Posts by Matt Bryant 9690 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2007
Re: Rocks don't float - loose lips not needed
"....Now waiting the Matt-B bashing about what he thinks M-values really mean....." All the vendors have their secret "comparitive performance figures". No bashing needed. If you want to compare Sun kit then they would seem a sensible starting place. Personally, I take any vendor's (yes, even hp's) figures with a pinch of salt as I prefer testing with our application stack and own data in our own environment, as that is the only bench that really matters.
Re: re: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: re: Drooling Matty
"Hey Matt, I'm still waiting for you to defend your lies....." But I note our drooler isn't keen to discuss Sun or Rock. Quel surprise!
".....I am especially interested in your ability to prove that Intel is making a profit from Itanium...." Like I said, go ask Mr Ortellini. Please feel free to call him a liar to his face. I'm sure you will as he'll only tell you truths you don't want to hear, and your stock response to reality seems to be denial, denial, denial.
/SP&L
Very telling that the Sunshiners are more interested in posting abuse at a "critic" of their beloved Sun rather than discussing the topic of the article. But is anybody surprised? So let's look at their latest drooling and try and separate some intelligence from the whimpering.
"It must be that he is hurting with his "management team" on the decision to go with the dead end product line like Itanium...." Consider that suggestion for a moment - Rock is dead, Itanium is not, so surely I'd be more in trouble if I'd recommended buying more SPARC to tide us over until Rock arrived, as Sun suggested and no doubt as you believed? Especially given that with the Oracle purchase, there is a big cloud of doubt over ALL the current and future SPARC lines which can't be resolved until late-July at the earliest. Anyone with half a clue and not blinded by the Sunshine would probably come to the conclusion the Sunshine option would make me a lot more unpopular with the board than our current use of Itanium or Power. And, seeing as we chose a backup platform option for all major UNIX projects, we wouldn't be in too much trouble if Itanium did die, unlike you Sunsiners that happilly promote SPARC Slowaris and nothing else. Your logic is poor at best, or just childishly petulant.
"....The past has been painful, and it doesn't look like the future will be much better....." Why has it been painful? Not sure what you're getting at here unless this is some insinuation that hp or IBM have somehow reneged on a platform promise like Sun did when they cancellled UltraSPANKed V and have now with cancelling Rock. But then I don't really expect any form of factual argument from Sunshiners.
"....You could always find an Oracle partner to work for instead of the HP partner that you work for now...." And more of the obsession with making out I work for an hp partner. Very sad. Do you guys really believe that only an hp employee or partner could possibly criticise Sun? Are you that obtuse? Haven't you noticed the big decline in Slowaris sales, even steeper than the general decline in UNIX? Are you really trying to tell me you have never heard a single complaint from a Sun customer? Mind you, it would be hard for you to hear anything with your head so deep in the sand. I suppose it must comfort you to pretend I am an hp employee or work for an hp reseller as that would be so much easier than having to face up to reality. I suggest you get your head out of the sand soon as your continued employment will probably involve learning some new skills with an OS and platform with a future, which means something not from Sun. As a hint, have you seen that Reg article on how RedHat is making a trend-bucking profit in the downturn?
/SP&L, very smugly.
".....Regarding QPI and DDR3 in Itanium not being out yet as Itanium is (again) late...." You have obviously forgotten that the article is about Rock being so late it has been cancelled. Tukzilla hasn't been cancelled. I'd try spelling it out for you but I might have to use words with more than one constinant, which seem to fox any chance of you actually grasping the facts.
"....So which way is it?...." QPI was developed as CSI in the Itanium stream and then also moved to the Xeon stream. DDR3 was originally designed into the Xeon stream, then added to the Itanium stream. Those of us with a clue have read and understood that from the Reg articles on Tukzilla and Nehalem. I assume you were waiting for the crayon edition with all the big words taken out?
"....Intel is not making money from Itanium due to extremely low volumes...." Wrong again. Intel reports it is making a profit on Itanium, and seeing as it is ramping up whilst all SPARC are ramping down, it looks like Itanium will go on making more money than SPARC. Well, more money than SPARC64 as it now looks doubtful any other server SPARC will exist in a year.
"....Even Sun sells twice as many SPARC CPU's ...." Care to post some facts to back up that claim? Even including the Mickey Mouse Niagara CPU and all of the Fujitsu sales it would not reach that "twice" claim. What you are also forgetting is that hp sell the ProLiant range against Niagara with great success, so what you should be looking at is all server sales. But you won't because it really pains you lot to have to admit hp is the number one server vendor. You also forget that hp makes more margin per server than Sun according to IDC, especially in the margin rich enterprise high end where Sun has virtually ceased to exist. In fact, hp makes more money in a quarter on printers and ink than Sun make losses from their whole server bizz in a year. The fact is, were it otherwise, it would be hp being bought up for chump change rather than Sun.
"....Intel is slowly moving Xeon features into Itainum so that they can kill Itanium all together....." Yeah, I heard that bit of Sun FUD too. I think it was before the UltraSPANKed V got canned. Nice to see you Sunshiners are staying up to date - not! Not much hope for an updated FUDset for the Sunshiners now that the Sun has set. Maybe soon they'll realise Intel (and hp) use Itanium and Xeon as a two-prong strategy to attack the RISC market - Xeon from below and Itanium from above. The success of the strategy can be gauged by a simple truth you'd no doubt like to ignore - the Sun server bizz has gone down the tubes with the cancellation of Rock being the final surrender flag. Even Sun's desperately late and failed attempts to jump on the x64 bandwagon haven't saved them due to the vanity of their SPARC pretensions. Had Sun got serious with Slowaris x86 as a real server offering back in 2000 then the story might be different, they might have held off Linux and Windows, but the SPARC-Slowaris crowd couldn't stand that, and they ran the company into the ground in their stupidity.
So let's try and keep it simple. I'll give you four simple questions, you just think long and hard about the answers and then see how silly you feel given your earlier posts:
1) Which company, Sun or hp, has made a profit in the last six years?
2) Which company has the larger range of products, Sun or hp?
3) Which company went from being a $200bn company in 2000 to having a market cap of less than $4bn this year, Sun or hp?
4) Which company has just been bought by a software company, Sun or hp?
/SP&L
"....MB has to go back 6 years to find a point when Sun's chips were slower than Itanium...." As is proven by their relative market positions (and the fact the Sun hardware bizz is currently being lined up for a rodgering by the Oracle banecounters), Itanium has been outperforming Sun kit for years. Apart from the fun we had showing this with Novatose's SAP posts, my own experience of Sun SPARC vs IBM Power vs hp Itanium shootouts for our projects is that Sun hasn't won a single one. The domination of hp-ux on Integrity in he enterprise high end just goes to prove the point. More to the point, we've been replacing old SPARC with Xeon becasue x64 has been outperforming low-end and mid-range SPARC for years too.
But, once again, another AC Sunshiner desperate to avoid the facts of the article - Rock is dead, Sun have studiously avoided denying it, and even if they did their customer base has already started porting off SPARC Slowaris onto platforms like hp-ux and Linux on hp servers (led by EDS, who are taking their own Slowaris skills and hp's excellent porting programs to help all those Slowaris orphans get to a better place).
As has been obvious for the last three years or so, Itanium has only needed to compete with Power as Sun were happilly killing SPARC through their own stupidity. Enjoy!
/SP&L whilst I still can, until Larry kills the rest of Sun.
Those of us that worked with UltraSPANKed will remember that US2 and US3 performances were generally so dire that even the "bump" of the US4 release still left Sun SPARC trailing existing Power, PA-RISC and Itanium. Just 'cos you managed to get SPARC of it's belly and crawling on it's knees didn't mean it was anywhere close enough to catch the competition. It was all the more amusing that Fujitsu's own SPARC64, developed on less money than UltraSPANKed 4, managed to be typically 20% faster for less money (I know 'cos I brought in FSC kit to replace some of our Sun Slowaris servers). You may want to recall that US4 did nothing to halt the dive in Sun sales and the continued lack of profits in the post-dotbomb period, whilst hp and IBM soldiered on with profitable businesses.
