IBM & Sun Agreement Puts Pressure on HP

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."

out of the server market?

[jcgf]

Sun may be taking this chance to drop out of the server market while at the same time capture Solaris subscriptions via IBM sales.

I don't know, Sun is investing quite a bit in their new niagra processors, so why would they get out of the server business?

Submitter is an idiot

[PCM2]

Nowhere in the article does it say Sun is thinking of dropping out of the server market. Rather, it mentions that Sun is tied with Dell for the #3 spot. You'd have to be an idiot to think Sun was even considering walking away now.

Re:Submitter is an idiot

[ejito]

They won't drop out for quite awhile, but Sun was visiting universities (including mine), and their presentations were emphasizing a shift to services. Their long term goals are for support on top of open source software (they believe in house developers will become a liability for businesses, who in turn will shift their development to large businesses like Sun).

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.

I for one...

[Arthur Grumbine]

...welcome our new IBM/Sun overlo-- wait a second! They've always been our overlords!

IBM did that a long time ago

[Per Abrahamsen]

They are mostly a service company that also sells hardware these days. And they are doing fine. It is not surprising if Sun wants to do the same.

Nah, this'll never fly

[Colin Smith]

Enterprise customers want a single vendor.

Why?

Admin: "There's a bug in the operating system, it's corrupting data under these circumstances"
Sun: "Naw, not at all. The problem is in the IBM firmware. The operating system is doing the right thing".
IBM: "WTF? no it ain't, the problem is in the operating system."

Queue many hours of haranguing both companies.

As opposed to:

Admin: "There's a bug in the OS, it's corrupting data under these circumstances"

Sun (Or IBM): "Actually the dump you sent us indicate the prob

Re:Nah, this'll never fly

[Xiaran]

the big one is that they know how it works all the way down to the metal and they can get someone on site in 4 hours who can fix it

I admire your optimism. I was young once :)

There is a lot more margin in services

[dreamchaser]

Hardware makes very little in terms of profit margin, which is one reason you see large support contracts sold with high end server hardware. Services make margins that are typically ten times that of hardware sales. That is why you see more and more companies that were traditionally seen as hardware outfits getting into the services market.

Re:out of the server market?

[Trailer Trash]

I don't know, Sun is investing quite a bit in their new niagra processors, so why would they get out of the server business?

They're also investing in a new line of viagra processors, which promise longer up-time.

Re:

[Kenneth Stephen]

Perhaps its because Sun is already effectively out of the *big*-server market. IBM no longer considers Sun a competitor on the high-end market segment and sees only HP to compete with there. Sun appears to be trying to find a way to find another way of making the revenues they had in the past.

Re:

[vacuum_tuber]

Maybe you should read IBM's Numa-Q paper that explains why ordinary CPUs don't scale to more than about 30 without the increasing demands of cache invalidations overcoming the advantages of more processors. I think IBM's whole point of starting to put two processors on a die with shared cache is aimed at scaling within that cache invalidation problem. Maybe for cache invalidation purposes the pair of processor (or four, say) can behave like one, and maybe the point of diminishing returns approaches 30 of

Re:

[ckaminski]

linky link to said paper?

Re:

[Doctor Memory]

You buy much IBM gear when IBM had that perceived advantage?

You betcha. When you find yourself stuck with a system developed by a team who think that 8000-line EJBs are perfectly acceptable, you better pack on the horsepower. So you send back the pair of 520s [ibm.com] that were originally specced with the system and lay in a couple of fat 595s [ibm.com]. Sure, the bean counters scream, but when you trot out the charts that show system performance tanking around 55-60 requests/second and you need to deliver 200+, it's easy to convince them to spend the money rather than scrap a $13

Re:

[vacuum_tuber]

Isn't it going to be a hell of a note if all the hardware companies get out of the hardware business and into something like services? Then the only people who will be making chips and boxes will be the Chinese, and their chips will be knock-offs of some retro CPU, such as happened with digital watch chips. The digital watch and clock chips at the low end are all the same, based on the coupla-button LED watches of (when? the 1970s?). Even my moderately expensive vehicle has one of those for a dashboard

Re:

[mhall119]

Then the only people who will be making chips and boxes will be the Chinese, and their chips will be knock-offs of some retro CPU

Correction, they will be making state of the art UltraSPARC T2 chips, since they can do so for free, and have the exact specifications to work from. And if it just so happens that the only quality chip being manufactured anymore was specifically designed to run Solaris and Java, well I guess that's just a lucky break for Sun.

Re:

[jcgf]

They are touting the Niagra, but those in the know realize what a piece of junk it is (seriously, lots of issues with even the second generation),

links, references?

Not really mainframes

[Jim Hall]

It's not really mainframes. Yes, the IBM / Sun agreement will eventually put Solaris on the IBM mainframe, but more importantly was this bit at the beginning of the article:

The collaboration announced Thursday will enable Sun's Solaris operating system to run on IBM servers. That means customers that run Sun servers will be able to switch to Big Blue's hardware without having to rewrite any programs. / At first this will be possible on IBM's "x" series of servers, which also run Microsoft Corp.'s Windows or the open-source Linux system. But eventually IBM hopes to bring Solaris to the mainframe, the big multitasking machines that have been one of the company's core profit centers for decades.

