Slashdot Mirror
Sun Acquires CFS/Lustre, Becomes Windows OEM
anzha writes "Sun Microsystems announced today that they are acquiring Cluster File Systems Inc. CFS owns the intellectual property related to and develops the open source file system known as Lustre." Relatedly Sun has also signed an agreement with Microsoft to be a Windows OEM. "Sun and Microsoft will work together to ensure that Solaris runs well as a guest on Microsoft virtualization technologies and that Windows Server runs well as a guest on Sun's virtualization technologies. Sun and Microsoft will work together on a support process for customers who are using the virtualization solutions. This joint commitment to customers ensures that Windows and Solaris will provide a solid virtualization experience."
Is this a problem?
I dont see one...
OK, there's the 'embrace'. Ready for the 'extend'?
oh wait....
Sorry Quantum, StorNext is dead, as are you.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070912-sun-to-sell-windows-server-boxes.html
Notice the so-funny-yet-true chart towards the bottom.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Microsoft seems to be making a lot of buddy buddy partnerships for compatibility recently. The novell one made me think they're going to try pulling something, but now they're going for Sun? Hmmm, maybe M$ actually is trying to actually fix its interoperability issues? Theres got to be a catch here somewhere.
Sun does a darth Vader? Tag suggestion : darthvader
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
So Sun got themselves a Cluster File System and a Cluster Fuck System on the same day?
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Interesting that with all these deals everybody is (as always, duh) critisizing Microsoft for "Extending and Embracing", but almost anybody is failing to see that it is in reallity THE OTHER PARTS who are trying to get some oxygen by teaming with the big guy. It's a SYMBIOSIS, people when everybody involved gets something good for them. And in the end, the winners are we, the users, because if we left the ********funny ideologies********* aside, nothing wrong have come with peace and understanding. Ever.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Linux makes a lot of inroads against MS in the enterprise market.. maybe they are just trying to offer the best of both worlds, while maintaining the competitive nature of Sun and their own history, against the 'brand' of Linux that actually makes no money whatsoever. IBM makes money, Novell makes money.. Linux as a brand doesn't really make money at all, does it?
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Running SunOS Under Windows VM? Holy Crap!
"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
On this path they'll be another Gateway or Dell.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The FASTEST most powerful machines I can fit in my datacentres.
Simple.
Deleted
I am sure there is a hidden agenda. M$ is up to something, with Novell partnership as well. Maybe Microsoft Linux is coming and Sun wants in for the server hardware sales? Maybe punishment for Dell offering Linux as HP is also getting in the act. Or just perhaps a realization that a real server runs xNIX.
What if Microsoft bought Sun and Novell?
This of course this is just conjecture. But one thing is for sure, M$ is up to something.
Or maybe as the old saying goes, keep your enemies closer...
Whether this make business sense, only time will tell. As a money-losing Sun investor, I sure hope so. As a two-decade Sun purchaser, it's hard to see this as the sort of innovation for which Sun was once known.
Apple doesn't make its own virtualization software, but even for the purposes of BootCamp, would this be an option for them? Letting me buy my next tower with both OS' preinstalled and working well together would save me enough hassle that I'd pay for it.
They have some nice boxes. I'm sure some admins would like to run Windows on them.
I'd like an X4600 so I could throw VMware ESX on it
Microsoft want to own the virtualization market, they want everything else running on top of a Windows hypervisor. They want to tie Windows DRM to the hardware and lock other operating systems out. Sun would be better of reneging on this deal, it'll end up hurting them and their customers.
Sun wants to sell lots of x86 boxes. To do so, it would behoove them to be a Windows OEM. Simple. And if Microsoft refuses, then they are being anticompetitive - this would seem like a poor choice of a place to be anticompetitive for Microsoft - there are much better ways - haha. Since both Microsoft and Sun have their own virtualization technologies, it would make sense for them to look at virtualization interoperability with each other as a way to maybe grab a slice of the virtualization money pie from VMWare. Microsoft to be sure is at a point where it needs to hedge its bets with Virtualization. If VMWare succeeds in getting broad adoption by the major server vendors of the newly announced ESX Server 3i embedded hypervisor, then VMWare has virtually (pun intended) locked in a crucial component of the next big thing in the data center.
Sun has no brand presence amongst the Windows faithful so it is very difficult to see them making an effective box business.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Let's see here. It's a Wednesday, and the date is an even number in a month with 30 days. On the other hand, the moon is just past new, Britney Spears' performance at the VMAs bombed, and oil broke $80/barrel today.
/. today.