But, as you say, let's see if this gets a statement from Sun (Oracle can't comment as they don't own the bizz yet). We can also wait and see if Oracle deny the reports that they are still trying to sell on the unwanted Sun hardare bizz.....
"....Jeez Matt, thats an insight and a half into your psyche...." Yes, it's called humour, I understand that Sunshiners just don't get it seeing as how they were the only poeple not laughing when UltraSPARC IV was announced. Trying to read anything else into it is just desperation on your part to find anything to divert from the topic of the article. The rest of your post is just wishful thinking.
In fact, the rather half-hearted response and the complete lack of ranting from the usually rabid Sunshiners indicates you guys have actually been secretly expecting this just as much as the rest of us, despite your continual denials.
"Ha ha ha!!! Nice Matt. You're right, those are great advances... LOL. and when will they be released? ...." They have been released already in Nehalem. One of Intel's big advantages has been the ability to bring advances from the Itanium line into Xeon and mass-produce them, which makes the cost of introdcuing them in Itanium much lower. When Tukizilla hits those Sun refugee accounts next year it will come with proven QPI and DDR3 tech, and run current Itanium binaries - no risk! Even if Sun had managed to get Rock out the door, it would have been "bleeding-edge" and unproven, with no prior successful implementations of scout threads or transactional memory to bolster confidences, and also with precious few applications even able to take advantage of the design even with a recompile.
".....QPI better be as good as they say, 'cuz they're hurting if not....." Aaaaaaaaannnnnd once again, time to remind you which combo is king in the enterprise high end, the most demanding but most margin-rich arena - yes, hp-ux on Integrity! In fact, Integrity's sales figures have been consistently upward for years. And the reason is because the whole package is better - better performance, better stability, better features, better management, better compatibility, better range, better integration with other hp products like storage, and better support and services. Oh, and also because us customers don't think hp is about to tank in the same way Sun already has.
But to get back to Rock, there is still hope for you Sunshiners. After all, this is still unconfirmed by Sun. Not that it makes much difference - customers will believe the rumours because it is what they expect, which does make it strange that Ponytail hasn't immediately been on the phone to deny it....
"....All they do is add more cores and more cache, and slowly at that. Nothing else....." Lol, so you missed all that stuff about DDR3 and QPI then? And so funny that a design that you say has additions so slowly and so lightly has been trouncing any SPARC design for years!
"....Complexity translates directly to cost....." Ah, so what you're really saying is you haven't got a clue how much Tukwila will cost, you're just swinging wildly in your grief. There, there, go wipe your eyes and blow your nose and try not to be such a whiner in future.
"Tukwila anybody? Later than ROCK and twice as expensive to produce." <Yaaaaaaaawwn> Look, I know you Sunshiners are gonna try and live out the denial by squealing on about Tukwila, but the truth is Rock is dead - you can't get any later! And as for the idea of Tukwila being twice as expensive to produce, how do you know? Do you have production costs for either? Well, actually do you have cost projections for production costs for Tukwila, seeing as it's not in production yet, and as the only costs now for Rock are disposing of all remainder of the Rock team.
Instead of wasting your time on more Sunshining, I suggest you get on over to https://www.redhat.com/training/ and start anew.
/SP&L
This is just the news not having yet been internally announced to all and Sundry, and what's left of the Sun marketing team getting on with what they have been told to do. When they canned UltraSPARC V, we had a Sun Veep (not naming names) come round only five days before the announcement to tell us US V was taped out, the silicon was ready, etc, etc.
Patience, grasshopper. You may have to put the popcorn on hold as it will take the Sunshiners a while to get over their shock, they're probably still in denial right now. But that popping sound isn't your Rice Crispies, it's Sunshiners' heads exploding.
Good morning, Sunshiners. And how are you all this morning? Please try and concentrate, now - the Grand Nova Master Ashlee Vance has said The Rock is dead. Now, which Sunshiner wants to put a starter in by claiming that Ash is just an hp salesman in disguise, trolling his own blog, and nothing but a Sun hater? Form an orderly queue - no pushing at the back! Wait your turn, Novatose.
Seriously, though, was there anyone out there that didn't realise Sun had lost the plot by 2001? They've been on the backfoot and going backwards ever since, and Rock was largely doomed by Sun's own actions before it even hit the drawing board. If Rock had arrived in 2003, when Sun still had some gravitas with the software houses, then it might have stood a fighting chance. Amusingly, it was the acceptance of Linux by those big software houses that put the first nail in Sun's coffin, and one of the most telling was Oracle's drive to make Linux a key OS. Larry is just getting Ponytail to finish what he started.
/Smug? Me? Never!
Good news, just hope no-one does buy them! Not so sure about the idea that Dell have to buy an OS as I'm not convinced an integrated stack and hardware is the way to go when both Linux and Windows are designed to perform well on a range of commodity hardware. Sounds very much like the old "buy UNIX over Linux because proprietary hardware and proprietary software must be better than cheap hardware and free software" argument. As the rise of x86 and Linux has shown, away from the ivory towers often good enough and cheap beats "better" but expensive in the cold reality of the commercial World.
/Smugly happy troll icon!
Being one to have grumbled about the excessive number of non-entities in the UK only famous for being gormless, can I ask if we can swap a few for the Spanish equivalent? Miss España María Reyes looks far more tasty than the Big Borther dross we have here. I'd be much less inclined to grumble if we got a few more pics of her and a lot less of Jodie Marsh or the like.
Oh, and number 4! In finest Jeff Murdock style.
/mines the dirty-old-man Mac....
<looks for the "Obligatory will-it-run-Crysis" icon.....>
I like the PCI-e way of connecting these GPU-CPU combos as it's a common standard and so will be easy to speed adoption across vendors . That means we might even be able to mix-and-match bits from different vendors to get the most suitable bundle for a given requirement. Whilst I'm sure there are more "elegant" solutions coming, they'll probably be proprietary and mean vendor lock-in.
"......then why has the PowerPC (RISC) been performing better than the Itanium....." Debateable point as I have seen hp-ux on Itanium outperform AIX on Power in our shootouts. And if Power is such a great design, how come the massive advantage in clock speed hasn't translated into a matching advantage in performance? That's because the chip just makes up part of the server and the server just part of the solution.
"....If Itanium is so superior why hasn't it crushed the competition...." But what you neglect to mention is your point cuts both ways - if Power is so superior, why hasn't it driven all competitors from the market? The simple answer is that we, like most customers, buy solutions, not chips. In fact, we have a policy of ensuring any solution can be run on at least two platforms from different vendors, just in case we want to change horses half way through a solution's lifecycle. In the old days it was pretty open and the solution could go on SPARC, Alpha, PA-RISC or Power. Nowadays the choice is Power or Itanium for anything we can't run on x64 Linux or Windows, as the other options have become unviable. Both IBM and hp can offer the whole hardware stack - x64 front end, UNIX back end and database, and proper SAN storage - plus services. IBM and hp could afford to discount the servers and make money through other areas of the solution, which Sun just couldn't do to the same extent.
".....Competition is a good thing....." Agreed. But competition by virtue rather than by FUD, and what has really killed my opinion of Sun is that they have spent the last eight-odd years slating all and sundry because they have had precious little good stuff of their own to talk about. I for one will not miss the passing of the Sunshiners as they fade into obscurity.
RE: Sparc an Itanium replacement?
I'm working on the idea this is an attempt at humour - surely no-one could actually believe something so laughable? After all, if hp wanted to continue making RISC chips they could just go back to their PA-RISC designs. They were already dual-core and socket-compatible with their current Itanium range, could go quad-core with a die shrink, and already outperformed all the current Sun chips with ease, and all without the cost of lumbering themselves with the Sun albatross. But there's a reason hp stopped developing the PA-RISC range - they foresaw the shrinking returns in performance that RISC was going to see as it passed maturity. So hp designed the EPIC format which became Itanium to get round the obvious limitations of RISC. Why would hp go back to a design with limited options when Itanium has plenty more design legroom? And then, why would they want to go buy a RISC design (UltraSPANKed) which their own RISC design outperformed; another SPARC design (Niagara) that already loses in the webserving niche hp already own with Xeon/Opteron ProLiant; or a vapourware SPARC design (Rock) that has just been cancelled because it just doesn't work? Why would they want to lumber themselves with the cost of chip design when the partnerships with Intel and AMD have made hp the number one server vendor? Yeah, about as logical as a Sun management plan....
