[rescue] Sun crushes the used Sun market

[Skeezics Boondoggle]

On Tue, 28 Jun 2005, Bill Bradford wrote:

> If I like it, I'll buy another later this year to use as the eventual
> sunhelp.org replacement, once I eventually retire the 420R (or decide to
> move to a colo host here in Houston).  They don't have serial ports (and
> hence no serial console) - but this new KVM-over-IP dongle I'm playing with

This stuck me as a little odd.  The new box probably uses as much power as
the 420R (400W PS vs. 380W in the 420R) and, tipped on its side on a shelf
is likely to use as much rack space as a 420R.  And I've configured 420Rs
to handle upwards of 100M hits/day (dynamic, through a custom Apache
module, not just static pages) without breaking a sweat, so it's not like
the old SPARC isn't up to the task.

I guess I thought it strange to be seeing "retire" a 420R, when a lot of
us on Rescue are still running hardware a lot older than that. :-)

On other recent subjects:

The lack of new and updated "low-end" SPARC designs is disappointing.  
With all that fuss they made a year ago about how Sun is 2nd only to Intel
in the number of chip designers they have working for them, new
releases/speed bumps/even updated roadmaps seem to be taking longer over
time, and you'd think they'd be getting better at it... "Niagara" and
"Rock" seem really cool, but will they ever see the light of day?

And, Dear Sun, where the hell is the US-IV+?  The stealth marketing, the
slow dying fade, the trumpeting of the Opteron machines, and the whole
Apple switch fiasco just have me wondering when that shoe is going to
drop.  Will the PRIMEPOWER line be the last great SPARC machines?  Better
to burn out, Sun, than to fade away... funny how I thought "well, I guess
if I buy a cheap $30/mo Opteron my kid can play games on it, and I'll have
full SunSolve access again for patching and maintaining my 'real' Sun
machines..."

Sigh.  The times, they are a' changin'.

-- Chris