Servers
Sun sells two Constellation supers for $30m
Sun Microsystems may be keeping quiet as lawyers apparently work out the details of a sale to IBM, but the company has made one announcement: a $30m deal to sell two of its "Constellation" supercomputers to support weather forecasting and academic research in Australia. Sun will install two complete Constellation systems, with …
What!
"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?
So what exactly does Sun do?
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 $$$? That's not the Sun I used to know. No Sparc, no Slowlaris? What's the world coming to?
Dumbing Down
Sometimes you have to "dumb down" to the customer's level to sell.
Anyone seen Matt
... where are his beloved HP? Selling printers again no doubt.
@Andy
Yeah well, we need something to fill the TV airtime between the end of the news and the start of tabloid current affairs programmes. Cheap at half the price.
But really, we're a big country. It was raining here in Adelaide whilst the outer hamlets of Melbourne were burning hot (literally). We're not some little island in the Atlantic 1/30th the size of Australia where the weather is either "rain" or "about to rain" :-)
obJoke
Meteorology? Sun misread the memo about Cloud Computing.
@Pirate Date: So what exactly does Sun do?
Open Systems!!!
Pirate asks, "Chips from Intel?"
Yep, done that before, but there was no market for it in the past, so the product was discontinued,
Pirate asks, "OS from Red Hat?"
Yep, used BSD UNIX early on. AT&T invested into SUN and Solaris took on SVR4.
Pirate asks, "Sun has sold a huge system just to push their new Infiniband switch and to get a little support $$$?"
Nope, the deal was very significant: server sales, software sales, support sales, massive storage, maintenance revenue... a very nice deal!