RE: Interesting times ahead...
".....of the "Big Three" (IBM, HP, Sun/Oracle) they're the _only_ one who have to rely on someone else for the DB software that seems to be the justification for the big iron these days....." Sorry to burst your bubble but we buy hp-ux gear for a lot more than just the database. Like, for example, a large SAP instance (currently too large to scale on Linux). And you also fail to realise that being independent gives hp an advantage - they can sell Oracle, M$ SQL and DB2 without having to push one over the other just because they also make it. And seeing as hp have that independence, customers trust hp to give independent advice rather than ramming an unsuitable product down our throats which comes tied to an army of unwanted consultants (I'm looking at you there, IBM GS). So all the database vendors need to be nice to hp, not the other way round (especially M$ who don't make their own hardware).
As for Slowaris support from hp, that was only agreed to give hp an advantage in attacking all those orphan Sun accounts (a lot of them via EDS) so hp can beat IBM to the punch by putting cheaper ProLiant up against IBM's offerings (bound to be AIX and Power). Why would hp want to port anything from Slowaris into hp-ux when hp-ux already has better performance and features? ZFS? Don't make me laugh! ZFS can't even be shared so it's useless for clustering, which means it can't meet the 5 nines availability rule needed to make it into the hp-ux arena.
RE: @Matt Bryant
No. As I've pointed out before, it's a common name. I've already been accused of being this gent (http://www.connectpa.co.uk/people/peopleprofile.php?id=48) in another Reg thread. But don't let that put you off sending hate mail and threats and doing some stalking of either of those Mr Bryants if it means you and the other Sunshiners spend some time away from here. If that's what it takes to help you guys get over your heartache for the recently deceased Sun then knock yourselves out! I look forward to reading an article on the Reg where one of the mystified Mr Bryants is at a loss to explain the number of Sunshiners throwing tantrums in his office carpark. Tell you what, to give you something to do after your pink slip comes through from Larry, why don't you go find every Matt Bryant you can and accuse them all in turn. To get you started, have a look here http://www.facebook.com/people-index/Matt%20Bryant - should keep you busy for a bit!
/SP&L
"Really?...." Yes, really. You see, you zeroed in on the last quarter of the downturn, when everyone saw a drop in sales, but hp still managed to pull off a profit. Sure, it was from the acquired EDS bizz, but hp still made a profit. Sun, despite many acquisitions, hasn't made a profit for years. And in the years preceding the downturn, whilst Sun was losing money hand over fist, hp was consistently turning in profits (and that was without EDS). So, yes, really.
"....Clearly you have absolutely no idea about the server market...." Ah, the Sunshiner response to anyone that doesn't toe their line. Well, it looks like there are more people not toeing that line than are nowadays, seeing as how Sun sales have casued it to crash from a $200bn company to the tier one equivalent of chump change. So, if I don't know anything and you're so smart, how come the companies we bought kit from on my advice (hp and IBM) aren't due to be bent over a barrel and molested by Oracle as Sun is, the company you tell us is always right?
"....not something I'm surprised about given you work for HP." And again, the Sunshiner Blindfold(TM) stops you seeing that customers just don't want your junk anymore. The market figures say it all - the majority of us customers stopped believing in Sun years ago. I've already told you a dozen times - I don't work for hp or an hp reseller. I'd suggest you write it on the back of your hand but I'm not sure crayon will write on skin.
/SP&L
RE: @Matt Bryant
Basically, your whole post translates to "wah,wah, boohoo, sob, sob, sniffle". Seeing as you obviously forgot, hp are still making a profit, they have been all these years Sun has been making record losses and losing market share in all sectors.
RE: Re: He bought his competitor to kill it
".....The whole of Sun is a competitor to the whole of Oracle? You're in Matt Bryant territory!...." I have never stated that I thought Sun and Oracle were competitors, in fact quite the opposite. As Linux and Windows cleaned up the webserving base, Sun became more and more dependent on refreshing their installed datacenter base, which was predominantly running Oracle db instances. In that respect, Sun has tried hard to keep Oracle loving it, but failed. MySQL in no way made Sun an Oracle "enemy", the threat to Oracle was minimal and far less than the threat posed by other vendors such as hp and IBM partnering with RedHat or M$.
"This is FUD being spread by HP at their conference this week. Let's get some facts instead of endless rumors."
Well, in that case I'm sure we'll see a prompt and robust denial of any such hawking from Oracle immediately, as they wouldn't want their potential future customers thinking the wrong thing. Just like how Sun and Oracle both immediately jumped up to deny that rumour (started by Ashlee Vance, not hp) that Rock had ben cancelled..... Oh, hold on a sec - they didn't!
Anyway, whilst it is fun to keep winding up the Sunshiners, the truth is the rumours don't state exactly which bits of the Sun hardware biz are being hawked around, so it could just be Rock and/or Niagara being pushed to Fujitsu. I can't see anyone else being interested in buying those turkeys!
/SP&L
Just down the road from one of our branch offices there is a "temporary office" that has sprung up for a well-known gas supplier. We watched as they built a two-story corral of Portakabin-type offices, and the other week they craned two containers with AC units and plenty of power cables into the middle, probably their new datacenter. At a guess, I'd say the whole affair has been probably less than half as expensive to build as the concrete and steel monstrosity that is our branch office, and has been assembled in a matter of weeks. Maybe this is the way most non-HQ offices will be going.
The biggest drops in sales also measn the biggest push for salesgrunts to get out there and get the biggest slice possible of what is out here. The good news for those of us with budget to buy this summer is that the vendors will be scrapping so hard for the few sales going that they'll be offering some tasty discounts. Resellers will be desperate to maintain marketshare (never could understand their fixation with marketshare, I always thought profits should be the measure that matters?) so expect them to be just as eager. Whilst prices will probably have to go up in the long run if sales do stay flat, it will be interesting to see who blinks first.
Going back about twelve years ago, I knew some clever bunnies. They had an idea to replace disks with "3D storage CDs". The idea started similar to this disk idea - a square CD that didn't spin, but had a very fast and accurately aimed laser that danced all over the surface to write or read data. Seek times were amazing, and the only moving part was the laser turret. Once they had cracked the laser aiming problem, they looked at a 3D version putting the laser on a mount in the center of a box made of six similar squares, giving almost 360 degree coverage in and almost six times the density (you lost a little area for where the laser's mounting arm entered the box). A big problem was the CD tech of the day didn't have the data density required to take on hard drives, and the 3D box idea took up too much space compared to a 3.5in drive. But what really killed it was they couldn't get VC funding, and this was in the pre-Y2K boom times. If this has got VC money behind it in a downturn then maybe it has got further down the development trail than my friends got.
Whilst if this works it looks like SSDs could have been the shortest lived fad ever, where is the proof? The slideset talks about all the concepts being proven in July 2006 and the article says all the technology is proven and doesn't need big changes in manufacturing process, so how come this hasn't already been out and defeated SSDs? If it really was that easy I'd expect a product in a range of capacities to be on the market already. I'm guessing the catch is coordinating all the heads. Otherwise I would have expected someone like EMC to have taken their arm off at the elbow in the race to get this into their SAN arrays ahead of their rivals.
