[Gllug] Sun hardware/firewall memory

[Christian Smith]

On Mon, 20 Dec 2004, Ben Fitzgerald wrote:

>On Mon, Dec 20, 2004 at 08:38:38PM +0000, Adrian McMenamin wrote:
>> So, what is so great about the Sparc that it cost so much more? To be
>> honest my impression is that it is a better box than, say the Pentium
>> 166 that is my firewall (which probably gets better benchmarks), but
>> then it does have 192 MB as opposed to the 48 MB on the firewall.
>
>The hardware is proprietary. If you have a solaris run shop you will
>pay what sun want, so they charge higher prices. This is one reason
>sun are on their knees, IMHO :)


SUN have the least proprietry hardware of any of the UNIX boys. Lets take
the SUN SS 20 as an example. We'll ignore the many clones you could get
(Tatung, ROSS etc.)

CPU - SPARC. Independent specification by SPARC Int. CPUs made by people
      other than SUN (TI, Cypress, Fujitsu, ROSS)

BUS - MBUS. Standard CPU modules available from many vendors.
    - SBUS. IEEE standard interface, with implementations available from
      many card vendors.

F/WARE - OpenBoot/OpenFirmware. IEEE standard, CPU independent peripheral
         drivers. The initial MacPPC OpenBSD port ran completely with
         CPU independent OpenFirmware FCODE based drivers, IIRC.

IO - SCSI. Drives and tapes use IEEE standard SCSI.
     RS232. Need we say more.


Of course, the kit that sun made themselves was proprietry, but that's the
meaning of proprietry, just as DELL kit is proprietry to DELL. The higher
price comes as a result of superior engineering and support, coupled with
the lower volumes.

If you are a Solaris shop, there are plenty of alternatives for hardware,
especially in the old days. Stuff like SCSI devices have a vast choice of
suppliers.


Christian


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