[geeks] Misuse of Java

[Kurt Huhn]

Chris Hedemark <chris at yonderway.com> wrote:

> Naw.  Not every year.  But the UltraSPARC III has been out for, what, 
> two years?  Shouldn't it be pretty pervasive across Sun's system 
> offerings by now?
> 

I'd like to see a nice new processor every couple of years also, but you
have to remember that Sun's customers are paying for the stability and
longevity of their processor lines.  I know that I can get a time-tested and
proven platform for my servers for a significant time into the future. 
That's what I want, and that's what a lot of large clients need.  Changing
platforms, OSs, and software is *expensive* - sometimes to the point of
being prohibitive.

Consider a (hypothetical) client of Sun with a few hundred Ultra-II
processor-powered servers.  They regularly add systems to their arsenal of
servers, and configure each one just like all the others.  They use the same
OS, the same software, and the hardware is (for all intents) the same.  What
happens if Sun changes the hardware offerings such that a the OS this client
is using won't run on the new hardware?  What if the hardware changes such
that the software they're using needs to be a different build?  Suddenly,
things just got quite complicated in this client's world.  At the minimum,
they now need to keep track of two different OSs and application bases.  In
the worst case, they need to swap out all their systems with brand spanking
new Sun servers.  If sun were change the hardware offerings regularly, large
clients like this would end up looking for another manufacturer that can
provide the long-term hardware stability and homogeny that Sun didn't.  Sun
knows this, and that's why it keeps hardware profile offerings so stable.

-- 
Kurt
kurt at k-huhn.com