Re: RE: Re: Re: No common Hardware model for Sun systems?
"Wrong target - for acceptance in a commercial role the Niagara Linux systems will have to run commercial apps, not hobbyist ones."
But we're talking Telecom here Matt. Telecom seems more willing to find the best solution vs the biggest vendor to do their apps. Many times the best fit is a small company that will compile their application to whatever box you want. Also, many Telecom apps are homegrown. Finally, in Telecom, you are talking thousands, if not millions, of users. Niagara is definitely the sweet spot for this. It's not how fast they run, it's the number of users they can handle. For the cost, nothing comes even close to Niagara on number of threads (read concurrent users).
"OK, so we're back to wheiner threads again."
It doesn't matter if they're wiener threads. Most or many of the applications that need to go here are low end applications (well, not exactly low end, but they need throughput, not speed). The many thread solution for Telecom is very important, but being able to do it on a small solution that you can throw into a brick non-datacenter building somewhere is also important.
"I can't see them jumping to Linux on Niagara unless it offered some specific advantage over OSs such as Slowaris itself." I agree, but they are doing it... Telecoms tend to be first to bite on a lot of this stuff for some reason and I don't see Sun doing this unless they had customers requesting it.
"If that was true, then x64 wouldn't be eating up the UNIX business from the bottom up, and Niagara is the very bottom of the UNIX bizz."
I'm not sure what "very bottom of the UNIX bizz" means, but again, we're talking Telecom here. This is not general purpose computing. They need Telecom certified gear, and that is what the Netra/Niagara is.
"Maybe, but will IBM love it enough to put any money into it? Doubtful."
Sadly, I agree. You never know though. It's a better than 1B dollar business with nice margins and growing faster than most platforms. IBM likes it's disparate platforms that it can charge huge sums of money to integrate. I just don't see them wanting to keep two UNIX around... Again... you never know...