by jasoneckert on 5/19/25, 12:50 AM
I provisioned, administered, and used so many Sun systems. I loved them so much that I still keep many Sun workstations and servers in my basement in case I need a nostalgia kick. I tried to use Marie Kondo's KonMari method to get rid of them, but it just didn't work... they all SPARC joy.
by dmd on 5/18/25, 2:05 PM
Not the 10000, but I admin'd a 4500 back in 1999 at Bristol-Myers Squibb at the ripe old age of 21. It was running Sun's mail server, which required constant care and feeding to even remotely reliably serve our 30,000+ users.
One time it just stopped responding, and my boss said "now, pay attention" and body-checked the machine as hard as he could.
It immediately started pinging again, and he refused to say anything else about it.
by eugenekay on 5/18/25, 3:00 PM
Throughout the late 90s, “Mail.com” provided white-label SMTP services for a lot of businesses, and was one of the early major “free email” providers. Each Free user had a storage limit of something like 10MB, which is plenty in an era before HTML email and attachments were commonplace. There were racks upon racks of SCSI disks from various vendors for the backend - but the front end was all standard Sendmail, running on Solaris servers.
Anyway, here’s the front end SMTP servers in 1999, then in-service at 25 Broadway, NYC. I am not sure exactly which model these were, but they were BIG Iron! https://kashpureff.org/album/1999/1999-08-07/M0000002.jpg
by trollied on 5/18/25, 2:20 PM
I used to love working with E10k/E15k boxes. I was a performance engineer for a telco software provider, and it was so much fun squeezing every single thing out of the big iron.
It’s a bit sad that nobody gives a shit about performance any more. They just provision more cloud hardware. I saved telcos millions upon millions in my early career. I’d jump straight into it again if a job came up, so much fun.
by hpcjoe on 5/18/25, 4:39 PM
I recall that while I was at SGI. Many of us within SGI were strongly against the move to sell this off to Sun. We blamed Bo Ewald for the disaster to SGI that this was, the lack of strategic vision on his part. We also blamed the idiots in SGI management for thinking that only MIPS and Irix would be what we would be delivering.
Years later, Ewald and others had a hand in destroying the Beast and Alien CPUs in favor of the good ship Itanic (for reasons).
IMO, Ewald went from company to company, leaving behind a strategic ruin or failure. Cray to SGI to Linux Networx to ...
by nocoiner on 5/18/25, 2:17 PM
To this day, “Sun E10000 Starfire” is basically synonymous in my head with “top-of-the-line, bad-ass computer system.” What a damn cool name. It made a big impression on an impressionable youth, I guess!
by JSR_FDED on 5/18/25, 3:16 PM
This was one of the all time biggest strategic mistakes SGI made - for a mere $50 million they enabled their largest competitor to rack up huge wins against them almost overnight. A friend at SUN at the time was telling me how much glee they took in sticking it to SGI with its own machines.
by znpy on 5/18/25, 2:52 PM
by ajross on 5/19/25, 12:53 AM
This was a Swan Song machine. It was instantaneously great but part of a dinosaur architecture with no future. It was released in 1997, just as the modern massively parallel datacenter paradigm was launching. By the time Web 2.0 was firing up on AWS, this kind of thing seemed ridiculous. And the world hasn't looked back, really.
It's sort of a recapitulation of the mid-80's, when the last waves of ECL mainframes (c.f. VAX 9000) launched with jaw dropping performance numbers and price tags, just to be buried beneath the flood of cheap CMOS workstations within the decade.
by neilv on 5/18/25, 4:22 PM
>
They were also joined with several engineers in Beaverton, Oregon through these mergers.They might mean from Floating Point Systems (FPS):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray#Cray_Research_Inc._and_Cr...
> In December 1991, Cray purchased some of the assets of Floating Point Systems, another minisuper vendor that had moved into the file server market with its SPARC-based Model 500 line.[15] These symmetric multiprocessing machines scaled up to 64 processors and ran a modified version of the Solaris operating system from Sun Microsystems. Cray set up Cray Research Superservers, Inc. (later the Cray Business Systems Division) to sell this system as the Cray S-MP, later replacing it with the Cray CS6400. In spite of these machines being some of the most powerful available when applied to appropriate workloads, Cray was never very successful in this market, possibly due to it being so foreign to its existing market niche.
Some other candidates for server and HPC expertise there (just outside of Portland proper):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequent_Computer_Systems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Supercomputers
(I was very lucky to have mentors and teachers from those places and others in the Silicon Forest, and also got to use the S-MP.)
by HillRat on 5/19/25, 9:49 PM
Still to this day the largest single line item I’ve ever signed off on; I have an old varsity jacket in the back of my closet that was their sales swag for the E10K. Still not convinced that it was that much more cost-effective than a bunch of E6500s for our (embarrassingly parallel) workload, but it was an impressive bit of kit!
by jasongill on 5/18/25, 2:19 PM
This is one of my dream machines to own. The Sun E10k was like the Gibson, it was so mythically powerful. It was a Cray inside of your own server closet, and being able to be the admin of an E10k and have root on a machine with so much power was a real status symbol at the time.
by jakupovic on 5/19/25, 11:03 AM
Sun had the prettiest and fastest machines back in my young days. Their keyboards also were a work of art. I still remember the feel of their keyboards and they were bigger than what we have now. Silky smooth.
by bobmcnamara on 5/18/25, 2:31 PM
Cray-cyber.org used to have free shell accounts on one in Germany.
by tverbeure on 5/18/25, 3:35 PM
I worked for a company that bought one of these. It was delivered, lifted through the window of the server room with a crane and worked fine.
A few days later, our admin noticed over the weekend that he couldn’t remote log in. He checked it out and… the machine was gone. Stolen.
Somebody within Sun must have tipped off where these things were delivered and rented a crane to undeliver them.