<Yawn> Try looking forward instead of spending all your time lookig in the rearview mirror. I'm sure there are plenty of people that laughed at your points like ".....first practcial network file system...." - nice qualifier there - or "....the work that took the Ethernet standard from 10 megabits to 100 megabits to a gigabit..." - no kudos to Xerox, then? Just because our World does revolve around the real Sun, doesn't mean everything that Sun claims it did to make the computing world revolve around it is true. But your ending - "....If you don't think SGI, and HP, and IBM, weren't at the same time trying to kill Sun, every minute of the day, you truly have no idea what the industry is about." - is spot on, if a little limited. Sun's blinkered vision concentrated on killing SGI and let such riches as what became nVidia spin off. Sun was late to the x86 and Linux party because, after SGI, Sun spent far too long trying to kill Microsoft and then Linux with the same tactics it used against SGI. Sun didn't adapt well, didn't realise Linux could not be treated like just another vendor OS, and didn't make the correct decisions on vital products. Everything else is forgotten becasue the latter meant Sun didn't make profits. Sure, there will be plenty of Sunshiners for years to come who will get all misty eyed and speak of Sun's "great history of innovations", but they'll be sharing the park benches with those saying the same about Cray, SGI, DEC......
As regards Ubuntu support, I can't say I'm surprised. RHEL, SLES and OEL seem pretty locked down and in-tune with the vendors, whereas Ubuntu seems a bit more bleeding-edge. I'm not bashing Ubuntu, it's not a distro I use professionally so my comments are very much as an observer rather than a convert, I just value RHEL's stability. And it is obvious why OEL gets better billing than Ubuntu - hp wants to be on best terms with Larry, so Oracle's Linux will always get preferential treatment. Besides, underneath OEL is largely RHEL with some minor tweaks, so it probably isn't that hard to validate if they have already covered RHEL.
Ah, but then it is becomingly worringy common for two things - firstly, not knowing the first thing about Judaism or the different strands of Judaic belief; secondly, it being fine to poor scorn on anything Jewish in a manner that simply would not be tolerated by the PC brigade if the same attention were directed against more protected religions such as Islam. Maybe that's because Jews don't chop the heads off unbelievers or crash airliners into highrise office blocks.
"Poor Matt must have a real inferiority complex - he's always trying to put down Sun and now he's started on Apple....." Surely, seeing as I align with the winner (hp) and you align with the loser (Sun), that should be a superiority complex, not an inferiority one? Admittedly, Apple are definately a winner in the consumer market, but in the corporate they are even rarer than Sun storage devices!
".....Clearly he has absolutely no idea about ZFS and it's features...." Before you depart on the usual Sunshiner "anyone that disses my Sunshine doesn't understand the beauty of <insert harebrained Sun commercial failure product name here>", you might want to check back and see that I didn't claim ZFS had been dropped out of Snow Leopard due to a tech issue but more likley due to politics or a lack of user interest. Hold on a sec - poor idea, asking a Sunshiner to actually read and comprehend. Like that will ever happen!
".....those who have a clue in HP have seen the light and are shipping Solaris on their pieces of lowest-component-bidder kit....." Oh dear, hate to break the news to you (well, actually I'm enjoying reminding you), but hp sales of ProLiants with OpenSlowaris are so low they don't even feature on the latest sales pie-chart! The hp support for Slowaris is just so hp can go plundering in all those SPARC-Slowaris accounts that have been left dangling by the Sunset. In fact, more worrying for you Sunshiners is the continued preference for Sun's own customers to order the Galaxy kit with Linux rather than Slowaris (I'm told the old 5:1 ratio is climbing as even more Sun customers look to ditch anything Slowaris).
"....Will we see a change in his posts? I doubt it. He's too stuck on PHUX....." As are a lot of customers. See, hp-ux works, as does the kit it runs on, all at a reasonable price, and the company providing it and the support has not crashed and burned like Sun has. The real question is how long you Sunshiners can continue with your prattle now that the whole World can see just what a disaster Sun has become.
"....Well - have fun being the tiny minority who still actually uses that dinosaur." More bad news for you - Integrity and hp-ux sales are rising, whereas all forms of SPARC are in terminal decline. Best you do switch your aleigance to Apple, at least you can pretend to be a fanboi, brag about iBone sales, and try and forget about the whole Sunset thing.
Of course, another reason for Leopard not carrying ZFS could be that Apple are looking to replace it with BTRFS.....
/Enjoying the P&L.
"....Seriously, where the fuck have you been for the last 4 years!" Probably working in a real corporate environment with a real business OS like Windows or Linux. Or hp-ux if he works in a large corporate and has a business critical application. Yup, that "dinosaur" is still king of the high-end. Outside of the Crayon Department (AKA Marketing), Apple has no share in the majority of today's corporates, and no chance in the datacenter.
Whilst it would be fun to wind up the Sunshiners by trumpeting this as an epic fail, the truth is it is just practicality. Apple have realised what most users in the Linux community have said for ages - the average desktop just does not need ZFS. Many edge servers do not. I'm not surprised that if Apple were looking to lighten the load then ZFS would have been pretty high up the troublesome-luxuries-to-be-jettisoned list. As for the Apple serves, I'm guessing they're waiting for a less buggy ZFA implementation before they roll it out. That is unless NetApp have been shaking their lawyers at Apple and Steve has backed off ZFS until the Sun courtcase clears.
In the meantime, respect to Mr Tom Bird for effective use of kitty pics in his presentation! Worth the download for them alone.
Whilst it might sound good, the reality is it would be trapped between two existing markets. On the low end we have a plethora of Linux-based NAS devices, from single disk home-NAS to multi-disk SOHO products all with embedded Linux on ARM or similar chips, and all available at a cheap price. As well as serving up NAS, many of these devices are plug-and-play and also add value by providing embedded print servers (and with a much larger range of print drivers than Slowaris). Their makers can take advantage of the open nature of real Linux, whereas if they go with Slowaris then they have all the fun of a pretend-open license and the possibility of NetApp slapping a lawsuit on them if they use ZFS. Until OpenSlowaris adopts a real open licence and the WAFL courtcase is resolved I can't see much use in the low end.
If you look higher up the chain then you meet a large array (pun unintended) or commercial multi-disk NAS devices which come from reputable companies with established channels and sound support services. Here Slowaris and ZFS do stand a chance as licencing costs can be hidden away in support charges. Problem here is there is already not just a host of Linux-based devices, but cheap Windows Storage Server offerings whch don't require the Slowaris skills most SOHOs don't have. At this level the majority of offerings have simple, polished point-and-click GUIs. And again, NetApp is keen to protect their ownership of the commercial NAS market and will more than likely clobber any vendor going to market with a product with ZFS. Probably the only chance for a real, commercial NAS is Oracle badging the current Sun storage kit, as Oracle may have the will to go toe-to-toe with NetApp, but that also makes it less likely for another vendor to pick it up as they then have to compete with Oracle.
The problems for ZFS are not largely technical, more legal. Until the purchase of Sun goes through, Larry can't make a real move on clearing up the ZFS/WAFL courtcase. Until the purchase goes through, the courtcase is likely to remain stalled. And with a fair few people lining up in attempts to block the purchase (Sun shareholders as well as rival companies), it looks like the whole deal may get spun out for a while longer. By the time it all gets cleared up - if it all goes Larry's way - it may be several years down the road, and by then tools like BTRFS will have gained market and mind share.
Slowaris and ZFS will work for the hobbyist community, especially the Sunshienrs, but that won't make it a commercial success.
Aaaaaannnnnnd..... still waiting for any form of technical argument from the Sunshiners. At least in between talking to or through his ass and examinng his diaper, our AC Kettle at least tried to form a discussion around Sun's prior achievements. Unfortunately, that's the problem with Sunshiners - all looking back at the Golden Days of the pre-dotbomb and desperately clinging to the belief that someone will be able to make Sun great again. Problem is, our Kettle should have asked his group; "Which of the top four vendors do you think will make a profit this year?" After putting hp and IBM and probably Dell in the profit group, they'd probably be scratching their head trying to think of a fourth vendor. I'm betting not one would say Sun would make a profit.
As for your poll of non-technical people, the eye-rolling was probably more to do with your rabidly forcing them to read a forum they have no interest in, then having you bark at them; "See? He's a loon! He hates us! Hates us!" I'm sure that same group spend a lot of time avoiding you from now on, that is if they don't already.
Oh yeah, because I invented FUD, didn't I - not! Here's the results of a simple straw poll I did a while ago amongst City admins I know, who work with a variety of server vendors. On the simple question of which vendor talked the most FUD, the answer was predominantly Sun by a massive margin. Here in the UK Sun is synonymous with FUD. The one good thing you could say about Sun is they aren't prejudiced, they FUD everyone! Micosoft, RedHat, Novell, IBM, Fujitsu, SGI, hp, even partner companies like Oracle when they do stuff like the Oracle Database Machine work with hp or RAC on Linux.
