The Sun model of beefy server, ultra-thin client worked incredibly well and presaged the widespread adoption of virtualisation that eventually led to cloud computing and containerised software. Unfortunately that model made it very easy to undercut their prices using commodity hardware; I managed a Solaris/Sun Ray network c.2004 and it was cheaper to switch to Linux/Intel and buy spare hardware to keep in a cupboard “just in case” than to keep the Sun network going through its support contract.
if a support contract is 70% of the cost of something, then for every 2 of something a spare is cheaper.
For Aruba I think it was 1:1; a support contract was the same price as the device itself over 2 years or something.
Support contracts never cover a "site" they always cover individual devices, so your cost scales with the amount you have... so I'm not sure I follow what you're saying..
Unless you mean to imply that you're replacing units more than once every 2 years, in which case of course you're right... but then I might consider going with another vendor entirely because that is a pretty terrible reliability record.
There are lots of different support contracts. Some of them really do cover the entire site. You seem to not realize the scale of a large data center. If every device lasts 5 years you are replacing 10 per day is not unheard of.
Support contracts never cover a "site" they always cover individual devices
Wrong. I've signed many support contracts that were negotiated basically to "one flat fee for everything we sell that you use, including future purchases[1]" for some period of time. Some people think that they 'optimize' contracts by pushing for "I just want a service contract only on the SKUs I have". That's not always a real optimization.
[1] Often, this includes a tacit "including things you are using that you didn't tell us about".
Interesting, I've literally never seen that (though obviously not doubting your experience) and I have (at one point) been in charge of 1% of web traffic..
I'm wondering if this is something uniquely american, because we don't seem to have much negotiating power in the UK/SE.
Sorta. Writing a 7- or 8-figure check certain gives one the leverage to negotiate. That said, if you're talking about US$250k DC switches, the vendor cares about each and every one. But if you're talking about 250 US$1k switches, you can talk about "let's make this easy on both of us...". Software licensing contracts are even more malleable. Having a really ballbusting purchasing and contracts team is fun.
Nobody knows how the future will be. There are lots of options. There are self hostable open models today - they are not as good, but some report they are good enough. Right now I don't have the hardware to try them (I could - if I'm willing to accept a small number of tokens per minute - useful means more tokens per second as I can get in an hour). However I expect in a few years I'll be able buy consumer hardware with good enough GPUs (or perhaps an AI chip???). Will anyone other than a few hobbyists buy them? time will tell.
I think prices will go down not up eventually and everybody will have access to it in abundance. That might make most current AI companies go down of course.
And space launches. The Big Names will lose a ton of money and disappear as the tech commoditises.
The moat is Being Able To Do Things No One Else Can and as both hardware and software commoditise that moat disappears.
Open LLMs are already only a few months behind the frontier models and as soon as someone works out that accessible and cheap domain-specific custom training has the potential to be a gamechanger the Big Names will die.
Math puzzles only get you so far.
LLMs are in their Big Compute phase, and it's only a matter of time before that ends - because the intelligence of the frontier models isn't increasing fast enough and providing big enough benefits to make the models more valuable than cheaper, smaller competition.
i mean, imagine if your a business and suddenly you had to expense > $200 a month for every employee just to run a compiler, or you could just buy a computer and use it for everything else and that as well…
i think llms will be the same.
n=1 but at $work they are forcing us off enterprise and on to personal claude max that caps at $200 and people are like “you don’t need the top end models anyways just use the cheaper one for coding”, which begs the question how long till those “good enough” models run locally (with relative ease) and our company can cut that huge monthly cost with just the macbook pro they are gonna buy anyways.
I worked at Sun labs and used a Sun Ray daily for a whole summer. It worked...OK. Definitely not "Incredibly well". We had a network of a few hundred Sun Rays and two E10Ks backing it. More than a million for the servers and $1000k a piece for the Sun Rays was not cheap. Basically any $1000 laptop was more powerful, without the need for a crazy powerful Sun server. The experience of taking out my ID card, walking down the hall to another cubicle and popping it in and getting my session was magical. But I did that less than once a week, so I don't think it was overall worth it. The Sun Rays also had a pretty crappy LCD, about 1-2 years behind the SoTA.
It was a cool idea. It will keep coming back again and again. But at Sun's price points around the early 2000s, it was a loser, and I actually agree with the market in this instance. Sun Ray was a flop.
Citrix is still everywhere you need a client that can do things a web browser can’t—like run ancient VB4 software or talk to device hardware—deployed at scale.
Citrix was bought out by PE for $16.5B a few years ago, under the (sadly correct) assumption they hadn’t been charging their customers enough money for this essential tech.
GeForce is pretty successful. But only because Nvidia can sell itself GPUs at cost and reuse old data center hardware to get lower prices than anyone else.
If you're not cheaper than buying a PC or console you can't win. No one wants to pay more for the privilege of input lag and compressed video, or getting in trouble with their ISP if they have a strict data cap.
The "two E10Ks" part is the important part there, as you need a very powerful server to support SunRay users running Solaris. At my university there was something like 200 SunRays supported by cluster of T2000s (7 nodes IIRC), it was fine for CDE, Firefox and few dtterms, completely unusable with Gnome (it took Gnome like 10 minutes to even start).
