Posts by Matt Bryant 9690 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2007
"Sorry, officer, was I really doing 120mph!?!? I hadn't bothered looking at my speedo, I just had my foot on the loud pedal and was relying on that lovely TfL limiter device. I've got so reliant on it I never realised it had gone faulty...."
</hiding over-ride hacking kit under the driver's seat> ;)
The reason the French military budget is so much less than the British, despite their "independent" projects - is because of the points listed below:
1) Their nucleur deterant budget didn't include a fire-control system - they never intended to use it as they knew the Ruskies would have to hack their way through the British and US forces in Germany, Belgium and Holland before the Fwench need get worried, by which time NATO would probably have already fired their own nukes anyway.
2) Their tanks are chaeper as they are only expected to go in reverse, so only one forward gear.
3) Their carriers only fly planes rejected by every other air force and sometimes even by their own air force, so all bought on the cheap.
4) They never need to budget for victory parades or hero pensions as they never win any wars (unless the US or UK do all the fighting for them).
5) Their training is much shorter and less expensive - "drop rifle, wave white flag, wait for US and UK to save them again."
I used to be one of the zealots pushing OpenOffice way back when it was the StarOffice first offered for free in 1998 (lots of people forget it originated as proprietary tech). Even after Sun bought up Star Division I still kept installing it with my RedHat, working through the bugs and incompatibilities, and telling all and sundry that the next version would be the one that would really be a replacement for M$ Office. Nowadays, even with the painful shift to Office 2007 (change everything about the interface for the sake of change - who came up with that great idea?), I just can't be bothered with OOO anymore. I'll pay the M$ tax and take the product that does the job - Office 2003!
My fave quote regarding OOO was from one of our Sun reps, whom admitted that after Sun bought Star Division in order to avoid paying for thousands of M$ licences, he used to take his work home and finish it all off in Office on his home Windows PC, just so he could be certain it would actually be readable by his customers.
One of the annoyances from the PV crowd is this constant assertion that solar power is "water-friendly" and therefore can be implemented in areas with limited water supplies such as deserts or large areas of the Middle East. Which makes me laugh. Just last year I got a sight of the early morning routine at a solar farm outside Madrid, which includes a dozen staff hosing down the panels and mopping them clean. PV panels need to be dust-free (and bird-poop free) to work to optimal efficiency, which means daily cleaning. In areas such as the Middle East (or even Spain) where water supplies are limited, massive expanses of PV panels will need a LOT of water daily. And what about the cleaning agents used? How much detergent gets dumped into the environment by the daily panel washing?
Oh, and just to make our European readers groan, that Madrid solar farm was proudly displaying signs saying it was "EU funded" - obviously not competitive, then!
"Only need to take a look on how much disc space you can reclaim by uninstalling silverlight" Oh dear, our Sunshiner forgot to take a look at how much dross just the Java RTE leaves on your system, let alone the space it takes up! Why does each release of just the Java RTE seem to require a compound growth of several hundred megabytes, I'm seriously expecting a release soon to hit the gigabyte mark. And even then it will still perform with Java's notourious lack of speed. Being equally slow and buggy across many platforms is nothng to be proud of.
From a commercial viewpoint, seeing as most companies still use Windows desktops and laptops, I expect there will be plenty of Silverlight 3 apps turning up on company intranets. The non-commercial world is another question - not being cross-platform could seriously dent M$'s hopes of beating Flash out on the Web.
".....I've seen apps benchmarked inhouse where a T5240 beat a HP quad socket AMD box,...." Whilst I'm sure there are situations, such as skinny-thread webserving, where a T5240 might have an edge over a four-socket Opteron box in raw performance, I'm guessing price didn't form part of that discussion seeing as the hp would be much cheaper. Probably so much cheaper you could get two of the hp servers for the price of the Sun solution. The market obviously thinks so as just the number of hp Opteron servers going out each quarter is higher than the Niagara lines. And that's because for the majority of customers, seeing as they don't want Slowaris, the T5420 is completely irrellevant as I can't run the Windows or Linux apps they actually want to run.
OK, let's just give the Sunshiners a chance - can one Sunshiner post exactly why it is that even though Slowaris is supposedly so great, SPARC (including Niagara) just so powerful, and Sun so good at R&D, why is it that Sun has crashed from a market-dominating $200bn company to a failure bought up for the tier 1 equivalent of chump change? Then how they really expect Larry to execute the same failed startegies and somehow make them a success? Please try and keep at least a tiny portion of reality in your responses, including why you think the market is so clearly moving away from Slowaris and SPARC to Windows and Linux on x64?
/not holding my breath for a non-fantasy response - well, hard to when you're laughing this hard!
".....Where's Matt Bryant when you need this level of argumentation?" Patience, Grasshopper. The cunning fox waits for the bumbling Sunshiner to dig themselves a hole before piling the soil in on top of them. As Mr Heathcote correctly points out, Apple don't make their own chips and never have, so Mr Ellison is obviously planning a mass blitz of fanboi type marketing whilst dumping SPARC in the background. Or maybe he was referring to the fact that Apple don't have an enterprise server business as to what he aspires to, Apple don't make enterprise offerings, and what few servers they do offer are using Intel's CPUs. Either way, it is bizarre for the CEO of an enterprise software company to want to make their new (and recently failed) enterprise hardware business into a consumer-orientated software and hardware bizz like Apple. SPARC is not a good fit for iBones or iPlods, and a CMT chip in a Mac? Yeah, right!
As for CISCO, they have spent years raking it in using over-priced networking kit against precious few competitors. That virtual monopoly has taken a big hit from cheap Chinese LAN switches and an even bigger hit from hp's ProCurve. Their first attempt to sow up SANs has been kicked in the pants by Brocade, and their second attempt with FCOE - which was supposed to leverage their installed LAN/WAN base to dominate SANs - looks to have just opened their accounts up to attack from Brocade leveraging their installed SAN base instead. CISCO are at the same point Sun were nine years ago - diversify or die! Sun didn't diversify, they believed their own hype and look what happened. The big cash lump in the bank won't keep CISCO going forever at the rate they are losing marketshare, hence the move into servers, though that is a risky choice given it is such a competitive arena.
Bringing ARM or MIPS into the argument is moot - Oracle don't make those either.
RE: The hardware business
"They don't want to subsidize a competitor, but they don't really have a choice....." Actually, it is Oracle that don't have the choice. Sun makes a tiny minority of the server hardware that is used to host new Oracle apps. There may be a mass of old SPARC kit running old Oracle DBs, but those are ripe targets for hp and IBM Xeon kit running Linux and Windows. Looking forward, for Oracle to continue making money they need as many new installations as possible, and that means being nice to hp and IBM as they own the lion's share of the server bizz. There is nothing to stop hp and IBM simply putting more money and effort into competitor solutions such as DB2 and Websphere, or JBOSS and MariaDB, etc, etc. When hp and IBM were planning to announce full support for Linux back in the nineties, many said that Microsoft would punish them. As it turned out, M$ needed them just as badly, and the result is that hp and IBM are both leading Linux and leading M$ partners. Sun railed against both M$ and Linux and simply died.
"....Customers chose Oracle over SQL for a reason...." Yes, as a user of large Oracle RAC instances I can agree there are times we would only use Oracle. But nowadays it is mainly the enterprise high end, and M$ SQL has already surpassed Oracle DB as the most common database in our business and in the market as a whole. We use M$ SQL widely in what could be referred to as the second-tier and departmental environment. M$ SQL is getting more capable with every release, and there are instances where we use SQL Server 2008 where we would previosuly only have considered Oracle. As regards the rest of the Oracle stack, more and more of that business is being eaten up by opensource's offerings or Microsoft's. I have previously wondered how Oracle could diversify, and buying a failed hardware bizz does not seem the best of ideas. And I suspect Larry secretly agrees - first time round he asked hp to buy that side of Sun.
