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No I don't trust them. I don't see any seismic waves on the grapevine as to how much faster these machines are, and the case studies are highly, highly suspicious for the reasons I stated previously. The descriptions some of these people give of their operations (running Fedora in production and then spending a ton of money on Sun kit, for example) simply doesn't stack up. Basically, the only people producing these wondrous benchmarks are Sun themselves and a few organisations Sun are using in their case studies, probably with free kit and consultancy attached for taking part.

It's certainly not an Intel versus AMD shift where lots of verification can be had. Even some benchmarks there have been iffy, but the recent picture has become clear.

Without specifics, the general premise is that you run these machines for very parallel operations. The only way you can possibly make use of this is to split your software operations into a lot of lightweight independent threads of execution, otherwise you are back to work done per single task. Either way, most are going to have to heavily optimise your software to get it to do that. Very, very, very few can exploit multiple cores within a single transactional sequence to any great extent. The simple fact is the vast majority of tasks are pretty single threaded.


The premise here is that somehow a Niagara machine is worth any given x86 machine several times over in a specific niche (replace X boxes with Y Niagara machines), benchmarks and specifics of which are thin on the ground outside of Santa Clara. Sun can't really afford to have their hardware people running around playing these games.


I would suggest you learn to read articles you quote. These are 'benchmarks' issued by Sun and not verified by anyone else, devoid of specifics, and their case studies are merely poster children organisations that have suspect operations. Repeating it won't magically make it true or some statement of fact.


No it isn't. Power has failed in terms of raw performance up against x86 machines as well, which is why IBM is keen to avoid crossover where they sell it. Why are you mentioning IBM?


Wow. I would suggest Sun stops spending time trying to tell us about [insert incredible technical innovation that will turn things around here], and spends more time working out why they are laying off thousands and are struggling to break even year after year. Obviously the 'bottom line' skills could do with sharpening.


It's a very, very, very, very, very niche benchmark for the vast majority, with massive effort and retooling required and questionable studies, which has been my point throughout. Sun cannot afford expending R and D money on niche markets unless they are very lucrative. Financial performance. That's the point here.


"I got Solaris and ZFS up and running on my dinky little 32-bit laptop with 512 MB of memory and, OMG, it didn't die!" does not prove a thing I'm afraid. The BSD guys' experience, and those of many others, are that ZFS will naturally tend to grow unbounded and grab memory as you increase its workload. Its extensive features come at a price, and it depends on whether most think the price is worth paying.

Besides, while you and others argue totally off-topic stuff like this, Sun sheds yet more jobs and is still struggling to get to break-even. Show me the money, as they say.


I'm not saying that at all. If you have thousands of threads of execution, those threads are quite lightweight, they don't do a lot of number crunching and they are pretty independent and parallel then one of these machines might well be ideal.

Alas, I can't see that being anything other than a niche, the workloads of the majority of organisations don't stay uniform, circumstances change and with advances in x86 machines with multiple cores you question the shelf life of a machine in a year or two that cost your company a lot of money. You're going to look pretty incompetent when your company wants to throw a somewhat new workload at your Niagaras and they fall over...........Niagara falls. Even Sun's consultants are careful where they sell them.


All the major benchmarks and case studies produced for Niagara compare it with x86 and Linux based machines, and talk about workloads such as MySQL and web servers because that's where Sun has been losing out. They don't compete with anything that runs AIX or Power in any way, and that's the problem.

If you believe this then you are very confused about what Sun's target market is for Niagara, which is par for the course really.


Well, they apparently run Fedora in production, so I'd call that naive. Free kit, consultancy and freebies also help. :-)


Talk to the hand sweetheart. You've spent God knows how many paragraphs talking about everything from ZFS to lovely technical comparisons of Power and SPARC to try and avoid talking about the inevitable, as Sun people love to do - and yet you would ignore Rome burning as you struggle to break-even and your company lays off thousands of people. Quite frankly, you won't get to fire me or anyone else ;-).


That would be lovely, but alas, in case you hadn't noticed Sun have laid off thousands of workers, again, and they are really struggling to break even year after year. The bottom line is that few out there agree with you.


I see an awful lot of people, a great many of them Sun employees, spending a great deal of time and effort banging away on their blogs about IBM, what IBM are saying about them and arguing fruitless points about various meaningless technical benchmarks they have come up with that few are listening to in the hope that will turn things around. You would think they would have other things to do ;-).

Edited 2008-11-18 00:42 UTC