Keep Sun Microsystems Inc. Independent

I was recently asked through my blog how one can make their voices heard by the management of Sun. I thought long and hard about this and decided the best thing was to start a petition. I urge all readers of my blog to sign this petition and to tell their friends and colleagues to do so also. I'd like to get as many signatures at possible. Here is the link:

http://www.petitiononline.com/smi09/petition.html

I will attempt to make the management at Sun aware of this petition so that they understand how their customers, shareholders, employees, former employees, etc. feel about the recent turn of events.

I also would like to extend my best wishes and hopes to all the employees of Sun that have been RIF'd today.

Hopefully all of us can come together and make our voices heard!

how many people are at the table?

As the saga continues.. it appears Sun has been shopping around Silicon valley trying to sell itself. There are some reports that it talked with Oracle, HP, Cisco, Lenovo, Fujitsu, and even EMC. I must say this is just insane and truly sad. To think that Sun and its management has carried on doing this behind the scenes. I'm curious if this is happening as a result of Southeastern Asset Mgmt company pushing for a sale. They upped their stake in Sun last year to something like 20% of the stock share. I'm very surprised that the US SEC has not come down on this already as the stock price has been affected by what could be in-sider trading information. Not to mention the fact that removing Sun from the server industry would cross the lines with anti-trust and anti-competitive regulations. With the massive investment the government has in Sun technology and services, I'm surprised they are not stomping all over this. If you remember back when AT&T had a large share of Sun and was thinking of buying it, the government stepped in and stopped it.

But if it's to be.. I'd rather see Sun get bought out by Cisco, Apple, Google, Fujitsu, or Hitachi. Going to IBM or HP is just a death warrant for Sun.

Sun Saga Continues

Well it's been over a week now and still no news on if the IBM will buy Sun or not. The rumor mill now is that IBM lawyers are looking over Sun's contracts and projects. I'm really hoping that this does not go through and that the US SEC or the EU will step in and stop this based on anti-competitive reasons. Sun's stock has not been doing well for years, no dispute there. However, if you pay attention closely.. you'll see that the volume of traffic has always been high and if anything Sun stock is actually a good market indicator. Most tech stocks have been vastly over valued for years, look at Googles. There's no way that if you liquidated Google today that it would be worth that much, let alone generate that much cash. I think the main thing the public and customers fail to remember is that the stock market is based on perception. If it wasn't the current mortgage and credit hole we're in would not be here.

So does Sun really need to be bought out to be successful? It is the 4th largest server manufacturer, ahead of Fujitsu and behind Dell. Is that really bad? Common sense would just say that if Sun was not making money it would not be in business. To put this into perspective, I've worked for many large companies and do consulting work where I get help companies do consolidation and virtualization. So is it true that everyone and their grandma is dumping Solaris for Linux on x86? I would say no. What's really happening is that applications that use to sit on mainframes, AIX, HP-UX, Tru64, etc. are moving to either Solaris on SPARC for bigger workloads and production stuff and Linux on x86 for general purpose apps and things Windows use to do. Many companies are moving in the direction of Solaris on SPARC replaces the big-iron expensive stuff, Solaris x86 or Linux for the low-hanging fruit and general purpose stuff, and windows for all the desktop apps and infrastructure. So why are the sales not the way they were years ago?? Well it's simple, you don't need as many Sun servers to do the work these days and the pricing is competitive. So basicly, Sun has more or less engineered itself into lower profits.

For example, look at the previous post about the Internet Archive. You have 800 white-box Linux servers being replaced by 63 x4500 servers running Solaris 10. Would Sun have made more money selling 800 or a 1000 servers to them? Well sure, but that's not what they needed considering the performance and capacity of current technology. See, technology has gotten faster, smaller, and cheaper. This is also the case in the SPARC world. For example, I've seen many customers replace expensive v880's and v890's being used as big Netbackup media servers because of the I/O capacity being replaced by T2000s and T5220s. Yes, that's right the CMT servers that IBM and HP make fun of for not being so hot on single threaded apps are killer for multithreaded apps and streaming media (something you'd expect on a backup media server). Again though, something (v880/V890) that cost a lot of money can be replaced with something faster, smaller, and cheaper.

