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Nibble:-
Re SPARC mainframes
In the 1990's Sun demolished nearly all
competition in the SPARC mainframe market. The first to get crushed was
Solbourne, which had shipped the first multiprocessor SPARC servers using its
own design of SPARC ships.
About 5 years later
Auspex Systems decided
that competing with Sun using Sun developed chips and their operating system,
was a game not worth the candle, so in the mid 1990's they switched to Intel
technology and waited another 5 years before the market recognised the Auspex
products for what they really were:- the world's first
NAS systems.
Cray
Computer also discovered, that competing against SPARC mainframes from Sun,
which they had originally helped to design, was an unprofitable business. They
exited the SPARC market after a few lean years, although they're still a Sun
reseller today.
In the early days of the SPARC mainframe market, it
was convenient for Sun to maintain the myth of a competitive market which was
binary compatible. But the reality is that Sun didn't want to share this market
with anyone. Fujitsu has had various failed attempts to get market share from
the Sun customer base, but their excellent products in the past have always been
let down by incompetent marketing.
Just like the IBM mainframe market
originally attracted a bunch of compatible rivals, most of which have since
disappeared, we expect that the SPARC mainframe market will consist of just one
company:- Sun. If you buy anything else you're probably making a big mistake.
The
real competition in the SPARC mainframe market comes from telco and ISP
customers who use
rackmount SPARC
systems. That's an area in which Sun is not even the market leader. | |
Sun/SPARC Resellers in
the USA
Sun/SPARC Resellers in
the UK