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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Prognosticator who wrote (34713)	8/26/2000 7:26:47 PM
From: chic_hearne	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

Re: Sun appears to have been less than open about memory problems with their systems Prognosticator, You've got to wonder if they could've fixed the problem much earlier if they were more upfront that there was a problem. The articles seem to imply that it was a while before the problem was determined. chic

To: Prognosticator who wrote (34713)	8/27/2000 3:58:34 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Prognosticator - re: "They're not Tandem's yet, but they are close." No, SUNW is two orders of magnitude below Tandem in reliability, on their best systems. Three orders of magnitude if Tandem's most reliable configurations are considered. On average, SUNW's high end products are down 100 times longer per year than Tandem systems. That is a different world. Tandem has systems which have not been down for even 1 second in 18 years. The hardware features you discuss - redundant hot fail everything - have been part of CPQ's volume server line for years. Unfortunately, hardware failures are not the most common cause of downtime - that's where Solaris has an edge as an OS over the volume OS products like Windows 2000. I don't believe that SUNW has any plans to go after the high-reliability market. First, it is a small market, and second, it is expensive to enter and maintain. Third, Tandem owns about 70% of that business... with a very loyal customer base. SUNW's moves seem aimed across and down, not up.

To: Prognosticator who wrote (34713)	8/28/2000 8:55:46 PM
From: THE WATSONYOUTH	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

At least Sun appear to be mea-culpa'ing and learning from the event. To the extent of even designing around it with mirrored memory modules in future server designs: outstanding! This "mirrored memory" means they will have to use 16Meg for actual 8Meg of memory (doubling up every bit). I believe that means they were never using ECC modules but simple parity modules in the first place. That would explain why the applications terminated every time a parity check detected a memory error. Since simple parity checking can only detect single bit errors, I think there is a good possibility that some data got corrupted. I think 8Meg ECC modules are quite rare so they instead went with this "mirrored memory" approach.. Of course, they will be paying thru the nose for 16Meg when only 8Meg is required. But, they likely had no choice. I mean.... we couldn't have USIII systems delayed any longer now....could we?? So, who makes this 16Meg fast reliable SRAM??? Only one company I know of. By year's end, Sun will release a mirrored memory module that should address this issue once and for all, Shoemaker added........... Sun quality???? HA! HA! LOL! What a bunch of shoemakers. THE WATSONYOUTH