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Last SPARC Standing -
TOP500 Supercomputers
Editor:- June 24, 2009 - the 33rd edition
of the TOP500
list of the world's most powerful supercomputers was updated recently.
Only
1 single machine in the list today uses SPARC processors.
That's a
steep decline from 10
years ago - when the TOP500 included 95 SPARC systems.
NextIO Unveils PCIe flash SSD
Editor:- June 17, 2009
- NextIO today
announced
it will demonstrate a 12 slot
PCIe flash SSD system,
designed in collaboration with
Marvell later
this month.
Each slot will be capable of over 200,000 IOPs and offer
400GB capacity.
Editor's comments:- there are nearly as many
companies making PCIe SSDs
today - as there are making 2.5"
SSDs. And it wouldn't surprise me to see the PCIe SSD oem count to become
the larger of the two.
With the growing number of
SSD controller and IP
companies in the market it's getting
easier to design
SSDs.
Notebook SSD Market - New Overview
Editor:- June 15,
2009 - StorageSearch.com
published a new article today called -
Overview of
the Notebook SSD Market.
This is a troubled and complex segment of
the SSD market - which has
earned a deservedly bad reputation.
Nevertheless SSD vendors continue
to throw products at the notebook market in many shapes and sizes - hoping that
something will stick before their cash runs out.
...read the
article
FCoE - New Standard
Editor:- June 11, 2009 -
FCoE is now
a draft standard.
To learn more
read the
(unreadable) T11 document (pdf).
If, like me, you ever wondered
what the difference was between this and the much older
FCIP
- this
2007
InfoWorld article explains. See also:-
iSCSI,
SAN
QLogic Ships 40Gbps InfiniBand Switches
Editor:-
June 8, 2009 - QLogic
today announced general availability of its
12000
Series 40Gb/sec QDR InfiniBand switches.
"With 864 ports and
bandwidth of 51 terabits per second, the QLogic 12000 series is the highest
capacity general purpose QDR InfiniBand switch on the market today," said
David Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org.
See also:- SAN
switches,
InfiniBand |
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| Sun
Executive Severance Calculations and Merger Background |
Editor:- June 4, 2009 - Scott
McNealy would be eligible to get about $9.5 million if he were to be
terminated in August.
The hypothetical calculations for Jonathan
Schwartz, John Fowler and other Sun executives are detailed in an
SEC
document which also includes a blow by blow narrative of the lead up to
Sun's recent acquisition by Oracle. |
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Recession is Hurting Server
Market - but SSDs will Hurt More
Editor:- April 28, 2009 - IDC reported today
factory revenue in the
worldwide
server market declined 25% year over year to $9.9 billion in the 1st
quarter of 2009.
This is the 3rd consecutive quarter of year-over-year
revenue decline and the lowest quarterly server revenue since IDC began tracking
the server market on a quarterly basis 12 years ago.
Unix servers
experienced 17.5% revenue decline year over year when compared with
1Q08.
Linux server revenue comprised 13.8% of server revenue in 1Q09,
declining 24.8% year-over-year to $1.4 billion, its lowest revenue level
in 5 years.
Editor's comments:- even when the recession ends
those past revenue shipments aren't going to bounce back.
When the
recovery starts the SSD
acceleration market will be in full force. That means users will be able to run
their apps using 70% fewer servers. That's something which was
originally predicted in my long range SSD market penetration model in
2003.
In the original article I explained that server oems were scared of the effect
that SSDs would have on their sales - and this fear was one of the reasons they
held back on user education about this technology. I also forecasted - that once
any single top tier server company announced SSD support - the others would be
forced to pile in too. But it was a game of dare to see how long they could wait
until users forced the issue. |
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Sun Responds to User Needs
for More SSD Capacity
Editor:- May 27, 2009 - Sun Microsystems announced
today it has
improved
its hybrid rackmount storage systems to support an additional 600GB of
flash SSD cache (compared to the current 64GB internal limit) for enhanced
application performance.
The Sun Storage
7310
is available today and starts at a price of $40,165.
Editor's
comments:- terabyte SSDs become commercially available in
2002 - so
Sun's initial product offering last November - which supported a mere 36GB per
4U rack - was a sure sign that the company either didn't know what it was doing
- or was being overly cautious.
There are plenty of
rackmount SSD
vendors in the market - and soon there will be hundreds more. There's wide
diversity in product architectures (open versus proprietary) and applications
experience in this part of the SSD market (ranging from months in the case of
Sun - to more than a decade for companies like
Solid Data Systems and
Texas Memory Systems).
If
you are thinking of buying an SSD from Sun - timing the purchase is a something
to think about. In recent years Sun used to steeply discount towards the end of
its quarter. I'm not sure how being part of
Oracle will
affect that. See also:-
Hybrid Storage
Drives |
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| Sun's
Future Lies in Oracle................................... |
Editor:- April 20, 2009 - Oracle today
announced
an agreement to acquire Sun
Microsystems for approximately $7.4 billion.
Editor's
comments:- this ends nearly a decade of speculation about the future of Sun
Microsystems, a company which created a unique server business peaking at
over $20 billion annual revenue at the turn of the Millenium.
You
can read how Sun created that market, then lost it piece by piece and then
finally lost itself in the storage market in the article which tracks the
22 History of SPARC
systems market.
It's fitting that Oracle writes the end of this
story.
In the earliest days of the Sun market, portable relational
databases were a great selling tool for Sun VARs a to open the doors for the
unknown Sun.
Typically they'd get the customer to run a dbase
benchmark on their VAX and then run the same thing on a Sun. In the late 1980s
Sun hardware came in at less than 1/2 the price and more than 2x the
performance. And that was before the SPARC market heated up with a series of
ever faster, and then unbeatable, products in the early to mid 1990s.
