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Sun's future is 'a coin toss,' analyst says

7 points by gibsonf1 18y ago

ajross 18y ago
Honestly, I think even this article is a little to rosy on Sun's prospects. On the software side, they've basically ceded the high performance server world to linux. Tools like dtrace and zfs, while nice, aren't really dealmakers to normal people, and let's be honest: those are really Solaris's only competitive advantages against RHEL or Ubuntu. And in hardware, they've bet the farm on Niagra which, contra the hopeful quotes in the article, really isn't all that great a CPU. It's two process nodes behind Intel (and one and a half behind AMD), and it's a largely unchanged core from the late 90's that doesn't scale beyond 1 GHz or so. The power efficiency point is valid, but only for some workloads (highly parallel servers, basically), and only by a tiny bit. Newer quad-core Xeon's are nipping at Sun's heels as we speak, and have vastly better per-core performance.
- gaius 18y ago
  Red Hat's customers aren't "normal people" either, they're also selling to corporate IT departments. It's worth noting that Sun's x86 kit, the x4500 and x4600 for example, is really pretty good (if a bit pricey, but you get what you pay for).
  - ajross 18y ago
    I wasn't saying that Sun's customers were abnormal. I was saying that dtrace and zfs specifically didn't have much appeal to the "normal people" corporate market. That is, RHEL doesn't suffer much in comparison. And their servers hardware is fine. It's very competitive in features (but, as you point out, not in price) with all nine thousand other server vendors out there. You can't maintain a company of the size of Sun Microsystems selling white box rack hardware without a huge increase in volume (which would make them a Dell clone, and that space is already occupied). I just don't see anything really good coming out of Sun that is going to save the company. Solaris isn't it. Niagra isn't it. What else do they have?
    - ComputerGuru 18y ago
      What else do they have? Project Indiana.
      - ajross 18y ago
        And free operating system is going to save them how, exactly? At best this would get them a revenue stream along the lines of what Red Hat or Novell sees, which is a solid order of magnitude lower than what Sun was getting during the boom years. It's noise. It's like saying that the Zune (at best, an iPod killer) is going to "save" Microsoft. I think there's a lot of confusion about my point here. I'm not saying Sun's products aren't cool. I'm saying that in the modern world, they aren't going to produce enough revenue to maintain Sun's position in the industry. The company is going to either fail or shrink into a tiny shell of its former self (which is basically the same thing).
    - patrickg-zill 18y ago
      Actually DTrace and ZFS are exactly what people are looking for. DTrace: Visibility into running processes and ability to debug a system without having to reboot or go offline. ZFS: instant, easy to use snapshots, built in ECC for all your files, ability to grow filesystems, etc. And, the snapshots actually WORK, unlike on Linux where you may or may not be able to snapshot the filesystem, depending on how big your snapshot volume is and how much the changes are while you are taking the snapshot. Solaris, believe it or not, is more stable 1) in terms of programming interfaces, 2) in terms of multi-threading 3) in terms of performance under load. It has a better virtual memory subsystem, and performs far, far better under memory pressure conditions (conditions where you are low on RAM) than Linux. They have not changed any public interfaces since Solaris 8, and guarantee that a program that runs on Solaris8 (shipped in 2000) will still run on Solaris 10 (shipped through at least now, which is 2008). Contrast that with Linux where the threading model changed a couple of times during the same period, the scheduler changed, device drivers had to be updated, etc. etc. And yes, I have seen all of the above, on production systems.
      - ajross 18y ago
patrickg-zill 18y ago
I hate dumb articles like this. The "analyst" or the "journalist", I am not sure which, is equating stock price with fiscal health of the company. Sun has 2.7B in cash, 1.26B in debt, meaning that they would have about 1.4B in cash if they paid off all their debt tomorrow. That is not the sign of a company about to drop off the face of the earth. While expensive, their T1 and T2 multi-core CPUs are innovative and useful for many tasks, tasks that people pay good money to have running quicker than before. ZFS is hands-done a wonderful thing; and the purchase of StorageTek was to get the patent portfolio, as anyone who has been paying attention, knows. To contrast Sun's dot-boom year of go-go 2001 to the later dot-bust years is borderline dishonest - it would have made more sense to show the last 10 or 15 years of revenue on a graph, which would show 2001 as a spike. While Sun has tough challenges, I seem to recall people thinking Apple was going to go under not too long ago...

