Itanium-based Server Market
Growing Faster than SPARC
INTEL
DEVELOPER FORUM, San Francisco - September 18, 2007 - Today, the Itanium
Solutions Alliance announced strong momentum in several areas, which
mirrored Itanium 2-based solutions growth worldwide.
Alliance
membership doubled in 1 year with more than 200 participants now part of the
effort to promote open, industry standard solutions based on Intel Itanium
architecture.
As the Alliance enters its 3rd year of operation,
Itanium-based solutions continue to show growth in areas such as application
support, volume and market share.
Intel Itanium architecture has a robust ecosystem supporting more than
12,000 applications from thousands of ISVs, reinforcing that it is a widely used
platform.
The number of Itanium-based systems sold has increased 40% worldwide
with Western Europe leading the regions at 90% growth; Asia-Pacific
Itanium-based systems volume grew 55% and the Americas, 24%.
Itanium-based systems sales are growing faster than SPARC and Power
systems. Worldwide, Itanium-based systems revenue is currently 58.6% of SPARC
revenue. This is more than a 30% increase compared to the same period in 2006.
Editor's comments:- I was once
dismissive
about the prospects for the Itanium server market. But the numbers above
suggest I was wrong. It shows that if you pour billions of dollars into a big
hole - then something may eventually come out. This was really more about Intel
versus AMD than Intel versus Sun. Intel just couldn't afford to give up its
claims to the high-end processor market. But the cost has been horrific.
Sun's Changing Profile?
Editor:- September 18, 2007 -
a new picture of Sun Microsystems is
starting to come into focus.
Here are some recent pixels which
suggest the way things are going...
Storage Market
Once
again Sun is failing in the storage market. First clear sign appeared in Sun's
earnings conference call in July 2007 when Sun revealed that its storage
revenue in the most recent quarter was down 10% compared to the year
ago period. Maybe that was a blip - but I didn't think so. And in September 2007
Gartner reported that
in the most recent quarter Sun's external disk revenue declined 36%. All of
which proves that I was wrong in assuming that Sun's
StorageTek
acquisition in August 2005 might help Sun become a storage powerhouse. It
didn't. And Sun not only has less market share in storage than it had back then
- but it isn't even engaged in many of the
fastest growing
segments within the storage market.
Intel Architecture Servers
Surprisingly
(and after many years of getting nowhere in this market) Sun revealed in
Jonathan Schwartz's blog (September 16,
2007) that it is has built a billion dollar annual runrate business in the
X86-X64 market. That was a factor in its recently announced
compatibility
and oem agreements with Microsoft. Sun has been losing out by not
being able to supply a complete platform when customers wanted Sun's rackmount
servers - but running Windows applications. The new deal with Microsoft means
that Sun will get a bigger toehold into previously unexplored customer
territory.
What About SPARC?
Sun's SPARC servers
generate about $5 billion / year of revenue - which means SPARC is still
the biggest and strategically most important part of Sun's whole business.
Although
competitors have made much of how well legacy SPARC / Solaris applications have
run on x86 hardware using
Solaris
Migration products - Sun's biggest customers (telcos) are unlikely to
switch their high volume applications away from SPARC as long as Sun holds out
the realistic promise of maintaining its lead in the number of core processors
it can fit into a motherboard.
Every time you read about internet tv
and similar entertainment content for cellphones being rolled out around the
globe in larger and larger deployments you're seeing the start of a trend which
will soak up orders of magnitude more server capacity than is installed today.
And there's no new floor space to put it in most of the datacenters where the
fat data pipes are. All of that is good news for SPARC's future prospects.
LEON3 Processor Licensed for New Space Missions
Goteborg
Sweden - September 12, 2007 - Gaisler Research AB announced that
license agreements have been signed for the use of the fault tolerant LEON3
processor with Assurance Technology Corp (US), Syderal SA (Switzerland)
and Tubitak Uzay (Turkey).
The LEON3 and the GRLIB IP
library will be used together with the RTAX2000S FPGA from ACTEL Inc.
"These license agreements represent yet another confirmation of
the success of the fault tolerant LEON3 processor. The LEON3 processor has now
been accepted for critical space missions in Europe, US and Asia," said Per
Danielsson, president & CEO of Gaisler Research.
The fault tolerant
LEON3
processor is based on the standard LEON3 SPARC V8 Processor. It has been
designed for operation in the harsh space environment, and includes
functionality to detect and correct errors in all on-chip RAM memories.
Why Sun will Shine with a New Lustre
SANTA
CLARA, Calif - September 12, 2007 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. today said
it will acquire the majority of Cluster File Systems, Inc.'s
intellectual property and business assets, including the Lustre File System.
Sun intends to add support for Solaris OS on Lustre and plans to
continue enhancing Lustre on Linux and Solaris OS across multi vendor hardware
platforms.
...Sun Microsystems profile,
Acquired storage companies
Editor's
comments:- I hadn't heard of this company before. A sure sign that they
were heading straight for the
gone away storage
companies list without any deviations on route. Here's what I picked up from
their web site present and
past.
The
Lustre
product description (pdf) says - "the Lustre architecture was first
developed at Carnegie Mellon University as a research project in 1999."
The company's website started in about 2001 amd they released Lustre 1.0 in
2003. By
2004
had a product ready for a bigger market.
Strangely enough Solaris
support isn't listed as a strong feature in their recent
roadmap. So why does Sun
want this technology? - Well - even if you're not in the supercomputer business
- some technologies which start there eventually trickle down to the rest of us.
"Zero single points of failure" - mentioned on their home page - is a
good enough reason. As I wrote in my
7 year storage market
predictions (2005) storage
reliability is going to become a major headache in enterprise storage in the
next 5 years.
See also:- Robin
Harris's blog which explains the business background to CFS - "why
aren't they rich?" | |
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Itanium-based
Server Market Growing Faster than SPARC
Sun's Changing Profile?
LEON3
Processor Licensed for New Space Missions
Why Sun will Shine with a
New Lustre
earlier news -
archive |
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Squeak!
- the Fastest Solid State Disks
Speed isn't everything, and
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But if you do
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And the SSD search problem will get even
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I predict
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I've done the research for
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the article, | | |
