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by ragall4 hours ago |
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upvoteby throw0101a4 hours ago|
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>> You can't deny that Sun hardware was top tier and always ahead of its time (until Oracle bought them).

> SPARC stopped being ahead of its time way before being bought by Oracle.

You seem to be focusing strictly on performance, but there were other factors: e.g., remote management is still a bit of a mess with x86. With SPARC everything can be done on the CLI (serials consoles or SSH), with x86 quite often you're still clicking on "open KVM window" for so many things. And of course many/most vendors make you purchase an 'advanced license' to use the remote KVM functionality of the LOM system.

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upvoteby Borg33 hours ago|
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Yeah, that was amazing. And so, I learned how to provide LILO + agetty on COM1 on every server I was admining :) So, unless there was HW fault, I could just connect to server via serial to check things out.
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upvoteby frutiger3 hours ago|
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Why is that a property of the ISA?
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upvoteby wmf3 hours ago|
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It's path dependence. If you built a Sun-syle x86 server with a serial console and inserted a random Linux installer CD, the installer would probably only output VGA and thus it wouldn't work.
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upvoteby ragall3 hours ago|
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> You seem to be focusing strictly on performance,

Just like the vast majority of buyers do. SPARC was abandoned by customers due to poor performance.

> but there were other factors: e.g., remote management is still a bit of a mess with x86

That's a property of the systems integrator, not the ISA. Dell's iDRAC works quite well.

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upvoteby 2 hours ago|
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