In article <52HSj.237348$pM4.71479@pd7urf1no>,
"Colin B." <cbigam@somewhereelse.shaw.ca> writes:
>
> Fascinating. Migrations may be going in one direction, but that has nothing
> to do with new growth and installations. Sun is selling gear--I know,
> because we're buying it and the oil patch is buying it. Besides, migrations
> to Solaris _are_ happening, mostly from Windows. eHarmony (the dating site
> with the obnoxious commercials--oh wait; that's all of them!) switched from
> Dell/Windows boxes to Sun/Solaris-x86 a year ago.

There are quite a number of migrations from Linux to Solaris x86
too, particularly from companies which went the other way a few
years back. Trouble is you aren't likely to hear about them because
if a company publicised the fact it was moving to Linux for all sorts
of preceived benefits, having to move back can be seen as a failure
which you generally don't want to shout about too much.

> Basically, Sun has two products: Solaris and Sparc, and the only directly
> make money off of the latter. Traditional Sparc is definitely facing
> extinction sooner or later, but Niagra has given them some strength for
> a few more years. (Of course, AMD and Intel are going to go down that
> route as well, now that they've figured out how to put more than one core
> in a CPU die. It may be another three years, but we'll see it.)

We also see lots of migrations from (non-Solaris) x86 hardware to
Solaris on Niagra. This is often driven initially by power and
cooling constraints -- these are the main problems facing most of
today's datacentres. Also, note that there are extremely few OS's
out there which can make full and effective use of so many
cores -- most of the OS's on x86 hardware don't come even close.
So it's not at all clear that the bulk of AMD and Intel's
customers could use such a design effectively, although readers
of this newsgroup should have no such fears!

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]