Re: IBM in talks to buy Sun

From:

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?= <arne@vajhoej.dk>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 22:39:56 -0400

Message-ID:

<49c4537d$0$90264$14726298@news.sunsite.dk>

Larry K. Wollensham wrote:

Arne Vajh?j wrote:

Larry K. Wollensham wrote:

Patricia Shanahan wrote:

1. They provide a nice, stable, predictable revenue stream even during
economic downturns. A company facing reduced demand for its products
and
services is likely to decide to put off upgrading its servers. On the
other hand, short of bankruptcy, anyone who has already paid for a 14TB
disk farm is going to want to keep it working.

I can get 14TB of disk for about $2500AUD. That's a tenth the cost of
a low-end new car and comparable to a middling-high-end workstation.

That's in the form of separate 1TB disks without RAID, though. I
expect* 14TB of RAID will top $10,000. That's still peanuts compared
to a big company's IT budget, and still less than adding one vehicle
to their motor pool.

* I leave the hardware stuff to the hardware guys and do Java
development here, so there may be something I don't know here.

Enterprise hardware is different than consumer hardware.

Often 10 times more expensive.

(a little bit faster and a little bit more reliable !)

Sounds not worth it to me.

Companies spend billions of dollars on expensive storage
systems.

I don't think they would unless they needed them.

There are now consumer RAID systems, which
often allow any (so long as all are identical) drives to be used in
them. They'll be reliable enough. Maybe you'll have to replace a drive
in the array a bit more often, but if those drives are a *lot* cheaper
the savings will add up and add up.

If it does not meet performance or maintenance criteria the low cost is
no good.

This is why IBM and Sun are in talks to possibly merge; the high-end
hardware market is shrinking, being attacked from below by commodity
microprocessors and drives and similar hardware, cheap and parallelizable.

If high end means anything above home PC grade then the high end
hardware is not shrinking.

It is changing a bit though. Solaris is getting squeezed by Linux, so
SUN has a problem and IBM does not have a problem.

(IBM has 13 billion dollars in cash to buy for)

Arne