I’ve had a geek crush on Sun Microsystems for several years now. Sometimes I find myself just browsing the Servers section of their website configuring different servers and imagining what I would do with ridiculous mounts of CPU power or storage. They make many cool products and technologies that continue to fascinated me:
- UltraSPARC T2 Processors - Highly scalable, energy efficient processors with Chip-Level Multithreading (CMT).
- Unified Storage Systems - Storage systems that scale up to 576 TB.
- Enterprise Class Servers - Systems that scale to 256 CPU cores and 2 TB of ram.
- Modular Blade Systems - Blade systems capable of running SPARC, AMD, and Intel blades all in one blade chassis.
- Sun Rays - True thin clients providing low cost, low footprint virtual display clients.
- OpenSolaris - An open source operating system proving to be a serious contender to Linux.
- DTrace - An open source dynamic tracing application giving insight into any running process with little overhead.
- ZFS - An open source “next generation” filesystem.
- Java - An open source, machine independent development platform.
- GlassFish - An open source Java application server.
Given all this, I am amazed at how poorly they do quarter after quarter, year after year. They bring in over $10 billion a year in revenue but make marginal income and little to no profit. I don’t see HP, Dell, IBM, or even Microsoft innovating in all these areas yet they’re all making money. So…what is wrong with Sun?