7 points by gibsonf1 18y ago

Honestly, I think even this article is a little to rosy on Sun's prospects. On the software side, they've basically ceded the high performance server world to linux. Tools like dtrace and zfs, while nice, aren't really dealmakers to normal people, and let's be honest: those are really Solaris's only competitive advantages against RHEL or Ubuntu. And in hardware, they've bet the farm on Niagra which, contra the hopeful quotes in the article, really isn't all that great a CPU. It's two process nodes behind Intel (and one and a half behind AMD), and it's a largely unchanged core from the late 90's that doesn't scale beyond 1 GHz or so. The power efficiency point is valid, but only for some workloads (highly parallel servers, basically), and only by a tiny bit. Newer quad-core Xeon's are nipping at Sun's heels as we speak, and have vastly better per-core performance.

gaius 18y ago
Red Hat's customers aren't "normal people" either, they're also selling to corporate IT departments. It's worth noting that Sun's x86 kit, the x4500 and x4600 for example, is really pretty good (if a bit pricey, but you get what you pay for).
- ajross 18y ago
  I wasn't saying that Sun's customers were abnormal. I was saying that dtrace and zfs specifically didn't have much appeal to the "normal people" corporate market. That is, RHEL doesn't suffer much in comparison. And their servers hardware is fine. It's very competitive in features (but, as you point out, not in price) with all nine thousand other server vendors out there. You can't maintain a company of the size of Sun Microsystems selling white box rack hardware without a huge increase in volume (which would make them a Dell clone, and that space is already occupied). I just don't see anything really good coming out of Sun that is going to save the company. Solaris isn't it. Niagra isn't it. What else do they have?
  - ComputerGuru 18y ago
    What else do they have? Project Indiana.
    - ajross 18y ago
      And free operating system is going to save them how, exactly? At best this would get them a revenue stream along the lines of what Red Hat or Novell sees, which is a solid order of magnitude lower than what Sun was getting during the boom years. It's noise. It's like saying that the Zune (at best, an iPod killer) is going to "save" Microsoft. I think there's a lot of confusion about my point here. I'm not saying Sun's products aren't cool. I'm saying that in the modern world, they aren't going to produce enough revenue to maintain Sun's position in the industry. The company is going to either fail or shrink into a tiny shell of its former self (which is basically the same thing).
  - patrickg-zill 18y ago
    Actually DTrace and ZFS are exactly what people are looking for. DTrace: Visibility into running processes and ability to debug a system without having to reboot or go offline. ZFS: instant, easy to use snapshots, built in ECC for all your files, ability to grow filesystems, etc. And, the snapshots actually WORK, unlike on Linux where you may or may not be able to snapshot the filesystem, depending on how big your snapshot volume is and how much the changes are while you are taking the snapshot. Solaris, believe it or not, is more stable 1) in terms of programming interfaces, 2) in terms of multi-threading 3) in terms of performance under load. It has a better virtual memory subsystem, and performs far, far better under memory pressure conditions (conditions where you are low on RAM) than Linux. They have not changed any public interfaces since Solaris 8, and guarantee that a program that runs on Solaris8 (shipped in 2000) will still run on Solaris 10 (shipped through at least now, which is 2008). Contrast that with Linux where the threading model changed a couple of times during the same period, the scheduler changed, device drivers had to be updated, etc. etc. And yes, I have seen all of the above, on production systems.
    - ajross 18y ago

patrickg-zill 18y ago

I hate dumb articles like this. The "analyst" or the "journalist", I am not sure which, is equating stock price with fiscal health of the company. Sun has 2.7B in cash, 1.26B in debt, meaning that they would have about 1.4B in cash if they paid off all their debt tomorrow. That is not the sign of a company about to drop off the face of the earth. While expensive, their T1 and T2 multi-core CPUs are innovative and useful for many tasks, tasks that people pay good money to have running quicker than before. ZFS is hands-done a wonderful thing; and the purchase of StorageTek was to get the patent portfolio, as anyone who has been paying attention, knows. To contrast Sun's dot-boom year of go-go 2001 to the later dot-bust years is borderline dishonest - it would have made more sense to show the last 10 or 15 years of revenue on a graph, which would show 2001 as a spike. While Sun has tough challenges, I seem to recall people thinking Apple was going to go under not too long ago...