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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."
``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. 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.
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.
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.
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 potential Solaris-on-x86_64 ecosystem. I supect the xSeries folks would be quite happy to have another operating system to help shift boxes, in addition to RHEL, SLES, and MS WinServer.
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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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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.