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SPARC Product Directory

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historical note - about the SPARC Product Directory

This independently researched and funded publication played a role in accelerating the growth of the SPARC market in the 1990s by helping users, VARs and oems easily find compatible products and suppliers from hundreds of SPARC compatible oems. This was acknowledged and endorsed by Sun Microsystems and SPARC International.

Thanks to everyone who made it possible during an exciting period in the enterprise computer market.

Zsolt Kerekes, editor and publisher

PS - the torch for igniting momentous changes in the computer market has now moved on to the SSD market. Join me there on StorageSearch.com.

SSDs and Sun-Oracle... past failures / future challenges

by Zsolt Kerekes, editor - February 3, 2010
The history of Sun Microsystems' SPARC/Solaris business can be broadly divided into 2 parts.

1 - the Growth Years - 1987 to 2000, and

2 - the Decline and Lonely Wilderness Years - 2001 to 2009

Sun's biggest strategic success in the Growth Years - was that the company designed a processor family (SPARC) - which at one stage (in the mid 1990s) attracted more than 6 competing, compatible chipmakers who supplied SPARC CPUs for use in workstations and servers that competed with Sun itself.

Apart from Intel Architecture - SPARC is the only processor chip family which has achieved this level of support within the mainstream commercial computer market. Sun, which was a small company when it started, used clever partner marketing programs to create the illusion that it was building an open systems server market. More than 50 computer makers and hundreds of bus compatible card makers helped Sun sustain this dream of creating an open server architecture - which would be faster and more reliable than Wintel, while being cheaper and safer to buy than "proprietary" products from IBM, DEC and HP.


2001 - Sun loses more than revenue!

2001 marked the turning point in the 2 phases of Sun's history.

In 2001 - all server companies were suffering from the dotcom recession - which was extended by the events of 9/11. But in this year Sun lost more than a share of diminished user IT budgets (which would increase later for its main rivals.)

Sun lost its reputation for reliability. For more about this see the article - Unsafe At Any Speed? - a contemporary exposé of an easily avoidable design mistake which affected tens of thousands of high end SPARC servers . That was a pivotal point for most Sun customers. If they couldn't trust Sun, and Sun's SPARC servers were slower and more expensive than alternatives - then why were users risking their own operations by relying on this flaky outfit? That's when many die-hard SPARC user sites decided that the bitter taste of migration planning was better than the risk of being poisoned.


Sun's biggest strategic failure in the Decline and Lonely Wilderness Years lay in its many failed attempts to achieve technology leadership and relevance in the storage market - and most importantly its failure to recognize the threats and opportunities for all server makers (not just Sun) posed by SSDs.

Once upon a time - in the early years of the new millennium - as Sun started to lose its earlier performance advantages (because Microsoft was supporting Intel's server chips much sooner - instead of ignoring new features for years like they had done before) and as all server CPU designers were looking ahead at slower improvements in clock speeds - Sun had unique reasons and opportunities for exploiting SSD accelerated architectures. I wrote an exasperated wake-up call to Sun in my (2004) article Why Sun Should Acquire an SSD Company. They controlled the OS, they controlled the CPU design and they sold servers. What a fantastic starting point for the next phase in computer architecture!

Instead Sun did virtually nothing to redress the problems caused by lagging CPU clock rates - and mindlessly pursued the easier option of fatter - rather than faster - processors.

This was a market strategy which solved some problems in some markets for a short time - but could not be sustained as the core SPARC base was declining - because other chips were much faster. Smaller revenues from SPARC servers - meant smaller investments and slower design improvements in SPARC chips. Sun's real strength had always been integrating and supporting new chips and interfaces with its OS. It wasn't the best at designing chips.

Will Oracle do any better?

Oracle has bought a server company at a time where the server is becoming almost irrelevant.

If you look at a datacenter in 2015 and look at where the money will be spent - the proportion spent on servers will be less - and the proportion spent on solid state storage will be much more than that spent on the processors, motherboards and RAM.

The key value for Oracle in Sun is its OS.

If Oracle can tweak Solaris so that it can automatically tune the best performance out of the attached SSDs - it would have a great product to pitch.

But the autotuning SSD acceleration market has already started. The race for the SSD ASAPs market is application agnostic.

The computer market is rushing ahead to a new bubble - and it will take another 5 to 10 years before the winners are announced.

Want to know what's going to happen?

Retune to StorageSearch.com - which since 1998 - has been "leading the way to the new enterprise storage frontier."
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Oracle's SPARC Ready for Business

Editor:- February 2, 2010 - Oracle has a -new SPARC processor home page - and a neat touch here is the Oracle logo on the image of a chip.

Also - as you may have seen already - the old familiar www.sun.com website now redirects to www.oracle.com. So you may have to change your old Sun bookmarks.

Some old pages from the Sun site go immediately to similar content on Oracles' new site - while some others take a minute or so to get redirected to appropriate content - or just to the home page. And some old pages still exist on Sun's old site - with new Oracle branding.

This kind of takeover can be a nightmare for website managers - but the companies have had plenty of time to prepare the ground - and have done a good job on the integration - compared with most other takeovers I've seen in this industry (more than 500).

Before the takeover Sun's web site was one of the top 700 sites worldwide, while Oracle's was in the top 1,700 (source Alexa). So from the web marketing point of view this will give Oracle a boost in their search-engine rankings.
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click to see more info about Energy Data Storage 2010
Energy Data Storage 2010

by SMi Group

November 3 - 4, Kensington, London
This new event will form a platform for the
energy sector to discuss and compare their
unique digital data storage needs.
Linux kernel will support RamSan SSDs

Editor:- August 16, 2010 - Texas Memory Systems has joined the Linux Foundation to help ensure that its SSDs are supported in the mainline kernel.

"Linux is key to our long-term success," said Jamon Bowen, Director of Sales Engineering at Texas Memory Systems.
SPARC T2 Server
for IBM BladeCenters
from Themis Computer
click for datasheet SPARC T2BC Blade Server
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