Personally, I find the whole idea of Larry bigging up the Sun hardware bizz quite bizarre, and if I was an Oracle shareholder I would consider it alarming! It was largely the hardware bizz that killed Sun, simply repeating the same mistakes with added Oracle licences is not likely to appeal to those shareholders. The line about SPARC/Slowaris being cheaper to own is just laughable. For a start, those Sunshiner admins price themselves rediculously high compared to your average M$ admin; the Sun management options are a joke compared to Windows; and then there is the fact the hardware costs ten times as much to give the same level of performance with the business apps people actaully want to run. And let's not forget Linux, which has been cheerfully gutting the SPARC/Slowaris bizz for years by being both cheaper, faster and easier to manage than Sun's offerings. Maybe he's hoping all the waffle will make IBM, hp or Fujitsu put in a bigger offer for the dross he needs to jettison.
/I never thought I'd say it, but now I'm pointing and laughing at Larry.
RE: Not a clue
If you paused to read the article, Chris Mellor did point out the difference as "RAC is fault-tolerant whereas VMware is high-availability", which does not quite match your correct point of continued operation versus recovery, but does imply this is a solution for those looking for a second-tier solution without the first-tier expense of RAC. This is not supposed to be a replacement for all RAC instances, but an extra, in-between option. Seeign as RAC reaches right into the enterprise high-end where VMware doesn't, there is little chance of RAC curling up and dying from a lack of VMware love anyway. Of course, if the VMware option also provides better performance (not sure on that claim) then it may protect smaller Oracle instances from comparison with other DBs such as M$ SQL, which already ties in neatly with M$'s own clustering out-of-the-box and at a cheaper price.
RE: RAC licensing
This is interesting as it could turn into a popularity contest - which is more wide-spread and valued, Oracle DB or VMware? Are EMC really worried that Oracle intend building a closed and proprietary stack and want customers to object now before the mortar sets in the brickwork, or are they just scoring cheap shots by painting themselves as the champion of choice against Larry's Licensing Machine and the RAC Tax? We use RAC in the high-end and happily pay RAC Tax for what it gives us - business continuity. Lower down the ladder, in the areas we would consider VMware, we wouldn't use RAC.
Personally, I don't think Oracle is even close to building it's walled garden just yet, even if they managed to cobble together OVM, Xen and Slowaris Containers into a viable multi-OS virtualisation package to replace VMware in most customers' affections. RAC is secure in the high-end enterprise, where VMware doesn't play anyway. And lower down where VMware does become a major factor Oracle is already under attack from M$ SQL and MySQL. If Larry really does want his walled garden then I think he will need to offer a lower-priced one based around virtualised and clustered MySQL or an "Oracle Lite". Maybe this more a case of VMware trying to garner attention in the face of mounting competition from other virtualisation packages.
Well, someone has to set the Sunshiners straight. That level of self-delusion just can't be healthy in the long term.
As a comparrison, consider a story from one of my colleagues in another office. She is very religeous, and can't pass up any opportunity to inform all that God created the Earcth in seven days (no, not Schwartz, the other God). At first, in typical British fashion, the rest of the office took pains to avoid upsetting her - they cautioned staff not to use blasphemy in her presence, frowned on anyone trying to suggest science and the bible might contradict each other, and generally let her sail on in her annoyingness. Then, she really started up on the Intelligent Design trip. For a while they all just tried to ignore her, but she got so bad that the other day my colleague sat her down and went through Darwin, some basic science, and then showed her the BBC news item on the Indonesian "Hobbits" and how they show evolution in action. At the end, she shook her head and said; "Those aren't people, they're aliens, and the scientists are hiding that from us!"
You Sunshiners are just like our religeous colleague - probably quite clever, maybe good at your jobs, but just living under a complete fantasy. For years you have been allowed to run around shouting everyone down with your Sunshine, and now that your fantasy world is collapsing you're willing to believe anything to avoid accepting the truth.
RE: Dunstan Vavasour - thanks, but I think these may actually be new sales rather than cannibalisation. After all, Sun doesn't really have any prior low-end storage to cannibalise. Hilarious that Sun should finally get round to diversifying into a relatively new area only about fifteen years after the other vendors, and about ten years too late to have any benefit to Sun.
RE: David Halko - shocking, I actually have to agree with Novatose on something! These must be new sales rather than cannibalisation, seeing as Sun is about fifteen years behind the other storage server/appliance vendors. Just imagine what could have been if McNeedy and Ponytail had got over their delusions about Slowaris on SPARC earlier. Ah well, too late now, the only benefit will be that Ellison will be able to spend the meager profits on new uniforms for his yatch crew.
RE: re: Good for SUN!
And that NetApp suit hasn't gone away, despite all your wishful bluster. And now, Oracle are in the driving seat, with NetApp being a major storage partner for them - much more major than the tiny Sun storage bizz. Maybe Larry will make it a condition of Sun's surrender that they also have to settle the NetApp case before the deal goes through. Now that would be funny!
RE: Pure comedy
Well, one good laugh does deserve another, and you Sunshiners have presented years of tragi-comedy worthy of the worst daytime soap. Try to keep laughing whilst your Solaris-based career grinds to a halt. And as for your fixation on hp, how many times have I already told you Sunshiners I don't work for hp. Just because you guys astroturf like crazy, don't paint us all with that brush. You'll find it's not a good thing to do to potential customers. What am I saying - Sunshiners don't have to worry about customers anymore, they've either already jumped the sinking ship or soon will! I'm happy to say my appraisal to the board of three years ago that Sun were too unpredictable an entity to be any part of our longterm IT startegy has not only been proven correct, but also killed any chance of any Sun sales into our business. With that in mind I suppose you can toss all the insults at me you like. Please try and add an element of humour, though. Happy tossing, Snnshiner (why does "tossing" and "Sunshiner" seem to be a natural association?)!
RE: Whatever
The fake Matt Bryant is obviously having a hard time coping with the Sunset. Mind you, that is the most accurate and eloquent post ever from a Sunshiner. Of course, that may be because, like the only good bits out of Sun's product range, it wasn't the original work of a Sunshiner.
/Keep trying, Sunshiners, you only have a few months more left before the final Sunset!
800 sales != enough cash to even save the Sun storage bizz, let alone the rest of Sun. Even if the current buy-out by Oracle wasn't ongoing, the profits from Amber Road still wouldn't be enough to stop Ponytail hawking the company to all comers, and still not enough to drive the price up to even a tenth of Sun's $200bn value of only nine years ago.
But if it gives the Sunshiners a moment of happiness that they have managed to save the ship's cat while the rest of the ship has sunk beneath the waves then I suggest we leave them to gloat in the corner. After all, the reality of the larger picture has been so much of a disaster for their confidence, it would be mean to point out the irrellevance of such a tiny success. So I don't want anyone posting and reminding them how many NetApp units went out in that period, or how many ProLiant Storage Servers were sold, or even the number of Dell Equilogic boxes....
Like Doom, you could make your own maps. That meant, after you had played your way through the game and fragged your mates on the standard maps, you could spend hours making your own maps in an intuitive and quick 3D tool. I still remember getting a friend that had never even used a map tool to get his first map done in Build in about fifteen minutes. The subsquent success of games such as Counter Strike Source have largely been due to a large following of fans that cut their teeth on Build and now make maps for newer games. It's all a shame, really, but I actually thought 3D Realms had gone bust years ago!
