The IT world is abuzz about the possibility of Sun being purchased by IBM, as reported by the WSJ. The author in the linked commentary makes a very good point with regard to the only thing holding up a hostile takeover of Sun is the credit market. For a while, Sun had a market cap at roughly the same value as it had money in the bank. That’s like having a house appraised at $100,000… taking into account that there’s a $100,000 pile of cash in the living room. Essentially, the market figured Sun to be worthless. They’re up a bit, but still not much. They’ve got around $3 billion on hand, but they’re burning through cash pretty quick and there’s no turnaround in site.
But speculation on how Sun will die or be consumed isn’t the point of this post: The point is that load balancers had a hand, at least indirectly, at killing Sun.
All in the IT world are familiar with what killed Sun: Commoditized hardware. Load balancing is what made commoditized hardware viable as an Internet platform.
When you need to add capacity, you can either scale horizontally, or vertically. Vertical scaling means adding more processors, better processors, more RAM, more disk, etc., to an existing system. Horizontally means adding more systems.
Sun hardware was great at scaling up. But it was expensive. Way more expensive. But initially that’s what people did. If only there was a way to split the load amongst smaller, cheaper systems, giving them the power of a vertical system at a fraction of the price.
Oh wait.
I started out as a Solaris administrator in the late 90s. In the geek IT community, Sun workstations where the ultimate materialistic status symbol. They were faster than x86 chips, and Unix had a solid reputation as a platform, with Solaris being the best of the Unix breeds. Those where the halcyon days.
I remember building out a Sun server farm for a client around 1999, consisting of about 50 or so Sun boxes. We were happy with the hardware and software, but the prices was something to behold. Sun’s idea of a web server was a Sun E250, which moderately equipped cost in the $30,000 range.
A $30,000 web server.
But hey, it was the late 90’s. They would dump garbage trucks worth of cash on Internet infrastructures, so the high price wasn’t that big of a deal. Windows was only moderately trusted as a server platform, and Linux was still considered a hobby platform, with little cachet outside of its dedicated fan base. Solaris ruled.
But things changed. With the dot-com bust of 2000, people (rightly so) choked at the idea of spending $30,000 on a web server. Linux had grown exponentially, and was trusted for web and application serving. Windows had grown to be a strong web platform as well. As a result, you could buy an x86 web server running Linux or Windows for about $2,000 that had roughly the same ability to serve traffic as a $30,000 Sun server.
Load balancing made commodity hardware viable as an Internet platform. It didn’t matter much what processing power a web server had, you just threw more behind a load balancer until you had the capacity you needed. Scaling horizontally was much less expensive than vertically.
Linux exploded in the server realm and Windows grew stronger, all at the cost of Sun. It still made sense to run your database on vertically scalable Sun servers, but the web and middleware markets were lost to Sun forever.
For too long Sun refused to acknowledge that $30,000 was too much to charge for a web server. They even dropped Solaris support for x86. They’ve taken a number of positive steps, such as offering x86 servers in addition to SPARC, and fully supporting Solaris on x86 and even open sourcing Solaris with Open Solaris. But it seems to be too late.
I was recently at a tier 1 hosting data center, and the racks are full of servers from HP and Dell. 10 years ago, tier 1 data centers where so full of Sun equipment, that all you could see was purple and gray.
It’s not as simple as Load Balancers. That fact that most Sun staff and system administrators were such arrogant idiots that went out of their way to offend anyone that was not part of the their inner circle had a lot to do with it.
They were so insufferable that a lot of designs were changed to avoid having to deal with Sun administrators because everyone thought they were complete twats.
It is a joy to see the success of Linux has wiped that smile off their face, and the “once great” computer company is more lauded for its storage products.
I only hope that when my turn comes and networking fades awat, I will have the grace to go quietly and no one will say, there goes that networking twat. Good riddance.
“Load balancing made commodity hardware viable as an Internet platform” – so true!
It’s not just enterprise server vendors who are doomed to make that mistake. How many load balancer vendors can you think of whose business model depends on vertical scaling, 3-yearly hardware renewals and ‘proprietary’ appliances that contain little more than a SuperMicro or Tyan motherboard? Will software on commodity hardware be viable in load balancing as in web serving? – I think so