Proggy: I think the point you make also is a reason why Linux will never scale beyond a certain point. People can hack Beowulf clusters together in academic and industrial labs, but at some point on the large SMP scale, the hardware and software engineers have to work together down the hall from each other and share knowledge directly. Linux won't run on a 64-processor E10000 unless Sun decides that it will, because the distributed crowd of Linux hackers won't have an E10000 to try their code on, for example (and even if they did, all the other points you mention would render it moot).
There is a basic disagreement over what can be commoditized and what can't. Workstations can be commoditized. Large servers can't, at least not yet.
Reggie: you talk about tolerating downtime. I think that tolerance for downtime, for shoddy software and hardware, is a huge factor in commoditization. Intel/MSFT/Dell took market share from Sun at least partly because the customer base could be conditioned to tolerate regular hangs and blue screens, which they do to this day. Your Sun workstation stays up for months and your Dell machine crashes every 48 hours, but you don't care because apps are available and boxes are cheap.
The customer space will not get conditioned that way on servers, but the difference in reliability will remain between Sun solutions and the boxes you refer to as "commodity". (And please spare the Ebay stuff). Itanic/W2K advocates claim the contrary. They claim it, but they have yet to demonstrate anything along those lines. So far, all we've seen is product delays and feature removal. Nothing is shipping. What you're really falling back on is a "just wait and see, time will prove me right" argument about things that may or may not ever happen.
We've been hearing that forever on this thread. It started on day one and has never stopped.
Regards,
--QS |