Clearly Sun is EVIL on
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I guess when faced with a runaway monopoly there is not much left that you can do other than sell your competitors software to make a buck.
Got Code?
Microsoft seems to be making a lot of buddy buddy partnerships for compatibility recently. The novell one made me think they're going to try pulling something, but now they're going for Sun? Hmmm, maybe M$ actually is trying to actually fix its interoperability issues? Theres got to be a catch here somewhere.
Yeah there's a catch alright. The "catch" is that there's fixing to be a Democrat in the whitehouse come January of 2009. And there's also going to be Democrat party controlled both houses of congress. And Microsoft knows there's nothing they can do to prevent this inevitability from coming, and the certain revival of the anti-trust court actions which they were able to weasel out of any effective punishment for nearly a decade under the Republican administration. Microsoft is now building up what they hope will be seen as a plausible defense against that. MS may be evil, but they're certainly not stupid.
A solid virtualization experience for both OSs. I'm sure that's what MS is after.
In the 1990s, Sun was awsome. Sun created amazing technologies, and set the standards. Now Sun just provides commodity products and services. If Sun wants to be another winbox maker, so what. Frankly, it suits Sun.
These days, Sun is more interested in cutting costs, than developing cutting-edge technology.
One thing that has struck me is that Joanthan Schwartz appears to be a friendly guy. Why would a company that big need friends?! Poor economy? Lack of direction and ideas? Or, even larger enemies? Or the threat from Linux? Hmmm... Wonder if a dinner with Linus Torvalds would have made a difference here.
Hi! I am Sun and I am a microsoft lacky! Please buy our hardware!
Did hell just freeze over, a bit? o_O
Yes techies flip-flop on their opinion of Sun. But, that is because Sun flip-flops on Sun's strategies, and opinions, like mad.
Penguine suit McNeally *loves* linux. Then sun joins with scox to kill Linux. Then sun tells us that only sun linux is legal. Then sun tells that linux is great - but only as a desktop, not a server. Finally sun tells us that linux is java.
Sun's official opinions on msft, and on x86 technology, have been equally schitzo. One day sun curses msft as an evil company, with crap technology, the next day, sun is msft's biggest bestest buddy in the whole wide world. One day sun sneers at all things x86, the next day sun is releasing x86 solaris - then sun is cranking out x86 windows boxes.
So when sun stops flip-flopping on everything, maybe people will stop flip-flopping on their opinions about sun.
Now, let's consider what Sun gets out of Lustre. This is clearly competition against Polyserve's take-over by HP, as there simply aren't any other rivals to Luster that Sub could have been threatened by. By all accounts, however, Polyserve's products were superior and it is unlikely Sun can survive a direct confrontation with what is (relatively speaking) not much more than a toothpick.
Microsoft? Their Cluster Edition has minimal clustering capability, is truly painful to use, suffers from horrible network filesystem access, and really should be put out of its misery. (I'd suggest finding a suitable volcano and dropping all copies of the source code into it.)
CFS, then! Beep, wrong answer! ClusterFS stand to lose their top developers (that's the usual consequence of such a merger), Sun just don't understand OSS and have a near-xenophobic reaction towards Linux, and precisely because the politics will be very hot, it will be impossible for third-paries to propose any necessary hooks or speedups. Everyone'll be too focussed on the battle.
So Sun and Microsoft get no tangible benefit beyond the elimination of a potential competitor who they could never have matched on a fair playing field. Linux? 1% of the market and the rate of rising is so slow that you could probably find the correct asymptotic equation for it. Besides, when has Microsft ever done anything that wasn't money-making?
There will be no winners in this takeover, only losers. GFS is so dead and beyond the grave that only zombies use it. Oracle OFS2 is no better, abandoned by Oracle themselves and suffering from really bad latency. At least that explains why Mr. Whitham worships at its feet - fools will follow fools. Intermezzo? Merged, abandoned and then unmerged. What a complete waste of time for the core kernel developers. CODA? Right, when did they last do a new tarball?
There are questions as to whether a DFS is even needed - if you can migrate code to data, on the grounds that data is going to typically larger anyway - then you are moving everything from process space to process space (so don't need a filesystem for the processes) and local data would be locally seen. A few people have tried this idea out with mixed success.
