Sun Acquires CFS/Lustre, Becomes Windows OEM

anzha writes "Sun Microsystems announced today that they are acquiring Cluster File Systems Inc. CFS owns the intellectual property related to and develops the open source file system known as Lustre." Relatedly Sun has also signed an agreement with Microsoft to be a Windows OEM. "Sun and Microsoft will work together to ensure that Solaris runs well as a guest on Microsoft virtualization technologies and that Windows Server runs well as a guest on Sun's virtualization technologies. Sun and Microsoft will work together on a support process for customers who are using the virtualization solutions. This joint commitment to customers ensures that Windows and Solaris will provide a solid virtualization experience."

It makes sense for Sun

[brennz]

They have some nice boxes [sun.com]. I'm sure some admins would like to run Windows on them.

I'd like an X4600 so I could throw VMware ESX on it

Sun has done this before

[Roadkills-R-Us]

OK, not exactly this, but they attempted to straddle the fence. It failed last time.

It was the Roadrunner 386i, which came out in 1988. It was a 386 system running SunOS (or was it Solaris by then? I forget) with a daughter board and co-processor to run DOS (not Windows, IIRC). I know, because I developed applications on it! The best part was that the beta release of the OS (bundled with their wonderful FORTRAN compiler!!!!) came on a stack of floppies several inches thick. Took a while to IPL or upgrade...

Anyway, Sun survived that debacle, and I suspect they'll survive this one. This time, the product may even survive as well!

Attention: Not 1998.

[fm6]

The author of that article knows jack. We (I'm the documentation lead for a couple of Sun x64 boxes) have been selling and supporting Windows servers for some time. We have a fair number of people working on Windows-related software, QA, support, and documentation (including me). We've even contributed some source code to a couple of open-source products in order to make them work better on Windows.

What we haven't been doing is selling servers with Windows pre-installed, or providing install discs with our drivers already on them. We couldn't do these things without an OEM agreement. Now we can. That will mean less work for me and various other Sun people, and (much more important) fewer headaches for our customers.

Next time I see Jonathan Schwartz (no, we don't know each other, but we eat in the same cafeteria) I'll have to resist the urge to prostrate myself. I just hope he's working on similar deals with our other OS partners.

Don't get me wrong, I love Solaris. It's a beautiful OS. We'll always support it. (In fact, the x86/x64 version is a lot better supported than it was 8 years ago.) But our job is to meet our customers needs, not force our favorite technology down their throat.

Get it through your heads, folks: the Sun-Microsoft feud is over. And good riddance. It was bad for both companies.

Re:Hey, it worked for SGI...

[vought]

Rick B is in charge of this?

Good lord, my faith in the Valley's ability to weed out the weak is really shaken. This guy is a moron.

On the other hand, I can see this being a good fit for Sun on a certain level. Where I work, the fact that Macs now run Windows "if needed" has bought them a lot of mindshare. If the same thing happens in datacenters, maybe Sun can sell more hardware.

On the other hand, this may just be a gift to Dell and other Windows Server vendors in the future. I understand the value of running Solaris and Windows Server on the same machine, but can't see why someone with the need for Sun's heavy iron to plop Windows on there just to run Exchange, for example.

Re:or HP or IBM

[ToasterMonkey]

Sun seems to want to use Linux and now Windows to get their foot in the door and offer other services/hardware.