Sounds like Sun and Fujitsu have come up with a close combat server! The war fan is made from iron, and is usually used for signalling troops. The reason that its made from iron is because it can fend off arrows, and even swords.

Of course in the server room, a steel-bladed fan will definitely take somebody's fingers off. "Uh, yes sir, just reach in and grab that wire..."

The gap this box fills is all about single threaded performance. While the Niagara boxes are tip top for multithreaded, parallel workloads, if something needs single threaded performance (or "straight line speed"), Niagara isn't the right choice. Since Sun stopped shipping the USIIIi boxes earlier this year, there had been a specific gap: running single threaded applications on an entry level Sparc box.

Yes please

Whilst 'a single Sparc64-VII chip can deliver 40 gigaflops of number-crunching power with all four cores running at 2.5 GHz', so can a single Phenom 9850 of the kind that Dabs will sell you for less than a hundred and fifty of your Earth pounds

to not call it the Bukkake in important meetings..

I fear Sun is bringing to market yet another offering people will not want.

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

Such a large server for one socket?

“Size matters not, ... Look at me. Judge me by size, do you?”

Is the death of Sun near? Will someone buy us please?

“Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them do not. Miss them do not. Attachment leads to jealously. The shadow of greed, that is.”

Will I be part of the next RIF? I hear the ROCK team just got hit.

“Soon will I rest, yes, forever sleep. Earned it I have. Twilight is upon me, soon night must fall.”

What should we do?

“Around the survivors a perimeter create.”

It seems everyone is hiding.

"Always in motion is the future."

Obviously Sun's future is numbered in days, not years or decades.

"When 900 years you reach, look as good, you will not."

Master Yoda

For all those stuck on Solaris that haven't departed for another OS, this will be a welcomed and much needed gap-filler to replace the old Netra type of Sun server. Just by bringing this out (and I reckon it was an FSC driven development) Sun are admittign Niagara can't fill the old SPARC shoes, let alone compete with Itanium, Power, Xeon or Opteron.

Former Fujitsu customers will recognize the M3000 as a rehash of the PrimePower 250.

It has similarly outlandish power requirements, and is expected to change hardware configuration significantly mid-flight as well. It took some effort to get the 'somewhere around 12A @ 110V' number out of them. Efficiency, yep, sure.

An informal poll of customers found two things: nobody wants it, and everybody knows the gap is in the M5000 to M8000 (10U to massively oversized cabinet with separate power cabinet.) Good luck finding a VAR that knows how to position it; they're getting no support now that Sun's dumped >90% of their customers onto them, and bleeding sales like a stuck pig with no support from Sun.

From http://opensolaris.org/os/community/on/flag-days/pages/2008032602/

Ikkaku is a Japanese name for "Narwhal", an

Arctic cetacean/whale, about 20 feet long; the

male has a single twisted pointed canine tooth

or tusk projecting forward like a horn.

The Japanese word literally mean "single horn".

Or perhaps a nod to 'Madarame Ikkaku' the Manga character (no, I've never heard of him either, but Manga's hip with the kids these days, isn't it? Isn't it?)

<-- The one with the colorful iron fan in the pockets, ta...

Why does every article about Sun or one of Sun's competitors always bring out the Sun haters talking about Sun's death? I'm not sure I understand. I can see not liking a particular vendor, but it's just so darn passionate when it comes to Sun.

It's like Sun dumped you on prom night for that hot chick you were jealous of and you never got over it 25 years and 100 pounds later.

Not that it's really a big deal for me, but I don't see the same amount of hatred for Dell, HP, IBM, Fujitsu, Unisys, EMC, Netapp, RedHat, or Novell. I think the only two that come close or may be worse depending on the article are SCO or Microsoft.

Can someone explain it to me?

Years of Scott Mcnealy top 10 lists.

Years of cockiness and better than everyone else

Years of saying SPARC & Solaris is everything and now bragging about how many chips/OS's they support

Years of making millions daily as the stock went to $65...and now under $2

Years of bashing HP, bashing MicroSoft, bashing IBM, yoyoing Linux, using Solaris license to get what they want from Fujitsu.

Understand now?

Yoda was right on....Sun is near death

And how is that different from anyy other vendor?

It isn't.

He just drinks a different flavour of Kool-Aid

Some marketing drone who posts anonymously (or is it Matt?)

Sun has a gap in its product portfolio, they are positioning a new box to fill it, standard marketing practise. If anybody esle does it, it is business as normal.

Joda says - The Great Scott Amazing the influence still has ...

Mine is the jacket with the Sun Kool-Aid in the pocket.

Matt - as usuall you do not know what you are talking about - the Netra's is a range of servers build to specific technical requirements - and you are the telco specialist?

As for the Rock team getting it ... repeating a lie does not make it the truth.

-- Paris as she also believes telling the same story over and over make it more believable