VentureBeat: Sun Microsystems may lay off 6,000 today
BeeCee
· 11 months ago
Your well-placed source is somewhat misinformed, only some locations were affected today.
Eric Eldon
· 11 months ago
Perhaps you missed my update?
Jeeves
· 11 months ago
it's true, I'm a Sun employee and today we started hearing from People sending Farewells
prozacula
· 11 months ago
well, that's what happens when you charge 4X as much $ for hardware that can be replaced with commodity parts running free software.
good luck "selling" Java for profit, Sun.
John Smith
· 11 months ago
Sun is great and they doing a nice job. I am sure they will suceed in this global crisis.
linh
· 11 months ago
prozacula, is right! sun is ridiculously sold Sun hardware at an expensive price!!! Only those people that bought those machines are old admins that way to secure their jobs from the new wave of younger Linux admins. Too bad they are getting old and losing jobs as well. So no more new purchase to Sun's fancy expensive servers. how can you make money from Opensource that you can already downloaded for free? MySQL is an excellent product, but there is no way I would pay for it because is already FREE.
Geoff O
· 11 months ago
linh.... As for "how can you make money off open source?" - Services... Hardware... Support... And not everything Sun is Open Source, anyway...
linh + prozacula... As for Sun's "expensive" servers... depends on what servers you look at... Enterprise kit is expensive... thats not a "Sun" thing so much as a high end server thing, as it is from IBM and HP... but enterprise class servers can't really be compared, apples to apples with x86 kit, its not the same, and even if they were done in high volume, they still would not be as cheap as x86 kit, its a different world... and in addition to that, less volume usually means higher prices in just about every industry...
If you did want to compare apples to apples, Sun's x86/x64 servers are very competitively priced as compared to HP, Dell, IBM... and they're packing more cores into smaller form factors than the other big players, and also more disks in many of the servers in their line up.
Sun have also done some really neat things in chassis design to keep things cool... and there's a bunch of software innovations now bundled with hardware you won't find anywhere else... I'd check the prices on x86/x64 kit and compare to others, its actually not bad.
But back on topic, I'm not sure "thats what you get, Sun!" is a very productive kind of commentary. Lots of people are losing their jobs from Sun, and other companies effected by this downturn, and that's going to be a killer for a lot of people and their families.
At any rate, I believe we can probably agree, whether you like or dislike Sun, that this is a real sad thing for so many people to be suddenly out of work, and that position is not something you would wish upon just about anyone.
PS. We're not all "old admins"... Sun actually has some really cool stuff, there's stuff in Solaris you won't find in Linux, Windows, or any other OS. Check it out, you may find yourself pleasantly surprised.
Peter Antypas
· 11 months ago
I disagree. You can compare x86 and SPARC systems in a dollars/MIPS ratio and Intel/Linux is a clear winner. I can build a distributed transaction processing application on cheap commodity hardware with enough redundancy and failover capacity to get 4 nines of availability, for less than the cost of two high-end SPARC T2 based servers.
And as for Sun's X64 servers, who cares? The moment they abandon SPARC they're just another commodity hardware provider with nothing that can seriously differentiate them from the likes of SuperMicro.
Although Solaris may in fact have "cool stuff" that you can't find in Linux or Windows, that "cool stuff" is largely IRRELEVANT to most potential customers, and that's Sun's core strategic failure: They overimproved and bloated their product offerings to move upmarket, while the disruptor (Intel & Linux) kept moving up, up, up until they finally tossed them out of their penthouse.
x64 won. SPARC lost. That's the bottom line.
OracleDBA
· 11 months ago
@ Peter: It isn't a win / lose comparison for the processors. They're targeted at different applications for different markets. SPARC was the workhorse of the financial industry analysts who need security and availability to manage large data sets using high performance computing systems with large amounts of contiguous memory. They targeted SPARC to those who would not want, for one reason or another, to resort to distributed processing across clusters using using lock management and synchronization to achieve the same thing. SPARC was targeted at high performance for numerical calculation often used by financial "what if" comparisons, data cube analysis, and pivot tables. x86 was general purpose from the start for everything from desktop publishing to spreadsheets to games. Fujuitsu had an interest and took over fabrication for Sun's SPARC design. SPARC has been the workhorse for the financial industry and many are no longer in business or not spending money with anyone for reasons completely beyond their use of Solaris SPARC.
Comparing web programming to application client-server programs for the financial industry does not provide an "apples to apples" comparison either. Geoff O pointed that out about the chipsets, but did not elaborate on how differently targeted the applications were for the processor + OS combination.
Yes, you sure can. You can run ten times the amount of hardware and even achieve your holy grail of "99.999", five 9's. But I know for a fact that clusters require MORE administration and maintenance work, as do you. And you can pay your sky high power bill every month so you can stay warm while you and your buddies huddle around your low priced Linux heaters.