Don't be silly - a MAC is a Media Access Control address, as used even on those over-priced Macs.
The real story is that the people behind the virus thought the fanbois such a tiny target pool they gave the job to their poorest coder, and kept the real codrs working on that much bigger PC base. After all, who wants to restrict their trojan to just the few people working in marketing?
"We plan to oppose the motion and present our own suggested course of action to the court."
Later today, SCO spokesghouls will announce the company's intentions to sue all manufacturers, vendors and consumers of SCOnes, as they are obviously and perniciously using copyrighted SCO code in their products without a licence. Expect Sun's canteen in Sanata Clara to be the first to fold and fork out for a licence whilst the rest of the World points and laughs.
I've been hoping a big-name manufacturer would get round to some Atom blades for a while. I wanted them a lot more dense, say eight cores on a blade, but then you'd probably need fans. The idea of a tower with several fanless Atom blades as a branch office server is very interesting.
Now, let's see what hp and IBM do in response!
I've always used AMD chips from way back in the K5 days for my homebuilds, and pushed AMD in the office when Opteron came out, but recently they have fallen behind Intel. I think a strong AMD will be good for both companies as it fosters competition and innovation to the benefit us of customers. Here's hoping the new structure helps them get back head-to-head with Intel.
But, ATi have really burnt their bridges as far as I am concerned. I used to use nothing but ATi graphics cards by choice, but the last two year's worth of drivers have been awful. Even our hp laptops, which mainly have ATi Mobile graphics, haven't proven immune to graphics bugs, to the point where exasperation made me tell the hp rep we only wanted future kit to have nVidia graphics. All my recent homebuilds for myself, friends and family have been with nVidia cards, and I don't see that changing.
RE: Troll Bryant.
<Looking for any form of technical argument....> Oh, there is no technical argument, just more blathering and insults. A complete lack of technical facts or discussion? You must work for Sun sales.
".....Repeat after me Matt,..." Lol, I know you Sunshiners try that indoctrination stuff - "don't think, don't reason, just repeat after me" - but I've already had far better Sun salesbods than you try it and they failed, because we made them try and prove their claims, which they couldn't. Slowaris is only number one in profit and marketshare losses, and both will only accellerate as Larry guts Sun.
RE: Re: MB rant
"...."Oracle plans to grow the Sun hardware business after the closing, protecting Sun customers’ investments and ensuring the long-term viability of Sun products."...." <Yawn> Yeah, and the bit that expressly ties Oracle to a SPARC roadmap, to a future for Rock or T3, or even a Slowaris roadmap is....? Oh, there isn't one! Now, repeat what TPM put in his Slowaris 11 article: "So until this deal is done - or undone - it is hard to say when any Sun product, be it hardware or software, will appear."
Until Oracle release some roadmaps, which won't happen until after the purchase completes (and that's if M$ and IBM don't have fun throwing up some objections), nobody has any commitment to ANY Sun product. Until then, Sun's whole product range has just become vapourware (well, the few bits that weren't already!). Anyone considering buying any Sun hardware under that uncertainty is, in my professional opinion, frankly, a sucker.
/making the most of the Sunshiner comedy whilst it lasts!
"....You are incorrect again..... Clearly, the benchmarks identified qualify as "any"...." Nope, I specifically asked you to find the CINT and CFP benchmarks for the T6340 and T6320. You have prevaricated, wandered off on sidetracks and just plain lied, but still not supplied those benchmarks for what is supposed to be Sun's great white hope for blades.
"....You are incorrect again. Q2 2009 results show increasing uptake on CoolThreads every quarter as well as year-on-year...." All the Q9 results showed was Sun making a loss, again, as it has for years. All Niagara has ever done is cannibalise a few of the remaining UltraSPARC webservers, Oracle's own figures show a decline in Oracle on Solaris licence sales, which proves your whole line is just waffle.
"...You are incorrect again. I never discussed single-threaded performance...." Lol, no, you Sunshiners never want to discuss single-threaded performance and Niagara as you know you get whipped every time! Which is why I asked specifically asked about CINT and CFP, and why you deliberately avoided them and went for the rates results instead.
"...I have not seen you post substantiated "extravagant claims" with "wild FUD" from Sun...." I was referring to previous Sun sales meetings, or are you admitting to a Sun relationship?
"....You frequently use FUD with unsubstantiated claims, many of which have been demonstrated incorrect post after post...." Really? Please point to one "claim" or "FUD" you have managed to disprove. Do you deny Sun hasn't made a profit for years? Or do you claim it is a lie that Sun wnet from a $200bn company to less than $4bn by market cap in less than a decade? Or that hp-ux on Integrity and AIX on Power are taking marketshare from SPARC Slowaris in the enterprise high-end (you know, the profitable bit where all those nice big Oracle instances live)? Oh, and please do try some more selective benchmark figures as they really make me laugh.
"....Your behavior appears to be a classic case of psychological projection...." Your behaviour is just the typical Sunshiner, unable to cope with the fact that Sun has been beaten into submission by hp, IBM, and Dell. That makes all you Sunshiners that swanned about for years saying only Slowaris on SPARC wrong. For years you gave us that baloney, and it was proven to be just that. And now you sprout junk about how Oracle is just going to keep on with al those Sun products that dragged Sun down and just expect us to believe you? I'd like to say if you weren't so comic you'd be pathetic, but you're both.
".....There have been "CINT2006 Rates" and "CFP2006 Rates" benchmarks..." Ha! Did I ask for Rate benchmarks? Nope, I asked for the CINT2006 and CFP2006, the tests that shows the single-threaded ability of a CPU. The Rate tests allow you to push lots of wheiner threads through many cores, which is what Niagara was desinged to do even though it has no relevance to the Oracle market. Of course, there is no way Sun want to show the ordinary CINT2006 or CFP2006 figures as they know any CMT CPU is pants at the type of Oracle app the installed SPARC Slowaris base is actually serving. Hence their failure to get SPARC customers to shift from old SPARC to Niagara. Those customers that remained faithful to Sun and waited on the promised Rock now have two options - buy a Fujitsu M-series server and worry about the future of SPARC64, or move off onto a real enterprise CPU with a future, like Power or Itanium. Some may be able to move to Slowaris on x86, but after Sun has let them down so badly, and Oracle have not reassured them, it will be Opteron and Xeon kit from other vendors, most probably the market-leading ProLiant. Niagara is going to whither and die, probably as another SPARC product "open-sourced" to a market that has zero interest in it. No other vendor has stepped up to fab T1, T2 or T2+ chips, and no-one has shown any interest in making a T3 (including Oracle).
The whole of your post is a long-winded and deceitful attempt to try and convince people Niagara doesn't have a problem with single-threaded performance or clustering problems, and you avoid both issues by going off into areas that are either nothing to do with the kit in question, or just plain deceitful. "....One can compare when understanding: system architecture (standard interfaces are leveraged without proprietary bus bottlenecks), common shared IC's between blades & racks, and existing benchmarks (that you did not know existed.)...." No you can't, because the whole backplane design is completely different between the Sun blades and the rack servers, the components are different, and only a complete ignoramous or a liar would try and pretend the difference would have no impact on performance. The hp DL380 racked server and the BL460c blade post different results because they have different backplanes and different board designs, even thought they use the same "industry standard interfaces" and are two-socket Xeon servers. In fact, the new hp G6 range has a whole number of two-socket designs using the same industry standard interfaces, are you going to pretend they all perform exactly the same?