"....You have no proof that Oracle will drop SPARC, as a matter of fact, Larry states the opposite..." Wrong! Larry can't commit to SPARC and his public statements in no way commit to a roadmap for any SPARC product, they're just vague "intention" statements designed to keep Sunshiners like you happy so you don't all start dumping Sun for hp, IBM or Dell. Please point us to a public roadmap which states exactly which SPARC CPUs will be definately produced under Oracle's control. Oh, you can't. And it's not me saying SPARC has no future under Oracle ownership, it is industry analysts. Your selective hearing tunes out the nasty bits but the customers have already got the message.
".....You make incorrect comments about IBM and Sun technology...." So which comments then? Please let us know where I have gone wrong in your eyes if only for the comedy value. I'm betting my "incorrect comments about IBM and Sun" just turn out to really be what are for you just painful realities about Sun.
"....Again, you have always stated that Sun cannot compete because their financials are not good enough...." And there we have the perfect case in point of just how happily blind to reality Sunshiners are. Sun has nose-dived from a $200bn company to a sub-$4bn market cap, with continual losses draining the reserves, and yet you Sunshiners try and pretend this doesn't have any impact on Sun's abaility to deliver. Even Schwartz eventually folded and made the announcement of cuts - do you think he did that for fun? It was because the Sun board realised they needed to cut costs drastically. Even if it was just people being lost if would affect Sun's ability to deliver, but we also hear tales of budget cuts and slashed development budgets, and those are coming from people in Sun. So Larry buys Sun and all you Sunshiners start bleating about how Larry is just going to pour Oracle profits into the same moneypit that was Sun without asking for any changes - do you realise just how stupid you sound? Larry and Co are going to go through every bit of Sun with a fine toothcomb and a scalpel, and I doubt if even 50% of the current Sun will still be in Oracle hands in three years time.
".....yet state that noone understands HP's tech (except you)...." Actually, I state the complete opposite. The fact that Integrity sales are growing share means that customers understand that hp tech just fine. Also, the fact that Sun has tanked like the proverbial brick just goes to show the customers also get exactly what you Sunshiners just can't face - SPARC and Slowaris are dead on their feet.
"....You are a FUDster and a hypocrite. I'm not sure which is worse....." Sticks and stones, Sunshiner. And who says I give two hoots about your opinion? It likely to be just as comic as your poor grasp of both technolgy and the market.
"....Oh yeah, you are the king of rants and frothing. I would bet that you must hold the record for word count on El Reg. You may even have more words here than the actual columnists. You must be so proud." More like laughing my face off at how much it winds you Sunshiners up! I am so enjoying watching you guys squirm whilst Sun goes down.
/SP&L
RE: Increasing commonality between IA64 and x64 at HP
"....So, under what circumstances would an end user pick an IA64 over an AMD64?...." That's a bit like saying when would a customer pick a Xeon over a Celeron. Whilst a Celeron can do a lot of what a Xeon can, you're not going to pretend that every user should drop Nehalem and go back to Celerons, are you? Itanium is designed as a "heavy-lift" CPU, it has much larger cache, a far greater number of registers, and a lot wider pipeline than Xeon or Opteron. Sure, if you have a lighter weight thread, and you just need CPU scale to say eight cores, then Nehalem (or Istanbul) makes sense over Itanium. But, if you have a heavy-thread app, like a lot of the enterprise commercial apps (e.g., SAP or Oracle), and you need wide memory and cache bandwidth to keep the data flowing, and the ability to scale for example above 32 cores, then Itanium is the better choice. You may disagree, but then a lot smarter people than you have done the benchmarks and gone for Itanium in hp Integrity (hp Itanium Superdomes are just about the de facto choice for telecom billing systems, for example, as they are the only platform that delivers the scale, sheer grunt and RAS at the best price point). I'm not expecting you to take my word for it seeing as you have already shown both your bias and your intent to immediately label anyone that disagrees with you as a liar or competitor and liar, so I'll just suggest you go talk to some of the companies on this list http://h20341.www2.hp.com/integrity/cache/405502-0-0-0-121.html and ask them why they picked Itanium over AMD64, Power or SPARC. Don't hurry back, you won't be missed.
"....It may happen from time to time, but in any given sale it will only happen when the end user is happy with IA64, the reseller is happy with IA64, the system integrator is happy with IA64, the app developer is happy with IA64, and so on...." Gawd, what a mind-numbingly innaccurate pile of male bovine manure. I'm a customer, tbh I don't give two hoots about whether the reseller is happy as he'd better be worrying about my happiness first and foremost (or at least making a damn good pretence)! Here's the big news you missed - Itanium has a massive number of applications, so I don't have to worry about the developer being as brain-dead as you either. Please name a major enterprise application that doesn't currently run on Itanium on either Windows, Linux, hp-ux or VMS. And as for integratrors should we make use of one, then you may be surprised to find all the major VARs are also hp resellers/integrators. So, to summarise, stop talking testicles!
"....IA64 is irrelevant...." Sales figures say otherwise, and the list of customers using hp Integrity for business critical solutions says it doubley so. The only thing irrellevant here is the continued mindless posting of repeated and boring nonsense. Please try some new FUD.
RE: Matt = the definition of irony......
"....Matt, you've excelled again, lets see if we can get you toward 2'000 word rants sometime soon please." Two things for you to consider - first, I only post in repsonse to the repeated FUD of you Sunshiners, so if you stop your drivel then there would be no need for me to show you up for the morons and liars you are; second, try a word-count on the amount all you Sunshiners post and you'll see I don't even come close.
RE: Re: Matt the HP droid.
"No proof, just conjecture based upon the stated claims by Intel that they are delaying the release...." So at least a Sunshiner admits their FUD has no basis in reality, but am I surprised you continue FUDing? Not really, it's the Sun way.
"....I didn't make that up, it's in Intel's public statements. ...." No you didn't, you just delved into fantasy for the rest of your post.
"....Intel is either lying (probable) or they have another serious issue with their overly complex chip...." From what I've read, the chip core is done, the additions like the DDR3 memory controllers are all peripherals, same goes with anything like the "hypercache" idea. Sorry to remind you, but Itanium isn't struggling with the basics like Rock, which can't even get scout threads and transactional memory working. And Intel can afford to take the time to get Tukwila right because it will be competitive, whereas Rock is already behind the curve and falling further behind every day. Power7? Who knows, has the core design even been cut to silicon yet? Looks like Tukwila is ahead of the potential rivals.
"....What's your hatred of everything non-HP based on?" I don't have a "hatred" for anything, just a profound distaste for the unethical approach of you Sunshiners and your FUD habit. What should worry you more is the profound liking for hp that the customers have developed as it means less options for neanderthals like you.
/SP&L, especially at the Sunshine re-runs - has Sun fired all their FUD merchants, can't they think of anything new?
"Once again, Matt is trying to obfuscate the article by attacking Sun and Sun users and now unsurprisingly IBM....." And why not? I merely highlighted the fact that the current crop of Itaniums are doing fine, and the folly of IBM having so much tied up in one CPU range when that is what arguably killed Sun. Care to contest either? I doubt it.
"....What's your take on the fact that Itanium is pushing out further and further for no other reason than it's performance sucks....." So you have perfromance figures then? You have any proof to your conjecture? No, none at all, just like the majority of the article. When will you Sunshiners start to realise just becasue you fantasise about something it doesn't make it true?
".....This seems to be pure bluster....." So you don't think it would be a serious issue for IBM if Power7 slips any later, especially when 60+% of the IBM bizz revolves around Power? I'm betting you're not in managment, unless that's Sun management.
"....How does that show that HP can stand another year of selling old and dying Itanic?...." Well, seeing as hp make a profit from Integrity whilst IBM are losing money on their chip business, and that sales for Integrity are not just holding up but increasing, it would seem that hp don't have as much to worry about as you wishfully rant.
