“Sun finally unveiled the full dimensions of its quest to change the computing landscape this week. It’s fundamentally a more monolithic landscape populated by pre-integrated components either acquired by or developed by Sun. It’s an alternative to Microsoft Windows abstracted from the operating systems (Solaris and Linux) and processors (SPARC and x86). It’s also Sun’s attempt to become a leading solutions provider competing against IBM, HP and Microsoft.” Read the editorial at ZDNews.
Can Sun Become the Dell of Enterprise Software?
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Sun might have nice stuff, but it still is an enterprise level company. I don’t see them bringing solutions in small businesses. Small businesses still need to do IT themselves, as outsourcing or cosourcing or own IT departments is to expensive for them. In theory Sun’s solutions might do the job, but I don’t see them focusing marketing and sales on such markets.
I saw on a newsgroup or two that people are actually pretty supprised at the V440’s pricing. Perhaps, Sun is on the right track?
All Sun needs to do is make Solaris 9 _appear_ as manageable as Windows 2003 for small businesses whose drool-factor is quite high.
for the enterprise, at least. the whole “thin client revolution” was geared to make it affordable for big corps to roll out and maintain, oh, 12,000 workstations. don’t be surprised that sun is waging war on the battlefield of the price point.
I see a lot of people in corporations, both large (50.000+) and medium (5000+) that are suddenly very excited about this Sun Java Desktop or what the heck it’s called. MIS people sems to consider it good value for money. And some seem to be attracted by the openness.
Of course, most of these people have had fair to good experience with Sun techsupport for Java or their server gear. Sun does have a foot in the door with lots of companies.
Sun Micro plans more job cuts
http://www.msnbc.com/news/968625.asp
“Sun’s revenues have now fallen for nine straight quarters, and it is now offering its own Linux-based systems in addition to high-end machines. In the most recent quarter, which ended June 30, Sun earned $12 million on sales of $2.98 billion. In the same period last year, it reported profits of $61 million on sales of $3.42 billion.”
$12 million profit on sales of $2.98 billion? Good Lord, hardware margins are thin these days, but I didn’t realize they were quite that thin.
Sun needs to drop sparc (and one or two sales people) if the really want success. I work with 2 sun fire v880. one of them have 22 hours importing an oracle database (from a 10gB dump file). The database is in restricted mode, so. . . there are NO users.
With 2 cpu’s, 4gb ram and 5 fc-al disks in raid 5 we espected a little more performance. . . our “test” server (intel p4, 512mb ram, ATA hd) is faster than that.
why not switch the p4 to production??? stupid diplomacy from the oracle/sun sales people.
yea, yea. . . i know “sun wil release the new ultra super sparc 4 (5 or whatever) in 2005, up to N times faster than actual processors”. . . CRAP!
When are they going to build a laptop, err, mobile workstation?
Sun is still a respected company within the IT community. If it’s software looks good and is easy to setup and use as a Windows environment, they could have a killer product. Think of how many people would switch if Sun name dropped Unix and Windows. “Unix made easier to use then Windows.” They’d get a hyped buzz word and familiar one in one stroke.
Yeah, vendors a are bleeding on hardware. I’d look for more closed architechture systems using common parts to emerge. Open hardware, just like open software really isn’t what the industry needs right now.
“When are they going to build a laptop, err, mobile workstation?”
They use there OEM’s for that, and acording to Scott McNealy
(from the chat transcrip over @ sun.com)
Q: You say Sun is looking to mobile solutions to bring and end to the physical office. We see this as Java has been deployed on handhelds and mobile phones. Has Sun ever considered making a step into the notebook/laptop market?
Scott McNealy: Sun is working with OEMs on the laptop market and have had tremendous success with Java and StarOffice in the desktop/laptop space. Starting with Tadpole, who announced both Solaris and Linux based will be delivering our Desktop solution this year. Expect to see more, laptops and desktop in the future. The Java desktop system will be made available to all laptop OEMs.
Sun needs to drop sparc (and one or two sales people) if the really want success. I work with 2 sun fire v880. one of them have 22 hours importing an oracle database (from a 10gB dump file). The database is in restricted mode, so. . . there are NO users.
With 2 cpu’s, 4gb ram and 5 fc-al disks in raid 5 we espected a little more performance. . . our “test” server (intel p4, 512mb ram, ATA hd) is faster than that.
Why is it I don’t believe you?