So you'll be able to run Solaris on IBM x-series hardware. This is a big deal. While you're unlikely to see big customers migrating their workload off the big systems (E25k, etc) to x-series, certainly you'll have customers moving smaller Solaris workloads to x-series. When you can run Solaris on IBM z-series (the mainframe) then customers can look again to move the big systems to IBM/Solaris.

Wow, it's just so weird to write "IBM/Solaris". :-)

Re:Not really mainframes

[the_humeister]

Wow, it's just so weird to write "IBM/Solaris". :-)

Make that GNU/IBM/Solaris...

Thanks you! I'll be here all week...

Re:

[afidel]

I'm not sure why you would want to run Solaris on xSeries when the Sun equivalents are generally cheaper and you would only have a single vendor to point at.

Re:

[mjt5282]

I know what you mean - in my old company, we had 1 problematic HP DL server running RH linux - of course, when we had problems, RH blamed HP and HP blamed the RH linux code. Of course, I had been spoiled previously because most of the Unix boxes used to be Sun Servers running Sun Solaris.

Re:

[Amiga Trombone]

I'm not sure why you would want to run Solaris on xSeries when the Sun equivalents are generally cheaper and you would only have a single vendor to point at.

I'd be a lot more interested in seeing Solaris on the P or I series servers. I wonder if that's in the works? Is Sun/IBM considering supporting Solaris on Power? Or perhaps Sun is considering transitioning to the Power architecture? It'd make sense - continuing to develop Sparc is a drain on Sun's resources, and IBM is itching to get Power (and it's der

Re:

[lanc]

see the Polaris [opensolaris.org] site.

Ahem . . .

[hawk]

That should be GNU/IBM/Solaris, thank you. :)

hawk, whistling innocently

Re:

[fm6]

I don't see anything in the article about porting Solaris to the z-series. Which is hardly surprising: porting Solaris to a new architecture would be a huge amount of work, and it's difficult to see how anybody could sell enough extra systems or support contracts to make it pay.

On the other hand, Sun is already putting a lot of work into the x64 version of Solaris, because AMD-based systems is pretty much their best profit center. And the Sun/Intel deal only strengthens that. So it's not that much extra wor

Re:

[MaggieL]

Wow, it's just so weird to write "IBM/Solaris"

No wierder than it was to write "IBM/Novell" back in the day of things like "NetWare for SAA"...

Re:

[SEE]

Wow, it's just so weird to write "IBM/Solaris"

Well, I've been expecting some form of Solaris on IBM ever since OpenSolaris came out, whether or not Sun was willing to cut a deal with IBM. How much can a Sun x86 Solaris box do that an IBM/OpenSolaris x86 box couldn't? How many Solaris-running SPARCs could be replaced with IBM/OpenSolaris POWER machines (either p or i series), if the price were right? The POWER/PowerPC OpenSolaris porting projects were going to (eventually) make IBM able to compete in Solaris shops that wouldn't dream of going Linux

Not necessarily mainframes

[simong]

When I read about this yesterday, as well as expecting a port to Power6, which isn't unlikely, I was wondering if Sun would be offering Solaris as a zOS virtual machine. zSolaris - now, that *is* weird.

Re:

[Bender Unit 22]

At least the older Solaris for Intel did not support different IBM options such as the ServeRaid controller, so you had to install something else like a Adaptec or something.
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:

[iarnell]

I stuck a Solaris 10 11/06 DVD into an xSeries 3650 only yesterday. No native support for the ServeRAID 8k (though there is a driver disk image on the latest ServeRAID Support CD). No native support for the Broadcom NetXtreme II ethernet interface (but driver is available from Broadcom). Installation still fails due to spontaneous reboots - but there might be a patch from Sun (haven't got that far yet). So no, it doesn't quite just run out of the box yet.

Re:

[lokedhs]

It's a big story for companies who actually want to run Solaris on IBM hardware. So far it has been difficult for them to get support. When you pay 100k USD for a server, you expect to have full support for the operating system you intend to run on it. So far, IBM has been unable to do this for Solaris. Them doing it now is a big deal. Not technically, but from the business side of things.

Re:Bait-n-switch

[HockeyPuck]

A couple of additional points here. First, IBM paints a pretty picture about being all cozy with Linux. The truth is that they use it as a bait-n-switch tactic to get people to move to AIX or z/OS (all proprietary IBM Operating Systems). This means added revenue for IBM. That is, as soon as customers start putting a heavy load on the system, IBM will start pushing AIX or z/OS as a preferred solution.

Dunno about bait and switch being an IBM trait. You could say that for ANY IT vendor. You start out by buying their entry/lowend gear and if you continue to grow they start to recommend larger/higherend versions of their gear. There aren't many shops where the google/yahoo model (add more and more commodity servers...) works. While the largest x86 based server IBM makes can have 32CPUs (primary use is VMWare), i highly doubt that windows or linux could take advantage of that many CPUs for a large database installation, while AIX/OS400 have no problems dealing with high numbers of CPUs.

