I’ve speculated before about Sun taking itself private – it certainly has the capability to do so, even withstanding the dents to it’s balance sheet due to the questionable purchases of StorageTek and MySQL.
News comes from iNewswire that McNealy has resigned from his position at Sun to head up an investment team which will be launching a counter-bid for Sun.
With Paul Ottelini of Intel’s comments that Sun had been hawking itself around Silicon Valley, it’s clear that Jonathan Schwartz either:
- sees no future for Sun as a stand-alone company
- is trying to sell the company while he can recoup some value from it
- has been pushed down this path by Sun investors who don’t understand IT or R&D (yes Southwestern Asset Management, I’m looking at you)
The last point seems the most likely – with the current economic conditions, many investment funds are desperate to recoup whatever cash they can in the short term, as investors panic and want to pull their money out or re-balance their portfolios.
If Scott and his team can follow through, this can only mean good news for Sun and it’s customer base. Like Steve Jobs at Apple, Scott has the narrow focus to push through his vision of how things should be done. Whether he can pull off the whole Jobsian Messiah thing remains to be seen, but I’d place far more credence in that happening than IBM doing anything other than asset stripping the company.
Have a read through the iNewswire release yourself and see what you think.
The rumours continue to do the rounds about the IBM/SUN acquisition, and on top of that comes news that Rackable are to acquire Silicon Graphics.
At this stage no-one is giving out any specifics, which is understandable as neither deal has been finalised and signed off. The coming weeks will be interesting as we get more details from the companies involved.
One thing is certain – with the consolidation of such major players in the IT and HPC business, the industry itself is clearly in the middle of a major shake-up.
When the dust finally settles, will we be seeing business as usual with a smaller number of larger players? Or will the companies involved take the opportunity to deliver some real innovation in the middle of this economic slump?
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that allegedly IBM are stumping up $6.5 billion to buy Sun.
The Wall Street Journal, quoting “people familiar with the matter,” reported Wednesday that International Business Machines was in talks to buy Sun for at least $6.5 billion in cash, a premium of more than 100 percent over the company’s closing share price Tuesday. Officials of Sun and IBM could not immediately be reached for comment.
This would be a seismic shift in the IT landscape, potentially bigger than Compaq’s take over by HP – consider all the large installations and government contracts that this would effect.
I have very mixed feelings about this, and will avoid commenting until we get some more details. If nothing else, it’s provided a nice boost to Sun’s stock.
The Supercomputing 08 trade show is in full swing, and I’ve been blogging about some of Silicon Graphics’ offerings over at Siliconbunny – links at the end. Sun’s John Fowler, who is now in charge of the Systems Platforms group at Sun, after the recent layoffs and re-organisation, popped up at SC08 to give a preview of some high end gear coming down the line from Sun.
Sun’s Magnum Infiniband switch
Probably the most interesting preview offering is Sun’s upcoming blade server. It has two sockets and squeezes an entire server into each blade. The key thing though is that each blade provides quad data rate (QDR) Infiniband direct off the board – 40 Gb/s throughput makes 10Gb Ethernet pretty laughable, even without taking into account the advantages the Infiniband protocol has over Ethernet.
Current Sun blades use PCI-E cards to provide Infiniband connectivity, which isn’t as fast and takes up extra room on the board.
Sun are also pushing to pre-package HPC solutions. For example, on the back of their announcements of the Storage 7000 Unified Storage System, Sun will be announcing the Sun Storage Cluster. This is a rack of pre-configured storage servers and disks, running Linux and using the Lustre file system.
The Sun Compute Cluster is another bundled solution, this time with an integrated rack of servers, network and software, all pre-configured, ready to be plugged in. Options range from 1 to 8 racks of gear, and are comprised of either 32 X2250 dual-socket servers per rack, or 30 Sun Blade servers.
The point of both of these bundles is to make HPC easy to implement – and to sell. IBM and HP already do something similar, and have had a lot of success with smaller installations.
Sun also announced something which we’ll definitely be seeing more of in our datacentres – their custom water jackets that fit to the back of racks, codenamed Glacier.
If you’re reading this and thinking “What does HPC have to do with me?”, think again. Silicon Graphics said back in 1996 that they wanted their high-end graphics systems to appear in a games console in 5 years (a wish that came true). These sort of lower-end HPC systems not only represent the technologies that we’ll all soon be using in our data centre, but they also make hugely cost effective solutions for larger-scale business problems like data warehouses or ERP. High Performance Computing is no longer confined to government labs and large research centres.
Follow these links to SiliconBunny to read about the Silicon Graphics Molecule concept computer, and SGI’s haul at the HPCwire Reader’s Choice Awards.
Big launch day for Sun on Monday as they announced their Unified Storage range. Head on over to the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System home page to find out more.
This is really, really slick technology. A normal web interface to your storage, commodity disks, leveraging ZFS and SSD storage to get the performance you need – plus it’s running Solaris, which means not only is it totally open, but you can also get the sort of performance metrics you always dreamed of.
Trying to get performance data from any vendor has always been a painful exercise – either they flatly refused to do it (“Just buy more cache!”) or else you had to pay a truly extortionate amount to get their performance software.
With Sun’s USS systems you can just unleash Dtrace. The same tools you’re using to manage and profile your servers can now be used on your storage.
Check out this screenshot:
The best part is, you don’t even have to buy one of these appliances to have a play. Yes, you can take part in the 60 day “Try before Buy” scheme. Even better than that, though, is that Sun have a freely available VMware image for download.
Just copy it down, boot through VMware, and start playing with your own storage appliance.
You can download the storage simulator from here, and I highly recommend everyone has a look – this is another really disruptive technology from Sun that SMEs are really going to love.
