HP Baited With Cutouts of Founders 206
eastbayted writes "According to InfoWorld.com, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz boasts in his public blog that his company has bought a life-size cardboard cut of the HP rival's founders, William Hewlett and David Packard, for $6,000. Sun staffers then went on to bedeck and photograph the dual portrait in pro-Sun paraphernalia. As a parting shot at HP, Schwartz notes in his post how popular a download Solaris is for HP server owners. Taking the bait, HP VP of Marketing Eric Kintz responds in his own blog that Sun's actions were 'a nice stunt' and that 'I never met Bill or Dave, but I bet neither of them would have approved paying thousands for representations of themselves.' He also cites an IDC report about how HP-UX dominates the Unix market over IBM and Sun." Update: 08/28 04:43 GMT by Z : Fixed confusing headline.
No Worky (Score:5, Interesting)
a perfect rotating quote (Score:5, Interesting)
Go placidly amid the noise and waste, and remember what value there may be in owning a piece thereof. -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"
File this under "things that make you go 'hmmmmmmmmmm...'"
Cardboard cutouts of CowboyNeal ! (Score:3, Interesting)
as were DEC, Compaq, Tandem, and everybody else absorbed by HP and Sun,
but they represent the 1970s and 1980s computer booms and the late-90s servers.
For this decade's cardboard cutouts, we need Web 2.0 figures, bloggers, and user-created-content wranglers, and I say who better than our own CowboyNeal!
I'm glad Sun and HP are having fun playing grabass (Score:5, Interesting)
Throwing Stones from Glass Houses (Score:2, Interesting)
In 2004, the management at Sun Microsystems terminated any more development on high-end processors and high-end servers. According to an article [theregister.co.uk] by The Register, Sun now sells re-branded Fujitsu servers as Sun's high-end servers. Fujitsu is an OEM for Sun.
Sun engineers still work on low-end multi-core processors, but Fujitsu designs and builds all of Sun's high-end processors. The processors that battle IBM's Power5 are Fujitsu SPARC64's.
The hardware division of Sun is now a shell of its former self. Sun management is seeking to close its Sunnyvale campus, which is the location of all of Sun's (former) processor development.
The HP Way (Score:2, Interesting)
They could have done something better with those cutouts: Stuck a copies of "The HP Way" under their arms, painted tears on their cheeks and propped them up on Page Mill Road outside HP's HQ. Well that's what I would have done.
- an ex-HP employee
Re:I dunno, it just seems ... (Score:2, Interesting)
They got $30 million of publicity for $6,000 (Score:3, Interesting)
So, they did it by making fun of HP. BFD. Everyone makes fun of HP. HP's nothing more than a printer-ink-delivery company any more anyway, after Carly got through with them.
And if you have a problem that requires a few hundred gigs of RAM, that needs to be worked on by a hundred or so CPUs, and can't be partitioned so a cluster isn't a solution, you need one of those big SMP boxes from Sun, IBM, or HP.
And according to some HP engineers I know, almost no one buys the big iron from HP to run as an SMP box - they partition them into a bunch of 4-CPU domains and run Windows on them.
Re:The leading "Unix' (Score:2, Interesting)
Partial truth... (Score:3, Interesting)
True everyone sells similar stuff nowadays at the commodity level (putting aside HP's itanium, Sun's Ultrasparc, and IBM's power systems, which makes things more complicated), however my experience certainly shows IBM to be capable boxes without need of Windows for everything, with few exceptions. The e325/e326/e326m are out of place and may be subject to your criticism. I don't think of those servers as a sufficiently serious Opteron effort. The x336/x346/ and blades seem pretty good to me, and the IPMI 2.0 based rack mount systems allow SOL in a sane way. The wave of Opteron servers coming are a much more serious effort and work well in general compared to e32*.
My job is exclusively Linux, never ever booting Windows on any of our servers (though admittedly there exists hard drive firmware updates and a few other esoteric updates that are still DOS boot CDs or floppys, however the more common BIOS, BMC, and Diag updates have very good linux support without using DOS at all). In the past they did do goofy things with a powerquest image being written to a linux filesystem with PC-dos and booting into that, and the BMC updates used to require moderately aggravating IBM drivers, but that has been dropped in favor for updates that are self contained (BIOS, diag) or use OpenIPMI drivers (BMC).
All the systems nowadays have similar manageability, ILO is nothing special compared to Dell's, Sun's, and IBM's BMCs nowadays. Everyone sells IPMI compliant management and at least IBM I know implements it well and provides all features I could think of for remote management save for remote video console (but who needs that when you have linux/SOL) without additional cost. RSA cards are there for the people who need remote video console and a fancy web interface. I'd wager everyone's BMC implementation is on par and nowadays manageability is not as much a discriminating factor...
IBM I admit could donate more hardware to some open source efforts, but they do contribute a significant amount of developer work to open source projects, which helps offset the hardware issue some.
Anyway, in summary, IBM may have in the past been subject to that criticism in the x86 space, but in my job experience it has improved greatly.
Re:Throwing Stones from Glass Houses (Score:3, Interesting)
IBM's older super computers were based on Power5 Technology, so IBM did use it in some of their most advanced computer systems.
While power and heat are very important chips like the Power5 are very important even though clusters of lower performance chips can get massive parallelization. Some application can be parallelized so your performance ultimatly becomes that of your fastest processing unit. So Power5 based systems work on entirely different problem sets then BlueGene.