All you have shown is you either don't understand architecture or don't want people to see the difference. Either way, since Sun haven't released the CINT2006 or CFP2006 benchamarks (I wonder why) or benched as large a cluster, you can extrapolate, bluster and lie all you like, no-one will take your word for it. In fact, the vast majority of customers that have been burnt by Sun's performance promises in the past will just flat out not believe you. Why do you think we moved to a policy of shoot-outs? It wasn't becasue we found that hp or IBM gave us unrelaible estimates, it was because we found Sun's increasingly extravagant claims and wild FUD to be unsubstantiated.
Moving to shoot-outs does seem to have prolonged many purchase cycles, but the payback is we get to spot a lot of issues (app, stack, storage and server, or just with our own processes) long before we hit production. It has also massively reduced the amount of FUD and promises we get from the vendors, as they now know we will be putting their statements to the test. Anyone even tempted to swallow Novatose's male bovine manure, I would recommend you do a real test before you hand over your money, as nobody even knows if there will be a "Sun" hardware bizz to complain to in a year or so.
/point, laugh, enjoy the Sunshiner deathrows!
"....An Itanium score of 2.8x faster than a SPARC score... at what cost?...." Well, just for you Sunshiners, I did try using the Sun online shop to price up an equivalent T5140 spec, only the online tool doesn't let you put more than 32GB of over-priced RAM into the SPARC box, and I ran out of PCIe slots and couldn't put in an internal RAID card for the boot disks way before I got to matching the number of fibre and Ethernet ports out of the BL870c. And then, there's the cost of the additional switches and mangement tools that you'd have to throw in to match the hp blades (I tried doing the same with the Sun baldes but you just can't get to an equivalent spec).
"....There is NOTHING to be proud of here, Matt...." No, nothing like having the fastest benchmark for a software solution you Sunshiners keep telling us is a key technology. Oh, hold on a sec - didn't Sun used to push these benchmarks like crazy? Could it be that since they have fallen off the performance map they just can't be bothered in even trying to benchmark their solutions? Did Ponytail lay off the testing team early?
"....Do the HP Itanium systems cost 10x as many Euros than the SUN SPARC systems? or is it 100x the Euros for that little 2.8x speed bump?...." Strange that hp seem so capable of supplying better systems at less cost to the customers then. Did you use the same warped calculator you use for all those Sun performance claims to calculate the costings there? Lots of research presented very neatly - not! Care to post some pricings to back up your wild claims (whilst your Sun rep can still give you prices)? I'm betting not.
"....The poor HP Itanium database server needed 7 dual-ported 1GigE Ethernet cards while the SUN just needed it's 10GigE Ethernet card. A little deficient in the I/O bus speed? Can't dig a 10GigE from a closet? Need a SUN Ethernet card?...." Lol, if you knew anything about other vendor's kit you'd know the Virtual Connect modules in the C-class blade chassis come with 10GbE ports. Looks like you know as little about the competition as you do about what customers actually want.
".....WE'RE WINNING!...." A quote that says it all about the deluded Sunshier mentality. How can losing money for years, losing marketshare for years, being late to every market with every product, being rejected for buyout by the two leading hardware vendors, going from a $200bn company to less than $6bn in real cash, refusing to let customers benchmark your kit because you know customers will then see how poorly it performs in real world tests, and finally being swallowed up at peanut value by a software company, class as winning? Sun is dead. SPARC is dead. Go find another cult.
RE: Matt Bryant: still looking for mr. goodbenchmark
Novatose, why do you bother posting as AC and then immediately after as David Halko? Your syntax, writing "style" and repeated innaccuracies and FUD are so obvious. Have they fired the rest of the marketeering droids already?
"....10519 12 HP-UX Integrity BL860c.... 09501 04 Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140...." And still pointing to a rack server rather than the new Sun CMT blade, and then comparing it to a different hp blade. Admit it, it's because you couldn't find any Sun benchmarks for the CMT blades, Sun have avoided them as they know the awful chassis design only compounds the poor CMT blade performance.
"....An equivalent SPARC T2+ blade would be the T6340 blade module....." Nope, not equivalent, they are different products. I would agree that both can't offer the performance or flexibility of options as the BL870c, but as to how the T6340 and T5140 compare you can't state as you don't know. Sun are very keen to keep any such comparison under wraps as they know how poorly their whole third failed attempts at blades do in comparison with hp blades.
"....Using the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark you suggested, to compare Itanium to SPARC Niagra, we can extrapolate the scaling factors on a dual-socket node...." Hilarious! You really don't have any idea how clusters work, do you? First off, you need reliable clustering and scaleable software and hardware - Sun can't post results for large T2/T2+ clusters becasue they know they scale clusters poorly. Secondly, you have the additional traffic in clusters that degrades performance as you add nodes - adding a fifth node does not guarantee a 25% increase in performance over four nodes, and it gets worse as you grow the cluster. So any extraploation is just the usual Sunshiner fantasy groping in the dark as Sun won't post large cluster results. Until they do, you can extrapolate all you like and no-one will believe you.
/maybe swine flu struck early, we just didn't notice the symptoms included delusional belief in Ponytail?
A friend at Oracle just reminded me that Oracle chose hp Integrity servers when it moved off Exchange to their own Collaboration Suite for all Oracle email users years ago. Their back office is all ProLiant, much of it on RedHat. Looks like Sun's own IT team had better get on with some cross-training!
Blame it on hp - provisioning LUNs with CommandView is so quick I actually had the time spare to go and look at the SPECjAppServer2004 results. And what grabs your eye first? Top result is an hp BL870c blades cluster with Oracle WebLogic Server Standard Edition Release 10.3, on hp-ux 11i v3, scoring 26,655 JOPS. Yes, hp's Itanium-based blades scoring higher than ANY Sun server solution, from blades right through to M9000. The highest Sun result published is just 9,501 JOPS for a cluster of four T5140 Niagara servers, again using Oracle WebLogic Server Standard Edition Release 10.3. Sun have always had problems scaling Niagara, so whats the excuse for the lack of an M-series result even close to the BL870c cluster? Isn't the M9000 man enough for the job? Guess not.
Talking of blades, shall we go look for results for the latest T2/T2+ blades from Sun, released back in October 2008, the T6340 and T6320? Direct competitors to the BL870c, you'd expect Sun to have lots of benchmarks ready to fight their corner, right? Erm.... no! No SPECjAppServer2004 result. CINT2006? No published result. CFP2006? Nyet, nien, non! Doesn't look like Sun thought there was much point in benchmarking their new blades seeing as they have such a tiny share of the blades market compared to hp, IBM or Dell. Makes you wonder why they even bothered making them seeing as they must have known back then the company was up for sale and anything SPARC had zero future. I guess they just hoped to sucker in some more Sunshiners to get a few more sales in whilst they looked for a buyer.
In fact, although there are some SPEC results for the T5xxx servers, there are no published T2/T2+ results for CINT2006 or CFP2006, probably as these highlight individual core performance. Sun still trying to hide the dreadful performance of their wheiner cores?
/waiting for Sunshiner meltdown in 3... 2.... 1.....
RE: Anonymous Marketing Droid
"Ha, Ha, Ha... LOL..." Yeah, hope the laughter helps whilst you wait on your pink slip from Oracle. You know I'm going to have the last laugh as my future is not tied to Slowaris or SPARC, unlike yours.