I'll wrap up by saying that yes, the little guys do need oxygen. But they're thrice fools if they buy it from the people who shoved them in the airlock in the first place. You seriously think that people who have a long history of betraying users, betraying employees, betraying legal obligations and betraying those in an alliance with it should be trusted with ANYTHING? You think that treachery and financial debauchery didn't play a bigger factor in the death of Spyglass than some perceived "accidental" conflict in their relationship? If a serial spouse abuser gets hauled up in court for the tenth time for the same crime, you'd have to be dumber than beyond to seriously believe the person without some damn convincing evidence.
So why treat this any different? We know about the copyright violations by Microsoft, the open willingness to "murder" in some sense the competition, the open and knowing violation of anti-trust laws, the willingness to ignore reasonable and direct court orders and demands, and so on. If their users can be considered married to their product, Microsoft is guilty of spousal abuse on a grand scale for decades.
What else is different? There's no symbiosis. There's nothing in common between Sun and Microsoft. The don't even use the same type of CPU. Nor is there any between Sun and Linux. Sun's attitudes in the past five to ten years has been nothing short of disgusting. They get CFS and I pretty much guarantee you won't see a damn thing, if they ever distribute anything at all. Don't assume they will.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I tried to grabe the lastest source and their cvs server listed on their wiki page is down. The article didn't mention the GPL at all. Is Sun keeping lustre under GPL?
Lustre+Linux was competitive with ZFS+Solaris. Have to wonder how HP let this happen - HP SFS is based on Lustre. Now HP is Sun's bitch?
Oh wait. Lustre is GPLed, HP, Linux, Lustre all still okay. RMS proven right one more time.
As just a flat statement, it's not a problem. It is a reason to be wary.
OTOH, if Sun releases something under the GPL, it's under the GPL, and therefore trustworthy. Especially if it's under the GPL3.
Still....if it isn't under the GPL3 I'm going to scrutinize the terms of the agreement with extra care, and refuse to accept questionable clauses. This is something that should be done anyway, but it's more important when a company has an agreement with MS whose terms I don't know.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The big UNIX vendors blew it. They rested on their laurels when they should have been improving the system and researching new ways for people to interact with computers. Soon only IBM will be left and I think they're too smart and too well diversified to die that way. They adapted their business model as deftly as a company of several hundred thousand possibly could.
I think Apple is the UNIX company of the future. They've shown that they can put a pretty face on UNIX. You don't even have to know that it is UNIX. Their nifty little devices run UNIX and interact with people in very unique ways. They didn't take that long to develop, either. A fraction of the time the big UNIX vendors wasted sitting around arguing about "standards" and deriding PCs as "toys."
I'm just glad that if another UNIX vendor goes under, more or less, I still won't have to program for Microsoft platforms.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
That should be qualified. If it's under GPL3 I might consider it safe to buy. Otherwise I wouldn't and don't. I've striped SUSE off my systems, because I don't trust what they might upgrade me with.
Before you accept any reassurances from Novell, actually READ the published parts of their agreement with MS. Its reassurances are trash, garbage, worthless. And *THAT'S* the part they weren't too ashamed to reveal.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Who both have windows server boxes, as well as linux and high-end unix and mainframe products. These guys are trying to be an end-to-end provider of servers, software, storage, and middleware. Sun was cutting themselves out of a big chunk of business. Champion whatever cause you like, but there aren't very many data centers without windows servers in them. From the point of view of the sun salesman, you can either have a machine room full of suns and HPs, or you can have a machine room full of suns and suns alone. What they want to avoid, is the machine room full of HP and HP alone.
And Sun wants a piece of that action. SGI was going downhill long before they made a few NT boxen.
living together!
OK, not exactly this, but they attempted to straddle the fence. It failed last time.
It was the Roadrunner 386i, which came out in 1988. It was a 386 system running SunOS (or was it Solaris by then? I forget) with a daughter board and co-processor to run DOS (not Windows, IIRC). I know, because I developed applications on it! The best part was that the beta release of the OS (bundled with their wonderful FORTRAN compiler!!!!) came on a stack of floppies several inches thick. Took a while to IPL or upgrade...
Anyway, Sun survived that debacle, and I suspect they'll survive this one. This time, the product may even survive as well!
The author of that article knows jack. We (I'm the documentation lead for a couple of Sun x64 boxes) have been selling and supporting Windows servers for some time. We have a fair number of people working on Windows-related software, QA, support, and documentation (including me). We've even contributed some source code to a couple of open-source products in order to make them work better on Windows.
What we haven't been doing is selling servers with Windows pre-installed, or providing install discs with our drivers already on them. We couldn't do these things without an OEM agreement. Now we can. That will mean less work for me and various other Sun people, and (much more important) fewer headaches for our customers.
