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. |
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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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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. | | |
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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. | |
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| suggested SSD articles... ....................................... |
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