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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.

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.

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.