Oh Lawd, it's the end of the world
-
There have been some strange things that have happened in this world that I would never have expected. The Red Sox winning the World Series, Macs with Intel processors, and are things I never thought I'd see. But none of the them seems as strange as this to me.
Sun is selling Windows servers.
I just can't believe it. I mean, it makes perfect sense to me in that Sun has a great sales channel and they'll never eliminate Windows from many customers, so many some money selling them Windows as well as Sun servers. But I just can't believe the SUN, the face of Unix workstations for so many of us in college, is selling Windows.
Scott McNealy was so anti-Microsoft, that I assumed he'd run the company forever and battle the beast from Redmond for the rest of my career.
I guess if Bill Gates can resign, if Compaq and DEC can disappear, if AT&T can disappear, whoops, they're back with the i(will overcharge you)Phone, then I guess Sun can sell Windows servers.
I think it's actually a great move by , Jonathan Schwartz and should help Sun continue their comeback in the computing world. Maybe those few shares of SUNW my Mom still has will be worth something one day.
Sun's only selling x64 systems, and a limited number of their systems support Windows. They also get Solaris supported as a guest OS for Virtual Server and Virtual PC, so that's a win for them. I know that margins are tight, but for customers that buy Solaris servers now, this means they can have one less vendor, something that shouldn't be discounted. Being able to make larger deals will help Sun over the long term and may help them make some gains against Linux in the data center as well.
-
Hey Steve,
Your mom may have purchased shares in SUNW but she now owns shares in JAVA. Sun changed its ticker symbol a few weeks ago.
Cheers,
Dan
-
What's with the Chris Rock picture? I'm familiar with all of his comedy routines, but I don't recognize any references to any of his jokes.
Live to Throw
Throw to Live
Will Summers -
I think it's Bigger and Blacker, the one where we starts off with the white kids in the elevator.
Plus it sounds like something he'd say
Thanks for the ticker update. Don't own anymore myself (anymore)
-
On one side of the coin I am flabbergasted but on the other side of the coin it makes sense in todays business climate. Maybe MS can take a lesson from Sun and begin to offer some favor of *nix ...
... does anyone remember Xenix ?
RegardsRudy KomacsarSenior Database Administrator"Ave Caesar! - Morituri te salutamus."
-
I see the title. I was just looking through the text for a Chris Rock reference.
'I got on the eleveator the other day and a couple of white kids got on the elevator and I dove off. You ain't killin' me! White kids is crazy. Trench Coat mafia - other kids picked on us, we don't have any friends. There was SIX of ya! I didn't have 6 friends in high school. I don't have 6 friends now! 6 friends - that's 3 on 3 half-court.'
As you can tell, I'm a Chris Rock fan. (That quote is from memory)
Live to Throw
Throw to Live
Will Summers -
Relax.
It's old news, for one thing, and it was very good news for of use who make a living at this instead of treating vendors like baseball teams.
We've been moving our Windows servers off Dell and onto Sun for over a year now, and our SQL Server 2005 deployment was the first of those.
A 4200 with 32 GB memory and 8 dualcore CPUs can support dozens of instances and hundreds of databases and tens of thousands of connections.
Most shops of any significant size run more than one server OS. Having had a good run with Sun for a couple of decades, it's wonderful to not have to use a second vendor for Windows servers.
Being able to run all on one vendor's bare metal is good for the bottom line. I don't need two sets of spares - one server or system board on the shelf can replace a Unix or Windows box on the fritz. That saves a ton of money.
There's power consumption. The Sun's power consumption is amazingly low. which saved us from needing to spend a quarter million dollars on STILL more power conditioners and UPS.
There's tperformance. When we did the SQL Server eval, HP was the only other vendor using the AMDs. That gets your IO off the front bus architecture.
For busy transactional systems, with multipath iSCSI arrays, this is a consistant, linear 4x improvement in performance against a similarly configured Intel box.
Sun is a server company, and has never been dogmatic about Unix (they don't even call their Unix "Unix" - it's "Solaris"). They've run Linux for years, and once MS had a atable, quality server OS (Windows 2003), I assumed they'd start selling it for Windows as well.
MS dropped the chauvanism a few years back; when they started a lot of lateral hiring of experienced VMS and Unix people. Combined with the exisiting Windows expertise, MS at long last is putting out some top quality products, and is no longer so useful as fodder for humor.
Database people should be the first to realize this - MS learned the business from Sybase, originally. Jim Grey did not start his career at MS - he came to them from IBM. The SQL Server team is full of people from the Oracle and DB2 worlds.
It's time their customers did the same, and stopped talking like a bunch of know-nothing gearheads at a car show yelling "Ford Sucks!" "Chevy Stink" "Ford Rules, Chevy Drools!" "My Chevy can beat up your Ford"!
Roger L Reid
-
Great points above from RL and my point was less that it's a big deal for Microsoft, but more that it's significant for Sun. They were very anti-Microsoft from the beginning, so it's good to see them maturing under Schwartz.
Microsoft's always been very opportunistic with not much institutional memory. They just want to win.
I think it's great that it simplifies things for customers. If I had a mixed Sun/some PC vendor environment, I'd seriously consider Sun for all servers, just for the reasons given above.
However it's still fun to act like a gearhead. Nothing wrong with having a little pride in what you run.
Viewing 9 posts - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply