Halloween Special: Cobalt, RIP?
Some of you may think I am living in the past by raising up what most think is a dead topic. With Halloween close at hand, I would like to report that I am hearing from ghosts.
In my work to drive a simplified Linux solution to the market, time and again, I am hearing "well, this reminds me of Cobalt". The medium usually pauses, and a whistful look comes over them. When they recover from this out of body experience, they deliver a eulogy that makes me wish I knew the subject. Perhaps it is time for a reincarnation?
For those of you that weren't at the wake, Cobalt was a Linux-based appliance developed in the late 90s. Praised for it's elegant simplicity, millions of these servers were sold. Sun bought Cobalt in 2000 for an estimated $2B in stock. In January of 2003, Sun took a $1.6 billion charge against earnings and put Cobalt into an end of life track (ok, they killed it).
Many have speculated that Sun did in the Cobalt products because they were cannibalizing the lower end of the Solaris line. Others link it to their ever shifting Linux strategy. The purpose of this post is not to question Sun's decision, that would be beating a dead horse (sorry, the macabre keeps creeping in).
In fact, we should give credit to Sun for releasing the source code of the two main product lines under an open source based license.
During my walk down memory lane, I was surprised to have found that there are active user groups (some even call themselves fan clubs) that are keeping the dream alive. There are patches to the 2.6 kernel that are specifically identified as Cobalt related. I have heard reports of "cubes" that have run non-stop for years.
Are there customers out there that would like to see this concept resuscitated? If we could make like Dr. Frankenstein, are there other body parts that should be swapped in? I kind of like the idea of a rather simple but menacing monster facing a brutal giant.
Happy Halloween,
Paula
Paula Hunter is the Vice President of US Marketing for Collax, Inc. Her last gig was Marketing and Business Development director at OSDL, and a while back she was the general manager of UnitedLinux.
I'm a former Cobalt and Sun sales engineer. I think the "millions" number for units sold is a bit optimistic. A few hundred thousand, across all incarnations of the Qube and RaQ, might be more accurate...
I think the appliance concept makes a lot of sense, even today. Witness the success of the various VMware "appliances" that you can download and set up to do single purpose functions. Granted, the RaQ's heyday of hosting providers in every garage and tool shed has passed by a bit, but a Qube-like appliance for the SMB market should still be a huge opportunity for the right provider.
Now that the newest Cobalt hardware is five years old, the former Cobalt community is shifting to newer Linux distros on modern hardware. The most popular of these distros is from the BlueQuartz project, specifically with a bundled installer that puts the RaQ 550 UI on top of CentOS Linux. There is also at least one port of the RaQ 550 to FreeBSD (RAQdevil).
For those who like living on the edge, modern Linux distros can be installed onto the aging Cobalt hardware - Strongbolt and Rackstar are two examples.
Like many other projects in the Linux/FOSS arena, it's hard to unify everyone to contribute to a single project. Everybody likes to have their own differentiators, etc. That's one of the things the Cobalt team was trying to get away from as the Sun acquisition was happening. Customers wanted a more generic platform that was easier to customize. Sun/Cobalt wanted to keep the RaQ and Qube as "black boxes" -- or blue box I guess :) -- which offered factory-provided features but weren't really meant to be tinkered with by end users. That model doesn't appeal to the traditional Linux crowd. When someone can solve that problem, they will have a large market to sell into.
This is a typical example of corporate arrogance.
marketing buys a competitor's product only to
kill it off via company politics. To hell with their customers who bought cobalt cubes,and to
hell with the market that wanted them. As the saying goes, " The customer is always wronged."
Maybe someone at SUN should read the:
CLUETRAIN MANIFESTO.
J.D.
The Cobalt idea is still a very powerful idea. Some of the technology that went into Cobalt had the potential to change the way small-installation systems are managed.
Combine some of the Cobalt ideas with modern web technologies and you would have a killer product. But who's going to do it? All the Cobalt people I know are pretty busy these days.
I love my RaQ3/4 units, the biggest problem I have is my fans keep dying. Anybody have a good source for cheap fans?