HP has given its hardware line a good scrubbing on Monday, refreshing a broad list of server and storage systems. HP has now included SuSE Enterprise Server 8 on its corporate price list for one- to four-processor Integrity servers. In addition, HP has sent out a beta of Version 8.1 of the OpenVMS operating system for Itanium boxes. In the meantime, Sun Microsystems plans to unveil a major overhaul to its server line on Tuesday, when it will introduce systems that use its own new UltraSparc IV chip and Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron processor.
Sun, HP Pump Up Their Unix & Servers
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Has that become the official name? 😎
Nope, but that’s how TheRegister officially calls it.
Nope, but that’s how TheRegister officially calls it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
has been called that since it’s second insurgence into the marketplace… Kinda like the Titanic
resting on the bottom
About time that “Mako” been released they been delaying it for quite awhile now.
As for Itanium, well i don’t see it going away just let, but i don’t think it’s going to end up as anything more then a PA-RISC/Alpha/Mips replacement.
I’ll always associate VMS with DEC Alpha mainframes and VT420 terminal units at an accounting job I once held.
Once I got to know the system I could navigate it staggeringly quickly by hitting the right series of keys, rather than waiting for a GUI to draw and then mousing to the right options.
I seem to recall that the server uptime at that point was about 2 years – impressive by any standards.
Is it still used widely?
oh yeah! go sun! But the question remains- is HP really committed to the technologies to aquired from compaq. It appears they are just doing it for short term. I wouldn’t make a long term investment in it unless if HP can proove theres a long term commitment.
With the Opterons Sun is on the way back. I wonder if we will see a Sun Opteron workstation this time out.
HP appears to be staggering around. If I were an HP server customer I would be very hesitant to spend more on any of their current lines. You just don’t know where they are going with anything.
Intel’s attempt to take the market in a proprietary direction (labeled Itanium) is well, …looking more like the Itanic. This is good for all but Intel in the short run.
Of course this is just my opinion. YMMV
Something few folk realize, unlike processors like Opteron or Itanium, SPARC is an open-standard processor run by the SPARC group, not Sun Microsystems. At its peak, a dozen companies produced SPARC processors.
Sad how the association with Sun managed to hurt an open architecture.
check it out at http://www.sparc.com
Well, SPARC is an open-standard, so what does it give you?
Actually not much. Competition, and therefore cheaper prices perhaps.
Sun’s SPARC impementation, the SPARC64 implementation from Fujitsu, aswell as the old Ross HyperSPARC are propriataty. The implementation is what matters, and if you don’t have a very well documented processor implementation, an generic “open standard” doesn’t help you much.
Ross HyperSPARC are not very well supported under Linux/*BSD. IE. forget SMP. Sun’s UltraSPARC IIIi are not well supported under OpenBSD (since they still don’t have the NDA documents).
IMHO it is much more important to have a good ducos, errata etc. for a specific processor than anything else. The ix86 is very popular, and due to this fact there is lots of knowledge about all variations implementation of this processor architecture.
But popularity is not really neccessary. Look at the Alpha, PA-RISC and Itanium processors. HP supports the open-source community and published almots all docu and inner details of these processor families.They actually even employ PA-RISC/Itanium people to develop for the Linux kernel, gcc and various other non-Linux related stuff.
The same goes for IBM (power processors) and partly for SGI (mips, itanium).
IMNSHO Sun is a nice company (I actually worked for them), but they don’t give a shit about Linux or any other open-source operating system on SPARC. They DO however support various other open-source projects.
argll, lots of typos in my previous post.
Please forgive me, I’m too tired to do spell checking …
“but they don’t give a shit about Linux or any other open-source operating system on SPARC”
Maybe the Linux OS isn’t suitable for Sun’s objectives.
But if you ask me, Sun is doing as much or more than any other company to promote Linux. JDS, the only systems company distro. Open Office, without this Linux position and case against ms would be much weakened. And many other lesser publicized contributions, gnome, net beans, nfs …
So I don’t see Sun as an enemy of Linux just because they don’t embrace every aspect of it. If it was my IT systems, I would run them on Solaris, not Linux. I would want support, stability and security first.
tb
You did not look far then either, as the Leon SPARC is a GPL’d SPARC v8 implimentation.
I wonder how different the Mach kernal is in OS X verses True 64. Perhaps Apple should purchse True 64, so that they could have an enterprise OS?
Perhaps Apple should purchse True 64, so that they could have an enterprise OS?
Great idea and as soon as they implement some of the feature in Darwin they get sued by SCo for transferring some UNIX into ??UNIX??..
VMS is still used alot in critical infrastructure areas where downtime is not possible.
Military, hospitals, stock exchange, are a few good examples.