Many Sun customers are also faced with another complicated situation.. hundreds or thousands of aging servers that are 5, 7, 10, or more years old that just keep running. But of course as data center space, power, and cooling become bigger issues.. these servers become targets for upgrades. And now you end up in a different field all together. For example, lets say you have a bunch of E450s or E4000s. They are not only old, but long sense EOL'd. Such servers could easily be replaced with a T5220 or T2000. But do you need to buy a box to replace another or do you look to virtualization? And this is a decision many companies are faced with today. You have old servers that just work, are paid off, but cost more to operate. On the other side you have new, faster, and cheaper technology that can replace it.. but it's all overkill. I've seen people consolidate a couple of v880s into a single T2000. So many companies are looking into or are already consolidating and virtualizing their legacy Sun footprint into a new and smaller Sun footprint.

My point here is that Sun is obviously delivering on good technology. The problem is that there isn't as much money to squeeze out of it. And this is where having good support and professional services could add some much needed revenue. Unfortunately, this is an area where Sun has struggled to compete in. I've seen the QA work alone in the Solaris patches go down in quality over the past few years as people have been RIF'd and customer support go through some tough times. I do question the cuts Sun has made over the past few years. Even with the recent RIFs I'm not sure how things have shaped up. I know when I worked at Sun, the management layer was starting to become rather hefty and the other layers being spread out more. When you need to shrink things down, it's best to get rid of things that aren't going to bring you a long-term ROI and bring your assets together, meaning fewer management layers. There are times where you need more grunts making good products and fewer managers.

Unfortunately, I've seen Sun slowly hemerage good people and somehow not remove the un-needed fat. And with how Wall St. looks closely at the numbers, the solution to most things is more RIFs at Sun. This isn't fixing things. So does selling out really help? Well if IBM were to run Sun as a subsidurary and fix the management and marketing issues, Sun would probably do well. But I find it hard to believe that is the plan. So I hope Jonathan is reading this and will hear my plea to not sell of Sun, but instead to make some drastic changes.

Sun has already been reorged. Why not spin off the software and cloud components as private companies? That would leave the systems group as the primary company with the majority of the revenues. And think of it this way, much of the complaints on Wall St. would probably go away.. fewer employees, operating costs, etc.. and a strong revenue stream vs capex/opex. Or take the whole company off the market and go private? Restructure, get investments that would goto marketing and sales development. Then when things are better.. go back on the market strong.

Well anyways, these are just some of my ramblings on the subject. We just have to wait and see how this unfolds.

Wayback Machine Powered by Sun

Well it was time to upgrade the Internet Archive with a Sun modular data center shipping container with 63 x4500 servers running Solaris 10. Obviously they are making use of ZFS and lots of 1TB disks. This shows how great technology can help businesses consolidate their footprint. The previous setup consisted of 800 Linux servers with only 4 drives each. Not bad going from 800 down to 63 servers.

Sun Selling Out??

Well the rumor mills are spinning big time today. It looks like Sun is doing the rounds and seeing who might buy them out. The rumor today is that IBM is interested. I think this would be the worst thing for Sun to do, hands down! Sun has a great product line-up. The issue is not the products or the engineers behind it. It's the poor marketing and management of those assets.

Sun would be better off selling to Apple or Cisco who understand marketing. Apple would be my ideal choice because they need help on getting into the server market. A good idea would be to see MacOS X drop the Darwin stuff and adopt OpenSolaris. Imagine MacOS X GUI and apps running ontop of OpenSolaris. That would be a killer combo for the consumer and enterprise markets.

But to sell out to IBM would be a huge betrail for all Sun customers and supporters across the board. When it comes to the commercial UNIX landscape, it's just Solaris and AIX these days. And realistically, most shops have reduced or eliminated their AIX and HP-UX footprints in favor of Solaris and Linux. Sun needs to get its butt in gear and help continue this trend.

The only way this would be good is if IBM were to dump AIX and push forward on Solaris. There has already been a port of OpenSolaris to the POWER platform that IBM could work on completing and marketing. But honestly, I can't see IBM making that choice. I've been through this once before years ago when I worked on and used Digital Unix (Tru64) and it was eaten by Compaq and trashed by HP. I'd hate to see Sun make the mistakes of Digital and Compaq all over again.

What's really needed is a change of management at Sun. If they want to make money, they have the right products and solutions. It's just a matter of selling it well and getting out infront of customers again. I mean when was the last time we saw a Sun commercial on TV? I've asked this countless times to Sun execs and management. IBM, HP, Apple, Cisco, etc. all have TV commercials and are in consumer and enterprise customer minds as brandnames. This is not rocket science!

I urge everyone to contact their Sun sales rep and complain. Also to write letters to Jonathan Schwartz and send him a clear message that selling out is not the solution.

