As someone who was buying hardware in the late 1990s, it is hard to overstate the difference in buying experience between Sun or Digital (DEC) and someone like Dell. The former forced you into a live sales meeting, endless quote revisions, it was a nightmare. I remember calculating the server rails and power cords for a new Alpha server were going to cost more than a shipped/delivered Dell server that I could get the next day.
For us dell has become that. Rep changes all the time, what appears to be random pricing and long unclear delivery dates. Instead I can for example go to Thomas Kren and configure my serves online for a fraction of the cost. They have what they list in stock, delivered a few weeks later. Everything is clear and hasle free.
At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you. You push back and the price drops, I don't want to negotiate.
I think this is a case of AI ruining the hardware market. We used to almost exclusively use Dell, but now we've been forced to look elsewhere and go through validating new vendors. The lead-times are ridiculous, and these guys now only pay attention to the really big guys. Not sure I can blame them though, you've gotta do what's best for your business.
Dell was very much moving this way before modern AI explosion.
The inconsistency on pricing alone depending on what rep was helping you also became a problem. I could often times call in direct and order via business line cheaper than dealing with my account rep. No reason to jump through so many hoops.
I prefer the "This is the price" model and just make it consistent. I can't wait until AI helps us remove multiple layers of middle men across Sales in general.
> I can't wait until AI helps us remove multiple layers of middle men across Sales in general.
Based on how things are moving, I think it's more likely that AI will _replace_ the layers of middle men (with layers of "middle AI"), then that those layers will be _removed_.
Of course, the process (of squeezing the customer) is the point. The implementation of that process, with either human account reps or sales bots, is irrelevant.
that's great as an attitude, the problem with it is that money is made up and so are prices. Business have an inventory and expenses, and hopefully they can sell enough product before their debtors come calling. There's no right price for something. Underpriced, Overpriced, the only qualifier is: is the company still in business? Sony could give Playstation 6's away for free, so long as people bought games for it, but culturally, that would look desperate, so that will have to charge money for it, when they announce it. The only thing something is worth, is what someone else is willing to pay for it.
We need more Tesla style this is the price for all.. less dealership style with prices varying by some ones mood. As a buyer with a relationship, I should not be able to just buy through the website cheaper than your quote (for the exact item line by line). That's the scenario I had multiple times. Hell with the GB10's came out I bought a couple and the price through our Rep was 6k a piece no extras. We paid the list price $4k and were even able to use a discount coupon due to holidays that our rep wouldn't take. That's the BS Dell has been doing.
Periodic component shortages have been a fact of life in the server business forever. Like a key supplier's factory burns down or something.
The key thing is being transparent with customers on price, availability, and delivery schedules. In the short term server vendors can use tricks and personal relationships to extract higher profit margins but eventually the senior executives at major customers figure out what's happening and start looking for other options.
> The lead-times are ridiculous, and these guys now only pay attention to the really big guys. Not sure I can blame them though, you've gotta do what's best for your business.
I don't blame them in the sense that I wish for them to be imprisoned or anything. But I wouldn't do business with them, either. I want business partners whom I can count on, not ones who will stop returning my calls as soon as a more lucrative opportunity arises.
> At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you. You push back and the price drops, I don't want to negotiate.
This is precisely the role of the sales person for something like a service, but for a physical product it is pretty egregious. There is no greater sin than leaving money on the table. There's an old story about someone offering a quote that was apparently pretty low based on reaction, so they quickly add "that was for my assistant" to give way for pushing the number higher.
> so they quickly add "that was for my assistant" to give way for pushing the number higher
I don’t understand what this means? I understand that they bumped the price. But I du not understand what is meant by it being for the assistant? Care to explain?
Pretty much, except the assistant is never going to handle things and the updated fees go up to include you and the assistant. If you only ever send out your assistant, you never make money
If you play poker, it is the equivalent of pushing 'portions' of your bet out at a time. You push the portion, observe their face and body language, and maybe push the rest.
The 'that was for my assistant' is just something they say to explain away the earlier quoted price. They are pretending that what they said wasn't the quote for this conversation, it was for another, different conversation, between the salesman and their assistant. This only works when the assistant is not in the call.
I like this version: The optician quotes the price of new glasses by saying "$100", waits to see if the customer flinches, "... for the lenses", waits again, "... each.".
I mean this is the point of having salespeople, to maximize the amount of money you get from each customer.
This is why when I go to the price page for a product and seeing "contact our sales team for a quote" I look for an alternative.
Dell does a soft version of this by setting uncompetitive prices on the website and making you call to get the real price, although ironically that usually just means we go with a different company that simply posts a competitive price.
The iron law is that vendors want to become like the old Sun. The only reason they don't is if they are trying to compete their way up the hill. Take away the old Sun and SGI and IBM and now Dell is Sun.
Difference is Sun was providing a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps. All that Dell does is assembling standard, commoditized parts and putting a free OS on it. Dell's business is incredibly easy to replicate, while Sun's business is extremely hard to replicate. Of course, Sun's competitive advantage turned into a curse when the components of that vertical integration become uncompetitive both features and price wise vs. the GNU/Linux-on-Intel stack. But regardless, Dell could never replicate the vertical integration Sun had.
Really? When I first met Sun machines they were selling 68k-based Sun machines that were better specced than Apple and Amiga and such but left them dependent on Motorola’s architecture that had indirect address and thus no future.
Sure they had an in house chip development ARM team right at the time when RISC economics looked good but CPU architecture had to work harder and harder to beat the memory wall and SPARC was not competitive by 2005 and “Hail Mary” projects like CoolThreads were difficult and expensive but did not deliver for customers.
Hypothetically customers could benefit from that proprietary stuff but they benefit even more from rapid progress is competitive, commodity markets.
When I was working at the library circa 2005 we were thinking about replacing all the Windows computers that patrons used to access the online catalog (and other services) with a web browser with Sun Rays, we probably would have bought a few hundred of them and we would have bought some SPARC servers to back them up.
We could have gotten Netscape to run under Solaris but after a week of effort I wasn't able to get Mozilla to build, so no modern web browser. So no Sun Rays. No servers. DTrace and ZFS were great innovations but without the magic of "can run the software you need to run" they are just Blub. Had Sun done the work to get Mozilla running on their machines and forgotten about DTrace and ZFS people might still be using Solaris... but instead DTrace and ZFS found an audience by supporting... the commodity OS!
