We spoke with Bill Moffitt, Product Line Manager for Solaris at Sun Microsystems. The second update to Solaris, called Solaris 9 12/02, was released this month. (Sun puts the month and year of the release date after the version number. Apparently, it was “released” in December, but don’t ask why it was only made available a few days ago). In addition to bug fixes and updates that you would expect in a release like this, Sun has included a couple of big extras for capability and performance.
Solaris 9 12/02 is the first Solaris to contain an integrated application server, the SunONE “platform edition” app server. That’s noteworthy primarily because of convenience, since the platform edition of SunONE is a free download for Solaris users anyway. Sun really wants people to use J2EE app servers because they help developers get the most out of their systems, but mostly because J2EE has a good head start on Microsoft’s .NET platform (or whatever it’s called these days) and Sun would like to keep it that way. Thousands of developers fiddling with free J2EE app servers to organize pictures of their cat on the web may be a waste of horsepower, but it’s an effective bulwark against Microsoft’s now and future efforts to rope developers into their tools too. These companies both know that the tools that developers feel comfortable with now are the ones that they’re more likely to use for the lucrative projects in the future,
Sun also sells an Enterprise Edition of the SunONE app server for more money, but as Sun’s Bill Moffitt says, their main goal right now is to get people using J2EE, not necessarily to push Sun’s app server on people. By far the most monetarily successful app server for J2EE is BEA Weblogic, and Sun is also including a free evaluation copy with the Solaris 9 media kit. Sun is very careful to point out that this bundling of the app server with the OS is not an attempt to squeeze out the J2EE app server vendors like BEA and IBM, since SunONE is not really a threat to Weblogic and WebSphere.
Sun’s Moffitt said that Sun wants to, “sell systems that are conducive for building applications on open platforms.” He hints out that Microsoft’s strategy all points toward deploying on Windows, while Sun’s gives your more flexibility. It seems that Microsoft’s idea is to let developers use many different languages and tools to develop for one platform, while Sun suggests one tool for many platforms. Which of these approaches is more appealing will be decided over the next few years.
Solaris 9 12/02’s other big new feature is a re-architected UFS file system that has great performance even with logging enabled. Solaris’ previous filesystem supported logging, but only with a big hit in performance. Many people felt the need to purchase a Veritas filesystem to have the safety of logging with the performance they need. Now, Sun says, their UFS performs on par with Veritas.
Finally, the last big feature for this Solaris release is that this will be the first versions of Solaris 9 for x86 architecture.
For more information on Solaris 9 12/02, see http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/
Apparently, it was “released” in December, but don’t ask why it was only made available a few days ago
It’s been available for the past several weeks.
The most notable improvement in this release from an end-user perspective is, in my opinion, the addition of XRENDER to OpenWindows, most likely in anticipation of Sun’s eventual move from CDE To Gnome.
Look at CDE… unrefined, poor functionality… you can’t even change monitor resolution without resorting to the command line. UltraSPART is also a slow chip, slower than Pentium 4. How does Sun expect to sell to the average home user?
can you say troll?
Look at CDE… unrefined, poor functionality…
Pretty much, this is why Sun is switching to Gnome.
you can’t even change monitor resolution without resorting to the command line.
Yes, and the majority of Sparc systems I run into are running at awful resolutions in comparison to what the monitor/framebuffer are capable of. Not to mention that the framebuffer configuration utilities aren’t standardized and vary depending on which framebuffer you have.
UltraSPART is also a slow chip, slower than Pentium 4. How does Sun expect to sell to the average home user?
Well, here you’re dead wrong. UltraSPARC IIIs may be clocked significantly lower than Pentium 4s, but in terms of I/O Sun has pretty much everyone beat hands down, including SGI. It becomes readily obvious in the case of the Pentium 4, whose design seems geared towards having a much more accurate branch predictor than the chip ended up with. Because of this, the front side bus bandwidth is essentially wasted as the chip hungrily pulls data in and out of main memory. Couple this with a dearth of registers in x86 and you have a chip which definately isn’t geared towards an I/O heavy server environment. SPARCs on the other hand have a plethora of registers, enough to allow for overlapping register windows for efficient construction of stack frames.