Supercomputer Win for Sun

I've noticed over the past few years that Sun has been winning contracts to build Supercomputers which is great. The Ranger supercomputer at the University of Texas at Austin is pretty impressive. Today, Sun won a contract in South Africa, read more here. One of my favorite websites that has an interesting collection of Supercomputers is HPCVL. Many of the Supercomputers being built today are using non x64 technology which proves that not all problems can be solved with general purpose equipment. It requires a combination of technologies. Just as any company has a wide range of hardware and OSs for their needs. The same is true in the supercomputing world.

Virtualization and Businesses

Virtualization is a big buzzword these days. I know because it's what I specialize in for work and blog about:) There are definitely some major misconceptions about it that I'd like to point out for people to consider:

• Virtualization? Oh you mean VMware right?
  
• You can virtualize anything and it's easy
  
• It'll reduce the need for SA's because there will be less to manage
• Virtualization product XYZ will solve all our problems out of the box

Well I hate to tell you, all of those assumptions are dead wrong. Like anything else in IT, "it depends". For example..

Many people have heard the "virtualization" buzzword, but automatically think the only solution is VMware. Obviously, it's been around longer than VMware has, look at VM on the mainframe. And virtualization is not just at the OS or hardware layer. You'll find it at the storage, networking, application, etc. layers. Each platform has it's own set of solutions, look here.

Many applications can be virtualized, this is true. However, there are apps that are not supported in a virtualized environment or will not work well. Not all commercial databases are supported in a given virtualized environment. Another example, it would not make a lot of sense to place a Netbackup media server into a virtual machine because it needs direct access to things such as tape libraries and any additional I/O overhead will cost you. You'd have to go for an option that allows for direct I/O access, such as Dynamic System Domains (DSD) or an I/O Domain in an LDom environment. Not something you could stick into a VMware or VirtualBox instance. So the key thing here is that the application support and I/O requirements decide the real options.

While the number of physical hosts can be significantly reduced in a virtualized environment, it does not remove the need for SA's. If anything, it places more emphasis on thier training and skills. You'll still have hundreds or thousands of OS and application instances to manage. Plus, the utilization, performance, and responsiveness of your virtualized environment will become paramount. Most standalone servers in traditional environments are only 10-30% utilized. So there is head room for usage spikes and for issues to grow in. In a virtualized environment, there are constraints that can cause contention for resources. As a result, an SA has to pay more attention to the metrics around their servers and adjust things as required to meat SLAs. It also requires SAs to know more. You're virtualizing not just the hardware resources, you're also virtualizing the networking and storage resources. So skill requirements in those areas increase.

And of course my favorate bad assumption is that some product XYZ will solve all your issues out of the box. Well I've seen many companies spend millions on software that promises to do all your work and make you dinner. Of course, it's just good marketing and never delivers what was promised. In the virtualization world, there is an investment in the hardware, the hypervisor (if it's not free like Sun's solutions.. zones, LDoms, and DSDs are free!), the management tools, provisioning tools, monitoring tools, HA components, etc. I have yet to see any virtualization solution that comes with everything out of the box, let alone not require some learning and configuration. A good example here is how people think that VMwares VMotion somehow will save the day. While it is good that a virtual machine can be moved around due to hardware failure or low resources, it doesn't do much beyond that. So lets say there is an application failure in your virtual machine, VMware has no idea about such things and even if you VMotion it elsewhere, the issue is still there, just on a different physical server. So the need for application monitoring or HA software does not disappear. If anything, the need for knowing what's going on in your environment becomes more important. So the reality here is it takes a combination of different solutions to build a truely robust virtualized environment.

Well I hope that gives everyone some things to think about and consider. Like I said, in IT.. it depends;)

UltraSPARC-T2 Reference Design Kit

On the note of the lack of SPARC workstations, Sun released a Reference Design Kit for folks to build their own UltraSPARC-T2 solutions. Here is the link. The kit is basically a T5220 system board in an Extended ATX form factor, 16GB's of RAM, and reference materials to help you build your own boards. I took the time to inquire as to the cost of this design kit, because it would be kewl to build my own UltraSPARC-T2 workstation for home. Unfortunately, the starting price is $10K ! Yikes! So a big fat no to that idea!

Of course if Sun were thinking about building a nice workstation, I'd probably start with this board design and do the following:

1. Strink it down to ATX form factor, perhaps remove 4 DIMM slots, or place the iLOM onto a card. Reuse the Ultra20/24 case?
   
