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Sun Chief Calls Out IBM, Demands Compatibility
downbad writes "Sun's President, Jonathan Schwartz, yesterday published an Open Letter to the CEO of IBM, Sam Palmisano, in which he alluded to "behavior reminiscent of an IBM history many CIOs would like to forget" - a reference to Sun's frustration that IBM isn't supporting Solaris 10 with WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli, Rational and MQSeries products. In his "Dear Sam" letter - circulated via his blog - Schwartz refers first to the "long history of partnering" between Sun and IBM, and claims Sun customers have made repeated calls to IBM about having the choice to run IBM products on Solaris 10." *cough* Kettle, meet Pot.
It is quite hypocritical of Sun to be saying this when so little of their software runs on anything but Solaris.
Was that necessary?
Sun doesn't make all that many software products that aren't OS-type products. Off the top of my head, I can think of one big product they've made -- Java -- and they seemed to try to make it available on all platforms, though based on their rules (which hey, is true for any GPL-based software also. It's all about letting the people who created the software determine how it's released).
It is, however, a little offensive to publicly decry a company not releasing their product on your platform, especially when that platform hasn't yet actually shipped its first non-beta version. Seems a little petulant.
This is where I stopped reading.
If I want Solaris professionally, I'll buy a SPARC to run it on. If I want to play around with Solaris, I'll download it for x86.
Allen Zadr is the Director of IT for a small software company
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Let's see - will Sun be making the API for their new file system's extra-special features available so that other *nix OSs can support it with their own native file systems?
No?
Well, will Sun make their new file system available for other *nix OSs?
No?
Well, will Sun have ANY compatibility between Solaris with their new, all-signing-all-dancing file system and any other OS?
No?
Then to Sun I say - "SHUT THE FBOMB UP ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE'S COMPATIBILITY UNTIL YOU ARE COMPATABLE YOURSELF!"
www.eFax.com are spammers
Help us make money and give your customers an alternative to your products.
Thanks,
Sun
At this point, it makes more sense for IBM to port their applications to OS X. Now that they supply the CPU for Apple's server hardware, there's a strong case to be made for this.
If WSAD were ever ported to OS X, my boss would be placing a nice order for xServes and powermacs on the Apple website.
Apparently you have not read your own literature. I refer you to the web page at
http://www.sun.com/2004-0803/feature/
In which you state:
"3.Aug.04--Customers who want the stability and security of the Solaris Operating System and the flexibility to also use Linux applications won't have to wait much longer. The forthcoming Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) will include a remarkable new feature that allows customers to run Linux applications unchanged on the Solaris OS. By enabling this functionality, code-named Project Janus, administrators can create an environment for running a range of Linux applications at near-native speeds. Sun is offering Project Janus as an optional kernel service of the Solaris OS, enabling administrators to run Linux applications in a new and unique way on x86 platforms. In keeping with Sun's long-standing support of industry standards, Project Janus is designed for compliance with the Linux Standard Base specification.
Ergo, if your version of *Nix was as compatible as you claim, there is no issue at all.
Thanks for taking the time to write, and while I have your attention, how are efforts to open Java for improvements by the open source community coming?
Signed,
IBM
Then: teenage girls arguing with each other via blogs /Emma Bunton
Now: CEOS of multi-million dollar corporations arguing with each other via blogs
"iBM iz such loosers. i not let them on my Freinds list. ha ha! i tell them to port DB2 and i might think about it. Loosers. Sam will not tell me my poetry sux N E more now. i write what i feel. i want to ask the Q T girl out but i am shy. Maybe i will send her some of my poetry. iBM better port WebSphere 2 or i still keep them off my Freinds list. ha ha! Take that you loosers!"
This has seriously pissed off Intel which has since been making trying to beat Sun into hamburger. Maybe some companies have a long memory. Strange as that may seem.
More than the companies having memories, I'll have to chime in that it's the people who haven't forgotten Sun's failure to support x86. I mean, I'd have given Solaris x86 a moment or two of consideration in 1997, when Linux was less mature and OS X was nowhere to be seen... but now ? Why bother ? What's the advantage, and can Sun be trusted not to drop support again if it thinks it's not making money, especially when it really needs to make money ?