On the other hand I have heard of some success stories about using SunRays as RDP clients, which is actually supported configuration (you still need a Solaris box that manages the sunrays and translates RDP to ALP).
I think it was not a technology that should have been designed for people actually doing series work. But for things like kiosk, self service terminals, and stuff like that.
And yes of course, a rack of commodity servers should how powered the server side, as this was a task that could be scaled vertically quite well.
The also didn't use the cheapest possible Sun Ray terminals, they used their internal developed embedded Sparc chip, not mass produced ARM chips.
the lab I was at got on this train right around the beginning of the sparc architecture. yellow pages. nfs based swap, nfs based boot. 10Mbit thinnet. we suffered for a few months and then moved to xterms for the cheap seats (which was a much better place to cut services) and went back to buying self-sufficient workstations.
the best was having everyone with a disk cross-mount each other. any failure snowballed into a global failure.
grahamlee · · focus · HN ↗
dijit · · focus · HN ↗
I have a bunch of Aruba switches and this is what we do, because it's a lot cheaper.
bluGill · · focus · HN ↗
dijit · · focus · HN ↗
For Aruba I think it was 1:1; a support contract was the same price as the device itself over 2 years or something.
Support contracts never cover a "site" they always cover individual devices, so your cost scales with the amount you have... so I'm not sure I follow what you're saying..
Unless you mean to imply that you're replacing units more than once every 2 years, in which case of course you're right... but then I might consider going with another vendor entirely because that is a pretty terrible reliability record.
bluGill · · focus · HN ↗
kjs3 · · focus · HN ↗
Wrong. I've signed many support contracts that were negotiated basically to "one flat fee for everything we sell that you use, including future purchases[1]" for some period of time. Some people think that they 'optimize' contracts by pushing for "I just want a service contract only on the SKUs I have". That's not always a real optimization.
[1] Often, this includes a tacit "including things you are using that you didn't tell us about".
dijit · · focus · HN ↗
I'm wondering if this is something uniquely american, because we don't seem to have much negotiating power in the UK/SE.
bluGill · · focus · HN ↗
kjs3 · · focus · HN ↗
miohtama · · focus · HN ↗
alpineman · · focus · HN ↗
bluGill · · focus · HN ↗
Nobody knows how the future will be. There are lots of options. There are self hostable open models today - they are not as good, but some report they are good enough. Right now I don't have the hardware to try them (I could - if I'm willing to accept a small number of tokens per minute - useful means more tokens per second as I can get in an hour). However I expect in a few years I'll be able buy consumer hardware with good enough GPUs (or perhaps an AI chip???). Will anyone other than a few hobbyists buy them? time will tell.
dizhn · · focus · HN ↗
TheOtherHobbes · · focus · HN ↗
The moat is Being Able To Do Things No One Else Can and as both hardware and software commoditise that moat disappears.
Open LLMs are already only a few months behind the frontier models and as soon as someone works out that accessible and cheap domain-specific custom training has the potential to be a gamechanger the Big Names will die.
Math puzzles only get you so far.
LLMs are in their Big Compute phase, and it's only a matter of time before that ends - because the intelligence of the frontier models isn't increasing fast enough and providing big enough benefits to make the models more valuable than cheaper, smaller competition.
andrekandre · · focus · HN ↗
i think llms will be the same.
n=1 but at $work they are forcing us off enterprise and on to personal claude max that caps at $200 and people are like “you don’t need the top end models anyways just use the cheaper one for coding”, which begs the question how long till those “good enough” models run locally (with relative ease) and our company can cut that huge monthly cost with just the macbook pro they are gonna buy anyways.
titzer · · focus · HN ↗
It was a cool idea. It will keep coming back again and again. But at Sun's price points around the early 2000s, it was a loser, and I actually agree with the market in this instance. Sun Ray was a flop.
arethuza · · focus · HN ↗
It lived on in the world of Windows Terminal Services and things like Citrix - maybe still does in some places.
steve1977 · · focus · HN ↗
twoodfin · · focus · HN ↗
Citrix was bought out by PE for $16.5B a few years ago, under the (sadly correct) assumption they hadn’t been charging their customers enough money for this essential tech.
abhiyerra · · focus · HN ↗
dbojan · · focus · HN ↗
foobarian · · focus · HN ↗
tancop · · focus · HN ↗
If you're not cheaper than buying a PC or console you can't win. No one wants to pay more for the privilege of input lag and compressed video, or getting in trouble with their ISP if they have a strict data cap.
dfox · · focus · HN ↗
On the other hand I have heard of some success stories about using SunRays as RDP clients, which is actually supported configuration (you still need a Solaris box that manages the sunrays and translates RDP to ALP).
panick21_ · · focus · HN ↗
And yes of course, a rack of commodity servers should how powered the server side, as this was a task that could be scaled vertically quite well.
The also didn't use the cheapest possible Sun Ray terminals, they used their internal developed embedded Sparc chip, not mass produced ARM chips.
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
Which is why it is kind of ironic having folks discussing microservices as something groundbreaking.
jeffbee · · focus · HN ↗
convolvatron · · focus · HN ↗
the best was having everyone with a disk cross-mount each other. any failure snowballed into a global failure.