How does Sun expect to sell to the average home user?
Well, unfortunatly, they don’t. Which is a shame for us non-average home users with Suns shining brightly on our desks!
Yours truly,
Jeffrey Boulier
Solaris is a great home platform for the power user. UltraSparc is, technically, on par with P4 all the way. P4’s HyperThreading technology is a real mess. UltraSparcIII has a shorter pipeline, better schedualing, branching and prediction capabilities as well. Don’t forget all the parity overhead. In a desktop/user enviroment, you have to put UltraSparc II/III up against something that’s more realistic, like an UltraSparc II 300 vs P3 1.2G, then you see some compitition. P4 falls apart at slower clock speeds thanks to that 20 stage pipeline. And let’s not forget that UltraSparc has been a 64 bit platform for over 10 years, while Intel has tried to make a 64bit platform, unsuccessfully, for 10 years.
And there are plenty of non-CDE options for Solaris. Use any open souce WM you like, preferably Enlightenment.
Are you comparing an USII 300 vs a P3 1.2G (I’m assuming by ‘G’ you mean gigahertz)? I would like you to clarify that.
If that is in fact what you’re saying you’re obviously smoking copious amounts of crack. Anyone who has used an Intel based machine and a Sparc based machine will tell you that Sun has lost the desktop/workstation war. The Blade 100 on my desk is slow as shit. The U10 300mhz at home got a nice speed boost after Solaris 9, but even with SCSI everything + 512mb of RAM, my roomates 800(or something)Mhz AMD kicks the fuck out of my U10. A clients Blade 1000 (2×700 CPUS’s) is quite fast. Then again that machine cost $20,000. Even so, she does most of her work on the SunPCI card (shame, really).
On a related note…
I was pricing out an x86 machine for my self last week. A dual PIII 1.2 Ghz motherboard + CPU combo goes for $600. You can’t beat that. A single Sun CPU (Even the USII 400mh) is several thousand dollars.
I love Sun, been a fan for years. I even wear a Sun branded Fossil watch for christs sake. But reality is reality. Sun is *very* fast becoming another SGI.
Sucks…
Some people like to boast about the SunBlade’s advanced bus, as if that somehow made up for their skowly CPUs.
Well, that advanced bus architecture doesn’t help worth a damn when it’s the CPU that is the system’s bottleneck, does it?
Big surprise there.
I thought this was a great idea when it was announced (LAST YEAR), and I still do. I’m dissappointed that they do no have a Linux version for it yet, but only a Windows and Solaris version.
But this is the kind of thing that Sun needs to do in order maintain some level of equality with Microsoft.
Bundling .NET server into the operating system gives MS a nice step up in the app server market, because out of the box their OS has most or all of the facilities of an app server.
Bundling SunONE, and making it portable, give ISVs a great platform to deploy against. First, you have J2EE, which while not perfect is certainly not horrible. This gives you, ideally, application portability across compliant containers (Sun, Weblogic, IBM, JBoss, etc).
Then, you have the SunONE which is a free app server implementing J2EE. This gives ISVs a low-cost, yet commercially supported, platform to deploy their J2EE applications upon.
Like I said, the real kink is that they don’t have the Linux version yet, which is really a tragedy. Linux with an app server and PostgreSQL is a pretty powerful little system for a LOT of applications.
I don’t want to discount JBoss, because it is popular and gaining momentum. But, there are quite a few resources behing the SunONE platform as well.
They’ll have to do a Linux version soon, I would think. Of course, with an inexpensive Solaris x86 version, perhaps it’s slightly less of an issue. But it’s still kind of a gapping hole in the product line.
First off, the CPUs in the Sun Ultra10 is an UltraSPARC-IIi (note the i). These are ‘low-end’ SPARCs ment for the desktop. Are they as fast as Intel P-4s? Nope, were not ment to be. They are essentially a scalled down UltraSPARC ‘attached’ to a PC motherboard.
Secondly, prices for Suns have changed quite a bit. You can get a decent SunBlade 100 or 150 for under $1000. I buy them at what a reseller pays, and can get an entry level for $750.
