Posts by David Halko

to General Taso - Pricing starts at $1,495

General Taso asks, "What are they going to charge for it ? Probably $100,000/cpu..."

Your estimate is three orders of magnitude from reality.

The article states, "The thin boy starts at $1,495, while the tubbier guy comes in at $3,195"

SUN is usually a price/performance leader against the major market competitors, and where they are not a price/performance leader, they are either Performance or Price leaders... for the market that they are targeting.

to Anonymous Coward - SUN 5240: Cooling: Read The Manuals

An Anonymous Coward says, "Not to mention you want some components to get the cold air first. The servers keep failing because of the thermal density. I would much rather have a 2U or 4U with reliability"

SUN sticks hundreds of these things in shipping containers in very harsh areas with air cooling - the pricing on the platform with maintenance would be much higher if this was an engineering problem.

Providing cold air to the racks is the responsibility of the person deploying the equipment.

Before loading racks full of equipment, it is very important to Read The Manuals.

http://docs.sun.com/source/820-3314-10/siteprep.html

"The operating environment re quirements are the same for both the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers. Your environmental control system must provide intake air for the servers that complies with the limits specified in Environmental Specifications."

"To avoid overheating, do not direct warmed air:"

" * Toward the front air intake of the server"

" * Toward the server access panels "

More details on Environmental Control System specifications.

http://docs.sun.com/source/820-3314-10/siteprep.html#50413569_11642

to Anonymous Coward - no 64 bit apps or 64 bit OS? Get a Real OS

An Anonymous Coward said:

"But where are the main stream 64 bit apps? That's been how many years of 64bit computing potential and we are still stuck in a rut with main stream 32bit OS and apps."

"multicore 64bit CPUs and now soon APUs totally crippled on a 32 bit OS running 32 bits apps, is it just me or can anyone else see how pathetic this is?"

Hope you didn't missed the boat - 32 bit users have been transitioning to 64 bit in the Open arena ( http://www.sparc.com/ ) for almost 20 years now. 64 bit users have been in 8 core open source CPU's ( http://www.opensparc.net/ ) for years now. People have used 32 bit and 64 bit applications on a 64 bit OS ( http://www.solaris.com/ ) for 10 years now.

When you run a 64 bit operating system like Solaris (for commercial support), or OpenSolaris (to compile and tweek the source code yourself) - it will run all of your old 32 bit code (transparently) and give you the option of running 64 bit code (when you run into a jam!)

Heck, you can even run various OS's in virtualized containers ( http://opensolaris.org/os/community/brandz/ ) with virtually no overhead and no licensing costs of virtual machines.

Yes, Solaris and OpenSolaris will run on your AMD x64 or Intel x64 platforms - and even on your 32 bit proprietary platforms.

While the rest of the market is struggling to get a foothold in the 64 bit world, the Open System market is moving to 256 bit capability ( http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/ ) with ZFS.

It has been time to move on from old 32 but technology for a decade, it is now time to move up to 64 bit & 256 bit computing capabilities on over a dozen cores ( http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug041708-story01.html ) with many dozens of threads.

Intel Beat Up AMD with Poor Engineering - AMD's Turn

Article states:

"Swift's 'Kong' graphics core is separate die built into the CPU package."

"Does this matter? From a technology standpoint, not much, and from a business perspective it's a smart move."

People did not care that some generations of Intel multi-cores were multiple pieces of silicon glued together into the same carrier... AMD took a beating over trying to architect it right!

Well, it appears AMD has taken a play from Intel's playbook - design unique junk and it will be bought because it is cheaper.

It is too bad that people care more about cost than rewarding good engineering - but that is the world we live in.

Perhaps the next generation will be a real system on one chip.

to Matt Bryant - "just-about-zero market penetration" is unsubstantiated

Matt Bryant laughs, "exactly how popular is just-about-zero market penetration?"

VirtualBox seems like it is pretty popular among normal people.

http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-05/sunflash.20080529.1.xml

"Sun xVM VirtualBox Breaks Five Million Download Mark... Currently downloaded more than 10,000 times a day, the new version includes more than 2,000 enhancements and full support for Mac OS X, Solaris and OpenSolaris host operating systems."

VirtualBox also seems pretty popular among trade journals.

