[geeks] Careeer shifting

[Brian Hechinger]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2001 at 11:06:15PM -0700, Peter L. Wargo wrote:
> 
> Well, Sun calls the new Serengeti line "Midframes" (I still can't
> understand that one.  Or calling them "Sun Fire" systems, which conflicts
> with the internal name of the previous generation E3x00-E6x00'sm which
> were called "Sunfire").

what the fuck is a midframe?  what a stupid idea.  it's SO painfully obvious
that Sun has I/O-envy.  keep in mind i'm a Sun-Bigot!!

> Marketing dildoheads aside, we never use the word mainframe at work.
> "Friggin' big SMP box" comes to mind... What the E10K really is is a mix
> of I/O and CPU - it's not the fastest (now), but I have seen a full-up
> 64-way with 466's cranking along with a metric buttload of disk and not
> even beginning to sweat.  (With SBUS, mind you!  I still think PCI sucks.)

Sun doesn't make mainframes.  end of friggin sentence.  they neve have and they
never will.  everyone else has dropped out of the mainframe market, and so IBM
is currently the only manufacturer of mainframes anymore.

> To me, a mainframe is a really special beast, full of features that keep
> it running no matter what.  The E10K has quite a few RAS features, but
> there are some single points of failure that keep it, IMO, from being a
> "mainframe".  (The centerplane, while able to be run in a degraded mode,
> is still a single point of failure, as is the system clock.  There are two
> sources for sysclock, but the entire frame has to go down to fail it
> over.)

a 'frame is really friggin hard to break.  an E10K is MUCH easier to break. as
much as i love sun (i am a Sun Bigot after all) no-one does un-killable systems
like IBM does.

-brian