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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."
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?
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". :-)
``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.
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.
Breakfast served all day!
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?
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
--
make install -not war
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.
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.
Since this is
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.
That should be GNU/IBM/Solaris, thank you. :)
hawk, whistling innocently
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.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
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).
...welcome our new IBM/Sun overlo-- wait a second! They've always been our overlords!
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
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. 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.
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.
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.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
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.
...
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
>
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 problem is with downrev firmware in your XXX adapter. Here's a patch which fixes it."
See the difference?
There are very good reasons for buying your systems from a single vendor, 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, all the way down to the metal.
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