[Info-vax] Maybe a bit OT, maybe not.. in any case an interesting article

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 5/14/2012 10:23 AM, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> "Mazzini Alessandro"<mazzinia$$$$@tin.it>  wrote:
>>>> Sun SPARC/Solaris used to be pretty popular for web servers.
>>>> Maybe it still is.
>>>
>>> It is becoming dramatically less popular thanks to Larry. Have a look on
>>> ebay. People are dumping perfectly good SPARCware by the metric tonne and
>>> pallet load. Most webservers today seem to be running Windows or FreeBSD
>>> on
>>> Intel commodity crapware. I'm shorting SPARC futures...
>>>
>>
>> Bit deviating from the topic but, given that I admit my total ignorance
>> about the Sparc current situation... why is it becoming dramatically less
>> popular after being purchased by Oracle ?
>
> Larry likes to do the Tarzan bit and yell he's King Of The World. And he
> really really hates IBM for selling tons of DB2 and AIX and POWER, but most
> of all AIX dammit! And mainframes cost more than Larry's biggest baddest
> Whoracle Exaworld-Is-Mine Appliance. And that causes somebody to fail the
> biggest pair test and he hates that more than anything.
>
> So he decided to kill about 75% or more of existing SPARC servers by EOL'ing
> them to death (everything from sun4v and earlier) and only sell THE BIG ONES
> you need three guys and a pallet jack to move. You want to pay a hundred
> grand? Buy a Whoracle x86 server and run Linux ya cheap bastid and say thank
> you for selling it to me! We're not worthy!
>
> You want to be a real man? Let's see if you can buy a Whoracle SPARC server
> and pay a hundred grand (or more likely 200-250) just for the software
> licensing. Solaris, yeah baby YEAH! SHOW ME THE MONEY! He thinks he can make
> a business selling only to premium customers like IBM did. But he made one
> big mistake. IBM sells AIX and POWER affordably and they've been cleaning
> Larry's clock something terrible even before Sun was Larry. It's the
> mainframes they can sell like they were made out of gold. The midrange
> server market doesn't work that way. Hello Larry, goodbye Solaris and
> SPARC.

Solaris/SPARC is being sold primarily as database servers today.

They are not price competitive with Linux/x86-64 in the other tiers.

That is not really something Larry has decided. The same thing is
happening for AIX and HP-UX.

Arne