Solaris x86 needs a real, good, strong selling point. What is it?
As far as Intel wanting to beat Sun, no, I think they haven't worried about Sun for years, they hardly compete in the same market, really, they have bigger fish to fry, and that fish is called AMD...
It's IBM that's gunning for Sun's market, and _that_ is a really good reason for Sun to be scared.
I've dealt with IBM Software in the past. They typically lag behind in their "official" supported platforms because they need to go through a lot of tests to validate their software works as designed. When I've run into issues like this they simply say "it may work, but we haven't tested it enough yet".
That is why they pick a flavor (or two) of Linux as supported instead of saying "we support Linux". Other distros will probably work, but they only have so much time to validate & test. For a long time WebSphere (at least on z/Series hardware) was only supported on a 2.2 kernel. It ran fine on 2.4, but it wasn't officially supported.
That being said, if you do have a problem and you have a support contract IBM will work with you to solve the issue, but they don't like to make gurantees about unsupported hardware / software interacting with their stuff.
IBM to SUN: We want you to Open Source Java
...
Sun to IBM: Get Bent we are keeping it to ourselves
Few months goes by
SUN to IBM: Please oh Please make your stuff run
on slowarus.
IBM to SUN: Get Bent we are keeping it to ourselves.
See how simple things are!
Got Code?
Then: teenage girls arguing with each other via blogs
Now: CEOS of multi-million dollar corporations arguing with each other via blogs
omg u would not believe what I heard at the conference last night!!!! the pres of oracle (she was wearing like this skirt that was like so cute omg!!) said that she's like totally adopting a 10b51 plan and selling like so much stock!!! and i was all like you gotta be careful cuz mr. donaldson over at the sec is like totally a dork and will be all up in her face about whether she had like inside information!! god he's such a tool lol!!
> If people would use PostgresSQL, most companies' OLTP systems would be thrown, performance-wise, back
> into the stone ages. No matter how you cut it, DB2 (and some of the other commercial RDBMSs) are simply
> light years ahead of open source software.
Yeah, there are still many reasons to choose a commercial dbms. Like:
1. db2 just set the world record for transaction speed - at about 50,000 transactions a second. Last I heard mysql was trumpeting 800 transactions a second with innodb. Not sure about postgresql.
2. with partitioning, parallelism, and clustering, you can get subsecond response time from db2 *adhoc* queries against tables containing over a terrabyte of data. Postgresql, Mysql, and Firebird aren't even in the ballpark here. Note: mysql "speed" will end up requiring you to index every single column, which will kill your insert speed, double the size of the data, and their optimizer won't use the indexes anyway whenever you want to access more than 5% of the data.
3. Mature, proven high-availability solutions.
4. Mature, proven replication solutions.
5. Cost. Really - cost is a reason (sometimes) to use commercial software. Here's how this works: lets say you've got a critical business problem in which 1 minute of downtime = a loss of $10,000 dollars in revenue. Add to this a development team of 20 people ($1,000,000/year). Add hardware costs ($500,000). Now, that commercial database license may run you $50,000 (vs $500+ mysql, free for postgresql). But $50k is nothing compared to the costs at risk:
- online changes to db2 vs recycling mysql & postgresql
- robust ha on db2 vs replication for mysql
- standard sql functionality & productivity on db2 vs mysql
- less hardware for db2 than msyql/postgresql to get same performance
- etc, etc, etc
So, on a big project where the database is critical - you will actually *save* money going with a commercial database. Well, on large & critical applications anyway.
6. Consistency: since most organizations will require a commercial database for their most demanding applications - and they can benefit from a complexity reduction by using the same database on all applications. This way they've got just one set of skills to get all dbas on, they can get by with a smaller dba team (read: less labor = less cost), when a new version, patches, etc - they can get up to speed with it much faster, etc.
Not to say that the open source solutions aren't great: they are, and can pick up much of the database work these days. But there's still a huge case to be made for commercial products - and will be for a while, since the functionality missing in mysql & postgresql needed to compete at the top-end will be very difficult to implement.