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To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (109218)	9/2/2000 5:26:12 PM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

JDN, >That really makes me bite my nails over Itanium. If the press is willing to blow Sun's mundane problem out of proportion, think how nasty those hounds will be if deployed Itanium servers run into a problem of the same magnitude. That's true, they'd be all over it like white on rice. But, look at it this way, current Intel based (PIII or Xeon) servers have a great track record. I don't remember a single reliability problem with these servers. Anyone else? That results from a good overall system design involving the OEM, like a Compaq, working with Intel, plus board, DRAM, cards like NICs, SCSI, fibre channel control, etc. makers. It's the same process for Itanium based, just a few changes, like the CPU chip!!! You know, I don't think people around here, in general, appreciate the groundwork, working relationships and precedents that have been laid with the Xeon and the PPro before that. That is, with the OEMs. You don't just willy nilly switch to a whole new CPU vendor. It would be like Sun all of a sudden canning TI as CPU chip source. Actually, it would be worse, because, whichever OEM decided to do that would be all alone vs. the other three major OEMs. AMD, as a company with an alternative CPU chip, has a huge row to hoe, IMO. By the way, having to reboot an enterprise server like a Sun is a very big deal. Ask Ebay. And, it's not as though a customer has many servers doing the same thing. In the case of Ebay, they had no backup to their main auction servers. When that one key server went down, their whole business was dead in the water. SUNW has amazing "ridethrough", that's all I can say (not the servers, but the stock). Tony

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (109218)	9/3/2000 6:34:32 AM
From: JDN	Respond to of 186894

Dear Tenchusatsu: Well, IMHO, SUNW went from being a side show in the past to being the TARGET of everyone. When you consider that pretigious companies like INTC, HP, CPQ, EMC and the like all CLAIM to be gunning for SUNW it says, they got something I want!! Pretty incledible I think. There is NO HIGH TECHNOLOGY company that isnt going to have product problems. We are PUSHING THE EDGE OF THE ENVELOPE throughout the spread of technology. Personally, I LOVE IT. I am nearly 57 years old now. Frankly, for most of those years things went on pretty much as usual every year. Last 10 years or so, especially since the end of the cold war, and money plowed into things that dont go bump in the night, the breadth and pace of technological evolution is BREATHTAKING to me. Can you believe, I used to talk to my Great Aunt about the INDIAN WARS especially Custers last stand when I was young (she lived through that), now its STAR WARS and beyond. Wonderful time to be alive. Almost everyday something new and exciting comes about. I wish all the tech companies success but I realize there will be problems now and again. The question is how the management DEALS with those problems. In fact, I will go a step further and say this: "Any company that DOESNT have problems in technology, isnt a leader in the field". JDN

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (109218)	9/3/2000 5:56:20 PM
From: Rob Young	Respond to of 186894

Tench, " JDN, what interests me is how mundane Sun's memory-module problem seems to be. From what I know, all this problem does is cause a reboot of the server. No data is lost, and tasks that were interrupted are simply restarted once the server is available again (if those tasks weren't already handed off to another server). Sure, that server will be down for several minutes due to reboot, but usually enterprises will have a cluster of those servers available. One of those servers rebooting isn't going to be fatal to the enterprise's computing system. That really makes me bite my nails over Itanium. If the press is willing to blow Sun's mundane problem out of proportion, think how nasty those hounds will be if deployed Itanium servers run into a problem of the same magnitude." Ahummmmm... you may be missing the point but if you come from the "when in doubt, reboot" club, I'm not a bit surprised. Some folks lose tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars for every hour downtime. A Sun UE10000 takes quite a bit of time in Power On Self Test. And high availability is a target market for those boxes , they are in the data center (not departmental: "reboot if necessary" segment). Didn't intend to rain on your parade here there and everywhere but it goes far beyond "mundane" server problems. Just ask eBay. They have lost quite a bit of money in downtime. For now they are the most public example of this but word has it there are some mightily aggravated Sun customers out there (more than 18 months after the problem first surfaced).. Also here is more fodder for the cannon: Message 14293362 Enjoy! Rob