Since this is /. and we must have examples:

I'm sure...

Your network is made up of hundreds of 16port Cisco hubs and not 9slot Cat6ks.
Your storage sits on internal disk and not external arrays by EMC/HDS/IBM/HP..
You still ride the same 1 gear bicycle you had when you were 6, and didn't upgrade to one with more gears.
10Mb ethernet on coax is still the preferred medium.
Haven't upgraded from linux 2.2 or windows 95.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

The should be paying more attention. Most of IBM's recent focus for AIX has been on the p570 and p590/595 boxen, not the 1x or 2x CPU type boxes that have to compete against the very similar i86_64 commodity boxes prevalent in the xSeries world. AIX is increasingly about big-time virtualization built on greater than 4x CPU systems (the minimum reasonable p570 "building block"). Allowing Solaris to run on xSeries and Blades gives IBM another way to sell more non-windows servers, while expanding the poten

Re:

[cayenne8]

I hope not. I've just come to a project that uses DB2. I'm an Oracle guy.

I've tried to approach this with an open mind...and I know DB2 will act a 'bit' different, but, man, the shortcomings I see in DB2 are a bitch!! I can't stand it...trying to do simple things are a PITA in DB2 (an example, doing a hierarchical query in Oracle with "Start with...connect by"), and a couple other things I've run into lately.

I hope they don't popularize DB2 at all......I must say I MUCH prefer oracle on a sun box...

Re:

[raftpeople]

They all have pro's and con's. How about returning a result set from a sproc in Oracle, I know, there is a kludge that gets around this but it's not pretty. Or the Oracle optimizer, compared to my experience with DB2 and MS SQL Server, Oracle is (or was a few years ago) by far the worst.

On the other hand, Oracle has things I really like, sequences, consistent read (by far the best of the 3 db's listed), etc.

Another nail in the server coffin for HP

[Itninja]

HP is getting to (or already has arrived) the point where their server support is laughably awful. Pair that with this recent announcement from IBM, and it could be interpreted as death knell for the Proliant line.

Re:Another nail in the server coffin for HP

[afidel]

Hahahaha, HP makes the best x86/x64 servers on the market right now. iLo, quickstart, foundation pack, etc all make HP's way easier to manage then the competition. Not only that but 6Hr call to repair is impossible to beat in the x86 world. The only thing that's slightly lacking is first and second level support, but I almost never need them and as soon as they start wasting my time I ask for the duty manager so I can get an SME on the phone.

Re:

[chef_raekwon]

wow. i hope hp is paying you for your plug.

side note: having used hp as well, i know from using sun/ibm, they also make very decent x86 servers. or you can build your own with barebones tyan boxen. and you can fix it yourself in less than 2 hours (or atleast the team bitch can (teh n00b) ;)

Re:

[cow ninja]

How are you going to get iLo with a tyan box? Or fit 4 hotswap sas drive on a 1U with HP's great smartarray card? (http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/prolia ntdl360/index-g4p-sas.html)

It sounds like you have never been an admin in a true 24/7 shop where uptime and space are critical.

Re:

[cow ninja]

Thats true Sun does sell those and they are pretty nice, I have one racked right now.

The point that I was making is that you cannot go buy off the shelf parts (tyan or not) and have it be comparable to a new DL360 or DL380 from HP. The parent post (GP?) by chef_raekwon was comparing a box he could build with enterprise HP equipment. In this case HP will out preform anything you build yourself from parts ordered from newegg.

Re:

[Itninja]

I agree that HP makes great servers...my issue is with their support. I provide tier II support for 250 servers in my state. I have to call HP often for hardware support, and it take a freakin' act of Congress to have damn replacement RAM stick sent out.

Re:

[David Gerard]

It seems to vary per support area. I know that in Australia, HP's support is shit. In London, they can be pretty OK. Not as good as Sun, but quite tolerable.

Most annoying HP experience: three-way blamestorm with Red Hat over who supports bonding network connections on a DL580. Red Hat I expect to be shit at service (Red Hat licenses are things you buy to pacify PHBs and Oracle), but I woulda loved to been proven wrong. HP I was thoroughly disappointed by.

Re:

[afidel]

Last time I called HP for a replacement part (earlier this week) the conversation went like this:
Them:Contact info please
Me:{contact info}
Them:Is this a new or existing case?
Me:new
Them:Serial number
Me:{serial number}
Them:What is the issue?
Me:I have a failed DIMM indicated by a trouble light and system management homepage
Them:Have you tried moving the DIMM around to confirm it is the particular piece of ram?
Me:No, I cannot. It's a production server and I have a limited dowtime window.
Them:Ok, would you like

Re:

[Doctor Memory]

Um, I think your wish has been granted. I just checked the HP site, and they don't list any Integrity series products with Alphas. It's all dual-core Itaniums (or MIPS in the Non-Stop series).

