A new study on the major players in the Unix server market has declared IBM the clear customer favorite and brought to light some serious issues with Sun Microsystems' product line. Most alarmingly for Sun, the company appears to have lost its cachet as the dominant Unix player and done so while alienating customers. Sun finished last in almost every one of the Gabriel Consulting Group survey's categories, spanning technology performance, customer satisfaction and software tools.
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Member since:2005-10-08
Actually, it's not a load of tosh at all. Sun's new AMD line of servers is specifically targetted at the low to mid-range that they have been ignoring in the past. Prices for Sun servers now start at around $700 for the AMD-64 models.
They also are producing workstations these days based on AMD-64 that even the average home user can afford. Ultra 20 Opteron based workstations start at under $900.
Member since:2005-10-25
Actually, it's not a load of tosh at all. Sun's new AMD line of servers is specifically targetted at the low to mid-range that they have been ignoring in the past. Prices for Sun servers now start at around $700 for the AMD-64 models.
Except, as a CTO of a small company, their servers just didn't cut the mustard. I needed a 1U system with 2+ Opteron processors, 4 GB RAM, 2x 300 GB hdd, and room for 2 more. Sun couldn't do it. I ended up buying a system from http://www.avadirect.com AVA Direct based on http://www.tyan.com/products/html/gt24b2891.html a Tyan whitebox system.
I'm utterly happy with it - as a Databsae server, it cuts several queries taking as long as 2 seconds all the way down to 56 milliseconds on a uniprocessor P4! A 10 minute database load drops in time all the way down to <25 seconds!
Sun's computer couldn't handle the 300 GB drives, and only had two HDD drive bays. (WTF? That's just stupid! I want RAID 1 for 2 drives, and room to grow from there)
Member since:
2005-07-06
And while Solaris may not be as popular as it used to be in the traditional (high-end) UNIX server market, it is (successfully?) positioning itself in the the middle- and low-end.
What an absolute load of tosh. Solaris and Unix is not low and middle end and never has been. It's the high end or no end for Sun, Solaris and SPARC. That's where the money has traditionally come from and that's where the money has now gradually diminished.