22 hours for importation of a 10GB dumpfile is ludicrous. It takes our dual 900MHz Blade 2000 less than an hour to restore a ~2GB database from a dumpfile.
Can you give us some more numbers regarding your PC setup as well (e.g. processor speed and how long the restore took)
To everyone else… why the focus on small business? This is not in Sun’s target demographic… Sun is aiming to create a highly scalable and easily maintainable workstation/server solution for large businesses with the Java Enterprise System, not small businesses. Much of what Sun is trying to accomplish is worthless to small businesses and therefore not worth the extra money. The 4 * 1.28GHz V440, priced at ~$26,000 (w 16GB RAM and 4 * 36GB Ultra320 drives) provides excellent price/performance (better than Dell in a recent survey, iirc), but is *well* beyond the needs of any small business I can imagine.
>>
All Sun needs to do is make Solaris 9 _appear_ as manageable as Windows 2003 for small businesses whose drool-factor is quite high.
>>
O yeah, it really would help if they could do that. Can they do that though? I don’t think so.
Sun does offer x86 servers:
http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v60x/
http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v65x/
Wouldn’t it be great if Sun and Apple combined forces to tackle the enterprise, the small business, the home, and school markets. Wait a minute: who buys whom?
Sun Micro plans more job cuts
http://www.msnbc.com/news/968625.asp
“Sun’s revenues have now fallen for nine straight quarters, and it is now offering its own Linux-based systems in addition to high-end machines. In the most recent quarter, which ended June 30, Sun earned $12 million on sales of $2.98 billion. In the same period last year, it reported profits of $61 million on sales of $3.42 billion.”
$12 million profit on sales of $2.98 billion? Good Lord, hardware margins are thin these days, but I didn’t realize they were quite that thin.
1) Hardware pricing has been falling – Look at the price drop of their hardware. Their big iron pricing used to cost as much as a Soyuz capsual, now they are available for most medium organisations to purchase without needing get a huge loan.
2) HP hardware – UNIX and PC, are in a continual state of money loss. Lets compare that to SUN which has been profitable for 35 quarters. Repeat, 35 quarters of straight out profit. They’ve cut costs and of course with cutting pricing they’ll have reduce revenue, however, as volume increases due to the software announcements, we should see the “SUN” rise again.
3) They’re pushing a large amount of their business to their software and services side. People are more likely to upgrade their software and need services than upgrading their hardware, especially hardware like SUNs which can survive 2 years longer than your a-typical Intel solution.
If you look at their balance sheet, their hardware profit as remained consistant and the bright spots which have been growing is software and services.
Wouldn’t it be great if Sun and Apple combined forces to tackle the enterprise, the small business, the home, and school markets. Wait a minute: who buys whom?
It would be a merger. Both have around the same amount of cash reserves and producing almost the same level of profits. What the bigger question will be if IBM is willing to continue to sell PowerPC 970 to Apple after merging with SUN considering that SUN is IBMs compatitor in the enterprise.
It would be a rather interesting senario if Mac moved from PowerPC to UltraSparc III 1Ghz for their low end Macs 😉
Sun Microsystems is the leader and will be leader in future.
We have V880s too, and their oracle performance is excellent. But we do real tests, not the bullshit you mention. Sun + Oracle means multiple accesses and clients, data cache-ing, prioritization of access and CPU time and fine-grained thread management. And an unmatched I/O bandwidth on the backplane.
Restoring a database is hardly an indicator of anything. But I must admit that I am surprised by the figures you have posted. Aren’t you not missing a zero or two, somewhere?
In our environment, we moved over a 100GB’s of dump files from our old E450’s to our new V480’s and it only took 6 hours to do the import. So I think you guys must have something wrong in your /etc/system tuning. Sun systems perform exceptionally well with Oracle or any big database. The problem I see with PC’s is that they don’t have the I/O bandwidth or the memory to drive a large database. Even with something like Linux, you are limited by the crappiness of the PC hardware out there.
The great thing about Solaris and Sun systems is that they perform well and can take on large workloads without missing a beat.
I’m glad that Sun is reducing the costs on its hardware and software. It’ll help bring in new customers and will help old customers upgrade easily.
Sun reps sound more and more desperate. It is as if they don’t know how to attract investors anymore. When they’re not swimming in the SCO swamp, they’re comparing themselves to Dell, a company that could sell more chicken nuggets than KFC. So, what’s up with those former geniuses ? Is it why Bill Joy decided he had enough of it ?