I would argue that Sun lost focus on the workstation market around 2000. While it had some great workstations (Ultra 60, Ultra 80, Sun Blade 1000/2000), it was pretty clear that the focus for Sun was on building mid-range to high-end servers (Ultra Enterprise 4x00-6x000 and E10k). And in that space, pushing the Mhz up would have cost Sun on the cooling and power envolope. And with SMP on more and more sockets, Mhz wasn't a problem back then. Kinda similar to how things have been on the CMT processors until recently. Solaris was optimize to scale up and as a result, its performance on a single socket suffered. Not really a surprise if you think about it. Sun from that point on was making the lion's share from servers and not workstations anymore.
And to add to the situation, the release of the Sun Rays really helped to kill off the workstation line. Sun couldn't make a 1-2 CPU box that out performed an x86 box and Sun wanted everything in the data center anyways. Not to mention that the graphics cards, while very capable, were getting more and more expensive. When I left Sun almost 10 years ago, we were starting to deploy Sun Rays and taking everyones SPARC workstations away. In typical Sun fashion, we were eating our own dog food and making Sun Rays work right. This was the second time that Sun tried internally to deploy thin clients, remember the Java Station? But the good news is that Sun Rays worked great and the deployment worked. This led to major changes on the thinking inside Sun.. 1. Pushed all the desktop workloads to the data center and enabled better remote access and work for field offices and telecommuters. 2. Reduced overhead in desktop support. I heard that it now takes less than 30 Sysadmins to manage the 30k+ Sun Rays at Sun. 3. It reinforced the vision of the data center handling everything and everyone using stateless devices (gee we're revisiting that again with mobile devices, lol) 4. It put into question the value of workstations beyond kernel and hardware engineers. Sun Rays are still a great product and you can do a lot on them. Sun, the US Gov, lots of service desk orgs, and etc use them. I've even deployed them inside of two banks with great success. Now on top of all this internal stuff at Sun.. you have to look at how the climate changed in the field for workstations at big organizations. There was a time when you'd walk in the Dilbert cube mazes of companies and find folks with a UNIX workstation and a PC desktop or maybe a Mac. Fast forward to about 5 years ago and most corporations decided to start out-sourcing or to downsize desktop support. As a result, they all pushed for standardized desktops and guess what? They are all windows desktops and most companies implemented a policy that if you want to use UNIX, you have to log into a box in the data center for that. So UNIX workstations, Macs, and even Linux were pushed out of the office space and back into the data center because of office policies. I have yet to see this change, other than some folks using a Mac laptop here and there like me:) But ultimately, this is what really killed the UNIX workstation market. Corporations standardizing on Windows PC's and making it *illegal* to have anything else. And this affected not only Sun, but also IBM and HP. The UNIX workstation market just dried up. And this is also what has killed Linux as a desktop alternative. Really at this point, the only alternative desktop that's making any progress is the Mac. The sales are up and everyone is buying iPhones and iPads. I think it's the only real chance to battle back against Windows and it's working better than even Apple thought possible. So where does that leave folks like us who want a UNIX workstation? Up the creek, that's where! I'd love to have a quad-core CMT workstation with great 3D graphics. But it'll never happen at this point. I have an Ultra 20 and a Sun Blade 2000 that I use as servers and test gear at home. In the future, it'll probably be a Mac Pro and lots of VirtualBox instances. I don't know. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Octave J. Orgeron Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com E-Mail: [email protected] *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ________________________________ From: Paul Gress <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, October 31, 2010 12:24:10 PM Subject: Re: [desktop-discuss] Oracle Sun SPARC and X64 Workstations, Market For, and Why or Why Not? On 10/28/10 06:41 PM, Robert Hanke wrote: Back to the work-group workstation concept, in the '00's certain third-parties offered frame-buffers with individual on-board serial ports to keyboards (I still have literature). SunRays are not X-terminals, but the client-server concept may still have some legs, splitting and optimally distributing display, computation, and database. With fiber, and 10GbE etc., the limitation may not be the server to terminal cable. Others have done remoted card-based PCs. Sort-of did Sun with their Sun-pci Intel co-processor cards. (Interestingly, the Sun-pci II had its own ESDI controller, with no socket installed.) Could Oracle Sun cooperate with a graphics vendor to make work-group workstations happen? > I've been using CAD since '94. Started with Pro-Engineer on a Ultra-2 Workstation. Paid $43,000 for the Ultra-2 and $25,000 for Pro-Engineer. Have been paying maintenance on Pro-E and kept it up to date. From the Ultra-2 I've upgraded to a Blade 100 then upgraded to a Bladed 2500. The graphics card for the Blade 2500 is an XVR-1200. So now I'm stuck on Solaris 10 with that system due to unsupported graphics card (Opensolaris/Solaris-Express-11 dropped support). To further make this situation worse, PTC, the maker of my CAD program stopped upgrading to Solaris on Sparc. They are curently at their revision WF5 for CAD and the last revision for Sparc Solaris is WF4. So for me to upgrade to WF5 I had tp change my computing platform to X86. I purchased an HP Z800 Workstation and installed Opensolaris (now at b134). Thankfully PTC still had WF5 running on Solaris X86. Now the dilemma, PTC has written and their tech notes there are currently no plans to support Solaris 10 in their next release. So I can read this a few ways. I can convince myself into believing that with Solaris 11 this will change. Chances to me seem slim at best. I can change my OS to the dreaded Windows 7 and have a virus ridden OS that assumes what I need. Whenever I move a window it immediately transforms to a maximized window, I didn't want this. I turn off automatic updates and it annoys me to constantly update. I constantly annoys me to updade virus databases, both from antivirus software and windows shield. It is not an Engineering computing platform, period. Opensolaris or Solaris 11/Solaris-Express 11 is superior. Now down to my reasoning. This is my theory, not actual facts, just my observations. In the days of the Ultra-2, because of the high prices of the workstations, Sun was able to afford paying various CAD vendors to continue development going on for Solaris. As Sparc started to lag behind in performance Sun started to lower the prices of the workstations. My Blade 100 only cost me around $2,500 and my Blade 2500 only cost me aroun $4,000. There wasn't much profit to continue paying vendors. So they dropped the Sparc workstation and promoted the X86 workstations. The hardware was a little cheaper, they could use commodity vendors to design the workstations and increases the profit margin slightly. What had happened, the first X86 workstation was powerfull, the W-2100z, which i purchased also. Afterward when I was ready to purchase another workstation the Ultra-27 to me, was nothing more then a power users computer. It was limited to 11 gigs of ram. So I purchased the HP Z800 instead. I imagine that sales weren't good for the U27. The bottom line, Sun couldn't afford to pay vendors anymore to continue development on the Solaris OS anymore. They were bleeding trying to keep the workstation alive. The first thing Oracle did after acquiring Sun was to stop the cash flow to outside vendors for development. Opera, the web browser announced the will not port to Solaris anymore, and so did my CAD vendor. I ususpect we'll see others soon. Adobe has been paid for current releases, I'd like to see what happens with Acroreader 10 when it comes out. This cutting out of paying outside vendors to support Solaris is how I believe Oracle became profitable their fist quarter. Well any way, thats my observation, I could be completely wrong. Only time will tell. Paul
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