VT420 terminals are only used for direct console port access.
General users sign onto a VMS cluster or node using a telnet terminal or x-window emulation package such as TerraTerm, Reflections, KEA, etc.
Anyone else notice that Sun’s UltraSparc IV chip seems to be a bit on the slow side? I know bandwidth and all those other things are important too, but it seems that Sun is the only company coming out with 1.05 and 1.2 ghz cpu’s. IBM, Intel, and AMD are all already running at around 1.5 ghz. Considering they all plan to release newer faster chips this year, Sun seems quite a bit behind. What is very strange is that Fujitsu, which also has based their CPU’s on Sparc, is running at equivalent speeds to PowerPC and Itanium. Also, their roadmap, in terms of mhz, is much more aggressive than that of Sun’s. Even if the extra mhz does not help improve performance, I know it will definately help in marketing. So why is Sun having so much trouble bumping up the mhz?
If an IT architect/analyst’s eyes glaze over simply because of a marketing blurb on rated mhz, then I’d be a worried employer.
Performance does not necessarily equate to mhz and anyone working professionally to build hi-end environments knows this.
Or should.
“You did not look far then either, as the Leon SPARC is a GPL’d SPARC v8 implimentation.”
I’m fully aware of this implementation. However I’m speaking about systems that are actually being used! ;-P
You argued that SPARC is an open standard, I said, that’s not really interesting for the masses. More interesting than a open standard for a CPU architecture is the “open” support (e.g. by publishing good docu) for it from the manufacturer.
“Maybe the Linux OS isn’t suitable for Sun’s objectives.”
Yes, likely. Other companies like SGI or IBM however try an other approach: they try to incorporate these features into the Linux kernel.
But Sun won’t be going this way, since they depend on selling systems, ie. their hardware and software (combined). If suddenly the software or its features is available on other, cheaper, but not neccessarily much worse platforms, sales will drop.
Sun is not interested in supporting Linux on SPARC (they have their own Unix), nor putting in enterprise experience into the Linux or *BSD operation systems. That wouldn’t really increase their market share.
To your second point:
OpenOffice, NetBeans, GridEngine etc. are nice open-source projects by Sun, and they all work on different operating system (Solaris, Linux, *BSD, Windows, …).
OpenOffice is not meant to “help” Linux, it’s supposed to “damage” Microsoft. The same goes for all the other open-source projects Sun is involved in. That this helps to promote Linux “is just an unintentional side-effect” 😉
I was working for Sun Microsystems for a couple of years. It’s a cool company, nice working atmosphere. But trust me on this, the prime objective of Scott McNealy is destroying Microsoft, the second keeping his company alive (by creating products of good quality)
“If an IT architect/analyst’s eyes glaze over simply because of a marketing blurb on rated mhz, then I’d be a worried employer.”
I’m not so certain that this is true. If you were buying a system today, and your options where an HP Itanium Server running at 1.5 ghz, an IBM PowerPC server running at 1.5 ghz, or an UltraSparc Server running at 1.2 ghz, which would you choose? If you look at the server market share, where IBM and HP both experienced raising sales, while Sun dropped around 10% of their sales, most chose the “faster” cpu. For a Sun marketting person, it becomes extremely difficult to push UltraSparc when the marketting people at IBM and HP are saying that their system can do everything Sun does and run at faster clock speeds.
I agree, speed is a critical issue that Sun has been following behind on for some time. I have built several search engines over the years with very large indexes and the fastest SUN boxes didn’t hold a candel to the WINTEL solution. Our customer dropped several LARGE SUN Boxes to goto a INTEL based solution and for a lot less money we had a significantly faster solution w/o the crappy SUN storage server as well.
The SunFire V20z, an Opteron powered server:
http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v20z/
The SunFire E25K server:
http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/sunfire_e25k/
slash:
Anyone else notice that Sun’s UltraSparc IV chip seems to be a bit on the slow side? I know bandwidth and all those other things are important too, but it seems that Sun is the only company coming out with 1.05 and 1.2 ghz cpu’s.
Care to show me another vendor offering a 72-way system with support for 144 hardware threads? The Altix comes to mind, but application support for Linux/IA64 at this point it time is sparse at best.
Sun’s clock speed problems are due to the relatively antequated .13 micron process being utilized by TI, Sun’s current fabrication contractor. The UltraSPARC IV is still based on a .13 micron process even after most other vendors have moved to or are in the process of moving to .11 and 90nm processes. This will be remedied when Sun starts using Fujitsu for fabrication. Sun will then also offer systems based on Fujitsu’s SPARC64 processors.
