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Solaris Now an Option for IBM Blades
Amiga Trombone writes to tell us that IBM and Sun have reached an agreement allowing Solaris 10 to be supported on IBM BladeCenter servers. From the article: "IBM confirmed the move in a statement, saying Sun is among more than 700 partners in the "BladeCenter ecosystem" and that as an operating system option, Solaris joins Windows, Linux for x86 and Power chips, and IBM's AIX version of Unix. IBM won't sell Solaris or support for the operating system to customers, IBM said. Anyone interested will have to purchase the software and support from Sun."
Me: Hey Dante, what's wrong?
Dante: Oh nothing, nothing at all.
Me: Come on, you can't fool me. Something's up.
Dante: Alright. You've heard about the news from Sun and IBM, right?
Me: No, not at all.
Dante: Well, apparently IBM is now bundling Solaris on some of its machines.
Me: No kidding? That's pretty shocking. But why does that bum you?
Dante: You see, me and my buddy Virgil just took another tour of hell. Sort of a "Dante's Inferno for the Modern Sinner" type of thing. We wanted everyone to know that hell is just as bad as before.
Me: And?
Dante: And we're having to change the name of the book. Hell is not only bad, it's worse than ever! The only down side is that "Dante's Not So Inferno" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Me: No! You don't mean...
Dante: That's right, hell has officially frozen over!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
IBM buys Sun.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
Maybe this is why..
Sun freezes hell, gets IBM to sell Solaris on blades Friday October 28, @10:55AM Rejected
IBM won't sell Solaris or support for the operating system to customers, IBM said. Anyone interested will have to purchase the software and support from Sun.
Intelligent Life on Earth
It's no secret that AIX sucks and IBM wanted to battle Solaris with Linux, but Solaris has a lot of advantages over Linux still. Give it another 3-5 years,thoug.
It's an open secret that Solaris doesn't just run on SPARC and x86. It's highly portable, and earlier this year, there was an official port of Open Solaris to PowerPC announced over at opensolaris.org. Heck, there was even an itanic port of Solaris last decade to prove that itanic sucks compared to everything else.
I reckon we'll see Solaris on big multi-processor POWER iron soon. Watch this space.
Stick Men
This announcement covers running Solaris 10 for x86 on Xeon EM64T or AMD blades (HS20 and LS20) it does NOT mean that Solaris will run on the JS20 PowerPC blades.
Immediately as "new" broke about this, I mailed the guys who sold us our LS20-bladecenter.
The reality is that as of today, no specific information is available.
Rumor has it that it will be certified still in Q4, but Q1 2006 is as likely.
Officially, you won't get anything out of IBM about this.
I'd love to run Solaris on our Dual-Core, Dual Opteron blades, but I doubt that:
- I can get SAN-boot to work
- I can get MP-failover to work
- overall support for our HP EVA3000 SAN for the above two features.
We don't have disks inside the blades and we will not buy any (they're not hot-swappable anyway).
IMO, it's mostly a publicity-stunt.
cheers,
Rainer
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
IBM Tech Support - Hello! May I help you?
Tommy the admin - My new IBM blade server won't boot up!
IBM Tech support - Hmm..What OS it has?
Tommy the admin - Solaris 10.
IBM Tech support - I am afraid I can't help you. You will need to talk with Sun! Here is the number xxx-xxx-xxxx
Tommy the admin - ok.
Calls xxx-xxx-xxxx
Gets back ~This number does not exist. Please check the number or call directory assistance.~
Goes to Sun Webpage. Searches for Tech Support.
~Gets 10000 hits.~
~Clicks on one.~
~Gets 404 Page not found error.~
~Goes to Google. Searches for Sun Tech Support. Gets the number!~
~Calls Sun Tech support.~
Sun Tech support - Hello! How can I help you today?
Tommy the admin - My new IBM blade server with Sun Solaris won't boot up!
Sun Tech Support - I am afraid I can't help you. Please talk with IBM.
~hangs up~
~Tommy the admin takes zoloft~
~Tommy the admin is happy~
- Sh!t
Yeah, so I got an IBM blade center, good stuff. HS20s are ok, JS20s are "da bomb" as the kids on the street say (when they are refering to Power based AIX boxes). And you know, I like Solaris 10, I run it at home, it makes a nice KDC and OpenAFS fileserver. I would like to run Solaris 10 on the bladecenter, so you would think this is good news right?
Well, suprisingly, what has been holding me back is not so much that I have been eagerly awaiting a press release telling me I can. What has been holding me back is that the solaris 10 installer DOES NOT FUCKING SUPPORT USB CDROMS DRIVES! It's been months, and it is a well known issue, that is all the blade center has, and every other damn OS on earth supports it.
So yes, I could set up a bootp and tftp server and install solaris that way, but you know what? That is just slightly more trouble that I want to go to when I can just throw an AIX or Debian cd in.
So in closing, IBM and Sun, in the future: Fewer press releases and more support for USB CDROMS would probably go further in getting people to put Solaris on a bladecenter.
Finkployd
There will be extensive snowfalls throughout Hell and production of snowballs is expected to rise.
Ed Almos
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
This will benefit both parties.
IBM need "Unix" on x86. AMD/Intel have the lions share of cheap processors that will do everything that 90% of customers need. As "Grid" gets more mature they will become more and more important, especially as 10Gbit and faster ethernet speeds become common and optimized TCP/IP stacks and dedicated hardware mean that you don't need to lose a processor in each node just to handle your grid interconnects.
AIX doesn't run on x86, and it won't be ported to x86. As much as I love linux, it still has still some maturity problems when you start playing in the enterprise space, most of them to do with getting all the right libraries for your various applications to play nicely together and do on-the-fly upgrades that don't break application support. (Of course, some ISVs like that you have to buy a new version of their software to upgrade your OS, but most hardware vendors would prefer that the money came to them rather than the ISVs).
IBM, HP and I believe Intel are working on a "Standard Linux", which will fix the inter-ISV problems. How long before that becomes (1)stable, (2) ported to by ISVs and (3) accepted by corporations will remain to be seen. (The big trick in the "chicken and egg" scenario between (2) and (3)). I'd say at least a couple of years.
There are some real funky things in Solaris 10, but these will move into Linux, either by porting code from OpenSolaris or parallel development. A side issue may be the SCO FUD. Although we all know that SCO's claims are baseless, CxOs scare more easily, and may feel that Linux is still open to legal challenges in the future. Solaris is unencumbered (though it might be interesting to see what happens now that they've opened it).
On the other side of the coin, most people still don't trust Sun with Solaris x86. Although they are finally backing their x86 strategy with some real hardware, many of us remember the on-again, off-again x86 strategy from the last few years. I think they're on the right track now, but CxOs have to be sure before betting the business.
So, IBM benefit from having an industrial grade Unix on their blade servers for people who don't want to go Linux. Sun benefit by breaking the "proprietary Unix" tag that RedHat are using to attack Sun's installed base, showing that yes, our downloadable OS run's on other people's platforms.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl