IBM & Sun Agreement Puts Pressure on HP 182
eldavojohn writes "IBM has turned to long time rival Sun in an effort to bring Solaris to its mainframes. Sun may be taking this chance to drop out of the server market while at the same time capture Solaris subscriptions via IBM sales. Either way, this certainly pressures HP in the server department."
Let Jonathan explain the deal (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not really mainframes (Score:2, Informative)
I have not tried Solaris 10 on IBM hardware, but 8(or 9, have forgot which one) was annoying and really only for die hard Solaris fans.
Re:Submitter is an idiot (Score:4, Informative)
If IBM sells more Solaris servers, Sun wins long term software support and IBM wins hardware sales and support, and both extend their brands. Of course, having their own line of hardware keeps a steady stream of support business; but I think they'd move their hardware business over to smaller niche markets or consolidate it with a larger company in a fiscal heartbeat. Sun is looking at every way to capture more developers.
Re:Bait-n-switch (Score:2, Informative)
What's more, this isn't just about HP-UX versus Solaris; it's also about Oracle. One scenario here would be for IBM to create "n-tier" heterogeneous configurations with xSeries and/or BladeCenter App and web engines running Solaris along with Power back-ends running AIX and DB2-LUW (same as DB2-UDB; name has been changed for the sake of marketing confusion). Oracle's current desire appears to be in part to cut Solaris out of the picture (thought I saw something about 11i running on Oracle's mutant/deviant RedHat clone "first", and everything else "somewhat later"). If so, this IBM partnering strategy gives Sun some more options in terms of competing against Oracle/HP-UX (PA-RISC and Itanium) as well as Ms SQLServer/WinServer (HP-Compaq) platforms.
Finally, all this comes together later on, when Mainframe DB2 can be complemented with Solaris running on those funny "special duty" processors IBM has been releasing for zSeries big iron. Again, existing Solaris-dependent applications can be run against DB2 back-ends, but this time some recompiling may be needed.
Don't shoot me if any of the above needs some tweaking; I am just trying to paint the bigger picture here. But the bottom line is not so much "bait-n-switch" but offering Solaris customers (and especially application developers/integrators) the full range of IBM systems as "solaris-friendly", using DB2 as well as Oracle as the target database (on AIX or zOS, at least near-term). A customer wouldn't need to move up to the Mainframe unless they absolutely wanted to. But for customers who like IBM hardware, this permits them to use a Solaris/AIX heterogeneous Web APP/DBMS configuration with all hardware from one vendor. I can think of at least one recent situation for me personally where that would have come in mighty handy.
Of course, your mileage may vary
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Re:Not really mainframes (Score:2, Informative)