd imagine that these machines are finding their place in applications where 64-bit addressing is absolutely, positively necessary to get the job done, or where so much Solaris is already going on that it makes the most sense to go with more Solaris boxes.



    Note that those workstations are software-interoperable with one of these:



    http://store.sun.com/catalog/doc/Bro...parentId=48615





    -- Mark
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  • Reply 2 of 19
    rokrok Posts: 3,519member
    i seem to recall a lot of sun machines being used as color RIPs for output facilities, from film houses to your run-of-the-mill kinko's.
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  • Reply 3 of 19
    xmogerxmoger Posts: 242member
    It's momentum. For a lot of companies it's probably cheaper to drop $100-200k on a couple dozen machines, than to port their custom app(s), and migrate their users. Places that use Sun anyway probably don't have a lot of devices attached using USB2 or firewire2. If they want 64bit workstations, I could only see them moving to Itanium2 in any numbers at this point. Opteron has only been out ~6 months, and the G5 are still mostly paper launched.
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  • Reply 4 of 19
    scottscott Posts: 7,431member
    Where I work we are looking at new software that comes with Suns. How often does the computer come with the software?
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  • Reply 5 of 19
    ghost_user_nameghost_user_name Posts: 22,667member
    They also make an incredibly large amount of money off of their enterprise servers. IBM and SGI can compete with Sun in that arena... it's a niche market for computers the size of refrigerators... but there is a lot of money there.
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  • Reply 6 of 19
    telomartelomar Posts: 1,804member
    People are forgetting the support you get with a place like Sun. It's considerably better than what you'd ordinarily find.
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  • Reply 7 of 19
    amorphamorph Posts: 7,112member
    Also, workstation hardware in that price range is built unbelievably well, and hardened. There are no shortcuts taken. You buy a Sun workstation and it will work well past obsolescence.



    Sun workstations are popular with engineers: I've been in Qualcomm, and the engineering area is wall-to-wall Sun workstations.



    That said, the UNIX workstation is precisely the market that Apple is trying to undersell with the old NT offer of "80% of the machine at 20% of the cost", and Sun has seen better days. I wouldn't rule them out yet, because they haven't made any fatal mistakes the way SGI did, and they still have the adaptable and popular Java technology to build on.



    Sun has been one of those companies that UNIX people has always had a love/hate relationship with because on the one hand they generally do good work (Solaris suffers from update disease in much the way that Windows does, but that's their one major gaffe), and on the other hand they've telegraphed monopolistic ambitions since their founding.
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  • Reply 8 of 19
    drboardrboar Posts: 477member
    I worked in a hospital lab were they recently had IBM unix server running on 604E CPUs. With thosands of samples each day and patients life at risk. Having a secure OS that stays up years at the time is far more important then the cost of the hardware.



    Sure some Wintel boxes would cost less, but the service packs, patches and viruses that appear at a frantic pace...



    "No sir, I can not diagnose your childs menigitis, we are reinstalling our server software, but we will be finished in 8-12 hours (and so will your son)".



    Would you like to be in an airplane controlled by MS Windoes
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  • Reply 9 of 19
    scottscott Posts: 7,431member
    Ohhhh DrBoar don't get me started on Windows in a hospital environment. Windows coupled with the super crappy job the software makes do in writing the stuff causes huge amounts of foul language to come out of my mouth.
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  • Reply 10 of 19
    madmax559madmax559 Posts: 596member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Aquatic

    http://store.sun.com/catalog/doc/Bro...ml?catid=77642



    Look at their "best" config there. No gigabit Ethernet. Half the max RAM. Firewire and USB 1. Much less CPU. Much less applications. Not too much more cache per CPU. and um....$15,000. How come they stay alive! Maybe Apple could buy Sun and take Java further. And make it less compatible with Windows...umm I mean "fix it" on Windows.





    um...have you ever worked in a high end enterprise environment ? or in a r&d place like qualcomm ?



    sun's hardware is top notch & can survive quite a beating.

    as for their desktops, i have a sun u10 & it can take

    an incredible amt of abuse & keep running.solaris is also

    a very very reliable os.
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  • Reply 11 of 19
    aquaticaquatic Posts: 5,602member
    But that isn't better than a cluster of G5s for the same 15k. Panther is better than Solaris. That's what VA Tech seems to think.
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  • Reply 12 of 19
    yevgenyyevgeny Posts: 1,148member
    Sun is still in business because they do what only they or IBM can do (HP/Compaq doesn't count anymore).



    Sun offers super robust solid enterprise servers that can do whatever you throw at them.



    I'm amazed to see the specwhores bashing Sun. Sun does not sell itself on the basis of superior performance. They (very much like Apple) sell themselves on the fact that their OS is TOTALLY SUPERIOR to every other *NIX out there. (OS X included, apart from the GUI)



    This is as bad a conversation as those people who wonder how Oracle stays in business when PostGre SQL can be obtained for next to nothing. People pay millions of dollars for Oracle because they have gigabytes of data that they need to relaibly access.



    Sun offers capabilities that other platforms only dream of, and with Sun, the capabilities are there, tested, guaranteed, and growing. Sun lives in the land of five nines uptime. That means that they are running 99.999% of the time. Can OS X say that? Nope. Do some people need five nines of uptime? Heck YES!
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  • Reply 13 of 19
    madmax559madmax559 Posts: 596member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Aquatic

    But that isn't better than a cluster of G5s for the same 15k. Panther is better than Solaris. That's what VA Tech seems to think.





    try this with a multi cpu g5 running a large database

    (my definition of large happens to be over 1tb



    Please do this while the machine is running



    1.randomly yank out any 1 of the hard drives..

    2.just for kicks add/remove ram from the system

    3.heck better yet why not yank out one of the cpu's too





    now when you can do all that & survive with all data intact

    THEN & only then ill look at a g5....

    until then my sun E class servers stay where they are

    until I keel over..
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  • Reply 14 of 19
    madmax559madmax559 Posts: 596member
    pqsql is a reasonably good db....please dont compare it

    to oracle or even THINK of comparing mysql to oracle..



    ill kill the next idiot who mentions that...

    (disclaimer im also an oracle dba)
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  • Reply 15 of 19
    nguyenhm16nguyenhm16 Posts: 203member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Yevgeny

    Sun offers capabilities that other platforms only dream of, and with Sun, the capabilities are there, tested, guaranteed, and growing. Sun lives in the land of five nines uptime. That means that they are running 99.999% of the time. Can OS X say that? Nope. Do some people need five nines of uptime? Heck YES!



    As a longtime UNIX sysadmin, the only way you're getting 5-nines is w/ an IBM mainframe. In the UNIX space, IBM and HP servers are both more reliable (in terms of RAS features) in my experience.



    In the OS space, AIX may be some sort of bizarro-UNIX, but it has the lead in terms of enterprise features (clustering, filesystems, etc.) companies desire. I like Solaris because it's the most 'real' UNIX, being a direct descendent of SVR4, but everything you need in the enterprise space is an expensive add-on (that's how they can afford to give you Solaris for free).



    Like some other poster said, Sun still exists mainly because of inertia.
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  • Reply 16 of 19
    aquaticaquatic Posts: 5,602member
    Good point, I should be comparing XServes. Which of course beat up on Suns even more. Xservers DO have hot swappable drives. They are smaller, cheaper, and the specs like Gig E do matter. And why is Solaris supposed to be so much better than OS X? Hopefully with SMB 3 Panther won't crash anymore (smb is the only thing that crashes me)
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  • Reply 17 of 19
    madmax559madmax559 Posts: 596member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Aquatic

    Good point, I should be comparing XServes. Which of course beat up on Suns even more. Xservers DO have hot swappable drives.





    how about the other stuff i just mentioned..

    as for solaris...i suggest working with it & gaining

    some real world unix experience before making a statement
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  • Reply 18 of 19
    amorphamorph Posts: 7,112member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by nguyenhm16

    As a longtime UNIX sysadmin, the only way you're getting 5-nines is w/ an IBM mainframe. In the UNIX space, IBM and HP servers are both more reliable (in terms of RAS features) in my experience.



    In the OS space, AIX may be some sort of bizarro-UNIX, but it has the lead in terms of enterprise features (clustering, filesystems, etc.) companies desire.



    Actually, I doubt anyone's beaten VMS yet for either clustering or filesystem performance.



    That notwithstanding, what you're paying for with this grade of hardware is absolute, no-excuses reliability. The senior sysadmin here is fond of yanking the power cord out on new machines (not PCs, the good stuff) in the middle of their first boot-up and install, then plugging them back in. If the machine picks up where it left off and completes, he's happy. If it doesn't, he sends it back as defective.
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  • Reply 19 of 19
    stunnedstunned Posts: 1,096member
    They can always sue Microsoft and earn money.
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