We’ll be seeing > 2GHz SPARC systems within a year, and with dramatically reduced heat dissipation (a 900MHz UltraSPARC III Cu currently runs ~70C)
> the fastest SUN boxes didn’t hold a candel to the WINTEL solution
Whatever crack you’re smoking there it must be pretty damn good, man. My take on your comment is that you haven’t even been around a Sun box and you’re spreading FUD out of sheer ignorance. Sun machines are the best scaling solutions out there preserving the binary compatibility accross the entire range of servers from single processor sub $1000 server to 106 processor Sun Fire 15K. As for numbers game, Sun is still the leader in throughput oriented systems — this is why Sun servers (not HP or IBM and god forbid Wintel) are still overwhelmingly chosen for enterprise databases and ERP systems. Processor clock speed is far from being a critical parameter when choosing enterprise systems and it probably matters only computer science dropouts failing to understand system architecture.
“Care to show me another vendor offering a 72-way system with support for 144 hardware threads?”
Well, this server was introduced last May, but I think it still is pretty good and runs Solaris too.
PRIMEPOWER 2500 http://www.fujitsu.com/services/computing/server/unix/enterprise/pw…
This will be remedied when Sun starts using Fujitsu for fabrication. Sun will then also offer systems based on Fujitsu’s SPARC64 processors.
Whoa! Did I miss something? When was this announcement made? Does TI know about this?
As for clock speeds… how do we compare completely different architectures? I’m not necessarily saying UltraSPARC chips are faster than those produced by Intel, AMD, IBM, etc., but I don’t think we can just look at the numbers (1.2 ghz vs. 1.5 ghz) — can we?
John
SPARC is an open-standard processor run by the SPARC group, not Sun Microsystems.
Sad how the association with Sun managed to hurt an open architecture.
Yeah but Sun invented the SPARC architecture and, through its own volition, spun off the independent, open-standards SPARC group.
Sun produces the most popular SPARC implementation out there. SPARC’s “claim-to-fame” pretty much comes from Sun. Considering this, I’m not sure how the architecture has been “hurt” by Sun???
John
Anyone else notice that Sun’s UltraSparc IV chip seems to be a bit on the slow side? I know bandwidth and all those other things are important too, but it seems that Sun is the only company coming out with 1.05 and 1.2 ghz cpu’s. IBM, Intel, and AMD are all already running at around 1.5 ghz. Considering they all plan to release newer faster chips this year, Sun seems quite a bit behind. What is very strange is that Fujitsu, which also has based their CPU’s on Sparc, is running at equivalent speeds to PowerPC and Itanium. Also, their roadmap, in terms of mhz, is much more aggressive than that of Sun’s. Even if the extra mhz does not help improve performance, I know it will definately help in marketing. So why is Sun having so much trouble bumping up the mhz?
The thing is, people don’t decide high end systems on Mhz, they look at price vs performance/stability and a range of other factors.
If SUN does show that their SPARC IV performs as well as they promise, and then by the end of the year release a quad-core UltraSPARC CPU, then they will get back into the race quickly.
Regarding Fujitsu, SUN is rather secretive when it comes to annoucing future products, however, I wouldn’t be surprised if at a later date Fujitsu and SUN work cloer together as to reduce the over head related to developing a CPU, thus making it competitive when compared to Opteron and Xeon.
I agree, speed is a critical issue that Sun has been following behind on for some time. I have built several search engines over the years with very large indexes and the fastest SUN boxes didn’t hold a candel to the WINTEL solution. Our customer dropped several LARGE SUN Boxes to goto a INTEL based solution and for a lot less money we had a significantly faster solution w/o the crappy SUN storage server as well.
1) Why go wintel when you can go Soltel (Solaris Intel)?
2) SUN Storage isn’t SUN manufactured, it is a rebadged Hitachi storage product. IMHO, it would be better had they done their own line or simply worked with EMC, however, as they say, “that would be waaaay too logical”.
I don’t think any company is bent on ‘destroying’ any other company.
I do think Star Office/Open Office is a $200 million $ contribution to OSS. Without it the Linux movement would be severly curtailed, there would then be no office product that could go up against MS. With OO the Linux story is greatly enhanced. I use this sales point in my own business, and it is significant. Having Sun willing to write support contracts for OO is also a big plus.
As to Sun and OSS, Sun was doing OSS long before it was cool. NFS is what it is today because Sun gave it away. Way back in the 80s.
So just because Sun doesn’t give away all it’s software, like the neat OS enhancements in Solaris 10, they do contribute substantially to the OSS effort overall. It seems to me that too many people try to lambast Sun unnecessarily. Sun is a full partner in OSDL as well. Who can blame Sun for trying to make a buck. After all they employ some 35,000 people around the world.
I wonder why IBM’s self serving meager contributions to OSS aren’t similarly attacked.