2. Go with 4 core UltraSPARC-T2 to bring the costs down.
3. Switch the e1000g chipsets to just two single-port ones. Don't need quad ethernet on a workstation, but dual is good;)
4. Remove the XAUI ports and add two more PCI-E slots.
5. Have it come standard with 2 x SATA hdds, sound card, 3D video card, and DVD+-RW/CD+-RW drive.
6. Enjoy!

I'd think something like that could sell for $3k easy. Oh well, enough with day dreaming about having an UltraSPARC-T2 workstation I could run LDoms on..

The Death of SPARC Workstations

Well recently on the OpenSolaris desktop forums, the discussion of video cards for the upcoming OpenSolaris 2009* release has become a hot topic. Alan Coopersmith gave a list of cards that will be supported in Xorg:

• XVR-50 (onboard graphics on some servers)
• XVR-100 (PCI board)
• XVR-300 (PCI-E board)
• XVR-2500 (PCI-E board)
• AST2100 (Service Processor/Remote KVM)

Of course people are not happy as this will prevent them from running OpenSolaris 2009* on their SPARC workstations. My response to all this is as follows:

Well there are definitely more folks out there with PCI and UPA video cards for their SPARC workstations. Realistically, many people are getting nice bargains on Ebay and putting together nice SPARC workstations. I know because that's how I've gotten by for the past 10 years and most of the people I've worked with during that time have done the same. If Sun would realize that there is a large market for such things and that people are paying less there. It should be a signal that Sun would stand to make a profit if they built a good solution at a reasonable price.

First off, it's a damn shame that Sun was never able to sell a descent SPARC workstation at a reasonable price to compete with the Ultra20/40. Second, the fact that Sun couldn't keep the SPARC workstation line alive, notice the only workstation now is the Intel Ultra24. Hmm.. I guess changing the stock symbol from SUNW to JAVA makes sense now. I think a lot of this stems from Sun's disconnect with the customer base which does want affordable performant SPARC workstations. When Sun was selling things like the Ultra25 or Ultra45, the prices were just as much as a low-end SPARC server, but with processors that were years behind. Not a good business model if you ask me.

What we're seeing here with OpenSolaris 200* is a real disregard for what makes money at Sun. It's not the x64 servers, it's the T-Series and M-Series servers which are obviously SPARC based. Notice there isn't a UltraSPARC-T* or SPARC64 workstation anywhere for developers, engineers, SA's, medical imagery, etc. I guess if you want to develop on current SPARC technology, you better work for a company that can spare a Zone or LDom in the datacenter for you. Oh well, most companies have taken away ppls *NIX workstations and forced them to use Windoze anyways it seems.

I've been very pleased with the progress of OpenSolaris 200*, but dissappointed that the SPARC side has languished until now. Of course, most of the benefits that have been delivered thus far have been around the desktop, installation, and package management. From this rather short and unimpressive list of cards that'll be supported on SPARC, Xorg will be pointless for most SPARC customers and users. People will end up sticking with SXCE or Solaris 11 when it comes out. Of course, the big question I have is, can Sun afford to keep all of these different streams of Solaris development alive and kicking? I get the impression that the majority of development and integration is on the OpenSolaris 200* side and that Solaris proper is just getting patched up with features from OpenSolaris until OpenSolaris can replace it. So if that's the long-term goal, what hope is there for customers and users on SPARC workstations?

Seeing how there won't be any new SPARC workstations, anything that's done to support them will be minimal at best. Other than waiting for the folks who have Ultra25's and Ultra45's to sell their gear on Ebay, not much of an upgrade path either. I have a SB2000 with dual 900Mhz procs, 4GBs of RAM, and a Expert3D card. It's a great workstation and I've enjoyed it a lot over the past few years. But seeing the "writing on the wall", I've just bought a used Ultra20 that'll be arriving today. I'm planning on upgrading the hell out of it and putting a AMD quad-core Phenom mobo and proc in there to get it kicking and screaming. Yes, I just wanted the case for the Ultra20! So I've given up on SPARC workstations, which is sad. But it seems it's time to just drink the x64 cool-aide and get on with things.

Well later on today when my Ultra20 arrives, I'll post some pics of it. It's sad that the company that use to be known for creating workstations only has 1 workstation to sell, the Ultra24. Not that it's a bad box or anything.. it's just not SPARC. But I've decided to move on and dive into the x64 world for my workstation/desktop needs.

BTW, I have lots to blog about and apologize for not posting for such a long time. Time to get 2009 rolling:)