What Sun Should Do (by a Sun employee)

Re:What Sun Should Do (by a Sun employee) by zmimon on Tuesday November 25, 2008 @09:56PM (#377186)

If I was running Sun I'd seriously look at splitting the company in two. The software side is shackled by the fact that they need to move in a direction that is going to erode revenue from the hardware side. As long as they are in the same company you will have a tug of war between two sides pulling two different ways and nobody going anywhere.

I agree with the software folks trying to become the best deployment platform for web software. There's a window of opportunity while the JVM is ahead of other VMs where Sun could pull this off if they can produce a super stable, scalable, easy to deploy runtime that runs everything from PHP to Python, Ruby and Groovy and make it a snap to deploy and manage. The catch is that I don't think there's any chance they will achieve this if they try and tie it to either Solaris or Sun hardware. That ship has sailed - hosting these days is either linux or windows for all but the highest top tier. They need to completely get over it and aggressively push themselves on linux.

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Re:What Sun Should Do (by a Sun employee) by jwilliams on Tuesday November 25, 2008 @11:33PM (#377270)

> The software side is shackled by the fact that they need to move in a direction that is going to erode revenue from the hardware side.

Unless they move into the cloud domain - in which case, their expertise in both areas (software/hardware) will be complimentary and useful.

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Re:What Sun Should Do (by a Sun employee) by alexandros on Wednesday November 26, 2008 @08:25AM (#377591)

come to think of it, sun may be the only company to have the entire stack of technologies in house... chips, servers, os, VM, programming language, development environment.. cloud computing seems an obvious direction.. perhaps they are doing that already?

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Re:What Sun Should Do (by a Sun employee) by jwilliams on Wednesday November 26, 2008 @09:41PM (#378352)

> perhaps they are doing that already?

Not really - the one piece of the puzzle that Sun doesn't really have is services (aside from support).

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Re:What Sun Should Do (by a Sun employee) by gaius on Wednesday November 26, 2008 @12:21AM (#377305)

But why should it be? All those environments you mention can run equally well on any operating system. If Solaris on SPARC can be made price/performance superior to Linux on Intel, then that's what they should do.

It's hard to see exactly what Linux gets Sun apart from "me too" points. They don't want to be Dell.

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Re:What Sun Should Do (by a Sun employee) by zmimon on Thursday November 27, 2008 @07:04PM (#378990)

> If Solaris on SPARC can be made price/performance superior to Linux on Intel, then that's what they should do.

No - this is where I think the worlds collide. You're basically saying they should commoditize their own hardware to the point where its at parity with Intel. I'm saying they need to do the opposite - they need to increase (or at least maintain) their margins and focus on selling it to the people who really need it - enterprises and top end institutions that value the incredible robustness and scalability you can only get with that kind of hardware. I think trying to do both ends of the spectrum on the same platform is just going to ensure they do neither effectively.

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Re:What Sun Should Do (by a Sun employee) by gaius on Friday November 28, 2008 @07:56AM (#379267)

Well, not necessarily. If a pair of Sun Exxx's in a cluster was cheaper, faster and more reliable than a rack or two's worth of 1U Dells then it would be a no-brainer.

Right now, for most applications, AMD64 beats SPARC. I would love to run Solaris on AMD in production. I can't tho' because Solaris x86 doesn't get tier-1 support from a couple of vendors I rely on. The choices are SPARC/Solaris or Intel/Redhat, and despite the fact that Red Hat is a complete pain in the arse, I can't justify SPARC/Solaris on grounds of better manageability and I can't do AMD/Solaris either. That is where Sun could make some quick wins.

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