RE: RE: Er so... RE: Yea right.
Victor 2 posts, "Vic, you are missing the bleedin' obvious here! Sun was still selling in exactly the most vulnerable segment of the UNIX market, the low end, which is being eaten up by x64."
Matt Bryant posts, "Sun was still selling in exactly the most vulnerable segment of the UNIX market, the low end, which is being eaten up by x64."
Open SPARC has been the dominant per-unit market leader in RISC for years... SPARC is the value leader in the mid-range arena, being about the only viable alternative to closed Intel or AMD architectures. Itanium and Power just don't have the applications variety, although they have other positives.
Matt Bryant posts, "Then do the maths, look at the average value of each UNIX server shipped - for hp it's about $82K, for IBM it's about $59.3K and for Sun it's only $26K. That means Sun's competitors were the ones selling the larger SMP systems for the biz crit roles, into the mid- and high-end of the UNIX market"
Unless we have a specification of average number of sockets per box, there was not enough information in this article to come to this conclusion.
It would also be fair to say that the lower-end Itanium & Power boxes just cost more than the value SPARC boxes with the OS & OS features included.
Victor 2 posts, "....Talk about critical systems and RAS and you can forget about x64."
Matt Bryant posts, "Looks more like talk about critical systems... The maths proves Sun's market share is all low-end and due to be eaten up by Magny Cours and Nehalem EX."
We discussed the math, how it does not necessarily add up. Sun/Oracle sells proprietary AMD & Intel platforms, as well... customers shifting from one sales channel to another is not a substantial problem.
Jesper Frimann posts, "Oracle SPARC revenue fell with 29.1% and shipments with 38.5%. That is nothing less than catastrophic."
Indeed, you are correct here, but it was expected due to taking almost a year since Sun was publicized as an acquisition target.
Jesper Frimann posts, "It's not like they aren't just rebading the vast majority of their SPARC revenue from Fujitsu? Oh wait."
There is a little bit of a wait. UltraSPARC T3 must get announced in the next quarter with UltraSPARC T3 servers released in the next two quarters. The timing seems reasonable, not long after the acquisition.
Jesper Frimann posts, "A fall in Unix sales from HP and IBM was expected as Tukwila and POWER7 both were to be announced here in Q1."
They were not announced nearly a year ahead of time, like aquisition of Sun first by IBM and later by Oracle. It is a significant difference to have an announcement a number of weeks earlier and an announcement a number of months earlier - these produce vastly different levels of FUD and concerns of instability in the marketplace.
Jesper Frimann posts, "How did you turn this into a success story for SPARC?"
SPARC still being #1 in RISC box shipments after almost a year of FUD spreaders suggesting that SPARC would be shut down???
That is truly a success story... I am very interested in seeing what happens next!