"....HP as a preferred partner to Oracle is over. Solaris is again the preferred platform for Oracle, as espoused by Oracle....." Now you are making me laugh! Oracle can't afford to turn their backs on the vendor that is going to give them the most new licensing opportunities in the coming years. How do you think hp broke the old stranglehold that Sun had on Oracle from the dot-boom days? Hp simply became much more important, especially when they bought Compaq and the code that underlies the Oracle clustering technology. With IBM pushing DB2, hp is the natural partner for Oracle, especially as it means hp are less interested in pushing MS SQL further into the datacentre whilst the reltionship lasts. Like I said, Larry doesn't do fantasies.
"....Shows that you're either inept at benchmarking or you're a liar. I lean toward the latter, but the former seems just as likely....." Well, Sun were allowed to tune the Niagara kit for our shoot out, so are you accusing Sun of being inept? And they lost, because we tested real data with a real business app, and the Niagara choked. As a result, all our old SPARC Slowaris Oracle instances which Sun wanted to move to Niagara are now running on either hp-ux on Integrity or RedHat on ProLiant - the M-series couldn't compete on price or performance. Check the market figures, it's happening all over the place, because Sun haven't been able to provide what customers actually want at a competitive price for years.
".....You obviously bought into the HP FUD over perf/core, but like them, forgot that it's about the system, not the core...." As I have explained before, we don't buy anyone's FUD, we insist on benchmarking any major solution in our environment with real data, as that is the only way to get a real idea of how it will perform. The only one buying the FUD seems to be yourself, or how do you explain the many instances on the web of users moaning that Niagara just can't handle the heavy threads needed for real enterprise apps with Oracle? Or that it is just so ludicrously expensive compared to Xeon or Opteron kit?
"Oracle runs very nicely on Niagara, and I know because I have done it and I do it...." Yeah, I'm thinking back to your statement about liars. Either that or you're running a cutesy webapp with tiny threads, rather than a real enterprise database. Whatever, if it suits your business then enjoy, at least until your management make the strategic decision that SPARC is dead and they had better move off it to a platform that has a future. Is that the IBM and hp salesgrunts knocking on your CIO's door? You'd best go and try feed him some more of that Sunshine, just in-case his Sunshiner Blindfold™ isn't on quite as tightly as yours.
RE: Novatose
I see there is still a problem with reality out there in the Land of Sunshine.
"....Once Oracle may own their own Intel & AM line of processors, the question is whether this will remain the same... One would suspect that HP ProLiant sales may decrease in this category....." You fail to understand that customers are buying hp ProLiant over other vendors' x64 offerings because they prefer what they get from hp. Oracle, with no hardware experience, is just as unlikely to be able to take on ProLiant with Galaxy as Sun were. Oracle and Galaxy alone won't even stand a chance against Dell or IBM, let alone hp. The fact is Larry is going to take an axe to the Sun hardware bizz - Galaxy may survive as it allows Oracle to pitch their own inhouse verson of the hp Exedata and Database Machine offerings, but only to accounts where they aren't partnered with hp already. Expect some nice little chats between the very close hp and Oracle sales teams as to whom gets to play where. Is that the sound of your buble bursting I hear?
"....Since Oracle may own MySQL as well as the Oracle RDBMS soon... one might expect a two-fold assault against MS SQL...." What you should expect is Oracle to protect their enterprise DB Oracle offering by castrating MySQL into an Oracle Lite. Result - a fork in MySQL, as already announced by the community. Oracle will make some suport money from the non-Oracle MySQL, especially through InnoDB, but MS will still get the last laugh. Or didn't you notice that the original Sun purchase of MySQL did absolutely NOTHING to the rate at which MS SQL is ramping up?
As to more of your selective benchmark quotes, do you really want a repeat of the SAP benchmark spanking you let yourself in for last time? Do you really want me to go look at those results and find out, like the SAP ones, you are comparing new Niagara with five-year-old Itanium? I'm not going to waste my time with any benchmark you quote as I've already had Sun come round and sprout all their FUD directly, and had fun showing them up. If all you're going to do is repeat the same Sun salesguide then please don't bother - the market didn't belief it either, as shown by the fact that hp and IBM are gutting Slowaris accounts in the enterprise high-end.
An even better reason to ignore anything you Sunshiners say about Niagara is that Oracle have said NOTHING about any future for it. MySQL - rapid response to negative community comments, attempt at reassurance - so tick. Java - tick. Slowaris - tick, kinda, still no details. Any Sun hardware? Big, long silence. Nothing, nada, nil point! Galaxy as storage is just guessing by the analysts, nobody outside of the Land of Sunshine even thinks Rock, T3 or the rest of the StorageTek side have a chance in Oracle hands. Carry on imagining that Rock is "too far down the line" to be cancelled, forget that even the SPARC fanclub canned UltraSPARC V at a later stage when it became obvious it was too little too late, and don't for a second remember that the SPARC fanclub are not even in control any more. You Sunshiners can squeal all you like, but the analysts that the market listens to are already looking at whom is going to buy up the bits Oracle doesn't want, and there doesn't seem to be any buyers lining up for anything SPARC. Did you forget, hp already had the chance and said "no", IBM dumped them, and Fujitsu have already said they don't have the cash spare? There's no-one left, even your latest fantasy dribbling of Apple buying up Sun have proven just as stupid as your idea that FSC would.
/must record some of these Sunshiner sulks, there's only going to be about another six months of this comedy to point and laugh at!
"....SPARC is Oracle's largest customer base for Oracle Databases....." But hp is Oracle's largest partner through the new Oracle installations on ProLiant. And ProLiant is also the largets MS SQL install partner, and that is where Oracle is looking to focus to try and stop MS SQL eating up the rest of their installed base. MS SQL has already overtaken Oracle as the most commonly installed database and Microsoft is making hungry looks at the rest of the Oracle stack. Oracle's big battleground is x64, not the high-end enterprise (where it sells the most new installation licences on hp Integrity anyway). MySQL offers Oracle an option for a a proper Oracle Lite based around the open source community's enthusiasm. Installed SPARC Slowaris Oracle is just an opportunity for migration licences as hp and IBM move to migrate all those Sun customers off that legacy SPARC base onto Power, Itanium, Xeon and Opteron. Oracle has more interest in keeping chummy with hp than trying to pursue a doomed processor line that dragged Sun down.
As to the other two Sunhsiners posting the ludicrous idea that Niagara is a good databse engine and that BTRFS is dead, you're not going to like these simple facts. Niagara is a completely pants as an Oracle engine, I know because I've tried it. Why else do you think Sun and FSC were forced to bring out the SPARC64-based M3000? And Fujitsu is too busy breaking up the old FSC, and doesn't have the cash to save SPARC. In truth, they seem to be struggling to pin a release date to the next gen SPARC64, so why they would want to lumber themselves with a bug-ridden and late product like Rock is beyond me. But then maybe that's because I don't wear one of those Sunshiner Blindfolds™ that seem so good at blocking out nasty things like reality.
And BTRFS has been adopted by the Linux community for the very good reasons that it had nothing to do with Sun, one of the most distrusted software vendors in the eyes of the community (kind of like a M$ Mini Me), and because it doesn't have NetApp filing a suit against it because it isn't a rip off of WAFL as even the Sun engineers admit ZFS is.
/only six more months of pointing and laughing at the Sunshiners before Oracle ties up the deal and starts cutting them off?