Let Jonathan explain the deal

[Bryan-10021]

``As many are already aware, we embarked upon a journey a couple years ago to formally separate the Solaris operating system from Sun's hardware business - as well as bring Solaris to the free and open source software world via a community effort named OpenSolaris [opensolaris.org]. None of these changes were easy, but I'd like to believe both were successful. What's my proof?`` Read the rest in Sun CEO's blog. [sun.com]

Keeping Solaris Relevant

[d3xt3r]

I don't buy the idea that Sun is looking to bail out of the hardware business. What they are looking to do is keep Solaris relevant. Sun doesn't want you to think Solaris requires Sun hardware. Sun realized that the only option for people wanting to go with x86/x86_64 chips and run a Unix-like OS on supported hardware meant running Linux or buying Sun gear.

Sun is looking to eat some of Linux's lunch. The question is, why is IBM interested?

Re:

[AxXium]

I agree on the looking to keep Solaris relevant part. There are many reasonable and attractive alternatives out there.

Re:

[astrashe]

I think that this makes sense for IBM too -- IBM wants to do a little bit of everything, and to have access to customers with all kinds of different shops.

This deal gives IBM access to companies that are currently centered on Sun, and Sun is still pretty big.

Re:

[pavon]

The question is, why is IBM interested?

That is obvious - they want Sun's customers. IBM doesn't make any money off of operating systems, they make money off of hardware and support contracts, which is why they have been so supportive of linux. Using an open source operating system decreases their development costs, but more importantly make it easier for people to migrate to their hardware. No one starts off using IBM anymore. They start small with individual servers, then move up to clusters, and when that starts getting out of hand they migra

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is, why is IBM interested?

They want the financial services market. Really. Major financials I've been in (yes, they're household names) run one of the following:

• Linux
• Solaris
• Windows

That's probably the list of servers, in order of decreasing market share. In some of the larger ones, Solaris (both on SPARC and x86) win over Linux, while others have bigger Linux installations. What I haven't seen have been HP/UX. I've seen one financial use AIX boxes, and that was over ten years ago now.

Re:

[SL Baur]

Sun is looking to eat some of Linux's lunch. The question is, why is IBM interested?

Unlike Sun, I see a lot of development activity on lkml coming from *@*ibm.com email addresses mainly aimed at the big iron. My best guess would be that Linux isn't quite up to snuff there yet. They certainly are not walking away.

Disclaimer:
IANALKD, but it sure looks like IBM is pouring a lot of development effort into (big iron) Linux.

Money.

[TheLink]

Same reason why they are interested in Linux, Java etc.

The more choices the customer gets the more IBM consultants/services/support the customer is likely to want/need.

Re:

[AnotherDaveB]

The question is, why is IBM interested?

The Register [theregister.co.uk] suggests IBM is just trying to keep their customers happy.

" IBM's move appears to confirm that there is strong demand for the OS among corporate customers. It's hard to imagine IBM agreeing to this arrangement without customers applying serious pressure."

Re:Solaris is only irrelevant if you play with toy

[M. Baranczak]

Gotta love the Solaris fanatics. Next I suppose you'll be telling me that Linux isn't "real Unix".

Solaris is a fine OS, and it's got some features that nobody else has. But in some areas it's about 10-15 years behind Linux and BSD. Don't take my word for it - take a look at what Sun itself is saying. [opensolaris.org] Here's a few excerpts:

Solaris installation is ugly, slow, and difficult.
...
We use outdated networking technology (RARP and Bootparams) by default, rather than contemporary network protocols, and thus are often unable to automatically determine configuration attributes that are easily discovered by our competition.
...
We don't include the right set of initial configuration tasks, such as an initial user account, that are commonly provided by competitors. This results in an installed system which boots, and can be logged into as root, but it's then up to the user to hunt around and find a tool (or, more likely, edit the configuration files directly due to our paucity of tools and poor integration of those that exist into the desktop) to create a usable account.
...
One of the significant deficiencies in Solaris compared to our Linux competitors is our ability to easily install additional software after the initial installation.

Well, the good news is that Sun is actually working hard to fix these problems.

Re:

[An dochasac]

The correct phrase is "GNU is Not Unix" and more importantly, GLNJL, "GNU/Linux is Not Just Linux" and GUBK, "GNU can be Used on Better Kernels." But I digress...

There are obviously areas of Solaris that are few years behind Linux but 10-15 years behind? No a chance. I started on Slackware 96, I spent several years supporting SuSE and I still use Ubuntu. Ubuntu is ahead of most Linux distributions on packaging and drivers and is also slightly ahead of OpenSolaris in this area. The sheer number of ho

Re:

[M. Baranczak]

There are obviously areas of Solaris that are few years behind Linux but 10-15 years behind? No a chance.

Concrete example, which I already mentioned: package management. The BSD ports system was first introduced in 1994, Debian APT in 1999. By 2002 or so, all the major Linux distros were using either APT or something that worked just like it. Solaris still doesn't have an equivalent tool. (OK, so it's more like 12 years behind.)

Re:

[Capt James McCarthy]

'I suppose you'll be telling me that Linux isn't "real Unix".'

You are correct on that statement, and legally, it is not and never has been. (just in case you were confused).

"Gotta love the Solaris fanatics."

