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

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (46207)	11/5/2001 3:48:30 PM
From: Bill Fischofer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

The problem with the RAS argument is that it doesn't match the realities of how technology evolves. The Internet's robustness doesn't come from a handful of armor-plated components, it comes from a distributed architecture where the failure of any component, or any group of components, has very limited impact on the whole. This is the secret of the robustness of any organic system. Armor plating is fine if you're selling tanks, but it's become increasingly archaic as a way to design computer systems. When RAID storage was first introduced it was dismissed as no real threat because after all IBM's mainframe disk drives had demonstrably superior RAS. It didn't matter. The industry quickly discovered that you could gang together a lot of "inferior" cheap disks to produce a product at dramatically lower cost that actually exhibited superior real-world performance and reliability. The same is happening today with processors. Even if you unwisely dismiss Windows XP you still have to deal with Linux clusters which promise to do to SUNW's big servers exactly what the RAID revolution did to IBM's big disk drives.

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (46207)	11/5/2001 4:06:28 PM
From: QwikSand	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Besides, that doesn't address the truly pitiful (when compared to Sun & IBM) throughput of the PCI bus. Cheryl: First, not to forget, I want to thank you for your thoughtful and clearly-expressed posts. Though we disagree on a point here and there (e.g., most of 'em :-), I respect and appreciate your integrity and thoroughness. I think that Sun and ALL the rest of the PC boxmakers that will try to enter the big-server space with Itanium() agree with you, as does Intel. The PCI bus is a desktop bus designed around a last-generation architectural I/O paradigm. Busses are out and switches are in; hence Infiniband, whose consortium has already gotten a few revisions of a spec out, with both Sun and Intel's full participation. I haven't bothered to keep up with what the silicon schedule is for it, but everybody, Wintel chattel and Sun included, is going to abandon (at the high end) whatever bus setup they're now using for I/O and go to Infiniband within the next 2-3 years(www.infinibandta.org). I'm sure you're aware of this development, being in the business. But in case you haven't done so yet, take a gander at the committee members listed in the spec...you'll find everybody who's anybody in addition to everybody who isn't anybody. The weakness of PCI and I/O busses in general is universally accepted and isn't relevant to the next generation of anyone's big machines. Eventually it will even replace PCI on the desktop, but that's a ways off. --QS = Itanium is called out with an asterisk because there's still a chance that it will remain a boat anchor for four years and allow Sun to recover some lost ground. That chance is certainly decreasing, but it just as certainly still exists.