Sun are still selling other peoples technology which means the margins will be small at best...... HPC is a nice flag to wave but unless you are shipping propietry hardware I wonder how the $$'s really add up.....

Sun is selling their own implementation of other peoples (and their own) technology - like almost all other system integrators and manufacturers in this market.

IBM is the big exception with BlueGene (and arguably Cray with SeaStar2 interconnect, but the CPUs in the XT series aren't Crays own). I'm not including SGI anymore since Rackable is not the same company.

The servers and blades, network switching and topology, storage infrastructure and software stack is architected, produced and implemented by Sun.

It's hardly whitebox reselling.

So how is Lustre other peoples stuff? Also the chips may be other peoples stuff, but the servers and IB switches are theirs. Of course, it would be nice to see one of these beasts running Solaris, but Linux is now the defacto HPC OS.