Posts by zvonr

@Big, tattooed Fred

IBM leadership showed lack of vision several time, remember the IBM PC? IBM virtualization expertise superior? Have you ever heard about VMWARE? All it matters in this world is market share not expertise.

X86 architecture is a ugly architecture, but nobody can beat it on price performance because of the volumes it get produced. Power, Itanium and SPARC will eventually be replaced by X86.

The most famous migration Transitive did was when Apple migrated from to slow and overheating Power CPUs to fast Intel CPUs.

IBM will do whatever it brings them more money, will see what that is...

"Given that filerview is a clunky incomplete pile of Java-crap"

You can develop clunky crap in any language.

You can develop responsive GUIs, games in java, a good example is: http://bytonic.de/html/jake2_webstart.html

Good programmers are rare, and might not enjoy developing admin GUIs ....

Certifications ...

Certifications do have some importance... it all depends what company are you applying too.

However, in my experience, I have encountered too many certified people who were quite bad... same with university degrees, have talked to "phd's" who could not articulate what their thesis was about ... I am also amazed with the amount of lies on people's resumes...

Recruiting developers is not easy, the only way is to test their thinking ability and the fundamentals, technology changes rapidly, you need people who learn fast, and you can only build on strong foundations...

client virtualization is to come

I am looking forward to client virtualization and the thin client war ...

A lot of PCs will disappear.

Linux Raid and ZFS are in different leagues

@Simon I have used linux raid and it is complete and utter crap compared to zfs (to use some famous guys words)

ZFS is more than raid, it is a filesystem too and it has data integrity built in via checksums. Linux Raid can never be as reliable as zfs, because it has not been designed as such.

Oh yes you can create a cheaper system running Linux but in exactly that case you will pay a higher price of data corruption since cheaper components will add you more errors and corrupt data that linux raid is not abble to deal with. With ZFS you can build a way more reliable cheap system.

Does ZFS require more resources? Hell yeah, however you get a lot for it, you get data integrity via checksums, double parity raid z (in case you care about how much re-silvering takes for 1TB drives), snapshots/clones (http://blogs.sun.com/erwann/entry/zfs_on_the_desktop_zfs), multi level compression, ease of use ...

HFS is in the same boat with Linux Raid, however Apple is on its way to replace it with ZFS.

But who cares about Disk Arrays for MacOS :-).

If Apple would be serious about the server market they would buy Sun :-).

Java FX is a good move.

They have a good shot on making this technology successful if they make sure it works well. Java has the most developers out there and that alone will make a lot of people to try out the technology.

One of the most important feature I see is the drag your applet to the desktop feature, allowing you to bypass the browser...

Sun only need to make sure the technology works well...

Thin clinet is the future

Virtualization combined with thin clients should replace a lot of PCs...

You can also try Sun ray thin client technology, it seems thinner :-)

http://www.sun.com/software/index.jsp?cat=Desktop&tab=3&subcat=Sun%20Ray%20Clients

Time to migrate away from power :-)

Maybe IBM wants to migrate away from Power architecture? It worked really well for Apple :-).

x86 is getting faster and more scalable with every generation, and at the volumes x86 has, no other platform can really compete including Intel's own Itanium....

Either way, emulation is always slow ... and more unreliable ...

IBM zealots stop spreading FUD

Guys please stop commenting about products and features you have no experience with and frankly have no clue about them.

To Jesper and Bill: a ZFS clone and a disk clone are 2 different things!!!

cloning a ZFS filesystem is imediate (no file duplications involved)

cloning a ZFS filesystem is extremely space efficient, allowing you to have hundreds of clones on a single disk.

ZFS has checksums, compression, raid ....

ZFS IS FREE

Please also stop spreading the FUD about Oracle licensing on sun systems, you can manage your licensing costs using zones with resource caps, so you only need to pay for as much Oracle as you need.

I have experience with AIX and HPUX, and frankly my favorite is Solaris and Dtrace, ZFS, ZONES+ BRANDZ have no equivalent in HPUX and AIX.

And about th IBM power hardware, as with anything non X86 it will linger around, while x86 systems will take away market from them ....

I am no fan of X86 architecture, and nobody with a minimal hardware knowledge can be, however economics will always triumph ...

Broken Patent System

Every day a patent is invalidated is a good day, and Hitz needs to hurry because soon he's case will contain only invalid patents...

When you are in the software and hardware business, suing a company like Sun ... who are loaded with patents is not the smartest thing to do...

NetApp users, I recomend you take a look at ZFS... and see why NetApp wants it shut down...

interesting x86 system ...

adding numa on top of the fsb does not sound like the cleanest approach... monster is quite an apropriate name...

mr. Matt , the Itanium might scale well (for the few apps that it runs), but these Unisys systems are for people who want to take advantage of binary compatibility, and scale up their X86 apps without putting effort to migrate them... Linux and Windows ru on x86 for quite a while...

Both Sparc and Power architectures have had binary compatibility for decades and scale better today than Itanium systems (256 Sparc cores in the M9000 today).

Itanium will remain a niche product, will have to compete not only against X86, but also against sparc and power systems ...

nothing really surprising

Oracle is not happy with sun purchasing mysql, easpecially when Elison wanted mysql for himself...

There is no doubt X86 will eat away from the market share of sparc, power, itanium systems... of course unless they inovate, the USparc T2 is best at servig web pages, and no CPU is faster at serving encrypted content...

Mysql is a very good oracle replacement on the low end, on the large multi terabyte warehouse apps I would advise to take a look at Sybase IQ, or other column oriented dbs ...

Response to Mr. Matt

Mr. Matt Bryant I don't assume anything, I am only presenting my opinion, just like you do, however without making disparaging remarks.

Calling Solaris Slowaris is not an argument and will not enforce whatever you say.

And I disagree with you that Solaris is slow and I will give a simple scenario: after a power outage ext3 will require a fsck while ZFS does not, and as a result Solaris will come up a lot FASTER, increasing system availability.

I have developed and deployed software on OS/2, AIX ,Windows, HPUX, Solaris, Linux, and all I can say that every OS has/had its merits. I also find the X86 architecture very hard to love from a technical point of view, but it does show how important backward compatibility and volume is.

If you buy the hardware and the OS from the same vendor you will always get better support, right now you can add MySQL to the stack. If I have to run Oracle on Linux I will always go with the "unbreakable" Linux from Oracle to avoid Redhat Oracle finger pointing.... I always had a good experience with Sun support, I never had a problem they have not been able to fix ...

Obviously Sun disappointed you, just like HP disappointed me when I needed to pay a 1000$ license fee to have software mirroring on my PARISK workstation a while ago... however I don't go around and post disparaging comments about HP...