HP To Lose Customers Yet Again Over Sun’s Niagara
HP really know how to make a bad impression with their current and potential customers - the company seems to have a tendency to offer appallingly low-quality lectures on IT strategy. Memo to HP Executives: if you give customers such low-quality advice, they will assume your employees are idiots, and stop listening. What’s the latest piece of “advice” from HP? It has to do with Sun’s new Nigara 2 (aka UltraSPARC T2) chip, which was announced yesterday.
Back in December 2005, when Sun launched Niagara 1, HP warned its customers to be “careful” about Niagara 1. Now HP is at it again, this time with the new Niagara 2. Niagara 2 is a big advance on Niagara 1 - aside from everything else that’s built into it, Niagara 2 has 8 cores, runs 64 threads, and has 8 floating point units. This should make it suitable for pretty much all general computing tasks cf. the Niagara 1 where the sweet spot was web-serving. So, what advice about Niagara 2 did HP have for its current and potential future customers? In a statement to the San Jose Mercury News, they said:
Sun’s Niagara and Rock platforms are proprietary, niche architectures. With the industry moving toward standards with processors built by AMD and Intel, HP believes that Sun’s Niagara 2 is the wrong way to go for customers and out of step with the market.
Well, here’s a statement for what I must reluctantly assume are the incompetents at HP. Some of the questions that people should be asking themselves when purchasing a server include… Does it run my applications with appropriate price/performance/power usage? Does it run OS’es that my existing IT staff know how to manage? Does it integrate with other infrastructure I have already invested in? Does it have good support options? Notice that the question - does the CPU have x86/x64 architecture? - doesn’t arise.
Of course, if you want to run Windows, then you will need such a server (that’s addressed by the “Does it run my applications?” question above). However if you want to run Linux or Solaris, x86/x64 isn’t a requirement. The reason why the industry is moving towards so-called “AMD / Intel standards” is actually nothing to do with “standards”; nor is it to do with the fact the chips are made by Intel or AMD. Rather, it has everything to do with price (or price/performance/power usage).
So, the truth is this - servers based around Niagara 2 chips will do very well in the market if they’re price competitive with servers based around AMD or Intel chips.
Mr X wrote:
Funny - I thought HP’s strapline was
‘Invent’ - not less scare customers aware from breakthrough inventions!
Bottom line is with Niagara Sun have a pretty much unique offering in the market place - currently niche ( high volume web serving ) but as you say the new offerings and the road map really are starting to look impressive.
Sun have stepped back - looked at the problem of scalability in the server room and are really starting to deliver some impressive, market leading products.
Posted 08 Aug 2007 at 8:36 am ¶
simon wrote:
Sun’s product roadmap is indeed looking interesting these days (hardware and software). I suspect the takeup of Niagara 2-based servers is going to get pretty significant, pretty quickly. There is just so much incredible stuff people will be able to do with these boxes.
Posted 08 Aug 2007 at 11:06 am ¶
James C. McPherson wrote:
Of course, the other aspect of HP’s press release that rankles is calling SPARC a “proprietary, niche architecture” — it’s definitely not proprietary (prior to http://www.opensparc.net and licensing the verilog for it under GPLv2, there was http://www.sparc.org ie SPARC International) and nor is it niche with more than 1 million SPARC cpus sold since its first launch. Sure, that doesn’t match amd64, i386 or em64t sales… but I’ll bet you a pallet-load of donuts that it’s more sales than all the Itanium sales ever!
More FUD from people who cannot compete. Sad, really.
Posted 10 Aug 2007 at 12:51 pm ¶
simon wrote:
Yes, of course you’re right about the proprietary stuff James. I don’t understand who on earth at HP thinks taking this kind of line helps their business.
It’s a pity. HP makes pretty good hardware, and I would actually consider buying it, if they didn’t put out this kind of rubbish… It’s fundamentally dishonest; and I prefer not to deal with dishonest people and businesses.
The point is - if HP is dishonest about this, I think the chances are high that they would be dishonest in other areas too e.g. try to mis-sell me equipment. I am interested in suppliers that add value to my businesses (which, I must say, Sun really does); not subtracting from it.
Posted 10 Aug 2007 at 3:29 pm ¶