Whats up with Sun PR?

I hate to be critical, but some times something has to be said so folks know we’re paying attention.

New systems are available from Sun, the Sunfire X4140 and X4440… behold:

These systems are AMD Dual Core and presumably NVIDIA chipsets (an earlier comment by a read states its 4 GE ports are NGE). There is no press release that I can find! Joerg Moellenkamp blogs about it here, and the Sun “On the Record” blog mentioned it as well. I suppose this means I should dump the Sun.com RSS feed and instead use the “On The Record” feed instead.

Here’s what I find really disturbing about the X4140 and X4440 releases. These systems were clearly designed as Quad-Core AMD systems to compliment the existing Intel Quad-Core systems of similar design. This is further confirmed by the many statements on the product page about being upgradable to Quad Core. The question is… why release them now? Why not wait untill the Quad Cores are available and release then? I just don’t get it.

Another PR oddity was this: Sun Microsystems Announces MySQL 5.1, which includes this amusing phrase: “today announced the pending general availability of MySQL 5.1″. Must. Make. MySQL Press Release. Why?

There are more examples but I’ll stick with these two. The point is this… Sun has gone from a company that released in volume at the announcement, to a company that released prematurely (eg, the LOM debacle on the X4150′s), to releasing software and systems pre-emptively!

What is going on here!? I don’t want to slam Sun, heaven knows I’m still a fanboy, but honestly, does anyone know whats happening here? (I’ll follow this entry with a ra-ra pro-Sun one to balance my SMI karma. I hate looking negative, but damnit people.)

97 Responses to “Whats up with Sun PR?”

  1. Craig Morgan says:

    Ben,

    I’d suspect an over-eager PR team observing that Johnathon was addressing the MySQL conference and hence trying to tie that into similar press.

    As to the pre-announcements … hmm.

  2. Craig Morgan says:

    Video cards are NVIDIA Pro 3600 and Pro 3050, networking is 4xNGE (2 via MCP55 (Pro 3600), 2 via IO55(Pro3050))

    HTH

  3. Craig Morgan says:

    Well, your comment system screwed that up … so here goes again …

    - Video cards are NVIDIA Pro 3600 and Pro 3050
    - Networking is via 4x NGE driven from above chipsets
    – 2 via Pro 3600 (MCP55)
    – 2 via Pro 3050 (IO55)

    HTH

  4. Fazal Majid says:

    Probably AMD is having a hard time ramping up Barcelona production, and Sun doesn’t want demand outstripping supply.

    The Solaris 10 5/08 “What’s New” page mentions X4540 disk status indicators as one of the meagre new features in the release, but there is no mention of the X4540 on Sun’s product page that I can find.

  5. kangcool says:

    nothing really, seems the same as always – shocking

    AMD are probably giving all the quad core to dell to keep them happy.

  6. John says:

    It looks like sun didnt want to keep the x4200 kits out there with only 4 internal drives since it didnt make them look so good when compared to the rest of the market (where 8 2.5″ drivers are more or less standard).

    So, why wait for the quad cores to actually show up. Start shipping the new form factor and when AMD ships the quads, offer the quads.

  7. H4mm3r says:

    What about FishWork project ? Last year, it was a big rumor and suddenly, everything was closed… No more information. Weird to throw this kind of rumors…

  8. TimM says:

    Our Sun vendor provided the following snippet of info.

    —-
    According to Sun:

    “The GA date on both systems is May 22, 2008. Both systems have an on board SATA controller that does not support hardware RAID. For SATA drives only software RAID is available. There is an optional SAS RAID controller that supports RAID 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50, 60.”

    So it looks like these will be built similar to the X4150 and X4450…
    —-

    Argh! Wonder what new *LOM settings/commands they will have this time =)

  9. SW says:

    Probably just copying their friends at Apple. They seem to have gone from super-secretive surprise announcements to pre-announcing stuff months in advance now as well.

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