(arguably at that time supporting a web browser was the #1, #2 and all the way through #99 task that the Solaris team should have been working on at that time and everything else from Java to Tcl to ZFS was a dangerous distraction... and that's how companies in a position like Sun die)
"When I was working at the library circa 2005 we were thinking about replacing all the Windows computers that patrons used to access the online catalog (and other services)"
why were you thinking of going Sun, as late as 2005? just easier to lock down, like kiosks?
We already had a big investment with Sun for back end systems like the library catalog. We perceived managing a big fleet of desktops as a hassle, it was worse then it is now.
You must be misremembering something. Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox had always tier one support on Solaris. You had nothing to build, just download and run, with perfect compatibility.
I only ever ran Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox browser (and still today in 2026). My desktops and servers were all Solaris from mid-90s to 2012 or so. Never a hiccup running the Netscape family browsers (and servers too).
There was Netscape support, but then there was that crisis when it seemed that IE would be the only viable web browser, the realization that the Netscape was too FUBAR to build on, and then Mozilla got rebranded as Firefox.
They probably had an official Solaris build of Mozilla later on but if one had been available at that point in time I would have installed it on the SPARC machine I had under my desk. The ship had sailed in terms of the organization's capital planning.
If you were happy running Netscape later than I was you might have felt supported.
This sounds right. There was a "dark ages" in the early 2000's, where Unix/Linux browser support was terrible. You were either stuck with old Netscape 4.x, which crashed every half hour, or you had to work with half baked, almost unusable beta builds of Mozilla (pre-Firefox). Because of this, I actually ran Windows on my desktop for a while!
There was never a time when Netscape Navigator, Mozilla or Firefox were not fully supported on Solaris (earlier, also SunOS).
When Netscape Navigator first came out eary/mid-90s I ran it on SunOS while working at a Sun shop, it always worked perfectly.
By the time the Netscape browser was open sourced in 1998 I was working at Sun and running it on Solaris, always worked perfectly. I attended the open sourcing party Netscape held in San Francisco, still have the autographed CD with the very first open source release source code. Netscape paid for buses from Silicon Valley to SF for people to attend the party. Fun times!!
In 1999 the Sun|Netscape alliance happened, AOL took the consumer software part including the browser and Sun continued the server product development under iPlanet brand. For a while I worked in the Netscape campus that year, and I continued working on iPlanet servers for years after that. Since the browser code had been open sourced, development continued outside AOL becoming Mozilla and later Firefox. Always first class on Solaris.
Firefox branding happened much later (wikipedia says 2004). Still working perfectly on Solaris. Only browser I ever ran, always on Solaris, until the bitter end (oracle lawnmower in 2010).
So yes I can confidently say it always ran perfectly on Solaris (SunOS in early years), having been there through all this and have fond memories of it all.
Dell puts a fair amount of engineering into their servers (as do other main brands like HPE and Lenovo) so it's unfortunate they've lost their roots from the old mail order sales company.
If someone else is paying I'd prefer one of these big OEMs for established firmware lifecycle, spare parts and long gray market availability, shock (shipping) and thermodynamics engineering. If I'm paying, Asus or MiTAC (Tyan) are good enough.
I was fortunate enough to work with a fair bit of sun gear (3/260, 4/670, enterprise 250/450 and even some big iron 6500s) back in the day.
These days, I've got several Dell 5820 style workstations and I'm pretty sure someone who interned at sun in the 1990s is now running dell's workstation division. The medium sized dell deskside towers have nearly identical vibes as those old workstations, and are a pleasure to work with.
> a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps.
True but Apple is a consumer company that makes consumer products. Sun lost all interest in that already by the early 1990s. They were happy to just be standard unix and didn't do anything to be a real consumer company. They talked a lot about competing with Microsoft but didn't actually.
They talked about buying Apple, and they could have, but the CEO basically admitted they had no clue what so ever on what to do with Apple.
They had no vision or concept of what being a consumer company would even be like. Even in the 80s they were focused on engineers and costumers like that, never end costumers.
> Dell's business is incredibly easy to replicate
Your sentence is a tacit admission that you don't have a very deep understanding of logistics and integration and what it has taken for Dell to build the deep supply chain they have. Yes, it's a commodity system; that's the point; but it's still leagues better than a Supermicro, right? Think about the difference there and why people still shell out for a Dell instead of a Supermicro or Exxact or plain whitebox hardware. There's a lot to a solid Dell server that you might not realize, from disk controllers to iDRAC....
>but it's still leagues better than a Supermicro, right?
We didn't think so.
I mean, if you have no knowledgable people, maybe, but for about 10 years we've found it a better use of time & treasure to buy generic servers and consumer laptops, and just have spares. We found Dell's support so costly and so ineffective that just buying extras turned out to be a better move.
Dell is at a sweet spot for many organizations where you can get hardware support from dell, or not.
You can (with dell) just buy used junk and use that, and you can still access their support library for firmware updates.
I did a lot of work with storage with dell stuff and I found it far simpler to "outsource" the storage integration to dell than to do it myself -- they make sure that all "2tb disks" are the same (exact!) size, they all use the same mechanism for firmware updates, etc.
A much larger org could have saved some money doing that integration and testing internally; a much smaller organization could save money just buying stuff from wherever and not worrying.
I personally haven't used dell support in over a decade, but I have found that their "look up the serial number" web site has been invaluable; I've found the fact that they publish firmware for all their stuff and let anyone install it valuable; the huge secondary market for dell is helpful, etc. And, if you care, you can even give them more money to directly support you, instead of just doing it yourself.
HPE, on the other hand, locks their stuff down super hard; I assume there are reasons to go with HPE, but I'd rather get clocked on my superdome with an HPUXy stick than ever touch that stuff again.
>I personally haven't used dell support in over a decade,
We used to buy the top-tier support plans for our laptops and servers, and we found they just consistently could NOT meet their obligations. Laptops stayed broken and nonfunctional for weeks and weeks.
> Difference is Sun was providing a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps.
Can you get an x86_64 CPU from someone other than Intel or AMD? x86 is much more proprietary than SPARC ever was.
Sun used the non-proprietary Open Firmware (IEEE 1275) for booting (also used by Apple with PowerPC), and SBus (IEEE 1496) for cards before moving to PCI. SCSI and Ethernet/IP were there since forever as well.
The "proprietary" label on Sun, at least when it came to hardware, was always a mystery to me.
Sun used a lot of open parts, but they had absolute control over the platform. Everything in your solution came from Sun or a Sun partner. Fujitsu doing weird stuff with Japanese mainframes was an interesting fact but irrelevant to 99% of Sun's user base.
Intel/AMD combined with EFI or IBM-compatible BIOS? You can get that from anybody. An HP server is basically interchangeable with a Dell.
> SPARC has been licensed to several manufacturers, including Atmel, Bipolar Integrated Technology, Cypress Semiconductor, Fujitsu, Matsushita and Texas Instruments.
Fujitsu was selling Solaris-compatible systems (as were many others). Linux and BSDs also ran on them.
There were a number of x86 makers up until the 1990s or so, but who is left of them? Can you still license x86(_x64) to fab your own CPUs? You can with SPARC:
"Many others" is stretching the truth a bit. There were maybe 4 or 5 Sparc clone vendors, ever. The one I remember offhand is Solbourne: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solbourne_Computer" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solbourne_Computer
Sadly, they left the Sparc clone business before they could even support Solaris! They stopped at SunOS 4.1.
It wasn't just the chip, it was the whole ecosystem.
Could an every day consumer buy a Sparc motherboard, chip, and build their own system? No. There may have been one or two vendors that did that late in the 90's, but they didn't stick around.
You kind of proved my point: that's an embedded platform. No consumer is going to be running it. The last link indicates "VxWorks, PikeOS, and RTEMS operating systems available."
It appears there is a Linux kernel port: <a href="https://www.gaisler.com/products/linux-for-leon" rel="nofollow">https://www.gaisler.com/products/linux-for-leon
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you can load a Linux distro on there. You have a couple other problems: there's no ethernet or wifi, and you only have 512 megs of RAM.
> You kind of proved my point: that's an embedded platform. No consumer is going to be running it. The last link indicates "VxWorks, PikeOS, and RTEMS operating systems available."
"Consumers" can be running it just as much as "consumers" could be running Raspberry Pis, which could also be considered 'embedded' by some. SPARC is no less (or more) proprietary than ARM: you can license the ISA, fab a CPU, and sell some kind of hardware stack.
Do you think it would be more or less difficult to get a license from Intel/AMD for x86(_X64) than ARM and/or SPARC so you could fab your own chips?
So you don't think the complete lack of connectivity (video, networking, and storage) is going to be a problem for a normal person? There is absolutely no comparison with a Raspberry Pi. It has all those things and great software support. That Sparc platform is for a satellite!
But yes, you are correct, it's much easier to get a SPARC license.
Yes you could do this, from Sun Microelectronics back in the 1990's.
We purchased an Ultra-10 motherboard with 250 MHz Ultrasparc II in 1998/1999, fitted it out with compatible third party SVGA, Ethernet and SCSI adapters and ran Solaris on it. Was our production LDAP, Mail and database server for a small ISP for many years.
I later worked for a systems builder that built and sold Sparc/Ultrasparc systems for government (eg. Hong Kong Mass Transit). We were the only vendor in the Southern Hemisphere doing it. So it wasn't common. But yes you could order parts from Sun Microelectronics and build your own systems, and it became easier use certain standard PC compatible parts once they standardised on PCI. We had shelves full of the older incompatible MBus compatible systems and boards as well.
That is what made Sun, Digital, and SGI loss hurt even more. Dell is nothing in comparison, just a bargain box maker with no ambitions beyond. Losing those other companies hurt because when you control the hardware and the operating system software, you potentially can build anything.
Look no further than Apple computer. I must admit, back in the day I wanted a Next computer or an SGI computer because of the graphics and sound capability, but the only thing I could afford at the time was an Amiga computer later on, I had to settle for a work related Microsoft computer using AutoCAD, Revit, Navis and a few other graphics programs.
I went to their server site and clicked “shop now.”
I picked a PowerEdge R360. It has the price right here at $5k and a big green “Add to Cart” button along with an incredibly long list of customization options just like I was buying a laptop or desktop. It doesn’t seem like I have to contact anyone to get an order in.
It can be that easy if you want a small number of servers and are willing to pay the outrageous sticker price. In reality, nobody pays $5k for that R360. You either play their game and deal with their insane sales team to get a big discount or you buy from a partner instead of Dell directly. We did the latter and it was just as easy as ordering from Dell online but also way cheaper.
Dell’s innovation to the computer industry was build to order, selling computers direct, and later online in short streamlining the buying process. IBM, Sun, Digital, and SGI we’re at a whole different level, and they were at that level because of their capabilities.
They could’ve have potentially changed the game (like Apple) and competed against Microsoft and Intel, but they were fixated on selling basically to the corporate level which was in hindsight not a good decision long-term, and eventually it cost them all, their loss was immeasurable because of the hardware and more importantly operating system capabilities they had in house.
> At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you
This is how license compliance shakedowns work. Make sure your DRM is more flexible than theicensing terms, find an overage and see what you can get the customer to agree to.
I have seen senior Oracle sales reps deliberately misreading their license doc to inflate what is owed.
DELL was an innovator in this "incomparable pricing" model for normal consumers.
You'd price out a machine and then go look at comparable machines (difficult) from other vendors, then the next day your machine wouldn't be "the" configuration anymore. Instead there'd be half the ram and double the harddrive space for an extra $50, and if you swapped back to what it had been yesterday it'd cost you an extra $200.
IIRC they won business awards for this.
Where's Cartman when you need a vigorous "SHENANNIGANS!!!!"?
We sold web traffic analysis software to Dell Europe, around 1998 or so. They never kept their data more than a week. As the traffic and purchase behaviour they were analysing in the store changed so much every week they said (if I remember correctly) it didn’t make any sense to compare the data over time. I took from that that what they sold every week changed all the time. Of course, data storage and processing was then not as cheap as it is today, so maybe there was more to it.
And that is the "thing". Every failed mini company had the same exact issue, seems customers had to beg and/or go through hell to purchase equipment. Never mind that the hardware was more expensive than what you cold buy from companies like Dell.
IBM is not much better than what I hear, but somehow they keep surviving. Probably because of their mainframe business.
> IBM is not much better than what I hear, but somehow they keep surviving. Probably because of their mainframe business.
Imagine every bank you know going through tech modernization and maybe 70% of those are now using Red Hat OpenShift.
They own Red Hat (OpenShift kubernetes, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ansible Automation Platform) AND HashiCorp (Terraform, Nomad, Consul, Packer, Vault, etc.) now, on top of their previous mainframe, services gigs, global financing arm, and calling everything they sell "watson".
Sun commercial sales reps, at least in Europe, were astoundingly slimy.
I had a colleague where almost his whole job consisted of beating them in sheer sliminess, and at this he was good. I don't think we ever paid 30% of the prices they'd start at, but the process of achieving this was disgusting, and there was still the sense everyone was being screwed.
Yeah that fits. I was in London (though not the City) and it was definitely that sort of scene.
Thinking about it, we moved to Dell as part of the run up to IPO, and I suspect had we not done so Sun would have been much harder to deal with afterwards.
What I recall from that time is Sun were very happy they'd sold a huge pile of servers to be the core of Interlink, and a whole load of people went off to work on that.
Yeah, and it wasn't just the "call for pricing" game, it was having to deal with monthly "touching base" calls which were mostly an opportunity to push corporate hospitality and other not-quite-inducements.
Whereas Dell just gave us a flat 30% discount on list pricing, and were clear in advance about what level of annual spend would trigger an increase to 35%. We'd order online and our sales rep would phone a few hours later to confirm. Other than that, they'd initiate contact maybe once a year when Dell refreshed their server or storage product lines and would offer to either send some bumpf or arrange for some demo kit.
Dealing with them was so much less hassle all round, you never got covered in slime, and you never felt like they were on the verge of offering you bribes.
Uh, as in "excessive paperwork", like brochures/leaflets [1] about the new products? Not a native speaker, had a parse error I'm just trying to resolve ...
Yep, a mix of glossy brochures and things like white papers from Intel about their latest Xeon 3 architecture or whatever. They tended to lie about on someone's desk for 6 months before being chucked out...
(and I'd had no idea about the "bum fodder" derivation, so thanks!)
Yeah, and then Dell more-or-less turned into that. Companies get big, customers and sales get more complicated, process gets more calcified.
SUNW would probably still be around if the whole x86 commodity pizza box revolution hadn't happened OR if they had pivoted away from SPARC earlier and went heavily into x86. Example: buying from IBM doesn't sound too different from buying from Sun, but they're still around because mainframes will be around until the Earth implodes (probably).
(I think that their channel/partner programs along with their professional services org are big reasons why Dell is still a key player in the datacenter space. You can buy Dell direct, and the sales process is still "good" as far as enterprise sales goes, but bigger players usually get their Dell kit through distributors/vendors with Dell professional services handling architecture, build-out, enablement, etc. I'm not sure how much energy SUNW invested in this, as they were before my time, but this combo is a major revenue driver for them.)
Also thanks to virtualization being originally invented in mainframes, and the OS design done by IBM (and Unisys as well), they get to run the old workloads on modern hardware, and also support various UNIX flavours.
You can even run most cool Python, Go, Java, Rust, PHP among others, on systems like z/OS.
We have a couple mainframes at work, had an incident last year when someone forgot to apply a new license to one. p1, no payments happening.
I was kinda stunned; there’s a level of balls involved in selling an x millions machine and having it fail closed that I’m sort of impressed by but also utterly appalled they’d treat their big customers like that..
I mean surely to fuck it could have been an automated reminder email to the mothership and not just: sorry folks no banking for you today.
IIRC (never got to physically play with that part) it's configurable - when you install licensing. And you can get quite expedited support/unlocks/etc.
I had a similar experience earlier this year. Cheaper situation than a mainframe, but... why do some companies make it hard for them to take my money? I'm already a customer ffs.
The rise of the Internet made channel sales handoffs a weak point in the business model. I bet this missed sale went to a reseller who didn't respond and Sun didn't have any controls or visibility on that failure.
Dealing with VARs was always the worst part of dealing with Sun (and certain other companies). Though a great many old-school CTOs I worked under loved the schmoozing, it meant engineering decisions were always fed through the management meat grinder and the risks of "added value" changes to orders were always there.
Yeah it was so much more accessible to play around with configs and pricing and then all you needed was a credit card.
Even now I think enterprise companies should be more open about what's possible and what the price and delivery date would be without having to talk/chat/email anybody. Even for something like a Juniper $100k+ device it would be kind of cool to configure it.
I’ve had that experience with dell consistently over the last 6+ years. While with other vendors I can do everything over email from start to finish, Dell insists on meetings, follow-ups on topics that I said I am not interested in talking about, services that I do not need, meetings with teams I am not interested in meeting, reps that straight up skip meetings, so I have to console a junior rep that got stuck in a meeting that is above their pay grade. Different reps same slimy bs.
I needed to add a bunch of capacity running Sun/Solaris back in the late-90s. Same thing: pointless meetings with sales reps without clarity in pricing. Finally, I found the gear we were looking for on eBay, bought it, drove over and picked it up in my Ford Explorer, and had it up-and-running in one day. To my surprise, people in my company were PO'ed. But I had air cover because the CEO found out and loved it.
In a time frame like 1999 to 2002, much more broadly than that, just the increasing gap in cost vs what you would get between buying any hardware+OS package from a legacy Unix-like vendor (Sun, DEC, SGI) and doing your own thing on a FreeBSD, OpenBSD or Linux on x86 hardware.
Dell was obviously a top choice, but by 2000 or so, Linux or FreeBSD had become good enough that you could do exactly the same thing for a fraction of the cost and run it on x86 hardware you had purchased from either Dell or one of the top 5 or 6 Dell-competitors.
As compared to, as you say, sitting through sales meetings, price quotes, revisions, a long slow and arduous process to arrive at a figure where you come to a conclusion "yeah you can spend $60,000 on these Sun servers or we can buy $20,000 of x86 servers and get creative with our own software stack to do the same thing in house".
At a certain point 1U and 2U server hardware got fast enough on boring standard x86 single or dual socket motherboards from Taiwan, in the era of like the 1.2 GHz Pentium 3 with 512KB cache, that the performance was pretty damn good and the machine cost a fraction of what the equivalent Sun or SGI rackmount machine would cost. This is in the era before a multi core x86 CPU existed. And you could be sure that its BIOS and motherboard were already OK for use with a current Linux kernel, we're talking about motherboards from Supermicro, Tyan, intel whitebox reference server boards, etc.
It's easier to see in hindsight but servers have eaten a lot of macro economic headwinds.
1999 and 2002 correspond roughly to telecom and dotcom bubbles popping. So open source operating systems were also pulled up into these positions through a lot of work and by the early 2000s it was kind of obvious this was the way forward.
