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."

Comments

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?

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". :-)