"....Your nonsense and FUD just proves further that you must really work for HP, no matter what you say to the contrary." Your continual insistance that I must work for hp is just illustrative of your inability to grasp the fact that customers don't want the Sunshine you peddle. Just because I don't agree with your Sun FUD doesn't mean I work for another vendor. Wake up and smell the Java - Sun is dead. Just for you Sunshiners, I'll say it again - I don't work for hp, I don't get paid by hp to do marketting for hp products, I don't work for an hp reseller and I don't get paid to do marketting for an hp reseller. Sorry, you'll just have to find something else to obsess about.
/SP&L
Sorry, I was actually waiting for a Sunshiner with a comment that actually contaned some logical argument before posting a reply, but it looks like I'd be waiting a long time. Besides, Sun is dead so not much fun in pointing out their folly to the Sunshiners, I suppose I'll have to switch to baiting the AIX crowd soon.
Let's deal with the "hp is the only vendor wanting Itanium becasue it is totally reliant on Itanium" bit first. Posters using that "logic" manage to conveniently ignore the simple fact that hp is also the leading x64 vendor and Intel's and AMD's largest x64 customer. If hp just wanted to sell x64 then they'd be happy to let Itanium die and wouldn't be pushing Intel so hard. The vast majority of those Linux and Windows boxen that have been replacing SPARC Slowaris servers for years have been hp ProLiant systems. And now that Sun is dead and their customers faced with migrating to another OS, hp is perfectly placed to plunder those orphan Sun accounts, because, unlike Sun, hp engaged rather than opposed the Linux community and Microsoft. But it is not a one-punch strategy, hp also needs Itanium to squeeze the RISC base from above, including AIX Power, whilst ProLiant eats it from below. Without that pincer move, Slowaris refugees could move off SPARC and upwards to Power or mainframe, but Integrity gives both the performance and pricepoint to offer a superior deal. Throw in the easy transition from Slowaris to hp-ux, especially with the porting programs that hp run, and you see how hp is well set to eat up those old Slowaris shops. And seeing as those Slowaris shops are the targets likely to generate the largest areas of growth for hp-ux, Linux and AIX in the next few years, it is no surprise hp and IBM are gearing up to fight over them.
So, will being stuck with the current Integrity servers for another year hurt hp in that battle? In a way, yes, because customers have been led to expect and have planned for quad-cores. To avoid customer disappointment I expect there to be a few more points off deals to convince some customers to take the current servers instead (well, that's what I'll be beating our hp salesgrunt up with anyway). Will it hurt hp because Integrity will somehow be behind in performance? The answer there is probably not. SPARC hasn't managed to match Itanium for years and is now zombified. Rock, even if it does escape Larry's obsession with rehashing the network computer, is going to be comprehensively outperformed by Nehalem and the current Itaniums, and Niagara is struggling to get out of its webserving niche before the boys at Oracle realise just how limited it is. AIX is still waiting on Power7 as we have now seen Power6+ as such a non-event that IBM didn't even make a noise when they slipped it into their range. IBM's gamble on extreme clock speeds hasn't worked out, it is still the surrounding architecture that keeps the cores spinning that is vital, and hp seems able to do that well enough now to match Power6+. Unless IBM manage to pull Power7 forward and also fit it with a radically better surrounding architecture, Intel have time to tune Tukzilla to meet and beat Power7. Then there are Kitson and Poulsen to come, and what does IBM have planned for after Power7?
So are Nehalem and Istanbul the big threats to current Integrity? Yes, just as Xeon and Opteron have been to RISC for years. But according to all the Sunshiners, quad-core x64 was supposed to have killed Itanium by several years ago, but the reality is Itanium (especially in Integrity and with hp-ux) still does some jobs that x64 can't and still does a lot of jobs better than x64. There are even cases where Itanium with Windows beats Xeon and Windows, especially large M$ SQL instances. And it still will even with eight-core x64 CPUs are available. There are plenty of heavy-threaded apps out there that require the grunt of Itanium for best performance and hp-ux for superior RAS and scaling.
And in a way Nehalem is Itanium's best allie, as they allow hp to use the economies of scale of the ProLiant bizz to benefit Integrity as the two ranges now share more and more parts, much more than i/pSeries and xSeries or M-series and Galaxy (just mentioned the Sun kit for the humour value). And tehn there are the continuing worries about IBM's commitment to x64 - will they sell the xSeries bizz to Lenovo like they did the PC bizz? Every account hp gets ProLiant into makes it easier to push Integrity into as they share the same comprehensive centralised management tools and support, and hp can deliver the whole deal with better storage options. There are even hp Integrity blades and NonStop blades that fit into the ProLiant blade chassis - yes, that hp blade range being the dominant blade vendor offering too. So Nehalem and Istanbul will actually help Itanium as far as hp are concerned.
In fact, if we want to talk about reliance on a single CPU design and any subsequent vulnerability, then IBM should be the target. Sun has demonstarted the folly of relying on one range - UltraSPARC - to keep the revenue rolling in. After all, IBM's revenue stream is much more dependent on Power than hp's is on Itanium. The vast majority, I think it is 60+%, is tied to Power. All those mainframe sales, services and licensing streams are largely tied to Power - what happens if Power7 slips some more? And yes, IBM trolls, Power has been late before, simply moving the deadline is slippage, it's not delivering on time. With the majority of hp's revenue streams related to x64, it is sitting pretty with Nehalem and Istanbul, and Itanium is the bonus that allows hp to own the high-end and squeeze AIX in between and attack upwards at the mainframe base. A slip of another year on Tukzilla isn't a massive problem for hp, but a slip of another year on Power7 could see IBM taking a big hit in revenue. But then I wouldn't expect TPM to highlight that.
/going to be so disappointing replacing the Sunshiners, the AIX boys are so grey and boring, they just don't froth and rant like the Slowaris fanbois. Ah well, SP&L whilst I can!
RE: Matthew 13
Lol! Still makes me chuckle whenever I hear that line.
RE: cop-bashers
To all the idiots protesting the tasing, do you have any idea how dangerous it is just stopping on the hard shoulder on an A road, let alone a motorway? Police officers in places like the US and UK are trained to keep the time spent stationary at the side of the road to a minimum, and to definately avoid any kind of physical confrontation that could spill out into the roadway as that is usually fatal. Age is no protection under the law - the officer may not have handled it the best way possible, but the granny was out of control and seriously looked like she was going to clout the guy. Any such struggle could have ended with the granny or the cop or both getting hit by a car, whereas the tasing put an end to the granny's behaviour and stopped any chance of a road accident from her bad behaviour. Personally, I don't have a problem with the tasing - she should have grown up by that age.
".....Read the posted URL's. If you read, you may not be so ignorant....." The link you posted with ref to the claimed "POSIX issues" is to the Sun marketerring slideset and has no details on any POSIX issues. Try proof-reading your own marketing before posting. With over a decade of using Samba in real production I have never seen any POSIX/Windoze compatibility issues that have been such show-stoppers as to make me want something more built into the kernel. A quick straw poll with other users I know (some whom have been using Samba since it was called nbserver back in '93) drew similar blanks for any such "issues". Same for a scan through the Samba release notes and a look at Samba.org. Not that I expected there to be anything, but I thought I'd best look just to confirm my suspicion that this is all just Sunshiner make bovine manure and feature sell. Even stretching the definition of "issue" to cover the known problem where a Windows users can cause timestamp differences with owners files, this can be handled in the smb.conf file with the DOS filetimes setting. Please go read the Samba man pages to realise how ignorant you sound.
".....Nope - just a developer who works on open source projects from SaMBa and OpenSolaris. You should read & understand....." Here's your problem - I already have good sources for advice on opensource projects I turst, and Sun and Sun-sponsored developers are not any of them. You'll find that theme quite common amongst what you no doubt refer to as "freetards", namely that we treat Sun with the same derision and suspicion as M$. Still, I went and read through the material at all the links you provided and it hasn't changed anything - there is still no information on the supposed "POSIX issues" you claim, and no case for pushing CIFS into the kernel. For a start, it means that any changes to the CIFS package have to be made as kernel changes, unlike with a Samba server package where it is outside and independent. And by sticking CIFS into the kernel on Slowaris, Sun are tieing it to ZFS - ah, now I see the point! This is just Sun trying to hijack opensource CIFS development and muddy the waters.
