The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Sun sells two Constellation supers for $30m

Andy ORourke

What! 

Posted Wednesday 25th March 2009 16:40 GMT

Joke

"a $30m deal to sell two of its "Constellation" supercomputers to support weather forecasting and academic research in Australia."

Two supercomputers to be able to figure out if it is going to be raining warm, hot, fucking boiling or on fire tomorrow?

Pirate Dave

So what exactly does Sun do? 

Posted Wednesday 25th March 2009 16:55 GMT

Pirate

Chips from Intel? OS from Red Hat? Sun has sold a huge system just to push their new Infiniband switch and to get a little support $$$? That's not the Sun I used to know. No Sparc, no Slowlaris? What's the world coming to?

Anonymous Coward

Dumbing Down 

Posted Wednesday 25th March 2009 19:55 GMT

Sometimes you have to "dumb down" to the customer's level to sell.

Anonymous Coward

Anyone seen Matt 

Posted Wednesday 25th March 2009 22:23 GMT

Pirate

... where are his beloved HP? Selling printers again no doubt.

Anonymous Coward

@Andy 

Posted Thursday 26th March 2009 13:20 GMT

Yeah well, we need something to fill the TV airtime between the end of the news and the start of tabloid current affairs programmes. Cheap at half the price.

But really, we're a big country. It was raining here in Adelaide whilst the outer hamlets of Melbourne were burning hot (literally). We're not some little island in the Atlantic 1/30th the size of Australia where the weather is either "rain" or "about to rain" :-)

Anonymous Coward

obJoke 

Posted Thursday 26th March 2009 14:26 GMT

Meteorology? Sun misread the memo about Cloud Computing.

David Halko

@Pirate Date: So what exactly does Sun do? 

Posted Saturday 28th March 2009 00:04 GMT

Go

Open Systems!!!

Pirate asks, "Chips from Intel?"

Yep, done that before, but there was no market for it in the past, so the product was discontinued,

Pirate asks, "OS from Red Hat?"

Yep, used BSD UNIX early on. AT&T invested into SUN and Solaris took on SVR4.

Pirate asks, "Sun has sold a huge system just to push their new Infiniband switch and to get a little support $$$?"

Nope, the deal was very significant: server sales, software sales, support sales, massive storage, maintenance revenue... a very nice deal!