Who is Marc Andreessen?

Marc Andreessen is widely recognized for his role in launching the Internet revolution in 1993. After his creation of the Mosaic browser while at the University of Illinois, he co-founded Netscape Communications and played a critical role in the company's massive growth and is the founder of Ning.

As one of the technology icons of our time, Marc has received numerous accolades, he was named one of the "Top 50 people under the age of 40" by Time Magazine in 1994 and graced the magazine's cover in 1996.

What is Ning?

Ning is a consumer Internet company which specializes in highly customizable social networking environments. Marc Andreessen, founder of Ning, joined Jonathan Schwartz at the Sun Analyst Summit 2006 to discuss some of his key findings on why Ning chose Sun to run his business.

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What did Marc Say?

• We originally planned to use Linux on Intel commodity hardware
• Solaris is a better Linux than Linux
• Solaris has similar economic and OpenSource advantages as Linux
• It's very easy to move from Linux to Solaris
• Solaris 10 reliability is a very big deal for us
• Sun is now riding aggressive side of the price/performance curve
• With Sun hardware, we know everything has been tested and integrated together
• With Solaris, we know if we need vertical scalability, we'll actually be able to get it

Ning's Detailed Cost Analysis

Cost analysis showed Sun Fire x64 servers cost less than half as much as Linux/Intel boxes over 36 month period: