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Last SPARC Standing in TOP500
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.


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.

It's not the most exciting read, but provides as much info as anyone is going to get until the memoirs start to appear.


Recession is Hurting Server Market - 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.


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.


Who's Going to Buy Sun Microsystems?

Editor:- March 19, 2009 - there's a lot of speculation on the web that IBM may buy Sun.

It's not the first time Sun has been the subject (or object of such rumors).

Sun's merger talks with Apple ended in February 1996.

And in July 2002 - I used the headline Who's Going to Buy Sun Microsystems? - to discuss possible buyers - at a low point in Sun's fortunes.

In the 2002 article - I suggested - IBM and Fujitsu as possible acquirers.

Some amusing ramblings about this on the Fake Scott McNealy blog.

An article in SFGATe.com raises the interesting point that Sun and IBM control about 90% of the high end tape backup market. However that's a market that's been declining for years anyway.

Users who haven't already migrated to disk backup haven't been getting a good experience from tape vendors even before this move. So it's not a material factor. The dominance of the 2 companies in the Unix market might be. But unless Linux suddenly gets grabbed by a single vendor - anti-competitive issues in the OS space shouldn't be a worry.


Wind River's Linux Now Flowing through UltraSPARC T2

SANTA CLARA, CA - March 17, 2009 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced that Wind River has completed the port of its Linux 3.0 and Workbench development suite to Sun's UltraSPARC T2 processor.

"The combination of Sun's enterprise class UltraSPARC CMT platforms and Wind River's Carrier Grade Linux gives telecom and networking system developers a new and significantly superior vehicle for delivering their most mission critical applications to enterprise and service provider customers," said Mike Knudsen, VP, Sun OEM.

Editor's comments:- I first came across Wind River Systems in the late 1980s, when I was designing real-time systems which shared memory space with embedded SPARC servers running SunOS. (The SPARCstations were the cheapest part of those systems. The slowest too.)

I was an evangelist for using Unix systems in real-time, and did the events circuit and wrote articles for our customers talking about the benefits of using C and Unix for their real-time applications - and leaving the real-time I/O handling to a virtual device interface which we supported with over 100 VME based processors and peripherals - which were mostly COTS - although we sometimes designed fast I/O if commercial products weren't available.

At that time Wind River were talking about a product called VXworks. I didn't use it - because it wasn't stable enough for my needs at the time. .

In the late 1990s nearly 20 companies were listed in our SPARC OS directory. There was even talk of IBM's AIX being ported to SPARC.

Most of that real (and vaporware) support ended by 2000 due to a combination of market factors. The availability of Linux on SPARC is something which I said in 2003 - would be the Trigger Event that will Turn Around Sun's Revenue Decline. That was in the midst of another recession - following the dotcom bust - which had a bigger negative impact on Sun (than the recession we're in now).


Sun Launches Flash SSD Analyzer Tool to Boost Server Sales and Performance

Editor:- March 11, 2009 -Sun Microsystems launched its new Sun Flash Analyzer - a free Java tool to help users determine how much their (Solaris, Windows and Linux) servers could benefit from SSD acceleration.

The company also launched a try before you buy marketing promotion for its servers which have Sun branded 2.5" SLC flash SSDs pre-integrated. The 32GB SATA SSDs have sequential R/W upto 250MB/s and 170MB/s respectively. Random R/W IOPS are upto 35,000 and 3,300 respectively (4k blocks). Endurance is 3 years - assuming max write speed and 100% write duty cycle.


Pliant Technology kicks off new series - the SSD Industry Bookmarks

Editor:- March 5, 2009 - Pliant Technology's VP of Marketing, Greg Goelz shares his SSD Bookmarks in the 1st episode of a classic new series starting today on the home page of StorageSearch.com.


HP to Offer Solaris 10 on x86 Servers

PALO ALTO, CA - February 25, 2009 - Sun Microsystems today announced an expanded multi-year partnership agreement that enables HP to distribute and provide software technical support for Sun's Solaris 10 OS on HP's ProLiant servers.

HP ProLiant led the x86 server market with 38% factory revenue share in the 4th quarter of 2008 according to IDC. ...HP profile

Editor's comments:-
it took over 22 years to get here. You can see the key milestones in Surviving the Solaris x86 Wars


StorageIO Founder Publishes Book - Green and Virtual Data Center

Stillwater, Minn.- January 27, 2009 - "The Green and Virtual Data Center" - is a new book (376 pages, MSRP $79.95) by noted author and StorageIO founder Greg Schulz.

The book sets aside the political aspects of what is or is not considered green to examine the opportunities for organizations trying to grow their business while being environmentally friendly in an economically efficient manner. Addressing multiple technology domains and disciplines, it looks at design and implementation tradeoffs using various best practices and technologies to sustain application and business growth while maximizing resources, such as power, cooling, floor space, storage, server performance, and network capacity. ...StorageIO profile
other SPARC news on this page

Last SPARC Standing - TOP500 Supercomputers

Sun Executive Severance Calculations

Recession is Hurting Server Market - SSDs will Hurt More

Who's Going to Buy Sun Microsystems?

Sun's Future Lies in Oracle

Wind River's Linux Now Flowingon UltraSPARC T2

Sun Launches Flash SSD Analyzer Tool

the SSD Industry Bookmarks

HP to Offer Solaris 10 on x86 Servers

New Book - Green and Virtual Data Center
Serial Attached SCSI  ssds
SAS SSDs
on StorageSearch.com
Megabyte had already mastered serial SCSI
for RPM storage - so SAS SSDs were a breeze.
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SPARC News Volumes at Historic Low
Editor:- June 5, 2009 - the volume of news about the SPARC server market is about 50x less than it was at the peak of the market a decade ago, as you can see by viewing the archived news links on the SPARC History page.

That's because the SPARC market is much smaller in annual revenue and hundreds of oems have switched their priorities to the Intel Architecture server market.

The hottest part of the server market in recent years has been the storage market. Storage has been a bigger part of the overall IT budget than servers for many years. You can see storage news here.

And within the storage market, undisputedly the hottest part of the market now is that for SSDs. Click here for SSD news.

If and when, there's a resurgence in SPARC technology news, such stories will be run here below.
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Can You Trust Your Flash SSD's Specs?
Editor:- I've noticed is that the published specs of flash SSDs change a lot -from the time a product they are first announced, then when they're being sampled, and later again when they are in volume production.

Sometimes the headline numbers get better, sometimes they get worse. There are many good reasons for this.

The product which you carefully qualified may not be identical to the one that's going into your production line for a variety of reasons... ...read the article
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