Once summer comes don't miss the chance to get out and reconnect with humanity to regain your compassion. This article was about people and how the downturn has taken a toll on the performance of Sun as observed by the thousands of people, with families and friends, that were affected by layoffs in a tough job market. No matter what OS and processor you put on your resume.
Geoff O
· 11 months ago
@Peter... We'll have to agree to disagree... OracleDBA clarifies the point I was making quite well (this isn't all about maximum performance).
ZFS, Dtrace, SMF, Role Based Access Control and so on are all fairly relevant technologies and solving real customer problems. This doesn't have to be a battle of winners and losers, Linux has some great stuff that I'd love to see in Solaris, especially in the area of driver support.
At any rate... Sun bashing here doesn't change the fact that people are losing their job, and thats terrible... lets leave it at that.
Harold Cain
· 8 months ago
IBM is laying off 5000, Dell and HP have announced cuts as well. When 18% of the gnp disappears companies either have to adjust down 18% or die. Hopefully the recession is over soon and gnp climbs again. That is the only long range cure.
All Comments
good luck "selling" Java for profit, Sun.
linh + prozacula...
As for Sun's "expensive" servers... depends on what servers you look at... Enterprise kit is expensive... thats not a "Sun" thing so much as a high end server thing, as it is from IBM and HP... but enterprise class servers can't really be compared, apples to apples with x86 kit, its not the same, and even if they were done in high volume, they still would not be as cheap as x86 kit, its a different world... and in addition to that, less volume usually means higher prices in just about every industry...
If you did want to compare apples to apples, Sun's x86/x64 servers are very competitively priced as compared to HP, Dell, IBM... and they're packing more cores into smaller form factors than the other big players, and also more disks in many of the servers in their line up.
Sun have also done some really neat things in chassis design to keep things cool... and there's a bunch of software innovations now bundled with hardware you won't find anywhere else... I'd check the prices on x86/x64 kit and compare to others, its actually not bad.
But back on topic, I'm not sure "thats what you get, Sun!" is a very productive kind of commentary. Lots of people are losing their jobs from Sun, and other companies effected by this downturn, and that's going to be a killer for a lot of people and their families.
At any rate, I believe we can probably agree, whether you like or dislike Sun, that this is a real sad thing for so many people to be suddenly out of work, and that position is not something you would wish upon just about anyone.
PS. We're not all "old admins"... Sun actually has some really cool stuff, there's stuff in Solaris you won't find in Linux, Windows, or any other OS. Check it out, you may find yourself pleasantly surprised.
And as for Sun's X64 servers, who cares? The moment they abandon SPARC they're just another commodity hardware provider with nothing that can seriously differentiate them from the likes of SuperMicro.
Although Solaris may in fact have "cool stuff" that you can't find in Linux or Windows, that "cool stuff" is largely IRRELEVANT to most potential customers, and that's Sun's core strategic failure: They overimproved and bloated their product offerings to move upmarket, while the disruptor (Intel & Linux) kept moving up, up, up until they finally tossed them out of their penthouse.
x64 won. SPARC lost. That's the bottom line.
It isn't a win / lose comparison for the processors. They're targeted at different applications for different markets. SPARC was the workhorse of the financial industry analysts who need security and availability to manage large data sets using high performance computing systems with large amounts of contiguous memory. They targeted SPARC to those who would not want, for one reason or another, to resort to distributed processing across clusters using using lock management and synchronization to achieve the same thing. SPARC was targeted at high performance for numerical calculation often used by financial "what if" comparisons, data cube analysis, and pivot tables. x86 was general purpose from the start for everything from desktop publishing to spreadsheets to games.
Fujuitsu had an interest and took over fabrication for Sun's SPARC design. SPARC has been the workhorse for the financial industry and many are no longer in business or not spending money with anyone for reasons completely beyond their use of Solaris SPARC.
Comparing web programming to application client-server programs for the financial industry does not provide an "apples to apples" comparison either. Geoff O pointed that out about the chipsets, but did not elaborate on how differently targeted the applications were for the processor + OS combination.
Yes, you sure can. You can run ten times the amount of hardware and even achieve your holy grail of "99.999", five 9's. But I know for a fact that clusters require MORE administration and maintenance work, as do you. And you can pay your sky high power bill every month so you can stay warm while you and your buddies huddle around your low priced Linux heaters.
Once summer comes don't miss the chance to get out and reconnect with humanity to regain your compassion. This article was about people and how the downturn has taken a toll on the performance of Sun as observed by the thousands of people, with families and friends, that were affected by layoffs in a tough job market. No matter what OS and processor you put on your resume.
ZFS, Dtrace, SMF, Role Based Access Control and so on are all fairly relevant technologies and solving real customer problems. This doesn't have to be a battle of winners and losers, Linux has some great stuff that I'd love to see in Solaris, especially in the area of driver support.
At any rate... Sun bashing here doesn't change the fact that people are losing their job, and thats terrible... lets leave it at that.