On Jun 7, 2012, at 8:49 PM, Garrett D'Amore <[email protected]> wrote:
> (Moving this to discuss, since it no longer has anything to do with actual > coding whatsoever. ;-) > >> But, true, the lack of enthusiasm and help (and money) from these boxes >> owners may be a showstopper, indeed. > > *That* is the clincher. There are tons and tons of SPARC boxes still around. > But *nobody* has stepped forward with a plan to invest in what everyone > recognizes is ultimately a dead end. The current box owners are basically > the folks (e.g. Unis) that got this stuff for free. Generally they reason > they are still using this gear is precisely because they lack either the > money to buy equipment, or the skills to port, or both. Which means they need service. > Which generally makes their ability to be anything other than freeloaders > somewhat questionable. If you need service, you are not a freeloader. > So the challenge is to figure out how supporting those guys servers a bigger, > more realistic, business opportunity. Nobody has presented me with a > reasonable business case yet, although a couple of people have *tried*. OS security patches. Freeware patch stream. Hardware next-day shipping replacement. New OS options for higher available hardware (3 way root mirror, even against USB external disk via zfs.) Future migration option into cloud to make legacy hardware unneeded in 3 years using KVM or branded zones. Central cloud repository for commercial package vendors. > Right now the trend for folks with money is to move off that gear, and mostly > into cloud-like deployments. Cheap spares now available for resellers and depo maintenance. > There is a non-zero SPARC opportunity still. Only if there is no moving forward plan with commercial OS, chargable freeware software patches, and isv support. > But's pretty small, and rapidly diminishing. Even two years ago, I think > there may have been some value. But now -- I just don't see it. Who here > has *SPARC* hardware in their data center, is wanting a newly updated > operating system for it, and is willing to pay significantly for such. Me. > (To be commercially interesting, I think there would need to be either huge > numbers of such people, or people willing to pay support contracts that are > similar to what Oracle charges. I can tell you that it certainly doesn't > make sense for me to work to support even 100 customers who don't want to > spend more than $500 a machine for software support. I think to be a viable > business, you'd need to come up with at least $1M in commitments, with > probably a substantial portion of that *upfront*. Right now, there is no OpenSolaris distro delivering enough value to claim this. We have been waiting for promised SPARC releases and patches - nothing materialized. The window is shrinking to the point where there is only about 6 months to make a go of it. (Need something before Solaris 10's last release.) > That would let you hire a few guys, and get the equipment you need to support > them, including footing the power bill. If you can't get at least that much, > then the opportunity probably simply isn't worth it.) With hardware support, it can be done. > And the "interesting" SPARC hardware (e.g. E10K) takes significant resources > to support -- we don't have all the source for it, for example. Mostly the > stuff we can support *right now* is desktop and lower end server (e.g. E450 > class) hardware. We don't have complete source to support anything called > "SunBlade" for example. (And there are no graphics options left for those > either, except some really really lame 2D cards. None of the 3D cards was > ever open sourced. And for that matter, supporting X properly on SPARC > workstations is probably a much larger task than anyone here would want to do > -- with exactly zero commercial benefit.) > > - Garrett > > > > ------------------------------------------- > illumos-discuss > Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now > RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175845-b97465aa > Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; > Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