2007.12 - http://www.techworld.com/opsys/reviews/index.cfm?reviewid=582

2008.05 - http://mac.elated.com/2008/05/30/virtualbox-16-review-free-vm-software-for-the-mac/

2008.08 - http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,71402-order,4-page,1-c,utilities/reviews.html

2008.07 - http://www.itreviews.co.uk/software/s629.htm

2008.07 - http://blogs.computerworld.com/moving_to_virtualbox

2008.08 - http://www.macworld.com/article/134584/2008/07/mwvodcast59.html

2008.08 - http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Virtualization/VirtualBox-Delivers-Free-Multiplatform-Desktop-Virtualization/

While not perfect, it seems like a reasonable product, in comparison to the other competing products.

Seeing 10K downloads a day in conjunction with reasonable reviews from multiple trade journals placing it near-par with other competing vendor products does not seem to support your opinion.

Perhaps you could provide a reference for your "market penetration" opinion?

to Pam Courson - Correction on the definition of a Hypervisor

Pam Courson states, "virtualbox is emulation it is not a hypervisor."

eWEEK Labs Technical Director Cameron Sturdevant disagrees.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Virtualization/VirtualBox-Delivers-Free-Multiplatform-Desktop-Virtualization/

"VirtualBox is a Type 2 hypervisor, which means that it is software that installs on top of the operating system installed on the physical host system. Type 2 hypervisors usually have slightly lower performance than Type 1 hypervisors that interface directly with the physical hardware, such as Microsoft's Hyper-V or VMware's ESX Server."

to Matt Bryant - Virtual Box is different and complements Xen

Matt Bryant suggests, "Xen and VMware are massively ahead both in product and the corporate mindset."

SUN has been contributing significantly to the Xen project.

http://www.xen.org/about/

"The Xen Advisory Board... current members are Citrix, HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems."

SUN released Xen (branded as "xVM Server") along side Virtual Box.

http://www.sun.com/software/products/xvm/faqs.jsp

"Sun xVM VirtualBox is a hypervisor that Sun recently added to it xVM portfolio through the acquisition of Innotek."

"Sun xVM Server is an enterprise-class hypervisor appliance that serves as the basic building block within the Sun xVM platform for enabling datacenter virtualization and management."

Are you suggesting that one Open Source project contributed to by SUN is leading another Open Source project contributed to by SUN in "product and the corporate mindset"?

Virtual Box is targeted by SUN more as desktop virtualization while Xen/xVM Server is targeted more by SUN as server virtualization - they complement each other.

Xen and Virtual Box are really two different tools meant for two different purposes... comparing them the way you did does not make much sense.

to Matt Bryant -- "free" does not equate to "problem" from an Open Systems Vendor

Matt Bryant suggests, "a better solution than Sun has cobbled together. This is shown clearly by the fact that Sun is releasing their 'solution' for 'free', as they know how far behind the game they are."

I wonder if this individual had considered that SUN had been an Open System vendor (building around freely available standards & offering freely available specifications to standards) from it's founding days and has been open-sourcing everything in recent history: from CPU (highest throughput single socket and dual socket performance) to Firmware (leveraged by alternative vendors) to OS (Solaris considered an excellent platform by the industry) to virtualization (Xen code shipped by multiple vendors and now by SUN) to desktop environment (from their days when they moved from Sunview to X Windows) to Middleware (JAVA is used as the basis for multiple vendor applications and middleware layers) to Applications (OpenOffice is leveraged by the millions of users)?

Considering this company has always been an Open Systems Vendor, from their very first days - any comment suggesting that they are releasing a product for "free" because of some unspecified "problem" demonstrates a poor understanding of the company, it's history, and the continual demonstration of their committment to Open Systems.

Such a rhetorical conclusion is not worth it's weight in virtual ink, casting any statement offered earlier in the light of most likely being poorly reasoned.

@Joshua Goodall

You commented, "None of your suggested 'openness' has any value once blades are deployed in the enterprise data center, no matter which vendor they came from."

I would suggest you review my comment and see the statement, "if someone does not like them, they can swap to1U boxes while not changing your management or provisioning software." An enterprise architect must take end-of-life as well as non-performance risks of a platform into consideration - there is value in risk mitigation.

In essence, I provided the benefits to not choosing proprietary vendor choices. One could seemlessly swap SUN out, without a loss in the investment any proprietary hardware, software, and sub-systems (which I had listed in detail in 2 different ways.)

