[Beowulf] SGI and Sun: In Memoriam

[Joe Landman]

Glen Beane wrote:
> 
> 
> On 4/1/09 10:45 AM, "Joe Landman" <landman at scalableinformatics.com> wrote:
>>
>> This is a current religious mantra within Sun, that Solaris/Sparc will
> (eventually) kill Linux and x86/x64.  Um.  No.
> 
> Isn't Sun's biggest business x86-64 hardware running Linux?  My cluster is

Yes, which makes it ironic (and a bit sad) that they keep the other 
mantra alive.

> all AMD64 Sun gear and they gave us a killer edu discount on it. I've been

... and they have to pay for those "killer" discounts by making up for 
it on the commercial side.  Which they haven't been able to.  A point I 
didn't make in my blog post on this stuff is that the academic side, 
while a nice market to play in, isn't terribly profitable.  You have to 
give "killer" discounts to play in many cases.  Which in the case of a 
low margin commodity business, is, in a real sense, a killer.

> very happy with their X2200 series as a cluster node. Actually our
> datacenter has a ton of Sun gear in it and we have a site support contract.
> I've been to a bunch of Sun HPC consortiums and while some time has been
> dedicated to the Niagara platform at each, I'd say the biggest focus is on
> x86 hardware.

Yeah, but that is customer driven.  Leave Sun to its own devices and all 
you will hear about is Solaris and Sparc.


-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
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