Though I appreciate your distain for Solaris supporters, I really don't think that there is an OS out there that can cliam 'no problems.' Solaris, like BSD, Linux, HPUX, AIX, all have their issues at some point. You also have to understand that linux has not been where it is now. So you have many a serv

Re:

[M. Baranczak]

1. Yes, I know that "Linux isn't Unix". My point was that nobody gives a fuck.

2. I never said that you should replace a working Solaris system just because Linux is faster to install. That would be silly. Disdain for Solaris supporters? Hell, I'm a Solaris supporter myself. What I was talking about is the Solaris fanatics: people who absolutely refuse to acknowledge any shortcoming in Solaris, no matter how glaringly obvious. Every user community has people like that, but for some reason Solaris seems to at

Re:

[Capt James McCarthy]

"3. Re BSD jails: my understanding is that Zones provide many additional features, like the ability to set limits on the RAM usage, CPU usage and bandwidth for each zone. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong."

When a Zone has resources assigned to it, it will then be considered a Container. The Zone itself is based off of a BSD chroot jail though.

Whoever wrote that is incorrect.

[jotaeleemeese]

You can script pretty much whatever you want at installation time. Do you need a user account? A short script will do that for you in all machines. No, the user should not be able to chose his account at installation time, in serious companies the user is given an account so you as administrator can script that perfectly fine.

Anybody that mentions a GUI at installation time to create users shows that has worked only in small enterprises. The GUI is the graveyard of the efficiency where efficiency is require

Re:

[Ami Ganguli]

Solaris has a couple of nice features, but the Linux driver issue isn't a problem on servers.

The drivers on Linux that are a problem are mostly on consumer hardware - accelerated video in particular - where manufacturers refuse to release specifications. On server hardware high quality Open Source drivers are available for just about everything so upgrades go very smoothly. Everything "just works". Plus, on Intel hardware, Linux has better driver support than Solaris.

That makes sense since nowadays n

Re:

[Ami Ganguli]

The distributions and hardware vendors themselves.

It isn't 1995 anymore. There's no way a single vendor like Sun can put more resources into testing than the Linux distributions + all the major hardware vendors (IBM, HP, Dell, etc.).

Rather you should ask yourself, who tests each release of Solaris against all the different hardware out there?

Re:

[M. Baranczak]

The installation problems are completely immaterial compared to update stability. For example all device drivers keep working after kernel update because they are both tested and binary compatible.

Driver stability is probably more important than ease of installation, but it's a completely unrelated issue. How can you say that installation is 'completely immaterial'? You have to install the OS at some point, don't you?

ZFS is a nice addition, and so is DTrace, NFS, etc.

I did say that Solaris has features that aren't available elsewhere (I was thinking specifically of ZFS, DTrace and Zones. NFS is a standard feature on every modern OS, so I'm not sure why you mentioned it.)

Adding additional software is now about as easy as in Linux

Now that's just straight-up nonsense. The Solaris packaging system is abysmal.

Actually, yes, it may be your SAs. fault.

[jotaeleemeese]

If you have hundreds of Sun machines failing, the question is: who did the testing before buying the stuff?

Any company investing so much money in new systems (and here, systems should mean the hardware, software, personnel and processes that are going to be followed to work with information) must make sure that the systems are fit for purpose. If so many systems are failing with a given configuration this should have been caught in a pilot deployment. If your SA did not do this or did it but the test were n

Re:

[v01d]

What have you bought hundreds of that aren't working?

Slashdot posts. Duh.

Re:

[5pp000]

Solaris doesn't need any magical enterprise fairy dust to be better than AIX, if my recent experience with the latter is any indication. AIX is S-L-O-W.

Re:

[MoxFulder]

IBM just wants a unix for its systems without having to pay to maintain AIX. That's why they sell systems with linux, and that's why the are going to sell systems with solaris. Its better for them to offer both, so they can get linux business from the idiots who are dumb enough to think IBM cares about open source, and get solaris business from the idiots who think solaris has magical enterprise fairy dust that makes it better.

So... um, what should smart, well-informed people actually choose? I'm actually serious. Is there some other option that people see as superior to Linux OR Solaris for enterprise Unix stuff? I've heard great things about OpenBSD, including its painstakingly good hardware support in some areas, though I have only used it for a couple of months myself, and not in an administrative role.

Re:

[ckaminski]

My manifesto of Unix:

Solaris : Applications are written here, and ported elsewhere. It appears to be the defacto king of VAR/OEM software for Unix. Zones: Great, though BSD had 'em first. ZFS: New, but a good start.
AIX: LVM. That's about it. Best disk management tools in the world, and has been since I started using it in 97.
HP-UX: Dogshit. Nuff said.
Linux: The bastard Frankenstein of the Unix world. Runs everywhere, runs reliably (I have

Re:

[MoxFulder]

My manifesto of Unix:

Solaris : Applications are written here, and ported elsewhere. It appears to be the defacto king of VAR/OEM software for Unix. Zones: Great, though BSD had 'em first. ZFS: New, but a good start.