There are implicit benefits of not being tied to proprietary hardware, software, and sub-systems - which I did not list because I had believed they were self-evident... let me list a few:

+ reduced customer cost - If a business does not need to invest in proprietary hardware, sub-systems, and software - then this money could be invested in other areas of the business

+ increased customer flexibility - if non-proprietary equipment is used, flexibility is optimized, and the need for future vendor roadmaps is mitigated, since financial investment in proprietary solutions does not need to be depreciated over a long period of time and future architecture changes does not obsolete previously purchased equipment

+ increased supplier flexibility - if non-proprietary equipment is used, the supplier is not burdened with sacrificing future performance & features in order to fit the old proprietary pieces (i.e. backplane, cards, etc.) and more supplier options can be made available at a lower investment threshold since the supplier is building common options for multiple families of systems leveraging economies of scale

+ increased choice - since more options can be made available at a lower investment threshold by the supplier, more options will be made available upon customer request. A fine example of this was the Open Source T* CPU Series from SUN being able to be fit onto a proprietary card onto a proprietary backplane into a proprietary IBM Chassis (in my former comment.) This would have been less likely if the SUN OpenSPARC T* CPU had a proprietary bus (i.e. remember Intel putting the screws to AMD when AMD wanted to continue manufacturing CPU's that would slot into an Intel proprietary bus socket?)

+ increased I/O options - using standard I/O cards (which I had listed in my previous comment) in a blade system means off-the-shelf cards can be leveraged from former investments in the new non-proprietary (i.e. SUN) blade system implementations. Existing spares at a customer site can be leveraged for new non-proprietary blade implementations. If the new non-proprietary blade system is swapped out, then the standard I/O cards from the non-proprietary blade system (i.e. SUN) can be re-leveraged into other existing server spares or even into new systems to replace them. If the blade system is outgrown (i.e. application requires more CPU or memory capacity than a blade can offer), the I/O parts can be moved to a different (non-blade) chassis, conserving parts from the original investment, or even leveraging the I/O spares from the non-proprietary blade server investment. Furthermore, if the non-proprietary blade supplier (i.e. SUN) does not offer a card, the customer can go to a third party to get the appropriate card to meet their business requirement.

There are many reasons why Gartner indicated that the proprietary blade technology would dull server growth. Suggesting the "openness" I listed does not have any value suggests that Gartner is wrong in it's assessment.

I had also indicated that Sun is "not perfect" - I wish a vendor in the industry would open-source a blade standard and invite other vendors to join in, as had previously been done successfully with hardware & software solutions to create huge markets of choice:

+ SPARC platform (i.e. TurboSPARC, HyperSPARC, SPARC64, "Niagra", etc.)

+ OpenFirmware (i.e. SUN SPARC, Macintosh, etc.)

+ POSIX (i.e. Linux, Solaris, OpenSolaris, HPUX, AIX, AUX, MacOSX, etc.)

+ X Consortium (i.e. Hummingbird & Exceed, Linux & XFree86, Cygwin/X, MacOSX and X Windows, SUN Solaris & OpenWindows, etc.

+ Java (i.e. Eclipse, NetBeans, Tomcat, IBM VM Microsoft VM, OpenJDK, Glassfish, etc.)

+ Open Document Format (i.e. OpenOffice.org, KOffice, Google Docs, NeoOffice, Zoho, IBM Lotus Symphony and Corel WordPerfect Office X4, etc.)

+ HTTP/HTML Protocols (i.e. Server: Apache, Tomcat, IIS, Netscape, etc. ; Clients: Netscape, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.)

In conclusion, I hope this clarifies the value for "openness" in the blade server market, both from an immediate value, future value, and examples of how "openness" had benefited other markets to create huge marketplaces for commodity hardware & software.

Silly Statement Concerning "Proprietary"

The statement "Major vendors such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems all lock in their hardware" is incorrect.

SUN's does not lock you into their proprietary "hardware": they do not lock you into a proprietary backplane (as does the other vendors in your list), offers Open-Source CPU (http://www.OpenSPARC.com/), offers 2 proprietary vendor CPU's (i.e. Intel & AMD), offers open standard I/O slots, offers their Open-Source CPU for integration into a proprietary IBM Blade Chassis, does not require proprietary KVM systems, does not require proprietary chassis management software like the other vendors in the list, and support runs Open-Source (i.e. Linux, Solaris) as well as proprietary operating systems (i.e. M.S. Windows.)

SUN is more open than the other listed Blade vendors... while not perfect, if someone does not like them, they can swap to and from 1U boxes while not changing your management or provisioning software (unless swapping TO a proprietary blade vendor, where one will have to buy special proprietary hardware software enablers, I/O cards, KVM management, management systems, etc.)

The fact that Dell, IBM, and HP are more closed is not SUN's problem.

Cost will probably dampen growth of the Blade arena more aggressively than proprietary lock-in (of vendors like IBM, HP and Dell.) Theoretically, a blade platform should be cheaper (due to component re-use), but I have yet to see this to be the case.