
Sun's future is 'a coin toss,' analyst says - gibsonf1
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/14/BUNJ12SC90.DTL
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patrickg-zill
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...

------
ajross
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
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
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?

~~~
patrickg-zill
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
IT staff don't know what to look for in running processes, and don't debug
production software in the field. DTrace is a great _developer_ tool.
Developers don't buy enough to sustain Sun's revenue model. Likewise ZFS
doesn't solve problems in the corporate space, where all the important data is
stored in database products that already provide snapshoting and integrity
protection (and lots more). Having that stuff available in the filesystem is
cool for a developer because it changes the list of feature you need to get
elsewhere. To an IT staff, it's just a bunch of checklist features.

I'm sure you like Solaris very much. That's not my point. My point was that
you, and developers like you, don't make for a sufficiently large market to
sustain Sun Microsystem's position in the market.