Thirdly, there are TONS of vendors selling ‘grey market’ Sun systems cheap. I just bought (10) Ultra 60 workstations with 512MB Ram, Elite-3D lite, (1) 360Mhz UltraSPARC-II and an 8GB SCSI Hard Drive for $350. Now, I have 5 Dual Processor Ultra60s with 1GB of RAM for $700. Don’t forget E-Bay and others. If your really particular, you can pay Sun $600 to get the systems recertified so you can carry Sun Maintenance (the 60s we bought came with 3 year parts, which is all we needed).
I agree with everyone that things Suns are not ment for the desktop/home-user. Perhaps as time goes by, with the move to Gnome and some of the newer technologies that might change, but the price/point on Sun systems is always going to prevent them from appealing to anyone that doesn’t have a real NEED to have a true Sun system. Most people that dabble will probably just use Solaris on x86, since it is essentially the exact same software (though, only 32-bit).
My cent-and-a-half.
SMF
That should be (10) Ultra 60s for $350 each. It is still an excellent deal. They have ALL Sun components, so they can be easily recertified if needed.
For anyone interested, contact Gulf Coast Workstations.
(No, I’m not afilliated or attached to Gulf Coast, they are a vendor to my company and I get nothing for mentioning them, I simply think its an excellent deal and took advantage of it both professionally and personally.)
SMF
See it at SolarSystems
http://www.solarsystems.com
Here is the link for Gulfcoast Workstations
http://www.gcw.com
Man, aftermarket deals on refurbished Sun/SGI hardware are pretty mindblowing sometimes.
Here’s a little benchmark for you:
I work for a department of the local university which specializes in atmospheric modelling. We run a rather CPU intensive mesoscale atmospheric modelling program on both Blade workstations and Linux clusters.
Our old cluster was composed of four dual 1GHz PIII nodes, originally interconnected by 100bT. The model, which is written in Fortran 90, was compiled using the Portland group compiler (see http://www.pgroup.com/ for more information) and MPICH while on the dual 900MHz Blade 1000 it was built with Sun Workshop 5.0 and shared memory MPI. The model ran 20% faster on the Blade 1000.
Now, one would think that if 2 measley 900MHz Ultrasparc IIIs could beat 8 1GHz PIIIs, something else must be the bottleneck, right? Well, despite our previous knowledge of the relatively low I/O intensity of the model and its intensely CPU bound nature, we went ahead and purchased fiber gigabit for the cluster. The results? A slight, almost neglegable improvement.
We have since upgraded the cluster to 4 dual Athlon MP 1900+ systems and I am glad to say that it is finally beating the Blade 1000 (by a factor of about 2). Nevertheless, I think it’s clear which is the superior architecture.
Now, if you’re going to talk price performance, that’s another story. Those Blade 1000 workstations cost $22,000, whereas the new Athlon MP-based cluster cost $5000.
You can knock the UltraSPARC III’s price performance, just don’t knock its performance.
I really still need to find an intel based computer that would be as reliable as the average Sun computer. (using “computer” to generalize)
We have thousands of UltraSParc CPU’s worth of servers and workstations in the labs in my building, and I never have experienced or heard of any hardware malfunctioning, in these 2 years that I moved in here. I’m talking about hundereds of computers, each with the OpenBoot PROM, disks and DAT or DLT tapes, remote management modules etc. etc.
As for speed, I would like everyone who has a blade to do the following: grab the bonus software CD (that came with the Solaris media package) and install KDE. You can run the Java utility that is on the CD for easiest installation. Then work with KDE on your Blade for a while. My impression was that it was at least as fast as a P III 600 MHz. (In fact, I have KDE running on Linux, on a P II 600 MHz next to the Blade!).
what would you guys recommend for a good sun machine to learn on….i’m comfortable in linux and freebsd.
i’m looking at gcw…
i’d like to spend at max $500.
