Wanna, >Intel has tried in the past to position Xeon against Sun, but businesses simply don't see the potential for an IA-32 based processor to go up against Sun's high RAS, highly scalable platforms.
Of course, Sun lost a lot of that high RAS reputation when all the Alpha, and other kinds of radiation caused outages came to light over the last year and a half. Sun since put cache ECC on USIII new designs, but didn't do such a clean fix on existing USII machines, which leaves their field installed base still susceptible. From Sun's mid Q update, they're still hurting for sales, remains to be seen if and when they pull out of the malaise. Sun's big selling point, IMO, was, and remains, Solaris and its robustness. Intel and the OEMs' big foot in the door with Itanium platforms has to be cost (and that world class RAS Intel and the OEMs are putting in can't hurt either). Stuff like remote, lights out managability, mucho redundancy, and hot plug replacement, even including CPU hardware(?) and ECC on memory, cache and lots of the buses will help get business away from Sun.
Tony |