2008 financial crisis really knocked the high end (RISC/UNIX/Itanium) and started the long migration to renting vs owning. In hindsight it's remarkable how much money used to just be there in the economy of all this. But I guess it still is, considering how expensive public cloud is.
> But I guess it still is, considering how expensive public cloud is.
It's not like there's less servers being sold, they're just bespoke designs from companies like the big Taiwanese ODMs that go straight into hyperscaler facilities, and we don't get to see public marketing websites and product info about them. The open compute platform stuff that's been publicly shown is like the tip of an iceberg.
> The open compute platform stuff that's been publicly shown is like the tip of an iceberg.
I find it a real shame it's not easier to get OCP hardware for our homelabs. Would be so much easier to operate, upgrade, and so on. And where would you even get decommissioned OCP gear?
Some of the ethernet switching top of rack 1U stuff used to show up on ebay. I think large other portions of it go into an industrial shredder/recycling process.
OCP was designed by vendors, including ones that didn't want to get sunsetted. It was never going to be practical for homeless until EOL hardware started to filter down.
I'm referencing the premium you pay to get some paltry VM in a public cloud with bizarre storage and networking that primarily make sense for the market maker versus the actual cost of the hardware. There are ways to make cloud economics work as a user, but only where staffing costs would dwarf spend (i.e. small businesses) and I've never seen them in practice.
People would sneer that you were using shoddy free software, but then the guys who bought the expensive vendor solution would discover that the paid software was also of poor quality and unlike the free version you didn't get the source so your only option for getting something fixed was to file a bug report and pray, despite spending 6 figures on a support contract.
If you click through to the anecdote[0] mentioned in the article, the problem was not with having to contact a sales rep. In fact the startup wanted a sales rep. Sun specifically asked them to use the website:
> More than once though, the Sun people did suggest I just buy the servers off the web site.
Dell was just the only one to callback.
I don't doubt your experience but that was at the height of Sun's business, not it's nadir as this article is about.
One of the first "expert systems" was one that helped you spec your DEC computer. It was easy to order a VAX that was missing necessary hardware (or had incompatible hardware).
Love to hear stories and real-world experience like this shared! I feel us tech folks should start Facebook groups similar to those "Old Photos from <city I grew up in>", except photos and stories from tech :)
The ultimate value of Sun, Digital, or even SGI was the fact that they were both hardware and operating system software companies. When they went down, it was a big blow to the American computer tech industry.
coreyh14444 · · focus · HN ↗
sschueller · · focus · HN ↗
At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you. You push back and the price drops, I don't want to negotiate.
bombcar · · focus · HN ↗
ako · · focus · HN ↗
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
mikestorrent · · focus · HN ↗
bombcar · · focus · HN ↗
Eventually they’ll come back and have some impressive sounding exec reply saying they need 20% less to get it in the budget.
pestatije · · focus · HN ↗
thevillagechief · · focus · HN ↗
ganoushoreilly · · focus · HN ↗
I prefer the "This is the price" model and just make it consistent. I can't wait until AI helps us remove multiple layers of middle men across Sales in general.
Just let me buy it and move on.
dabraham1248 · · focus · HN ↗
Based on how things are moving, I think it's more likely that AI will _replace_ the layers of middle men (with layers of "middle AI"), then that those layers will be _removed_.
warkdarrior · · focus · HN ↗
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
fooker · · focus · HN ↗
Monkey's paw - now you have to deal with a layer of bots.
kjs3 · · focus · HN ↗
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
ganoushoreilly · · focus · HN ↗
We need more Tesla style this is the price for all.. less dealership style with prices varying by some ones mood. As a buyer with a relationship, I should not be able to just buy through the website cheaper than your quote (for the exact item line by line). That's the scenario I had multiple times. Hell with the GB10's came out I bought a couple and the price through our Rep was 6k a piece no extras. We paid the list price $4k and were even able to use a discount coupon due to holidays that our rep wouldn't take. That's the BS Dell has been doing.
nradov · · focus · HN ↗
The key thing is being transparent with customers on price, availability, and delivery schedules. In the short term server vendors can use tricks and personal relationships to extract higher profit margins but eventually the senior executives at major customers figure out what's happening and start looking for other options.
bigstrat2003 · · focus · HN ↗
I don't blame them in the sense that I wish for them to be imprisoned or anything. But I wouldn't do business with them, either. I want business partners whom I can count on, not ones who will stop returning my calls as soon as a more lucrative opportunity arises.
dylan604 · · focus · HN ↗
This is precisely the role of the sales person for something like a service, but for a physical product it is pretty egregious. There is no greater sin than leaving money on the table. There's an old story about someone offering a quote that was apparently pretty low based on reaction, so they quickly add "that was for my assistant" to give way for pushing the number higher.
hosteur · · focus · HN ↗
I don’t understand what this means? I understand that they bumped the price. But I du not understand what is meant by it being for the assistant? Care to explain?
Huppie · · focus · HN ↗
Electrician: "Okay, so my services start at $100/hr"
<nobody bats an eye>
Electrician: "... for when my assistant can handle things."
Replace Electrician by whatever skilled professional you prefer.
dylan604 · · focus · HN ↗
_puk · · focus · HN ↗
You price it at what you think works. There is no push back, so you make room to push the price higher.
You were happy to do it at the original price.
dylan604 · · focus · HN ↗
gorjusborg · · focus · HN ↗
The 'that was for my assistant' is just something they say to explain away the earlier quoted price. They are pretending that what they said wasn't the quote for this conversation, it was for another, different conversation, between the salesman and their assistant. This only works when the assistant is not in the call.
chrisweekly · · focus · HN ↗
dcrazy · · focus · HN ↗
yellowstuff · · focus · HN ↗
marssaxman · · focus · HN ↗
jandrese · · focus · HN ↗
This is why when I go to the price page for a product and seeing "contact our sales team for a quote" I look for an alternative.
Dell does a soft version of this by setting uncompetitive prices on the website and making you call to get the real price, although ironically that usually just means we go with a different company that simply posts a competitive price.
PaulHoule · · focus · HN ↗
cherryteastain · · focus · HN ↗
PaulHoule · · focus · HN ↗
Sure they had an in house chip development ARM team right at the time when RISC economics looked good but CPU architecture had to work harder and harder to beat the memory wall and SPARC was not competitive by 2005 and “Hail Mary” projects like CoolThreads were difficult and expensive but did not deliver for customers.
