RE: Solaris on Itanium?
Wait for a response from Matt Bryant. He's a true Sun hater. He rips on Sun every chance he gets even if the article isn't about Sun.
Matt said "but HP's Itanium range is the only enterprise server range that is growing in market share and revenue, the rest are stagnating or diminishing"
If you sell 1 egg one year and 2 eggs the next, that's 100% growth. Your shipments have grown much faster than your competitors that are selling 500,000 the first year and dropped to 450,000 the next.
http://www.itjungle.com/bns/bns022108-story01.html - review by gartner of major server vendors of 2007.
"RISC-Itanium Unix servers fell on a global basis for 2007 at 13.8 percent in shipments but grew 1.7 percent in revenue for the year," explained Jeffrey Hewitt, a research vice president at Gartner who does the server counting, said in a statement accompanying the numbers." "By Gartner's count, seven of the top 10 server makers in 2007 had shipment increases, but IBM, NEC, and Sun Microsystems did not. Hewlett-Packard is still the king of server shipments worldwide, thanks to its acquisition of Compaq back in 2001, and managed to push out 2.64 million boxes, up 16.8 percent and giving it a 29.8 percent share of the global 8.84 million shipments in 2007. Gartner reckons that ProLiant branded shipments rose by 17.2 percent, Integrity shipments rose by 56.8 percent, and NonStop shipments climbed by 13.8 percent"
As far as Solaris being slow http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Jul/03/1_million_messages_a_second_for_trading_system.html.
That beat out Linux on an HP system of very comparable configurations. HP systems couldn't even come close. So Solaris not only performed but out-scaled the competition in a standard topology in an apples-to-apples comparison.
To add to that, Sun just isn't about SPARC anymore: "Sun Fire X4450: Challenging the HP and IBM bastion" http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3316
Anyone who thinks SPARC is expensive, hasn't been keeping up on price. You can get a SPARC server for about $2800: http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t1000/index.xml.
When you compare it to other RISC or Itanium based servers, the price/performance on SPARC is pretty good and very comparable.
Just check out the following to see how Itanium and SPARC compare:
http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t5220/benchmarks.jsp
http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/m8000/benchmarks.jsp
http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/m9000/benchmarks.jsp
There's a reason why the undergraduate and graduate school Computer Architecture bible moved the Itanium processor discussion from the main book to the online Appendix in favor of the UltraSPARC T2 processors:
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach By John L. Hennessy, David A. Patterson, David Goldberg, Krste Asanovic
http://books.google.com/books?id=R7Frpn3g9AEC
Universities in China are adopting SPARC as their primary architecture to design and develop: http://news.softpedia.com/news/China-Universities-Join-Sun-039-s-SPARC-Partnership-Program-79587.shtml
There's also a reason why SPARC has been so successful since SPARC International was formed. It was never closed or proprietary: http://sparc.org/.
"SPARC International fosters innovation of SPARC by offering testing and branding programs, and, by promoting and protecting SPARC and SPARC-related brand names. The organization maintains this openly and cooperatively defined technology by using its membership fees to ensure that SPARC maintains continuity with the industry standards of binary compatibility. It is this organizations sole responsibility to clarify these definitions which are made available for free download from our web site. You do not have to be a member to download. However, becoming a member provides your company the choice to test and brand products based on the SPARC architecture."
Sun's opensourcing of its UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processors (http://www.opensparc.net/) has led to Universities in China adopting it as the main processor of focus and how there are already two deritivative designs S1 (http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4310115400.html), and
People are starting to deploy SPARC beyond just traditional servers: "Wind River to port Carrier Grade Linux to Sun's UltraSPARC T2 CMT processor" http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0ECZ/is_2008_April_17/ai_n25343268
and also beyond just Sun's own chassis: "Themis Partners with Sun to Make Sparc T2 Blade Server": http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug060508-story04.html
At the end of it all, Matt will probably call me a Sun droid or a Sunshiner or something along those lines. Perhaps. Maybe. It doesn't matter. He's pretty close "behind" Hurd from what I've been seeing reading register articles and comments. Don't care what he will reply with. I don't intend to respond. I like Sun products and I think they're pretty good. Compared to the 330,000 man IBM or the 250000+ man HP, the 30,000 man Sun does a pretty damn good job. And that is without a real marketing organization. Anil Gadre sucks and should be fired and a real marketing organization should take over. I just listed a ton of articles and unless you've been talking to someone from Sun, you probably didn't know all that happened. How much does Sun marketing suck? How much does Anil Gadre suck? How much time do you have?
And amid how bad all the vendors have been struggling in the present U.S. economy, Sun hasn't done great. But for the most part did all right: http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/080715/sunmicro_forecast.html?.v=4
The reality of Itanium has been quoted time and time again:
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/02/24/clabby_cured_again/ - Negative view point of IDC on their consistently rosy depiction of Itanium
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/18/ibm_plots_idc_mistakes/ - IBM plots out why IDC has been wrong about their Itanium prediction.
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/01/10/ibm_itanium_five_years/ - Arcticle in which IBM states that Itanium has 5 years to live.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Dell-Says-Bye-Bye-Itanuim-8651.shtml - Article about Dell discontinuing Itanium servers.