Re: EnigmaForce (Adam)

> any comment on the actual point I was making?

You have to ask El Reg but for some strange reason, many of Sun's blade related announcements didn't make it into this article. Why do you say that Sun's blade

architecture is a me too product ? It's the only one that is different from all the

others in that Sun uses a standard PCI-EX backplane - now critics would say it's

worse than all the others - it's still different. Sun seemed to fill up a very important

gap in their blade products, which is an integrated NEM switch which gives a

virtual 10GE link to each blade and eliminates need for an external chassis level

switch. All new Sun servers and blades now come with their flash MiniDIMM

which is a pretty aggressive SSD strategy for a vendor in the red. They seemed

to make quite a lot of announcements in the HPC space with integrated QDR

IB modules, cooling doors for their HPC racks etc. In fact Sun has one of the

best IB based HPC solution for large scale HPC implementation, although

DELL/HP would likely beat them with lower prices.

Many Sun zealots would say solaris/ZFS/DTrace, and as you rightly said, nobody

cares. It's true Sun likes to make noise about solaris, but most of their money

is coming from hardware, and x86 servers and blade is a real bright spot

if you look at their past few quarterly revenue breakdowns. Their x86 revenue,

which is minuscule, is growing well while the big players are slowing down,

and is profitable. Even if Sun can persuade the handful of SPARC shops

planning x86 purchase to buy from them instead of HP/IBM/DELL - that's

big win for them.