Hypothetically customers could benefit from that proprietary stuff but they benefit even more from rapid progress is competitive, commodity markets.
When I was working at the library circa 2005 we were thinking about replacing all the Windows computers that patrons used to access the online catalog (and other services) with a web browser with Sun Rays, we probably would have bought a few hundred of them and we would have bought some SPARC servers to back them up.
We could have gotten Netscape to run under Solaris but after a week of effort I wasn't able to get Mozilla to build, so no modern web browser. So no Sun Rays. No servers. DTrace and ZFS were great innovations but without the magic of "can run the software you need to run" they are just Blub. Had Sun done the work to get Mozilla running on their machines and forgotten about DTrace and ZFS people might still be using Solaris... but instead DTrace and ZFS found an audience by supporting... the commodity OS!
(arguably at that time supporting a web browser was the #1, #2 and all the way through #99 task that the Solaris team should have been working on at that time and everything else from Java to Tcl to ZFS was a dangerous distraction... and that's how companies in a position like Sun die)
jasonfarnon · · focus · HN ↗
why were you thinking of going Sun, as late as 2005? just easier to lock down, like kiosks?
PaulHoule · · focus · HN ↗
jjav · · focus · HN ↗
> I wasn't able to get Mozilla to build
You must be misremembering something. Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox had always tier one support on Solaris. You had nothing to build, just download and run, with perfect compatibility.
I only ever ran Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox browser (and still today in 2026). My desktops and servers were all Solaris from mid-90s to 2012 or so. Never a hiccup running the Netscape family browsers (and servers too).
PaulHoule · · focus · HN ↗
They probably had an official Solaris build of Mozilla later on but if one had been available at that point in time I would have installed it on the SPARC machine I had under my desk. The ship had sailed in terms of the organization's capital planning.
If you were happy running Netscape later than I was you might have felt supported.
icedchai · · focus · HN ↗
jjav · · focus · HN ↗
When Netscape Navigator first came out eary/mid-90s I ran it on SunOS while working at a Sun shop, it always worked perfectly.
By the time the Netscape browser was open sourced in 1998 I was working at Sun and running it on Solaris, always worked perfectly. I attended the open sourcing party Netscape held in San Francisco, still have the autographed CD with the very first open source release source code. Netscape paid for buses from Silicon Valley to SF for people to attend the party. Fun times!!
In 1999 the Sun|Netscape alliance happened, AOL took the consumer software part including the browser and Sun continued the server product development under iPlanet brand. For a while I worked in the Netscape campus that year, and I continued working on iPlanet servers for years after that. Since the browser code had been open sourced, development continued outside AOL becoming Mozilla and later Firefox. Always first class on Solaris.
Firefox branding happened much later (wikipedia says 2004). Still working perfectly on Solaris. Only browser I ever ran, always on Solaris, until the bitter end (oracle lawnmower in 2010).
So yes I can confidently say it always ran perfectly on Solaris (SunOS in early years), having been there through all this and have fond memories of it all.
kev009 · · focus · HN ↗
If someone else is paying I'd prefer one of these big OEMs for established firmware lifecycle, spare parts and long gray market availability, shock (shipping) and thermodynamics engineering. If I'm paying, Asus or MiTAC (Tyan) are good enough.
cduzz · · focus · HN ↗
These days, I've got several Dell 5820 style workstations and I'm pretty sure someone who interned at sun in the 1990s is now running dell's workstation division. The medium sized dell deskside towers have nearly identical vibes as those old workstations, and are a pleasure to work with.
gofreddygo · · focus · HN ↗
this is apple today.
panick21_ · · focus · HN ↗
They talked about buying Apple, and they could have, but the CEO basically admitted they had no clue what so ever on what to do with Apple.
They had no vision or concept of what being a consumer company would even be like. Even in the 80s they were focused on engineers and costumers like that, never end costumers.
mikestorrent · · focus · HN ↗
Your sentence is a tacit admission that you don't have a very deep understanding of logistics and integration and what it has taken for Dell to build the deep supply chain they have. Yes, it's a commodity system; that's the point; but it's still leagues better than a Supermicro, right? Think about the difference there and why people still shell out for a Dell instead of a Supermicro or Exxact or plain whitebox hardware. There's a lot to a solid Dell server that you might not realize, from disk controllers to iDRAC....
ubermonkey · · focus · HN ↗
We didn't think so.
I mean, if you have no knowledgable people, maybe, but for about 10 years we've found it a better use of time & treasure to buy generic servers and consumer laptops, and just have spares. We found Dell's support so costly and so ineffective that just buying extras turned out to be a better move.
cduzz · · focus · HN ↗
Dell is at a sweet spot for many organizations where you can get hardware support from dell, or not.
You can (with dell) just buy used junk and use that, and you can still access their support library for firmware updates.
I did a lot of work with storage with dell stuff and I found it far simpler to "outsource" the storage integration to dell than to do it myself -- they make sure that all "2tb disks" are the same (exact!) size, they all use the same mechanism for firmware updates, etc.
A much larger org could have saved some money doing that integration and testing internally; a much smaller organization could save money just buying stuff from wherever and not worrying.
I personally haven't used dell support in over a decade, but I have found that their "look up the serial number" web site has been invaluable; I've found the fact that they publish firmware for all their stuff and let anyone install it valuable; the huge secondary market for dell is helpful, etc. And, if you care, you can even give them more money to directly support you, instead of just doing it yourself.
HPE, on the other hand, locks their stuff down super hard; I assume there are reasons to go with HPE, but I'd rather get clocked on my superdome with an HPUXy stick than ever touch that stuff again.
ubermonkey · · focus · HN ↗
We used to buy the top-tier support plans for our laptops and servers, and we found they just consistently could NOT meet their obligations. Laptops stayed broken and nonfunctional for weeks and weeks.
They're awful.
throw0101a · · focus · HN ↗
SPARC was not proprietary, buy fully licensable:
* <a href="https://sparc.org" rel="nofollow">https://sparc.org
Fujitsu sold their own SPARC servers for many years with their own CPUs, and many third-parties put Fujitsu SPARC CPUs into (e.g.) laptops:
* <a href="https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coolest-90s-laptop/" rel="nofollow">https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coo...
Can you get an x86_64 CPU from someone other than Intel or AMD? x86 is much more proprietary than SPARC ever was.