"....ZFS has better interoperability than any other non-windows filesystem - LOL! How about a reference to your funny FUD?...." Really? Ignoring the many opensource options such as BTRFS, want to compare to WAFL? Should be a fair comparison seeing as ZFS is just a WAFL rip off. Maybe if you did a bit more reading on a wider scope (i.e., not just swallowing the Sunshine) you might realise Slowaris brings very little new to the table, a lot that has been done before and better by others, and nothing of real value compared to established competitors such as RHEL or SLES. Every time you open your mouth an squeal "the OpenSolaris option is the ONLY option because I say so" you sound just like the old Sun mantra ""Solaris on SPARC and nothing else", and look where that ended!
"....By the way, you should learn how to spell Solaris. There was no one named Novatose in the thread, not sure why you talk to yourself...." Looks like your memory is as short as your objectivity. We've already been over the fact that Sun's own customers came up with the Slowaris moniker, not me. But I admit I christened you Novatose after a particularly nauseating bit of Sunshiner blather you posted on The Reg not too long ago, where you stupidly cherrypicked SAP benchmark figure in an attempt to FUD Itanium. That was fun, it left you wide open to a counter showing how poor Sun's own kit did on the same benchmark. For those wanting to relive the comedy, take a gander at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/27/hp_sun_oem_comment/comments/ and enjoy a real Novatose moment (and please note Jake's correction on the whole petard thing). I chose Novatose due to your complete and unquestioning faith in Sun's Nova project, and how it mimic the objectivity of the comatose. I seem to remember around that tie you were posting a whole load of male bovine manure about how Sun was doing just fine, no need for a sale, Nova was going to save/change the World, and Slowaris on SPARC was going to rise again and crush the competition..... Yeah, you got that one so right - not!
"...Can't read, can't spell, talk to people who do not exist - not the sharpest knife in the drawer." Oh dear, the usual Sunshiner insults in lieu of counters. Seeing as you obviously have both memory issues and problems with reality, I'd advise anyone to keep you and knives far apart, if only for your own safety.
/the Novatose Workout - I'm getting bulging biceps from all this pointing and laughing!
"....Kernel based CIFS offers benefits with cross-vendor compatibility and performance unseen with a userland SMB protocol. Solaris is now a first-class citizen in the CIFS world, leaving SaMBa reliant operating systems suffering with unresolved POSIX/Windows compatibility issues....." Again, what issues? If you hadn't noticed (and you probably didn't because your head is so far up Ponytail's rectum), the rest fo the industry is doing just fine with Samba when needed, and real fine with standard Windows.
"....A summary of the basic requirements for CIFS under Solaris...." Expecting an independent discussion, especially given the Samba.org link? Nope, just another Sun marketeering slideset. But, it does give us the first hint of the real problem - it's also pushing ZFS. Suddenly the penny drops - this is just trying to paper over another of the holes in ZFS - poor Windows interoperability.
"....Some of the best direct answers to your question comes from Solaris CIFS developers...." And again, more Sunshiner material, nothing from the rest of the community saying "Hey, wouldn't it be nice to have CIFS in the kernel". In short, just more Sun hogwash, but it does admit the core problem for Slowaris - Windows is the king in the new area Slowaris has to play in. Seeing as Sun is being driven out fo the datacenter, for Slowaris to survive it has to be able to integrate better with Windows if it is to survive in the appliance world, and that means it has to acknowledge Windows is the prime OS that their applienaces will be tacked onto. Congratulations to Ponytail and McNeedy - they not only turned a $200bn company into a has-been, they also turned one of the leading UNIX OSs into a cheap appliance OS. Not happy with copying NetApp's WAFL to make ZFS, Sun is now turning Slowaris into a poor Data ONTAP clone.
The real merriment is that Sun and the rabid Sunshiners like Novatose are highlighting the appliance tech of the new OpenSlowaris rather than any advances in datacenter technologies like FCOE (not surprising seeing as the OpenSlowaris implementation is just a copy of the Linux OpenFCOE initiator). Just another example of how the Sunshiners are abandoning the high ground of the enterprise for the edge server market. The real laugh is this just makes them more vulnerable to Linux, which already has a massive advantage there.
/SP&L
As usual, the Sunshiners have no grasp on reality.
"....samba is not integrated at the kernel level, matt...." Why does it have to be? SMB's a protocol and works just fine outside the kernel, and has done so for years for Linux, hp-ux, AIX, Mac OS et al. Oh, sorry, did I just p*ss all over your latest Slowaris feature sell? "Hey, no-one else has CIFS integrated into the kernel, so buy Slowaris 'cos having it in the kernel is just VITAL, dude!" Puh-lease! So, I'm supposed to give up my tried-and-tested and trusted Linux Samba for what is an untried and no-doubt bug-ridden piece of Sun code done on a shoestring ('cos Ponytail doesn't have any budget to spend on Slowaris) by developers that failed keep Slowaris on SPARC competitive with hp-ux and AIX ('cos all the good developers saw the writing on the wall and left Sun long ago)? Yeah, I can really see that one flying with the board - not!
"....hp cifs server a.02.04 is based on samba 3.0.30 - sun bundled free samba for some time...." And your point is? Oh, your point is that it isn't new, and bundling it into the kernel has no real world value. To prove otherwise, please post some cohearent argument and performance data to back up your drivel. Otherwise you can go perform fellatio on a the nearest power socket.
"....you clearly don't know what a kernel is...." The problem for you is not only do I know, but anyone with a modicum of tech know-how will too, which covers a large swathe of the customers that are going to laugh at you when you try your new "CIFS-in-the-kernel-for-the-win" feature sell.
".....by the way, it is spelled S - O - L - A - R - I - S..." Not to the customers, they christened it Slowaris, not me, and surely now you'll have to start spelling it "O r a c l e E n t e r p r i s e L i n u x"? By the way, since that's based on RedHat EL, it also already has a tried-and-tested Samba/CIFS content and won't need the Slowaris CIFS-in-the-kernel, which will no doubt come loaded with bugs and unwanted "features" aka limitations common to the whole OpenSlowaris nonproduct.
"....one day, you'll finish grammar school...." Long since, Sunshiner, and it was a real Grammar, not a jumped up secondary. And got my degree many years back too. Oh, and I have a job with a future because I work with OSs that businesses actually want, unlike you - enjoy your pinkslip when Slowaris dies!
/SP&L
Fact one - the F-22 is not some super, undetectable stealth plane. It can be seen on modern radar from most angles and is thought to be detectable by the AESA type radars as used by Eurofighter even head-on from range. It is thought to be just as vulnerable to different wavelength detection technologies as the F-117 shot down after being detected by reflected signals from mobile masts over Serbia in '99. Raptor has stealth in a narrow spectrum only.
Fact two - in making the F-22 radar-stealthy against 90's radar, Lockleed made a compromise - no wing pylons. This means it can't carry as wide a range of weapons as an upgraded Eurofighter. To carry any large missile like the Harpoon missiles carried by the current F/A-18 it would need a bolt-on wing pylon and also lose a lot of its radar stealthiness and range. Guess what - Typhoon can already carry Harpoon amongst others, including the Storm Shadow cruise missile which gives even the current Typhoon the ability to stand off at range and get the job done, without having to get all close where stealth is needed.
Fact three - in designing predominantly for radar stealth against '90s radar designs, Lockheed made a poor compromise on IR and UV stealth. Poor IR and UV stealth means that enemy aircraft can detect it at long range simply from the friction generated by transonic flight (in the Typhoon's case the detecting kit is the PIRATE-IRST system - I have yet to see any details of any IR or UV detection system carried by the Raptor). This is particularly surprising stealth design ommission by Lockheed given that the Russians were well-ahead of NATO in airborned IR and UV detection kit as far back as the '80s! However, UV and IR stealth were design features for the Eurofighter, and in these areas it is MORE stealthy than the F-22. And as shown by the recent F-15SE, radar stealth features can be added to existing designs if required, and there is nothing to stop BAe from adding some conformal bits to increase the Eurofighter's radar stealthiness.
