[NTLUG:Discuss] Mac v. Linux

[Chris Cox]

jpmiller at quorumhost.com wrote:
> yeah... long post. =]
> 
> While I will accept everything you have said, I just do not think it matters for
> sun.  It's still too little to late:
> 
> - High powered workstations... yeah, it's a great box, but who's buying them in
> volume?  The last 3 places I've worked $2000 was better than twice the budget
> for desktop computers.

Aack!... So you are saying that the desktop market is what keeps
computer companies alive?????!!!!   Sorry.. don't agree with that
at all.  I gave the workstation example, because I need a workstation.
Their server machines are equally as agressively priced.

> 
> - sparc development... on the low end, they seem to be priced at about twice
> what a comparible intel based box would be.  High end Intel doesn't really have

SPARC does carry a premium, so you REALLY need to compare Intel/AMD
(Dell/HP/Other) boxes with Sun's AMD line... not their SPARC line.
Our price on a Sun V880 (a bit dated, now the V890) is about $20K.  That 
gets you two processors (holds 8) and 6 73G SCSI drives (holds 12) and
you get fiber ethernet as well.  Granted that's pretty expensive.
How much does your 8-way Intel box cost?  Certainly more of course.
I realize that your point is that NOBODY buys an 8-way box, you'll
just have to trust me that people do buy these things.  In fact my
company owns 2 E15K's.  I think they hold 108 processors each.

> comparible.  I don't deny that they are technically great boxes, but, from the
> prospective of providing business services, horizonal scalability is a much
> easier sale than vertical.  Buying a $500,000 to $2,000,000 box is just about
> impossible these days.  Though, I'll admit that may be just the environments I
> have been in (with the exception of the db space, which still likes big boxes,
> but I think google is proving that may not be true much longer).

Did I mention we also own a few mainframes as well?  For web serving
and such, you are correct that horizontal works.  But if you look at
the enterprise high end.... these large redundant multi-processor things
still rule the roost.

> 
> remember, technical superiority isn't necessarily a winning business model:
> ref Microsoft vs Apple, VHS vs Betamax, Excel vs Lotus...  I won't nail Sun's
> coffin yet, but come on... Solaris as a relevent desktop OS? It just isn't
> going to happen anytime soon.

IMHO, this is Sun's first venture into trying to handle the datacenter
needs at both the low end (Sun lost this market a while back) and
the high end (where they've been playing recently).