Sun used the non-proprietary Open Firmware (IEEE 1275) for booting (also used by Apple with PowerPC), and SBus (IEEE 1496) for cards before moving to PCI. SCSI and Ethernet/IP were there since forever as well.
The "proprietary" label on Sun, at least when it came to hardware, was always a mystery to me.
spauldo · · focus · HN ↗
Sun used a lot of open parts, but they had absolute control over the platform. Everything in your solution came from Sun or a Sun partner. Fujitsu doing weird stuff with Japanese mainframes was an interesting fact but irrelevant to 99% of Sun's user base.
Intel/AMD combined with EFI or IBM-compatible BIOS? You can get that from anybody. An HP server is basically interchangeable with a Dell.
Sun was proprietary in the same way Apple is.
throw0101a · · focus · HN ↗
* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC
Fujitsu was selling Solaris-compatible systems (as were many others). Linux and BSDs also ran on them.
There were a number of x86 makers up until the 1990s or so, but who is left of them? Can you still license x86(_x64) to fab your own CPUs? You can with SPARC:
* <a href="https://www.gaisler.com/products/gr765" rel="nofollow">https://www.gaisler.com/products/gr765
icedchai · · focus · HN ↗
Sadly, they left the Sparc clone business before they could even support Solaris! They stopped at SunOS 4.1.
icedchai · · focus · HN ↗
Could an every day consumer buy a Sparc motherboard, chip, and build their own system? No. There may have been one or two vendors that did that late in the 90's, but they didn't stick around.
throw0101a · · focus · HN ↗
Yes:
* <a href="https://www.gaisler.com/products/gr-sbc-gr740" rel="nofollow">https://www.gaisler.com/products/gr-sbc-gr740
icedchai · · focus · HN ↗
It appears there is a Linux kernel port: <a href="https://www.gaisler.com/products/linux-for-leon" rel="nofollow">https://www.gaisler.com/products/linux-for-leon
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you can load a Linux distro on there. You have a couple other problems: there's no ethernet or wifi, and you only have 512 megs of RAM.
throw0101a · · focus · HN ↗
"Consumers" can be running it just as much as "consumers" could be running Raspberry Pis, which could also be considered 'embedded' by some. SPARC is no less (or more) proprietary than ARM: you can license the ISA, fab a CPU, and sell some kind of hardware stack.
Do you think it would be more or less difficult to get a license from Intel/AMD for x86(_X64) than ARM and/or SPARC so you could fab your own chips?
icedchai · · focus · HN ↗
But yes, you are correct, it's much easier to get a SPARC license.
toast0 · · focus · HN ↗
Not someone looking for rad hardened boards with flight qualified bootloaders...
colejohnson66 · · focus · HN ↗
nineteen999 · · focus · HN ↗
I later worked for a systems builder that built and sold Sparc/Ultrasparc systems for government (eg. Hong Kong Mass Transit). We were the only vendor in the Southern Hemisphere doing it. So it wasn't common. But yes you could order parts from Sun Microelectronics and build your own systems, and it became easier use certain standard PC compatible parts once they standardised on PCI. We had shelves full of the older incompatible MBus compatible systems and boards as well.
rjsw · · focus · HN ↗
Danox · · focus · HN ↗
Look no further than Apple computer. I must admit, back in the day I wanted a Next computer or an SGI computer because of the graphics and sound capability, but the only thing I could afford at the time was an Amiga computer later on, I had to settle for a work related Microsoft computer using AutoCAD, Revit, Navis and a few other graphics programs.
Mistletoe · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://companiesmarketcap.com/sun-microsystems/stock-price-history/" rel="nofollow">https://companiesmarketcap.com/sun-microsystems/stock-price-...
Grombobulous · · focus · HN ↗
I went to their server site and clicked “shop now.”
I picked a PowerEdge R360. It has the price right here at $5k and a big green “Add to Cart” button along with an incredibly long list of customization options just like I was buying a laptop or desktop. It doesn’t seem like I have to contact anyone to get an order in.
It says I can get it as soon as October 2.
muvlon · · focus · HN ↗
bluegatty · · focus · HN ↗
Danox · · focus · HN ↗
They could’ve have potentially changed the game (like Apple) and competed against Microsoft and Intel, but they were fixated on selling basically to the corporate level which was in hindsight not a good decision long-term, and eventually it cost them all, their loss was immeasurable because of the hardware and more importantly operating system capabilities they had in house.
RajT88 · · focus · HN ↗
This is how license compliance shakedowns work. Make sure your DRM is more flexible than theicensing terms, find an overage and see what you can get the customer to agree to.
I have seen senior Oracle sales reps deliberately misreading their license doc to inflate what is owed.
aleph_minus_one · · focus · HN ↗
"I guess I can't pay so much because such a huge fraction of the contract volume goes to my lawyer."
inanutshellus · · focus · HN ↗
You'd price out a machine and then go look at comparable machines (difficult) from other vendors, then the next day your machine wouldn't be "the" configuration anymore. Instead there'd be half the ram and double the harddrive space for an extra $50, and if you swapped back to what it had been yesterday it'd cost you an extra $200.
IIRC they won business awards for this.
Where's Cartman when you need a vigorous "SHENANNIGANS!!!!"?
euroderf · · focus · HN ↗
bjelkeman-again · · focus · HN ↗
fhn · · focus · HN ↗
inanutshellus · · focus · HN ↗
walrus01 · · focus · HN ↗
I think this would be expected from a company that has acquired and absorbed EMC and Perot.
jmclnx · · focus · HN ↗
IBM is not much better than what I hear, but somehow they keep surviving. Probably because of their mainframe business.
bch · · focus · HN ↗
[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#2010s%E2%80%93present" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#2010s%E2%80%93present
[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture
esseph · · focus · HN ↗
esseph · · focus · HN ↗
Imagine every bank you know going through tech modernization and maybe 70% of those are now using Red Hat OpenShift.
They own Red Hat (OpenShift kubernetes, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ansible Automation Platform) AND HashiCorp (Terraform, Nomad, Consul, Packer, Vault, etc.) now, on top of their previous mainframe, services gigs, global financing arm, and calling everything they sell "watson".
jhallenworld · · focus · HN ↗
fidotron · · focus · HN ↗
I had a colleague where almost his whole job consisted of beating them in sheer sliminess, and at this he was good. I don't think we ever paid 30% of the prices they'd start at, but the process of achieving this was disgusting, and there was still the sense everyone was being screwed.