Fact four - whining fish heads should look up who did the shooting down of the enemy aircraft by Brits since WW2. Besides the innaccuracy of the statement (an Indonesian Air Force Hercules "crashed" whilst trying to avoid interception by a RAF Javelin over Malaysia in the 1964 confrontation, which is technically a kill, especially as the Javelin returned minus one Firestreak missile), all too often, as in the Falklands, the RAF had to provide many of the pilots to get the kills (RAF Flt Lts Barton, Penfold and Smith got a kill each over the Falklands, whilst Flt Lt Morgan got two, plus at least five RAF pilots that scored kills flying F86s with the Yanks over Korea). Just because the Admiralty decided they wanted to keep the nuke subs rather than carriers don't blame it all on Eurofighter and the RAF.
Fact five - we are stuck with the stupid numbers for Eurofighter due to political tie-ins to European, multinational projects. These are mainly due to the fact that a Labour Government stuffed the UK air industry in the '60s (remember Duncan Sandys?). Ever since, there has been this stupid penchant for joint projects. Most are limited successes and too many are grand failures. Contrary to believe, the UK industry (well, BAe, seeing as that's just about all that's left), can do projects alone if given the Governmental support and left free of political interference, as proven by the BAe Hawk program, which is arguably the most successful fast training jet program of any country since WW2 (we even sold it to the US Navy).
Fact six - whilst our air combat has mainly been in distant places where the only resource usually was the Fleet Air Arm, the air force with the greatest jet combat experience and most success since WW2 is Israel's, and they don't have any stealth aircraft. In fact, the aircraft credited with the recent raid on the Syrian nuke facility were humble F-16s, and this was against one of the most advanced air defence nets in the World. The Israelis have shown that planning, training, range, good payload capabilites and EW capabilities are far more important than just radar stealth.
Fact seven - the Raptor is not invincible. There is a famous USN F/A-18F which has a Raptor "kill" painted on its nose after a Red Flag exercise. The F-22 jock believed his own hype and ended up letting himself be manouvered to the point where the F/A-18F pilot got a gun kill, probably the most embarrassing for a so-called superfighter. It has also been reported that, away from carefully constructed exercises such as the Red Flag encounters, the Raptor has been "killed" by such simple jets as an F-16C (you, remember, the unstealthy '80s "cheap option" fighter the Israelis love?).
My preference would be to take the existing Eurofighters the RAF has got, bring 90 max up to Tranche 3 standard PLUS add the gun back in, then tell the rest of the Eurofighter consortium to get stuffed. Then offer to build every component of completely new airframes for the Saudis and Japs as we could do it all with the right investment (after all, BAe desinged the EPA which was the bassis of the Eurofighter by themselves). As for the RAF, once they have got their 90, make them use a BAe Hawk 205 variant for the rest of their needs as it will be just as useful for the majority of UN policing actions and massively cheaper. And forget the F-35 in any form - just navalise another 30 Typhoons and put catapults on the new carriers. At least then Lewis might stop whinging.
There are also reports of at least one RAF Venom FB6 kill on an Egyptian MiG-15 in November 1956 during the Suez Crisis. And (hilariously) an RAF Tornado GR Mk1 claimed a "kill" after an Iraqi MiG-25PD hit a mine from a JP.233 dispenser attack on the Fal-Taqaddum air base in the First Gulf War (which means the GR version actually has more combat kills than the fighter version!). Technically, as the MiG was taxiing, it is not a "kill" by RAF rules, but is by Yank rules. By these rules, there are also two RAF Buccaneer "kills" on Iraqi transports at Shayka Mazhar Airfield using LGBs.
So much for the FAA getting all the "kills".
Have to give cautious agreement - SAP can be a pain, but that's well known, and the usual approach is - if you can - to run the new SAP implementation alongside the old tools for a period to make sure they agree before switching off the old. To run a partial system in production sounds like just really bad project management. The cautious agreement is because I've done Government work before, and it is the Land of the Moving Goalposts! Often, political decisions will take precedence over technical realities. Either way, I suspect the blame lies either with poor project management from IBM GS or just poor control from the Council (which IBM GS probably wouldn't be too upset about, as every goalpost move gives them the chance to lengthen the contract and add on some more charges).
With budgets slashed, one of the most common questions we get asked is "Rather than buy all new systems, can you upgrade our existing systems and stretch their lifecycles for less cash until the budgets get rosey again?" We have a mix of Xeon and Opteron servers, and for the Xeons the options are limited - if they want more CPU oomph then they are usually going to have to fork out for a new Nehalem server. But with the Istanbul offering we might be able to upgrade some of our servers just by swapping out the CPU - less money for the server vendor, but then AMD only makes the CPUs so just as much money as a new server to them. Too early to tell if this is practical but there's enough interest to keep AMD in the game and stop it turning into a Nehalem whitewash (which may be the whole reasoning behind Istanbul in the first place). The problem for AMD is we are usually being asked for more memory rather than more CPU grunt.
OK, so it is ugly, but no more ugly than the majority of euro-boxes nowadays, and the performance is very similar to the average family saloon, excepting range. It would definately look good enough to be used as a second family car for taxiing the kids around in and doing the shopping, most of which tasks only require a range of well less than a hundred miles a day on mainly urban roads so the 80mph limit is no big loss. A bit of style tweaking - especially the awful nose - and it could replace the dozens of cheap Korean and Jap imports on UK roads quite easily.
The Porsche input is interesting - was this just consulting work or is there a real VAG commitment to this project? If it's a success, could we see a VW-badged variant in Europe?
It's an interesting tech, but what speed PCI-e slot was used for their performance tests? I'm guessing it was a 16x slot, not a 1x. If i was a 16x then many current corporate PCs don't even have one! Some have 8x or 1x, which would probably be slower than and still much pricier than the SATA alternative, or they are using the existing 16x slot for a graphics card. With PC sales seeming to have fallen off a cliff, I can't see many corporates splashing out on new PCs with 16x PCIe slots just so they can have SSDs for a few years yet.
Besides, hasn't Larry Ellison told us we'll all be running Java-driven network computers by then?
The interesting question is whether Mr Donnerkebab will take a third less pay, and whether Dave Roberson will be getting that third for his role of doing the storage part Donner isn't allowed to touch. What, you think that the whole thing is just some sham and that Donner will actually be manageing the whole kit and caboodle behind the scenes, and Roberson will just be sitting back, taking the pay and reading the odd announcement from Donner's script? You cynic, you!
Hello bigot, earth calling bigot...
"....Surely what those numbers reflect is that serious customers of HP/UX, NonStop, and VMS have nowhere to go except Itanium (and non-serious customers have already left the building)....." Really? So, that would imply that hp-ux, NonStop and VMS host nothing but completely proprietary applications that no competitor OS, such as Slowaris, AIX or Linux, can run. Which is, frankly, a load of male bovine manure. The truth is customers are choosing hp Integrity for their server platform over Sun or IBM offerings to run commercial apps, hence the growth.
"....Nobody (almost nobody) buys Itanium through choice, but the people whose businesses need HP/UX, NonStop, and VMS *have* to buy Itanium to get their OS and apps of choice...." Which is the same gonads as the stuff above. For a start, we buy hp Integrity by choice. Most hp-ux apps we use, such as the Oracle, SAP, Veritas or AMDOCS product ranges, will run on AIX or Slowaris, in fact many of them were originally developed on SPARC Slowaris until developers realised Slowaris was becoming increasingly irrellevant. And any inhouse code on hp-ux would usually have been done with ANSI compilers such as the C/C++ sets, so would be easily ported to another UNIX if we thought another platform was a better option. Time you morons faced facts - customers like us are choosing hp Integrity because it gives the best package - OS choice and depth, performance, application availability, price and support. For you to mutter about "lock-in" as the reason for growth is just putting your head in the sand. Grow up and get a clue.
/Point, laugh, repeat.
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