...Later:-
April 22, 2009 - Although I've read a lot of "analyst" blogs - I
haven't seen any analysis about this significant deal that's worthy of a
link. So here's what I think.
The 2 most important emerging trends
in the computer market which I've been discussing for many years
elsewhere are:-
The new content enabled industries
of the future mean that vast data sets, which were once the preserve of telcos
or governments - will become much more commonplace than in the past.
Although
Google manages huge amounts of data using Linux, and internally developed
applications, most enterprises can't do that. Because unlike Google they don't
have a monopolist's business advantages, and unlike Google, they can't easily
recruit PhDs to write most of their software.
Instead enterprises will
turn to platforms which already have a reputation for managing large data sets
reliably - as the starting point for their new projects.
SSD
accelerated, Solaris hosted Oracle makes good sense for that kind of business
plan.
If readers have views on this Oracle / Sun thing that they'd
like to share. Drop me a line,
saying who you are and what you think. | |
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| 1 year ago - July 2008
- Sun
and Fujitsu Unveil SPARC64 VII Servers |
Delivering 2GHz performance
7 years later than
customers needed was symptomatic of Sun's failure to satisfy
expectations.
In a technology roadmap in 1996 the fast growing Sun
had promised that SPARC CPUs would remain at least twice as fast as those
made by Intel or AMD. Instead they were slower. |
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2 years ago - July 2007 -
Sun's
Results Show Failure to Leverage Storage
Sun revealed that its storage revenue was down 10% compared to
the year ago period. That was at a time when many of the other top 10 storage
companies were reporting over 20% revenue growth.
It was clear to storage analysts like me that Sun had failed to
leverage any worthwhile benefit from its expensive
acquisition of
StorageTek 2 years earlier. Users were regarding Sun mainly as a tied storage
supplier, instead of an open supplier of storage to non-Sun servers. So the
company had to make its server business work better to survive. Storage was not
going to be its get out of jail free card. |
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3 years ago - July 2006 -
Running SPARC /
Solaris Apps on Intel Hardware
Transitive said it would
soon launch an emulation package to run SPARC / Solaris applications on Intel
/ Linux servers.
Not only would this provide usable performance - but
in some cases the SPARC apps would run faster on Intel servers than on the
original SPARC machines on which they had been deployed.
This made it
much easier for SPARC users to test the benefits of
migrating
away from Solaris. |
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8 years ago - July 2001 -
Sun's Q4
Revenue Declined 20%
Although the dotcom crash had already hit the
Intel server market 3 quarters earlier - Sun had continued reporting revenue
growth.
It seemed at one time that the company was invulnerable. The
1st shock was in April 2000 - when Sun reported that its revenue growth was
flat. But this (in July 2000) was the 1st time in Sun's history it had reported
negative revenue growth.
Later we were to hear reports of channel
stuffing. Sun had delayed its own bad news by allegedly shipping stock to VARs
who didn't realize that Sun's meteoric rise was to permanently end.
To
save costs Sun shut down its plants and offices during the 1st week in July
2001.
In the absence of Sun news - I published a daily spoof blog
- Diary of a
Workaholic Sun Partners Program Manager. |
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9 years ago - July 2000 -
Sun
reports $5 Billion quarter
This was Sun's finest hour.
Revenue was 33% up year on year.
By a strange twist of fate -
in the same month - we ran 2 other news headlines which, now in retrospect,
warned that all of this would end soon.
Red Hat Leads Global Linux Use
in New Surveys
IBM, Intel, Microsoft Eclipse Sun and Oracle with World's Fastest
Commercial Server Cluster
And in the next quarter - Intel issued a
warning that a recession was about to hit the PC and server market. |
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SPARC
Market Outlook in 2009?
What are the main trends likely to
influence the SPARC market in 2009? |
Having failed long ago on the
desktop and still being insignificant in the overall notebook market (despite
the availability of technically impressive products) SPARC - unlike Intel
architecture - is best viewed solely as a server processor architecture.
The
market prospects for all servers in 2009 / 2010 (not just SPARC) will
be driven by the following considerations.
Factors which will tend
decrease server unit shipments.
- the Credit Crunch:- for most enterprises uncertainty about their future
survival, that of their customers and lack of funding - will mean that
spending on new servers will be done only as a last resort when all other
options have been exhausted.
- Virtualization:- time sharing applications capacity into a common pool of
less servers is already a well established trend in the market. This will
continue to a more rigorous degree.
- Fatter Multi-Core Processors:- this trend has already impacted server sales
in previous years. As the number of cores heads into double digits it satisfies
many customer needs by reducing the physical and energy footprint of server
installations - as well as reducing cost.
- SSD Server Acceleration:- SSD
acceleration enables users to get more applications IOPS and lower response
times using less servers than systems which use only hard disk storage. In the
past this relied on expert installation to get the best results. As this
function gets managed better by automated software - SSD solutions will get
more widely adopted in the user base.
Factors which will tend
increase server unit shipments.
The killer app for creating
increased demands for servers is Internet TV.
Many mainstream
broadcasters already make some of their content available for viewing online.
As business models evolve - this single application has the potential to push
ISP and telco server infrastructure to a new level - just as the original
dial-up internet did over a decade ago.
And one of the effects of the
Credit Crunch will be to accelerate user uptake fo these services - because in
bad times - consumers spend a disproprtionate amount of their disposable income
on things that make them feel better.
Was there ever a "Golden Age"
for SPARC systems?
In an article soon, I'll explore that idea from
various angles. |
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