This is the part of the article you really need to focus on, before you start all your usual Sunshine about how nothing is going to change, all the old Sun bits that were making a loss at Sun will miraculously manage to survive the purchase by Larry's profit machine, etc, etc. Read it carefully this time, and try and actually comprehend what it says - you may need to remove your Sunshiner Blindfold™ temporarily for that, though:
".....So until this deal is done - or undone - it is hard to say when any Sun product, be it hardware or software, will appear....."
Oh - looks like I was a bit late pointing that out to stop your bleating on again. How do you lot carry on so vocally when you still have both feet still so firmly in your gobs from the "only Solaris on SPARC" howler, or that UltraSPARC V was going to kill Itanium? How about some of that old bravado about how Sun would never need to resell x86/x64, or partner with M$? And let's not forget my all time fave, courtesy of Ponytail himself: “Also, let me be really clear about our Linux strategy. We don't have one. We don't at all. We do not believe that Linux plays a role on the server. Period."
/I have a sneaky suspicion that actually, Ellison is just a fan of loon comedy, and only bought Sun so he too could keep laughing and pointing at the Sunshiners....
RIM weren't giving the phones away for free, the carriers were. How else do you think someone like Voadfone can give you a Storm for £30 a month (could be less, I haven't checked recently)? Where RIM makes the money is on the Blackberry services, which EVERY Blackberry has to use unless you just want to base voice service. For every Blackberry sold, RIM get a monthly revenue stream as the carriers need the RIM service to provide the secure email and other services that users really want when they buy a BB over a plain voice phone. Even the private users using the webmail version of BB mean money going to RIM. Currently, Apple makes a mint off iPhone unit sales because they can (fanbois will pay the premium), but the longterm plan for Apple has to be the services such as iTunes and the app store, and by giving carriers a Mac OS server equivalent to the Blackberry Server for commercial users.
CEO: <pausing, pen held over new director's contract> "So, you're confidant this non-compete clause will save our company money and not just keep you lawyers busy?"
LAWYER: <rubbing hands together like a fly and grinning nervously> "Of course, don't you know we do these things because we love the company?"
CEO: <makes his mark in an illegible scrawl on the contract>
LAWYER: <turns to winged monkey HR minions> "To the bank, my sweets, we have more blood to drain before nightfall!"
Just like Sun did for waaaaaaaaay too long, the new Moon Macrosystems idea ignores Linux. RedHat and Novell have shown you don't need the full solution if you can partner with the leading vendors (hp and IBM) to provide the base to mount your OS and apps on. Whilst Moon sounds a lot better idea than Sun has become, it doesn't have the market presence or simply the scope of even the dead-on-its-feet Sun of today, and it would have to go up against both Windows and Linux, and I'm not sure there's space for another x64 OS in the long run. There may be in the short-term for those customers wanting to get off old SPARC onto x64, but expect to be battered by the marketing and sales might of Oracle, hp, IBM, Dell, Fujitsu, etc, etc, who will be targeting those same accounts with polished migration plans, services teams, and the ability to discount well beyond what some small start-up can afford. And hp, IBM, Dell and Fujitsu at least can offer Solaris x64 support to boot (even Solaris on SPARC for a price for the diehards or those simply too scared to migrate).
All in all, this does remind me of some of those bitter AS400 refugees that left IBM when they saw the rise of AIX and WIndows, tried their own thing, and then faded into obscurity. Or ended up working for the Reg! :P
Yeah, so Larry is just going to continue on with exactly teh same loss-making Sun products that buried Sun! Go on, try saying it into the mirror with a straight face. You know that is just male bovine manure. Larry is going to want to make a profit - he is going to take an axe to Sun and gut it. Anything less and IBM will be buying Oracle in five years.
As for the Oracle-hp relationship suddenly crumbling, that's almost as laughable as the rest of your delusions. If all else fails, there is nothing to stop hp simply ratcheting up their relationship with MS (or did you forget they are also MS's biggest partner as well as Oracle's) and start really pushing MS SQL into the datacenter. Or even partner up with the MarisDB people. Oh dear, did those facts just blow a great big hole in your fantasy world?
"Let me get this right - this bozo leaves EMC (company apparently doing alright)...." Apart from VMware, EMC is not so secure. Their proprietary storage business has gone from dot-boom complete market dominance to also-ran and is now under serious threat of being eaten from below by "cheap" storage solutions like LeftHand.
"....Better still, rather than join the only part of Hopeless President that's making good money (yep, that old clunker EDS - now we can see why they bought that pile) he choses to join the group that - reputedly - is losing la dinero faster than a rube at the Vegas tables....." It seems to have escaped your notice that hp have consistently turned in profits for many years before the EDS acquisition. And the hardware bizz was making a profit all that time - didn't you notice those Gartner and IDC figures about hp being the number one server vendor? Ever heard of the ProLiant range? Or notice that Integrity is out-selling IBM an Sun in the lucrative enterprise high-end. How do you think hp made the money to buy EDS?
"....I can only assume that the sainted exec relishes the challenge of turning that turkey around....." No, more like he saw a nice, comfortable bearth to weather out the recession, with the added bonus of a long-term shot at the CEO slot when Hurd The Butcher gets bored and looks for a new victim. With Sun going belly up, IBM and hp will be targetting all that creaking SPARC base as a key growth area over the next few years, and Donatelli is probably going to pick up some nice bonuses off the back of prep work others have put in place as hp reaps in those migrations.
As you can see, the Sunshiners aren't dealing too well with that whole Sun-just-got-raped-by-Larry thing after hp and IBM both laughed at the idea of buying their ludicrous hardware bizz. As regards layoffs, they also seem to have forgotten that Ponytail announced 6,000 before the sale and it still won't be enough for Larry. Not to worry, even the most obtuse Sunshiner can only keep going for about another year, by then Oracle will have killed off most of the existing Sun product lines and they'll have to switch to championing Scientology or some other cult of the deluded.
Dear Tim,
Nope, I save my humour for when the real loons break cover - like you. I feel it's only fair to offer that you save yourself a lot of time and embarrasment up front by stating right now that I don't agree with your obviously ignorant views on the whole Iraq issue, I have done my background reading, spoken to troops that actually went to Iraq, and there is no way you can regurgitate some Indymedia piece and expect me to change my views. But, if you want to start up then I suggest you type D9 into the search box at the top of the page and you'll see exactly what a humour-filled b*tchslapping you are lining yourself up for. Please do try and do a little background reading outside of your obviously limited comfort zone so you don't get too much of a shock or make this too much like shooting Willy Peter at fish in a teacup. Ready? I doubt it, but let's begin....
"....We invaded their country,..." Wow! One actual historical fact! I'm guessing that's your quota filled for now.
"...butchered over a million,...." Really? By who's figures? Even the debunked Lancet figures only mentioned 654,965, and they had to use the most unscientific and ludicrous statistical projections to get there (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casualties). And even the original Lancet article makes no attempt to blame allied forces for all those casulaties, but admit many were caused by Iraqi in-fighting. Maybe we should just stop there before we expose your idiocy further? No, you want to go on?
"....you are suprised they are upset?..." Who are upset? The article says the "insugents" were allowed to state their piece for the game, so why would they be upset? Oh, are you talking about Iraqis in general? So that would be the feelings of the majority of Iraqis, as represented by the democratically-elected government that sent the Iraqi forces in to fight alongside the US forces in Falujah, against Al Quaeda forces which have been estimated to be as high as 60% non-Iraqi? Ah, I can see exactly how thorough your research was leading to those deeply entrenched opinions of yours - all of about five minutes of MTV?
