Anybody have an opinion on Sun's UltraSpark III server? This is a big machine aimed at SGI's terrain in the high-end server market.
infoworld.com
A quote from the article:
Achieving this level of performance is "a real feat," said Marc Perl, business manager at Visa USA, in Foster City, Calif., and a member of InfoWorld's Corporate Advisory Board.
However, Perl is not convinced servers need this level of performance.
"I'm not certain that it matters," Perl said. "For the most part, servers are just switching data."
(end quote)
The attitude that servers "don't need much performance" is a pervasive one. ISP's won't shell out money for machines they don't need, and they may not feel the pinch until bandwidth really opens up to large numbers of consumers with an appetite for teleconferencing and streaming video. I asked the guys at my ISP -- Edge.net if they considered SGI when they recently bought new servers, and they said something like "you really like to go first class, don't you! We got something we could afford." On the other hand, they were out of service for 24 hours two days ago due to system failure that lost two weeks of data (including some of mine). So I guess there's gonna be a learning curve. Might take more than one quarter, anyway.
PS -- Guys, your comments have spurred me to the first decisive action since I joined SI. I went back and erased a bunch of my "profile!"
--JD |