So when we could move to Dell we did.
arethuza · · focus · HN ↗
fidotron · · focus · HN ↗
Thinking about it, we moved to Dell as part of the run up to IPO, and I suspect had we not done so Sun would have been much harder to deal with afterwards.
What I recall from that time is Sun were very happy they'd sold a huge pile of servers to be the core of Interlink, and a whole load of people went off to work on that.
roryirvine · · focus · HN ↗
Whereas Dell just gave us a flat 30% discount on list pricing, and were clear in advance about what level of annual spend would trigger an increase to 35%. We'd order online and our sales rep would phone a few hours later to confirm. Other than that, they'd initiate contact maybe once a year when Dell refreshed their server or storage product lines and would offer to either send some bumpf or arrange for some demo kit.
Dealing with them was so much less hassle all round, you never got covered in slime, and you never felt like they were on the verge of offering you bribes.
unwind · · focus · HN ↗
Uh, as in "excessive paperwork", like brochures/leaflets [1] about the new products? Not a native speaker, had a parse error I'm just trying to resolve ...
[1]: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/EnglishLearning/comments/1hlbxv7/comment/m3kyff2/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/EnglishLearning/comments/1hlbxv7/co...
roryirvine · · focus · HN ↗
(and I'd had no idea about the "bum fodder" derivation, so thanks!)
unwind · · focus · HN ↗
nunez · · focus · HN ↗
SUNW would probably still be around if the whole x86 commodity pizza box revolution hadn't happened OR if they had pivoted away from SPARC earlier and went heavily into x86. Example: buying from IBM doesn't sound too different from buying from Sun, but they're still around because mainframes will be around until the Earth implodes (probably).
(I think that their channel/partner programs along with their professional services org are big reasons why Dell is still a key player in the datacenter space. You can buy Dell direct, and the sales process is still "good" as far as enterprise sales goes, but bigger players usually get their Dell kit through distributors/vendors with Dell professional services handling architecture, build-out, enablement, etc. I'm not sure how much energy SUNW invested in this, as they were before my time, but this combo is a major revenue driver for them.)
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
You can even run most cool Python, Go, Java, Rust, PHP among others, on systems like z/OS.
cyberpunk · · focus · HN ↗
I was kinda stunned; there’s a level of balls involved in selling an x millions machine and having it fail closed that I’m sort of impressed by but also utterly appalled they’d treat their big customers like that..
I mean surely to fuck it could have been an automated reminder email to the mothership and not just: sorry folks no banking for you today.
p_l · · focus · HN ↗
zdragnar · · focus · HN ↗
gregw2 · · focus · HN ↗
The rise of the Internet made channel sales handoffs a weak point in the business model. I bet this missed sale went to a reseller who didn't respond and Sun didn't have any controls or visibility on that failure.
hylaride · · focus · HN ↗
AdamN · · focus · HN ↗
Even now I think enterprise companies should be more open about what's possible and what the price and delivery date would be without having to talk/chat/email anybody. Even for something like a Juniper $100k+ device it would be kind of cool to configure it.
proxysna · · focus · HN ↗
jimt1234 · · focus · HN ↗
walrus01 · · focus · HN ↗
In a time frame like 1999 to 2002, much more broadly than that, just the increasing gap in cost vs what you would get between buying any hardware+OS package from a legacy Unix-like vendor (Sun, DEC, SGI) and doing your own thing on a FreeBSD, OpenBSD or Linux on x86 hardware.
Dell was obviously a top choice, but by 2000 or so, Linux or FreeBSD had become good enough that you could do exactly the same thing for a fraction of the cost and run it on x86 hardware you had purchased from either Dell or one of the top 5 or 6 Dell-competitors.
As compared to, as you say, sitting through sales meetings, price quotes, revisions, a long slow and arduous process to arrive at a figure where you come to a conclusion "yeah you can spend $60,000 on these Sun servers or we can buy $20,000 of x86 servers and get creative with our own software stack to do the same thing in house".
At a certain point 1U and 2U server hardware got fast enough on boring standard x86 single or dual socket motherboards from Taiwan, in the era of like the 1.2 GHz Pentium 3 with 512KB cache, that the performance was pretty damn good and the machine cost a fraction of what the equivalent Sun or SGI rackmount machine would cost. This is in the era before a multi core x86 CPU existed. And you could be sure that its BIOS and motherboard were already OK for use with a current Linux kernel, we're talking about motherboards from Supermicro, Tyan, intel whitebox reference server boards, etc.
kev009 · · focus · HN ↗
1999 and 2002 correspond roughly to telecom and dotcom bubbles popping. So open source operating systems were also pulled up into these positions through a lot of work and by the early 2000s it was kind of obvious this was the way forward.
2008 financial crisis really knocked the high end (RISC/UNIX/Itanium) and started the long migration to renting vs owning. In hindsight it's remarkable how much money used to just be there in the economy of all this. But I guess it still is, considering how expensive public cloud is.
walrus01 · · focus · HN ↗
It's not like there's less servers being sold, they're just bespoke designs from companies like the big Taiwanese ODMs that go straight into hyperscaler facilities, and we don't get to see public marketing websites and product info about them. The open compute platform stuff that's been publicly shown is like the tip of an iceberg.
rbanffy · · focus · HN ↗
I find it a real shame it's not easier to get OCP hardware for our homelabs. Would be so much easier to operate, upgrade, and so on. And where would you even get decommissioned OCP gear?
walrus01 · · focus · HN ↗
rbanffy · · focus · HN ↗
This is just criminal. Reusing is much better than recycling.
dcrazy · · focus · HN ↗
rbanffy · · focus · HN ↗
hylaride · · focus · HN ↗
rbanffy · · focus · HN ↗
kev009 · · focus · HN ↗
jandrese · · focus · HN ↗
dmitrygr · · focus · HN ↗
schmichael · · focus · HN ↗
> More than once though, the Sun people did suggest I just buy the servers off the web site.
Dell was just the only one to callback.
I don't doubt your experience but that was at the height of Sun's business, not it's nadir as this article is about.
[0] - <a href="https://fullhoffman.com/2006/03/20/the-sun-doesnt-shine-on-me/" rel="nofollow">https://fullhoffman.com/2006/03/20/the-sun-doesnt-shine-on-m...
Tangurena2 · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcon" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcon
indymike · · focus · HN ↗
fhn · · focus · HN ↗
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Danox · · focus · HN ↗