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Nibble
Re: rackmount SPARC
Manufacturers, have been
selling rackmount Sun systems as far back as the 1980's, and even before Sun
designed the first SPARC chips. Sun's use of standards in the 1980's like the
VMEbus, made it easy, even for people like your editor to market a rackmount
Sun-3 with an attached Analogic array processor, without needing mechanical
tools any more complicated than a screwdriver.
But the market for
rackmount systems in the 1980's was small. It was mainly used by military
research, broadcasters, and intelligence agencies (those were my customers,
anyway).
Sun made it easy for integrators by selling its
motherboards, called "SPARCengines" unbundled from complete systems.
Unfortunately the market for these board level products was so small, that by
1991, Sun withdrew from the VME SPARCengine market and sold the product rights
to a company with a longer term commitment to embedded systems and VME:- Force
Computers.
During the early 1990's there were more companies making
SPARC motherboards than today, and the telecoms market, which has very long lead
times became the largest user of embedded SPARC systems. The very first edition
of this directory, published in 1992 had a special category for rackmount SPARC
systems. But the market was still small.
Then in the mid 1990's the
internet started to change the computing landscape and a new type of company
called Internet Service Providers (ISPs) started to emerge as wholesale
consumers of SPARC servers. To save operating costs, and floor space, they
mainly used rackmount systems, and that's when this product segment really
kicked into high gear.
By 1999, rackmount SPARC had overtaken every
other product category (except desktop workstations) as the most popular product
category on this web site. Then in 2000, rackmount systems became the #1 product
sector.
One effect of the 2001/2003 computer recession was to
accelerate the trend towards rack mounted systems, as commercial users have
learned this is the lowest cost way to own and manage large numbers of servers.
The
rackmount market is one in which customers have their own very special needs and
standards. Factors like: where do the cables go?
, how do I attach labels?, and how deep is the cabinet?
make it impossible to use the same kind of high volume standardisation which is
achieved on the desktop. And that's why most rackmount SPARC systems aren't
actually supplied by Sun, but by the other companies listed here who have
focused on meeting the special needs of their own customers, and helped to make
Sun's operating system technology more affordable.
...SPARC History | |
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War of the
Disks: Hard Disk Drives vs. Flash Solid State Disks - Despatches from the
Magneto / Flash Wars - article by BiTMICRO
BiTMICRO is the
#1 best recognised brand of SSDs (source
STORAGEsearch.com SSD
Survey) and they have published a lot of
articles to help
customers understand the benefits of their products. When I first saw the
submission for this article I was pleased to see that it quoted extracts from
and linked to several other articles that I myself had written or edited - so
that gave me a warm glow.
After years of analyzing this market SSD
vendors and analysts are starting to see some clear patterns emerging. Although
opinions still differ on some subjects, and vendors are prone to pitch their own
solutions as best, this article is a useful synthesis of current industry
thinking by one of the leading flash SSD module manufacturers. ...read the article,
...BiTMICRO Networks
profile, Solid State Disks,
Hard disk drives | |
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SATA Raids
the Datacenter - article by Engenio
"The debate on duty cycles
and MTBF does not mean that SATA hard drives are more prone to crash than other
technologies. Engenio's experience appears to suggest that SATA media must first
endure an intensive burn-in process. Once accomplished, failure rates are
equivalent to those of Fibre Channel and SCSI. This makes it the duty of the
storage system manufacturer to ensure a long life for the medium by way of
intensive tests and certification." ...read the
article, ...Engenio
profile, RAID systems,
SATA | | |
Sun/SPARC Resellers in
the USA
Sun/SPARC Resellers in
the UK