It depends. If you want to learn Solaris as an OS, you could pickup a copy of Solaris 9 for X86 and toss it on a spare PC. If you want to learn Solaris on SPARC, then about anything is useful. Ultra10s are nice since they are expandable, but are not great performers. Ultra60 is a good system, dual internal drives, dual processor capable, 2GB RAM, onboard SCSI, Dual UPA slots (for moderate end frame buffers). I’m very happy with the Ultra60s we got from GCW, and if you can afford $700, get two and get a nice dual processor system. They came with Solaris 8 installed, but you can download Solaris9 for SPARC for free(?) from Sun. In my opinion, SPARC and Solaris really shines when you have multiple processors and gobs of RAM.
I don’t know about some of you but I can live with CDE. Sure it looks a little windows 3.1’ish, but I can get along without all the eye candy that loads down most systems. I am currently running a Ultra 2 Enterprise with dual 400Mhz Ultra sparc II with 2megs of cache each and 1 gig of ram. Video performance is not the best but it’s good enough for what I’m doing with it. (67Mhz bus creator 3D)
I also have a dual PIII 1Ghz linux box and the Ultra 2 gives it a serious run for its money. The floating point performance of the ultra just about matches the performance of my 1Ghz dualie! Disk I/O performance is almost as good. In either case, the differences are NOT noticable (only with benchmarks). The only one that is is video performance.
For anyone who would like to play with a Sun box get atleast a Ultra 1 E 200. It’s about on par with a Intel 233 and fast enough to play mp3s without too much cpu overhead. Other machines to get are Ultra 5, 10, 30 for uniprocessor machines. But if you are into dualies like I am (once you go dualies you’ll never go back) get a Ultra 2, 60, or a quad processor Ultra 80 :p
But the best thing is the memory I/O, the Ultra 2 has a memory bus width of 576 bits wide (granted it’s only 60ns)!! Compare that to Intels measly 64 bits..
By the way, I only spent 400 dollars for the Ultra 2. Not bad for a 64 bit machine..
Mere mortals, I laugh at your 32 bit clunkers
As far as the proprietary Unices go, it is the one that really is the easiest to use – though most of this comes on the extra CD’s.
To a poster above, there is no way you are going to ever find an Intel machine that is as stable as a SPARK machine. I would love to eat my words, but it is never going to happen. It is not just the hardware quality, but the architechture quality. Try writing asm for both archs if you do not believe me.
Hello,
I like Solaris Intel and I want to say that Solaris 9 Intel will be better than Linux.
Big thanks to Sun Microsystems!
Well, what I am most interested is the development of the Solaris Volume Manager (better known previously as Solstice DiskSuite). They seemed committed on upgrading it’s features to catch up with Veritas. And I actually see some benefits of SDS/SVM over VxVM, even at this stage.
Veritas is still more powerful, but it seemed as Sun was adding new features quickly.
“How does Sun expect to sell to the average home user?”
This really made me laugh out loud, nice sarcasm.
This thread is a coincidence has I’m looking to the possibility of buying an HP/Compaq 64 bit or a Sun Blade 150 (64 bit) after selling two of my i686 machines.
I’m more tempted for the sun at 550 mhz because of proce and ram type (SDRAM ECC) and because there is the ‘card’ (which is a mini-mainboard for a pci slot with celeron @733 mhz) allowing me (and you) to run windows binaries natively, they call it ‘Sun PCI II (2) Pro co-processor’.
The problem is 3D rendering on windows applications, the vga card is a ATI Rage based which has poor performance and the celeron 733 mhz (not using what I wanted, the 64 bit sparcIIi).
Anyone had an experience with this workstation and the pci card SunPCI II co-processor for windows applications ?
Could it run Linux or NetBSD (since it’s a recent cpu) ?
(Any real world experience comments would be very nice).
The SunPCI card is pretty nice. I’ve used them for running Windows on Sun-Workstations and its quite speedy. One nice feature is you can plug a seperate monitor into the card and have 2 seperate displays on one system, or run it in a window on a single monitor.
As for Linux/NetBSD, I’ve heard of people doing it, but it isn’t suppported and I’ve got no information as to how to do it. If you find something solid, I’d be interested in knowing, as would several people who read these boards.
SMF