Interesting. I worked in 2001-2002 for a small software company (which had just been bought by a larger company, but that is mostly irrelevant). Our company had developed its products for and under Solaris, exclusively, starting in the early 90s... when I guess Sun offered cheap and good options for developer-friendly workstations. I was in diapers coding in QuickBasic at the time :-)

The company was switching largely from Solaris to Linux and Windows, and there were some bumps (such as the fact that our

Re:

[ckaminski]

Actually, Linux from 2000 onward is taking more of Solaris' thunder in the development arena. License costs are cheaper, hardware is more prolific (and cheaper). But no one does development on AIX and ports to Solaris.

When I worked at Parametric (CAD software), development was mostly done on SGI and Solaris, and then ported everywhere else. No one wanted to touch the IBM or HP hardware.

I far preferred the SGI keyboards myself. :-)

Re:

[MoxFulder]

Actually, Linux from 2000 onward is taking more of Solaris' thunder in the development arena. License costs are cheaper, hardware is more prolific (and cheaper). But no one does development on AIX and ports to Solaris.

When I worked at Parametric (CAD software), development was mostly done on SGI and Solaris, and then ported everywhere else. No one wanted to touch the IBM or HP hardware.

Interesting. I've been in grad school and out of the industry loop since 2003 (hope to get back into it though...). I guess it's no surprise that Linux has taken over.

I can understand why Sun hardware was preferred to AIX stuff, which I've loathed in my brief contact.

I far preferred the SGI keyboards myself. :-)

Hmmm, I've never seen an SGI keyboard. All the ones I find on Google Image Search [google.com] look like standard PC 104-key keyboards. The Sun Type 5 keyboards have a block of 10 or so extra keys on the left, like this [sunstuff.org]. Sometimes I *still* find myself reflexively reaching to the left for my Emacs shortcuts. I have a salvaged Type 5 board lying around somewhere, but sadly there's no easy way to hook it up to a normal USB/PS2 connector :'(

Re:

[ckaminski]

The SGI keyboard *WAS* a standard 101/4 key keyboard, but it's tactile response was somewhere between the existing PC standard, and the old super-click IBM Model M keyboards that clacked like old mechanical typewriters. I'd like to get one and make it bluetooth compatible. They came in marbellized colors that matched the system you bough it with, and they were an absolute joy to type on.

Re:

[stevesliva]

IBM just wants a unix for its systems without having to pay to maintain AIX.

That'd make sense 1) if IBM had actually ported AIX to x86 and was paying to maintain it. 2) Solaris ran on Power 3) Sun would actually maintain Solaris on Power.

Do three fictions make a truth?

Re:

[Amiga Trombone]

If Solaris is indeed superior, maybe IBM are getting a cut from Sun, too..

Well, that's a dubious proposition right there. Having admined Solaris for 15 years, and AIX and HP-UX for about 8, I consider AIX to be head and shoulders above Solaris. If you look at Solaris 10, it look like it coped a good deal of features from AIX.

Possible Futures of Possible Pasts

[Doc Ruby]

If Sun had bought Apple any of the many times it's been rumored the past decade or more, then IBM mainframes might be running OSX right now.

OTOH, if IBM had bought Apple any of the many times it's been rumored the past decade or more, then Sun might be going out of business right now, without this IBM contract keeping them in business.

Re:Possible Futures of Possible Pasts

[porky_pig_jr]

If sun had bought Apple, z-frames would have the iPod slot (and come with an optional matching white color).

Re:

[perlchild]

The former:
more like xserves would have no choice but to run Solaris...
With Apple Interface Guis so slick you can skate on them

The Latter:
You'd be hearing about FreeOSX, a competitor to Linux, bsd-derived, anytime soon...

Re:

[kaffiene]

Bullshit. Sun has a lot of cash and they were making money prior to this announcement. This, only a year down the track from the change at CEO and change in direction.

Re:

[Doc Ruby]

You know, I'd be interested in discussing this with you, if you weren't such an asshole to lead off your disagreement with the uncalled for "bullshit".

Fuck you.

Re:

[kaffiene]

"Sun might be going out of business right now" is pure FUD

If you spread FUD, you get what you deserve.

Re:

[civilizedINTENSITY]

yahoo says:

APPLE INC
Market Cap: 101.79B
Cash And Cash Equivalents: 6,392,000k

Sun Microsystems Inc.
Market Cap: 16.68B
Cash And Cash Equivalents: 3,569,000k

Re:

[Doc Ruby]

Is there any way to use the OpenStep source, perhaps in combo with Darwin (and maybe NetBSD or something) to produce a completely open source OS that will run OSX apps without porting the apps?

It sounds like the kind of research that Sun would sponsor, to compete with Apple. Run Mac apps on Sun HW, or maybe now on IBM HW in some kind of Solaris/OpenStep "container".

Doesn't add up

[evilviper]

IBM has turned to long time rival Sun in an effort to bring Solaris to its mainframes.

Yes, if you want Solaris, Sun would be the company to talk to. The fact that they WANT Solaris to run on their machines (not yet mainframes) is the news here, since they've been fierce competitors for decades.

