[rescue] UnOracle patches for Solaris

[Mike Meredith]

On Wed, 19 May 2010 16:19:05 -0400, Dave Fischer wrote:
> So the question is, coming out of the late-90s, why didn't SGI crush
> Sun in the high-end server niche?

They did :)

In terms of pure hardware, the Origin 2000 was roughly at the same time
as the E10K, and could expand to 128 processors with 256Gbytes of
memory compared to the E10K which expanded to 64 processors with
64Gbytes. And that's a standard Origin 2000 configuration; with enough
folding green you could get something bigger out of SGI (didn't NASA
have a 512-processor Origin 2000 linked with metarouters?).

Of course when you talk about the high-end server "niche", you are
talking about two separate niches ... business, and high performance
computing. SGI was a leader in the later (they did after all buy Cray
in 1996), but never really took off in the business sector.

As to why, who knows ? It wasn't simply the lack of suitable software -
after all Oracle was available for IRIX. Probably a number of reasons,
not least the perception that SGI did just number crunching.

> I think it was largely the popularity of Solaris versus IRIX.

Hmm ... I'm not sure the operating system had much influence. The
choice of what large systems to buy has always been made by the PHBs in
_my experience_ (actually it's usually a choice of what platform to
run).

> And some of that can be traced to Sun being hobbyist-friendly.

Or possibly academic influence ... Sun long had a presence in the
academic computing field simply because a Unix workstation from Sun was
cheaper than a Unix workstation from SGI. 



-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
  So I think I'm becoming a geek vampire. Damn. Hate when that happens.
                       -- Davezilla