[nycbug-talk] Sun News Roundup

[Aleksandar Kacanski]

>

> On Mar 19, 2009, at 6:43 PM, Andy Kosela wrote:
>
> > Miles Nordin <carton at ivy.net> wrote:
> >
> >> But yeah, the brilliant work of fresh college grads that made Sun
> >> great in the old days has already been largely squished by this new
> >> regime that insists on pandering to idiot Bank sysadmins, and it
> >> smells liek there's this growing culture of laziness-as-a-virtue
> >> festering in there---like, the Tier 1 phonemonkeys in the call center
> >> seem to be running the entire company, bossing around the developers
> >> to the point they live in fear and create these assertion-riddled
> >> Fisher Price interfaces with binary config files, because they don't
> >> want anything that'll be a ``call generator''.  or, maybe the Tier 1
> >> techs are in fact taking orders from the lunchladies in the  
> >> cafeteria.
> >> It's structured as one of these ``bottom up'' companies, you know,
> >> because that's how you incubate bold new ideas.
> >
> > Couldn't agree more.  Sun nowadays is *definetly* not the same company
> > as when Bill Joy was there.  Even Oracle got more fresh ideas than  
> > them.
>
> You are aware that Sun is the company behind ZFS, DTrace and Niagara  
> right?

ZFS -- yes, DTrace -- absolutely, but Niagara??   Miles already said
some interesting things about this "invention".  Let me just add on top
of it that its extremely low float performance and overall low 
performance per core compared to x86 cores just don't make it look 
real promising for the future.  Actually SPARC has been dying for some
time now -- that's why Sun jumped on x86 bandwagon.

And don't forget that their sales are dropping dramatically.  Actually
only Integrity platform is seeing *any* positive growth in the
enterprise market as of lately.

--Andy


Sun is also doing well in HPC market. I work with both IBM and SUN extensively and I see this move as IBM attempt to be preemptive. I would argue that SUN is  actually getting better in delivering variety of products and services.  As far as sparc is concern, you may quote specs, but SUN did excellent job with cool threads. In my experience apache, java and tomcat are performing significantly better, faster when running on the sparc platform. This not to say that you can't achive similar things on bsd or linux but the fact is that performance of applications is not lacking on the sparc platform. On HPC side, lustre, qfs, zfs, sge and rest of products dedicated to storage, shared FS and parallel computing are very popular on the market.
--sasha
--sasha