"...They do not have UAV's,tanks,aircraft,computers,supply or logistics chains. They do not even get an income...." Ignoring the fact that the original invasion was against the very well armed Iraqi forces - the biggest armed forces of any country in the Middle East - the jihadis that fought in Fallujah represented the minority of Iraqis, not even the whole of the Sunni minority (hence the sucess of the Anbar Awakening program that has helped other Sunnis show they are no friends of the "insurgents"). The "insurgents" chose a battlefield - Fallujah, a crowded civillian town - where they knew the Iraqi and US forces could not use the majority of their high-tech weapons. This brought it down to the type of conflict "insurgents" (AKA terrorists) like - hiding behind women, kids and booby-traps. All this activity was carefully planned and well-funded by Sunni groups throughout the Middle East, even to the point where the jihadis did get paid an "income".
"....Did you know that we denied using illegal chemical weapons only to find that ex-soldiers confirmed (in the Starts and Stripes) it was used on civilians...." I'm guessing you want to wade into a discussion of whether white phosphorous counts as a chemical weapon, regardless of what convention the US was signed up to or not at the time. Oh, and did you mean Stars & Stripes? The reports you refer to recount the use of "shake and bake" tactics - using WP shells to drive enemy forces under cover into the open where HE shells can be used to kill them. At the time, this was completely legal for the US. I'm guessing you can't even name the convention or law you think the US broke by using such tactics at the time. Go on, just try. Before you do, please also go read up on Saddam's use of chemical weapons against the Kurds so you can get a little perspective on your next childish rant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_poison_gas_attack).
"....They didn't even attack us and we still went in...." Are we talking about Fallujah or the Iraq invasion? The former was at the direct request of the democratically-elected Iraqi government. The latter was in response to Saddam's continual breaching of UN Security Council resolutions. Vent all you like, but you and your like will have no fun ever trying to get the invasion actually judged illegal by a US court. Even Obambi is wary of that, as it would seriously tie his hands shouId he ever need to smack somebody down. I suggest you just give up now and find something useful to do with your life. In the meantime, instead of swallowing that bilge about US troops all being sadist killers, try reading some articles like this actual report from the Wall Street Journal journo embedded with the Marines:
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB108561482302622502.html?mod=opinion%255Fmain%255Fcommentaries)
"...Then we used bulldozers to lift approx 1.5ft of topsoil from around Fallujah to ensure investigators did not find any proof....." Never heard that one before, and I've seen some pretty wierd conspiracy stuff posted on the web! How would lifting topsoil OUTSIDE the town hide evidence of fighting INTOWN? How would removing topsoil hinder an investigation into fighting taking place INSIDE buildings, and exactly which investigators were these you mention as being obstructed? Please supply the source for this bizarre claim, I'm chuckling in advance at such a barmy idea!
"....Next you'll be telling us black people have have no right to be mad at the KKK....." Ah, the usual sign of an idiot running out of anything to back up their argument - a slant off into wild implications of racism. Please, try harder, you're not fooling anyone. I'm nowhere near run out of stuff to counter your ramblings.
"....What never ceases to amaze me is how we (as a nation) are so blind and incapable of thinking independently for ourselves." Just because not everyone shares your point of view does not mean we are all blind. It just means we are better read, more informed and generally more intelligent than you. Don't feel too bad about your failings, I'm told there's one born every minute.
Now, I'm guessing your reply is going to follow the usual for an ignoramus such as yourself when they run into someone more than capable of showing you up - backpeddalling, unsubstantiated accusations against US forces, more moralistic preaching followed by a wander off-topic into the areas of Gitmo or rendition. Before you do the Gitmo trip, I suggest you read this article about how Iraqis deal with the "insurgents" in Fallujah, then ask yourself whether Gitmo was really that bad: http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/2008/02/the-dungeon-of.php
If you'd actually checked you would have found out that the leading group pressuring Konami not to release the game was not from the US but here in the UK. Yes, those ever-so-fashionable loons from Stop the War Coallition, based out of the UK. And what was their main concern? "It's entirely possible that Muslim families will buy the game, and for them it may prove particularly harrowing." So that would be the UK PC brigade, not the Septic vets.
The complaints from the US vets seem to have centered on two points. Firstly, there was no inclusion of extreme Islamism in the game. For example, no discussion of such niceties as the "geurilas" using places of worship (mosques) as arms stores, torture centres and sniping positions (all breaches of the Geneva Convention), and no inclusion of the type of extremist actions against the civillians the "geurillas" deigned not muslim enough (which included the torture centres). Instead, all the civillian dead seemed to be attributed to US or Iraqi Army fire.
Secondly, they felt that the game just made too much happen to the squad. Taking stories from many different units and then making them all happen to one small group was unrealistic, said the vets. It made it more dramatic and horrorific, but failed to show that long periods of battle are actually spent waiting around, and often the lead up to action can instead lead to a stand down as the enemy surrenders, falls back or you just realise the intell was wrong in the first place. Unfortunately, the old soldiers grumble that war is 99% boredom and 1% unremitting horror accurately portrayed would not sell many games.
All in all, Konami were in a no-win position - include the reality of Islamic extremism and face the wrath of the PC brigade, who seem happy to boycott and picket the stores Konami needed to sell the game through; or get bad-mouthed by the vets and maybe face a similar picketing by vets groups.
"....Tukwila will not ship in systems until November, after HP's fiscal year end. The HP reps have been telling customers this already...." Strange, but hp wouldn't give us a ship date without an NDA, but all I can say is the date wasn't November. Are you sure your "customers" got the NDA briefing or just the FUD?
"....Expect Oracle to eliminate over half of the models...." Nah, just the ones with any Sun SPARC chip, so all the CMT line. Not sure what Larry will do about the SPARC64 boxen, I suppose that's down to renegotiation with Fujitsu. After all, SPARC64 is a Fujitsu concern so Larry doesn't have to shoulder the development costs, that's if they can convince Larry there is a market for future SPARC64s. Galaxy might survive in some form for Oracle appliances. The rest? Scrapped or sold off. By my estimation that would leave less than half the models.
By the way, when is Power7 actually due now? The IBM roadmap used to have Power7 as 2009, then 2010, now the latest version just says "future".....
I always wondered why it took IBM so long to get the Power6 across the whole server range, and it looks like there was an issue with the design that meant some systems had to wait for the "Power6+" CPU. And then the Power6+ cores had to be wound down for some reason - don't tell me IBM wouldn't have loved to release them at full speed. All very interesting. It'll be interesting to see if IBM see fit to answer TPM's queries.
"Truly, this is locking the barn door after the horse has bolted." Or maybe before the door closes. It could just be rushing to get features out before Orcale comes along and starts singing "it's my party, and you'll cry if I want you to". Or it could be the MySQL team trying to impress before the Oracle axemen get busy with the pink slips. Just imagine what it's like for all those other Sun hardware departments where Oracle hasn't stated any desire to proceed with their products - how do you impress your new overlords when you're the ones getting the blame for killing a Silicon Valley "legend"?
"....Despite her employer's claim it had done everything "by the book", TUC general secretary Brendan Barber noted: "Most employers wouldn't dream of following their staff down the pub to see if they were sounding off about work to their friends."...." How stupid is that? Of course you are responsible for the image you project of your company! If I go down the pub and tell my mates exactly what I think of the new CIO then I'm smart enough to make sure (a) there's not someone around that might report me back to the CIO, and (b) they are my mates and not some unknown I have never met. Of course, not that I would ever complain about our wonderful and respected CIO, a true genius and inspiration to us all.....