Sun may be taking this chance to drop out of the server market while at the same time capture Solaris subscriptions via IBM sales.

That doesn't sound too likely, with open sourcing the core of Solaris a while back, as

why doesn't IBM just buy Sun?

[m2943]

Why doesn't IBM just buy Sun? They'd get control of Java and Solaris, they could kill the Sun/Microsoft dealings, and they'd get Sun's server customers. Granted, at 16B, Sun is probably still somewhat overvalued, but I think such a deal would be good for IBM overall.

Re:

[stevesliva]

I think that Sun may finally not be overpriced. It's forward P/E is similar to IBM's. I guess it depends on how correct the analysts are about Sun's prospects next year.

I've often wondered if IBM would just up and buy Sun, but there's a few reasons I think it would be a poor acquisition. First of all, the past five years or so have proven that the remaining Sun customers will not jump ship just because Sun's not building the fastest or cheapest unix boxes. These customers stick around because, for som

Re:

[SL Baur]

These customers stick around because, for some reason, they like Sun.

Sun stuff Just Works and it has for a *long* time. I've been around Sun in the workplace since the mid '80s. Except for their desktop stuff which used to be first class [the Postscript interface was a cool idea, but X was available by then and abandoning SunView was a disaster, and I won't talk about the Titanic, I mean CDE], everything else has been slowly improved.

At work I currently have a choice between Solaris, RHEL and Microsoft Windows XP as my primary workstation O/S. I'm using Solaris because a

Re:

[ckaminski]

I've run my laptop running XP SP2 for three months back and forth to work, to Starbucks, to the backyard, wireless bluetooth (IBM T42) before I finally had to reboot to fix some fubar'd display problems.

I'm terrified to move to Vista. Microsoft finally has invented a decent consumer OS platform in XP, and I'm happy here.

Then again, I can't keep Battlefield 2142 from rebooting my computer every 3-90 minutes.

Re:

[David Gerard]

I'm a Solaris admin for a living. We stick with it because:

* Solaris is good and stable. Userland is horrible, but no-one uses that.
* Solaris is UTTERLY PREDICTABLE and BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE. No sudden changes. If your old SunOS 4 binaries stop working, that's a reportable bug.
* Sun hardware is pretty good.
* Sun support is pretty good. This last is a big one.

Linux is fine, you know. And Solaris 10 feels like a sorta weird GNU/Solaris. If they can pull that off for Solaris 11 without losing their backward com

Re:

[stevesliva]

How exactly is Solaris proprietary? I'm not quite sure what you mean by that word. Given that it's been open-sourced and has had major technologies (ZFS, DTrace) incorporated in other other systems (BSD, OS X) I can't see how it's any less open than (say) Linux.

That's not really the issue in business. The issue is who's paying the developers and selling support. So s/proprietary// and you still get something IBM doesn't want to foot the bill for: a second flavor of Unix.

Not the first time...

[georgewilliamherbert]

In the 90s, there was a PowerPC port of Solaris 2.x. IBM has wanted to get out of the AIX business for decades. Sun had the chance to walk in and take over the UNIX market in pretty much one fell swoop, and walked away from it for percieved strategy benefits at the time.

IBM still wants to walk away from AIX... hence the Linux support. But I think they realize that there are businesses who are queasy about high end enterprise Linux who will jump all over Solaris, and it's essentially just having to agree to a marketing project now so it's free for everyone...

Sun doesn't want out of the server market. The server market keeps Sun's employees happy and well paid.

Re:

[wytcld]

The curious question here is to what degree IBM and Sun have embraced not just their own alliances with the FOSS world, but accepted the underlying business philosophy of plenty. The more computers can do, the more the sales of computers and services. The more the software is simply available, ubiquitous even, the more uses will be found for computers, faster. The more the software can be recombined, the more synergies between computers and business methods will be developed. The richer the possible permuta

This is dissapointing.

[MrJerryNormandinSir]

Sun was a hardware innovator. What happened? I would like to see come back with some new innovative
hardware. Gee... I learned Unix on a Sparc 2 pizza box. I got to play with Sun E4000 machines,
and later Sunfire servers. I'd like to see Sun Get back into the game.

Re:This is dissapointing.

[mjt5282]

Are you kidding me? Sun has just announced the T2 (Niagara 2) processor - 64 concurrent threads. High speed 10G networking. Built-in encryption support for apache. Sun is still in the "game" - its just that the "game" has changed and Sun can no longer make money selling $1M USD refrigerator-sized servers. Hopefully, Sun can make money by selling the most technologically advanced sub $20K servers that are optimized for scalability, throughput and middleware (Databases, web, infra etc).

Total marketing non-news

[afabbro]

All that is certain from this article is that IBM is going to certify its xSeries (x86) boxes to run Solaris x86. Big deal. They already do...this is just saying that it'll be supported. Now, if IBM announced that Solaris will run on Power6 and they're dropping AIX, then you'd have some news. Jonathan Schwartz rather fatuously states "To me, this is a tectonic shift in the marketplace" - give me a break.

