Try running a 128 proc. NT box with 32 GB ram and 10TB stiped disks for a good example.
I'm pretty sure Tandem (nee Compaq) offers this right now, and I remember reading something recently about NEC going to built a mainframe running N-way Merced on NT.
Its all about economies of scale. Sun, Digital, SGI, SCO, IBM, HP, etc. had a big chance in the 80s to solidify Unix in the mainstream. There were a number of Sun and HP clones (DataGeneral, Apollo, Ross, etc) but they never really took off. Internal squabbling and inability to bring down price points has let Wintel get their foot in the Enterprise computing door.
Microsoft and Intel don't seem to give up if they consider their target critical. NOISE doesn't seem to have this attitude. Look at Oracle's recent redeployment of their InterOffice (or whatever it was called) set of apps. It was "supposed" to be a competitor to Office. Meanwhile, Microsoft keeps plugging along with SQL Server, no one is saying SQL 6.5 is really enterprise ready, but its only a few years off now.
Its so much easier to standardize on one "environment" across the enterprise. Yes, this is the 'no one gets fire for buying IBM' mentality, but one thing to think about for those who think the next generation computing will do to Wintel what Wintel did to IBM : most companies nowadays already have a computing infrastructure in place, whereas in the late 70s and early 80s you either had a mainframe and terminals or you had a bunch of typewriters.
Very few places went in wholesale and replaced their "old" system with something new. And the longer NOISE takes to think up their whole network-computing paradigm, the more Wintel platforms will be deployed and entrenched... |
