Mc Squealy's flavor of "blue screen of death".
IBM started using ECC memory in the 1970s for this very reason
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forbes.com
Sun Screen
Daniel Lyons, Forbes Magazine, 11.13.00
THE MYSTERIOUS GLITCH has been popping up since late last year. At a new Web company in San Francisco, a telecommunications company in the Midwest, a Baby Bell in Atlanta, anInternet domain registry on the East Coast--for no apparent reason, high-end servers made by Sun Microsystems suddenly crashed.
It happens not to all of them, and not all the time, but enough to cause problems for America Online, Ebay and dozens of other major corporate accounts, baffling Sun engineers who spent months trying to identify the problem.
Adding to the mystery is Sun's own reticence.It has never issued a warning to its customers or disclosed the flaw to new buyers. For months Sun told customers seeking a repair that they must sign a legal agreement promising to keep it secret. Many still don't dare speak out. Even now Sun hasn't published on its main Web site an official explanation of the bug.
Sun says it has finally figured out what's wrong. It is an odd problem involving stray cosmic rays and memory chips in the flagship Enterprise server line, whose models are priced at $50,000 to more than $1 million. Yet Sun won't fix all of the servers it has sold; instead it will make repairs when it deems them necessary.
"We're dealing with this on a one-to-one basis with customers who have had a problem," says John Shoemaker, the executive vice president in charge of Sun's high-end server business.
When the crashes began over a year ago, Sun believed the problem was caused not by its boxes but by some flaw in customer data centers. As the months went by and shutdowns kept happening, customers began leaking word of their predicament. Gartner Group, a research firm, put out a bulletin. Computerworld, a trade publication, ran a story and editorial criticizing Sun's treatment of its customers.
Suddenly Sun, a bright star in the high-tech firmament and proud of the power and reliability of its products, finds itself taking heat both for quality and for what looks like a clumsy cover-up.
It is not clear whether the snafu will slow Sun's momentum. It owns 43% of the $32 billion market for Unix servers. Sun sales grew 60% to $5 billion in the third quarter; net soared 85% to $510 million. But Wall Street won't brook any disappointments with this stock. At $117, up 70% since January, Sun shares go for 90 times this year's expected earnings.
Last November Verisign Global Registry Services, a domain name registry, was down for two hours after a crucial Sun box crashed. Verisign complained but got no explanation. Months later an executive at Verisign ran across the Gartner bulletin.
"I said to Sun, 'My God, you knew about this problem, and you didn't tell me? That's unconscionable,' " he says.Verisign still uses Sun for some tasks but has moved important systems onto IBM Unix servers. |