Re:

[M. Baranczak]

There's an article at the Register [theregister.co.uk] about this. It says that Sun may be looking to port Solaris to Power, but doesn't go into any detail.

There's already a sub-project in OpenSolaris to port it to PPC, but from what I've seen, Sun isn't putting too much weight behind it. This deal might change that.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

[postbigbang]

Let's talk enemies:

Sun has x686 Solaris ports, and IBM's still heavily invested in Inel and AMD hardware, as well as their own Power and Cell CPUs. and SUSE (Microsoft's new best friend) has ports on IBM iron, ranging from tiny stuff up to S390) which I'm sure Sun is jealous of.

IBM, now that SCOx has essentially been wiped from the screen, wants more business, and they don't make that much from Windows stuff. They sell IRON and SERVICES. They stopped operating systems at OS/2 and decided to let others do it. Fine.

IBM has service revenues and gets into a lot of NOCs. They like Linux, 'cause it's all value (read $$) add. They understand iron, they understand services.

The multi-core UltraSparcs are an engineering marvel.... and they're selling like old mortgage debt on Wall Street right now. That silly Linux stuff is pumping it out. Call it a toy if you want, but a bullet is a bullet and if you don't need howitzers, bullets are fine. Add in VMWare, Xen, or whatever, and you have a loaded gun with several rounds in it. That's where servers are going right now: virtual.... and Solaris containers aren't so wonderful.

Microsoft is getting bitten at the ankles by just about everyone. Let's count the ways: uh oh, SCOx will soon run out of money and will stop biting the ankles of IBM and Novell. Pity. Adobe wants to bring an office suite to market. Google hires Sun's StarOffice to be in their bundle. Several companies, weakly but in a virgin kind of way, start selling desktop Linux of various flavors. Microsoft co-opts Ubuntu and makes a slave of Xandros. How silly.

Add to the cake Steve Jobs stealing thunder wherever he can seed clouds. Salt it up with rotten DRM in Vista, and an underwhelming adoption when your server sales are cannibalized by your own inability to ship Windows 2008/Longhorn server.

As Vonnegut might say, Microsoft is feeling the breeze that occurs when the excrement hits the airconditioning. Schwartz is still upwind of that.

Sun get out of the server market?!

[SwashbucklingCowboy]

Sun may be taking this chance to drop out of the server markett

Not likely! In a recent blog entry [sun.com], Sun was crowing about sales of their CoolThreads servers: "$550 Million in sales and a 225% growth rate - year over year." While that's only about 4% of their revenue, that growth rate is going to be hard to walk away from.

What's in it for IBM

[Daishiman]

Disclaimer: I work for IBM.

IBM is becoming primarily a services company, doing systems development, "solutions architecture", and outsourced operations. A LOT of people at IBM are familiar with Sun technology and have used it at one point or another. Heck, most of the Global Services staff that maintain AIX servers also maintain Solaris servers. How hard do you think it would be for IBM to expand their business saying "Sure, we support Solaris. We can build that payroll system that you need for your company on your existing Sun infrastructure. BTW, can we interest you in a new pSeries for these workloads?".

Indeed, this is opening up a new area of the market where they can now claim expertise and recognition. And when the installed customer base is satisfied with what they have, it'll be 10 times easier to migrate their hardware to IBM stuff, and software to IBM proprietary OSes, if there's more profit to be made there.

Re:

[David Gerard]

Well, yeah. IBM will sell you service on anything. IBM is currently Sun's biggest reseller!

Sun is not dropping the server market...

[Fallen Kell]

They have too many new technologies in active development for them to drop out of the server market. Their new Sparc processors, and motherboard chipsets truly have major advantages over current Intel offerings. The new T2 processors in a 4 or 8 CPU system can and will stomp over anything out of Wintell (64 threads per CPU, time 8 CPU's makes 512 ACTIVE processes at a time in a single box! Now imagine a beowulf or grid cluster of those! Hell, simply imagine a single rack!). No, Sun isn't leaving the server market, they are simply expanding their OS market, nothing more. Which is a good thing. The more hardware that can run Solaris, the more it will be seen by new people who may not be familiar with it. The new capabilities for self healing processes, zones (think like VMWare, but each is running a contained Solaris, without a ton of overhead from having the separate kernel instances, as well as being able to portion exact percentages of resources to each zone. This allows multiple "budgets" too pool together and buy a big(er) server then they would otherwise and have assurances that each group would get at a minimum X% of CPU time (or memory, or bandwidth, etc., etc.) on the system, where X corresponds to the percentage of the cost that the department/group/unit paid to purchase the server, and if no one else is using the system, well, you get to use all its resourses...).

No Sun is far from leaving the server market. Very, VERY far.

This is a win for both of them

[ChrisA90278]

Solaris is Open Source. That means anyone can use Solaris on their servers, desktops or whatever. Our Suns "sales guy" explained that it to me. They say "if they grow the pie, everyone's slice gets bigger" Sun is in the same possition as Apple. Either one can if they play it right double their sales by only gaining a few percent more market share. This is a very good place to be. Do you think Microsoft could double their sales? No they are "flat" now and have only one way left to go if they move off