Recently I have been following our Sun's President Jonathan's Weblog .
I am trying to understand the value of why Solaris on Power would have any value? After few debates with myself I have convinced myself on the value.
I base it on "SunTouch" - Merely defined as how many lives have been touched by a Sun Product. Till recently Solaris was primarily on UltraSPARC which meant that the number of lives touched by Solaris is equal to the number of lives touched by the SPARC hardware multiplied by average remote user 'N'. Is that good? Sure.... Is that good enough? No.. Considering there are lot of other hardware out there not touched by Sun and growth number is 'N' for each additional platform. Sun's leading Opteron Servers is now filling the gap for Solaris on the x86 space. And Solaris on Power is just another way of improving SunTouch of Solaris.
So ideally what should a SunTouch number of a product be like?
Realistically I guess it is
Sun Hardware : ***** (Hardware Sold by Sun)
Solaris : ************ (Solaris on Sun + Solaris on other platforms)
J2EE (or JES) : ******************* (J2EE on Solaris + J2EE on other platforms)
J2SE (JDS+Windows): ***************************** (Java on desktop)
J2ME (mobile apps): ****************************************************** (cellphones,javacards,etc)
So in this pyramid of increasing SunTouch of Sun Hardware automatically increases the rest of the technologies. However the new "Solaris on other platforms" push improves the SunTouch of Solaris faster than Sun Hardware which is a good thing for Solaris and hence Sun.
1 comment:
In a way, this "graph" should be inverted. Is a "touch" "physical", if so your correct. But how many millions of people every single day connect to a Solaris system on Sun hardware or even Linux on Sun hardware? They don't know it, they don't need to. The beauty of Java and Solaris, and Sun hardware is that the end user doesn't know it's there unless they are savvy enough to care. Grandma doesn't know that her favorite website is on a Sun server, or that when she books her vacation it's a Sun server that will handle the transaction, or that an Sun SSL Accellorator made the transaction secure.
So, POWER. The only reason to suggest that POWER is going to help Sun touch more people is by assuming that it's more powerful and thus going to run more useful applications and thus be in higher demand, etc, etc. But Fujitsu is work with Sun on this now. So why do we need IBM POWER? I only see this as an attempt to push AIX off of it's own platform, which is unlikely. Sure POWER is a great chip, but I'd put a Sun system up against an IBM any day of the week. IBM can't build systems like the V1280, nor the 3810, 4x, or 6x systems, and definately not 15K's. What Sun offers in firmware is supplied on a secondary system in the high end pSeries.
I would argue that the Internet would not be what it is today without Sun; the boom really rolled out because of the avaliblity of cheap and powerful Sun workstations running SunOS and early versions of Solaris... Sun touches more users each each day than any other systems provider on the planet, esp if you count database servers and not just web frontends.
Anyway, even though J2ME has a greater potential to be close and handy to an end user, it's still that Sun server thats their best friend. Like so many things, the most useful things to you are the things you don't even know are there.
Just my take. :)
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