And it also conveniently ignores the main point - if these people are off sick then they are claiming pay for not working because they supposedly cannot work. If they are shown to actually be capable of work then they are just thieving.
Sure, IBM will want to kick uppitty CISCO about a bit in public, but not too much. They still use a shedload of CISCO kit in areas like their Catalyst-based blades interconnect modules, and the IBM SVC product is pure CISCO tech. With storage virtualisation of existing SANs looking like being a key market in a downturn where array sales are likely to drop, IBM can't afford to junk the SVC offering. Getting cuddly with Brocade makes sense as Brocade are the leader in the SAN switch market, and likley to lead in converting exisiting SANs into "unified" LANs, whilst CISCO still lead in pure LAN installations and so will be the lead attacker in converting LAN-only shops to FCOE. IBM needs both on their side.
One problem with old Novatose's marketeering - did he call Larry first to get his approval? Fact is, all the "coming" Sun chips mentioned are waiting on Axeman Larry to decide whether Oracle want them or not, and the evidence so far is not. First off, Oracle haven't committed to ANY current Sun hardware, let alone future products. Wonder what the two-week delay was in Sun announcing the Nehalem kit? It wasn't just Sun being slower to market than the other vendors (as they usually are), it was probably because Sun had to ask Oracle for permission to launch the kit. Until Larry stands up and says Rock and T3 are go they are just vapourware, and even less convincing vapourware than when the SPARC fanclub was running Sun.
And even if they do get released, Intel and AMD are hardly going to be quaking in their boots. T3 will still have the same scale problems of all the Niagara lines - Xeon and even the old Barcelona Opteron already out-scales and out-perfroms it. And the Nehalem and Barcelona cores are full-bodied cores with a real pipeline to keep those threads spinning, whereas the whole Sun design is a capitulation to the idea that you can't have all the threads going at once, because Sun couldn't design a bus or core powerful enough to. All T1 and T2 did was cannibalise the existing low-end SPARC base, and even then Sun and FSC finally had to produce a single-SPARC64 M-series server (the M3000) as their customers kept screaming at them that Niagara just didn't do what they wanted. And the final nail in T3's coffin - even if Oracle drop the stupid Sun insistance of pitching Slowaris as the OS of choice instead of Linux, it still can't run Windows, which means it can't compete with the cheaper, more flexible and faster x64 options which can Linux, Windows or even Slowaris x86. Niagara's little webserving niche is not going to be enough to keep T3 alive in Oracle.
Rock? Way too little and far too late, even if they can fix the bugs. Going on the info Sun have released, Rock will be out-performed by the Power5 and old Madison Itanium2 cores it was originally supposed to go up against. Power6 and the latest Montecito Itanium2 cores will comfortably out-perform it, and then there are Power7 and Tukwila Itaniums waiting in the wings. 32-thread Power7 pricing is anyone's guess but likely to be keenly driven as IBM and hp scrap over who gets to migrate all those Sun accounts McNeedy and Ponytail have left in the lurch. Tukzilla-based Integrity servers from hp will come with the big price advantage that Tukwila and Nehalem allow more sharing of components than Power7 and xSeries can, so hp will be able to leverage the economies of scale of that massive ProLiant bizz to keep Integrity costs down. Oracle doesn't have a massive x64 bizz (Galaxy can't be described as a tier1 x64 bizz), and the Galaxy servers don't share components with the Niagara or M-series servers to anything like the same extent. So, Rock and T3 will offer poorer performance and at uncompettive prices. Yeah, I can see Larry jumping with joy at that prospect - not!
IBM aren't keeping the Power6+ as a spoiler to the Rock/T3 announcements, they don't need to. They are keeping it ready for the arrival of Tukzilla this Summer. With hp's new servers due around this September, IBM will want to throw a spoiler in there to stop hp pointing out to all those Sun customers they can have a shiny new Tukzilla server in September or wait another six months plus for Power7. After all, if IBM play it the same way they did Power6, they could start with just one part of the range and that could mean customers actually waiting for Power7 in the servers they need as late as 2011.
Interesting though that Novatose is no longer singing the praises of the Fujitsu SPARC64 chips. Are the Sunshiners just sulking because Fujitsu didn't ride in and save their fantasy world like they insisted FSC would? Or is this a silent admission that even the next gen SPARC64 - if it ever arrives - is going to be just as uncompetitive as Rock?
Larry Ellison isn't blind, unlike McNeedy and Ponytail, and he will know better than to follow their blinkered and comic faith in SPARC. Larry may want the Galaxy servers for his new storage stack, but the rest are just a profits blackhole, and I predict Larry will cut them lose without a second thought.
/Novatose - the comedy gift that keeps on giving.
RE: Cs
You forgot there are other popular and powerful open choices out there, such as Perl, which many seem to consider unfashionable but may turn to should Larry make a mess of Java. I know Perl is not included as standard in every major OS (/looking at Redmond) but it's definately in many of the flavours we use such as hp-ux and RedHat, so no major change in structure required either.
RE: Bruce Ordway
".....HP JetAdmin is a good example...." Not really - the latest version (10.x) uses .NET, is still criminally slow to load, but does work very nicely once it's up and running. The interface is prettier, though. HP does have a serious fixation with making sure their tools run on as many platforms as possible, hence the use of Java. Many of those tools were PAINFULLY slow to start due to Java, but did the job very nicely once up and running. Personally, I've always valued how much information is coming out of the interface rather than how "pretty" it is, but I do strongly agree that there is a strong market opinion that Java = "slow".
Oh, did I miss the bit where ANYONE at Oracle stood up and committed to Rock? Or even more of the current UltraSPANKed or Niagara kit? The storage kit maybe? Nope, not even Galaxy. In fact, Oracle have very carefully NOT committed - despite continual requests for clarification - to anything other than Slowaris, Java and MySQL. I guess you'd better put that humble pie on hold, you're probably going to be choking on it soon.
As for zvonr's childish belief that Oracle can't sell the Sun hardware business because "revenue is significant" - that revenue is negative. Sun's hardware business is the rabid four-hundred pound gorilla Oracle are quietly pretending isn't in the room. It has been a constant source of losses for Sun for years, and only realistic and drastic cuts both to product ranges and employees will ever make it even close to breaking even. Don't take my word for it, go read the analysts reports. You Sunshiners can get all giddy and sing hymns to Ponytail all you like, but as soon as Oracle gets down to the nitty-gritty of carving up Sun's carcass you guys are going to be crying into your beer.
Enjoy!
Careful on that storage deal! IBM had something similar with the early Sharks, they would cut a server deal along with a Shark for next to nothing or even nothing for a year, you'd take it thinking what a lovely deal it was, and then a year later when you had your bizz crit data on there IBM would tell you the real annual support costs - ouch! They tried it with us, they hoped we'd replace some old EMCs, but we didn't like the Shark and so just used it for archives. At the end of the year we simply backed the archives off to tape and let IBM take it back. Most amusing!
The straight edges of the landing gear doors actually increase radar signature even if they close relatively flush with the fuselage or wings. If you have a look at real stealth designs you'll see a toothlike patterm of triangles down many straight edges such as doors (the bottom of the windscreen on the F-117A is a good example which can been seen in most pics of the plane), so that radar waves are deflected and dispersed.
Given the recent Israeli use of drones to attack targets in Sudan, which supposedly has an air defence system, it seems there will definately be a market for stealthier attack drones. Seeing as the Taleban don't use much radar, it looks like the Avenger is expected for work in places like Iran or North Korea (or Syria or Pakistan, depending on how paranoid you think Obambi can get).
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