I just noticed that Sun release a fresh new release of SunMC, which stands for Sun Management Center. SunMC is a very solid monitoring framework targeted primarily at monitoring Sun-based infrastructure, so it is not quite as wide in coverage as Tivoli or OpenView, but certainly does a much better job at monitoring Sun hardware that either former or the letter. Although make no mistake SunMC can gladly monitor Linux, Windows, and Solaris x86 machines without a problem. Up to this moment SunMC has been a pretty solid product, but had some shortcomings that were perhaps a little irritating and disappointing sometimes. One and the biggest shortcoming for me in the old version of the product was reliance on Oracle 8i database, which would get installed with SunMC as a repository for all monitoring-related and configuration data. And as you know Oracle, it is a huge, bloated, memory and hard disk hungry piece of crap. And I really hate dealing with Oracle in places where MySQL or PostgreSQL would do just fine. The other shortcoming was rather unpolished Java Swing based interface, which was quite functional mind you, but from the point of view of aesthetics it was hopelessly stuck somewhere in mid '90s. Lo and behold as an answer to my prayers these rough edges have been polished off in the version 4. Oracle finally got the boot in favor of PostgreSQL, which is a huge plus in my book (did I forget to mention that Oracle is huge, bloated piece of crap?). And I hope the new Lockhart based web interface is as useful as in the previous incarnation and is no longer an ugly duckling. Well, these are preliminary impressions from reading the feature list of of new SunMC 4, I should be downloading the product now. And if I'm really impressed I might blog about it. Stay tuned.

Oh yeah, here are the links for the new version:

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/sundocs/articles/sunmcnew.jsp
http://www.sun.com/software/products/sunmanagementcenter/get.html

Don't you miss the days when Unix workstations were ruling the desktops of the engineering elite? When almost every serious engineer's desktop was adorned with either Sun SparcStation or Silicon Graphics funky colored Indy, Indigo or O2? Well, it looks like Silicon Graphics has been completely erased by its own shortsightedness and the market forces and Sun has been relegated to the highest end corners of the workstation market. The economics of price/performance delivered by Intel/AMD desktops have been making a pretty compelling argument in the last few years making it hard to justify a RISC workstation on the lower end. Sun has caught the wind of this as well and is pretty happy selling the Opteron and now recently the Intel Core Duo powered boxes. I really hope the marketing hot heads at Sun will not get inebriated with their recent success and won't make a mistake of quietly ignoring the RISC workstation market and stop developing the better/faster SPARC workstation. I'm not sure if it is just me but it is certainly starting to look that way - it's been a while since Sun has put out a new model of Sparc powered workstation on the market (barring the repacking of essentially the same hardware into different enclosure as in the case of Sun Blade 2500 to Sun Ultra 45 transformation). Despite this apparent stagnation I think now Sun has the opportunity to introduce a completely new kind of workstation that can re-energize the Unix workstation prominence with the recent introduction of Niagara 2 processor. By completely new I mean a workstation that can be oriented at the jobs that require a high degree of parallelism - perhaps image rendering and film post production or life sciences, the places where data is easily broken down into comparatively independent pieces and therefore can be operated on in parallel fashion, exactly the places where the conventional workstations orientated squarely at single-threaded performance may not fair quite as well. The fact that floating point units are now attached to each of 8 cores of the Niagara 2 processor should also be a boon for the above mentioned tasks. Dare I say that there is a chance that with this processor Sun has a chance to come back to the areas formerly dominated by Silicon Graphics - entertainment industry with its insatiable glut for processing power required for rendering and post-production jobs would be a prime spot for the capabilities found in Niagara 2. And so I'm asking myself will Sun be smart enough to exploit this opportunity or will this opportunity be just shrugged by Sun marketing dwibs calling the shots on what products actually get developed and sent to the market place? I certainly hope not and I really hope Sun will take a risk of productizing a Niagara-2 powered workstation. It certainly is a risk, since it has never been done before and no one has ever put out a workstation that is throughput oriented instead of squeezing maximum performance out of a single execution thread by cranking up the clock speed. But as the Russian proverb says "those who don't take risks don't drink champagne", I think that says it all.