Next time I see Jonathan Schwartz (no, we don't know each other, but we eat in the same cafeteria) I'll have to resist the urge to prostrate myself. I just hope he's working on similar deals with our other OS partners.
Don't get me wrong, I love Solaris. It's a beautiful OS. We'll always support it. (In fact, the x86/x64 version is a lot better supported than it was 8 years ago.) But our job is to meet our customers needs, not force our favorite technology down their throat.
Get it through your heads, folks: the Sun-Microsoft feud is over. And good riddance. It was bad for both companies.
In the early 90s, before NT had a foothold, UNIX could have taken over the server market.
The problem was: which UNIX? The major vendors gave lip service to integrating standards, but actually the majors were more interested in protecting their own turf. So you couldn't write a program for one UNIX, and expect it to run on another. Supporting the product would have been another huge headache. Also, UNIX was very expensive.
Microsoft stepped in and solved the problem.
JMHO.
Botnet creators announced that they would work together with Sun to utilise their new Microsoft capabilities to the fullest extent.
Ya jim-bob, thats why we gots us some heavy democrat funding already going on here at MSFT to help with that thar election yer speakin' of:
http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/contrib.asp?Ind=B12&cycle=2006
We're fixin' to be the top in the industry... Hyuk!
It's a pity these two topics were smooshed together because they have very little to do with each other.
The Windows thing is obvious. Sun sell Opteron boxes and it helps their marketing if they're an official Windows OEM.
The filesystem stuff is much more interesting. It seems to me that the Lustre purchase is to fill a gap in the ZFS firmament: distribution. ZFS as it currently exists only works on single computers. The natural next step is to allow simple clustering. I imagine they did the old buy-vs-build weighoff before deciding to buy an existing clustering fs technology.
It may also be that Lustre is the subject of patents that might be useful to own were -- just a hypothetical here -- a NAS/SAN company were to start a lawsuit regarding ZFS.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
It's there in black-and-white in the press release: "As previously announced in July 2007, Sun also plans to deliver Lustre servers on top of Sun's industry-leading open source Solaris ZFS solution".
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
Oh, come on. It was inevitable.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
It starts with the hardware, .JET
who knows probably a few weeks later we might see a new prog. paradigm
anyone know if it's possible to run lustre on linux ppc? OSX just plain sucks as does XSan and we need to do something with these expensive xserves other than sit there and look like works of art. Their NFS performance is terrible compared to much slower linux systems on much slower processors and they crash because of bugs in the O/S (confirmed by apple support).
Just have concern with "OEM". I thought its about all OEM car parts but it's really not. Anyway, thank you for this. Goodluck to everyone.
You are a coder. Typical.
Today's data centres could not exist without the ideas that Sun promoted vigorously in the 90s (the network is the computer).
Binary compatibility across all their SPARC based offerings (the same binaries can run in a personal workstation or laptop or in a supercomputer).
Centralized naming services (NIS, NIS+), descentralized file services (NFS) included implementations sharing device drivers across networks (RFS, now sadly deprecated).
Modular, scalable, servers (predating Google's swappable computers by several years).
Solaris 10 (for anybody hat knows what it does, thsi should mean enough said really).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-0547/eyaks?l=en&a=view&q=samba
You need to make sure all the SUNWsmb* packages are installed, then enable/configure libnss_winbind, pam_winbind and kerberos to talk to your AD.
It's a little tricky to set up but pretty straightforward if you know all your AD details.
What would be nice is some management tools that automate it but we can dream, right?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Since everybody beat up on Novell for doing an interoperability deal with Microsoft, I'm waiting for the Solaris fans to beat up Sun for becoming a Windows OEM just because there's money in it.
Where's Stallman?
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
A Big SUN server running a VM with a Windows Server ruinning a VM running Solaris running a VM with a Windows Server ruinning a VM running Solaris running a VM with a Windows Server ruinning a VM running Solaris running ....
crap out of memory... call Sun.
You are a coder. Typical.
Yup.
Today's data centres could not exist without the ideas that Sun promoted vigorously in the 90s (the network is the computer).
Having spent time in the UC system in the late 80's with various vaxxen, BSD on sundry hardware, IBM equipment, etc, I'd have to disagree. There were some SUN workstations around, but that's what they were used for: workstations. I always thought "the network is the computer" to be short-sighted and misguided. The computer is the telephone (iPhone is a 600Mhz machine, I hear? as fast as the machines used in those days). It's pretty clear that the computer is the computer - and it is dirt cheap, tiny, and a monster. The network is the network.
Binary compatibility across all their SPARC based offerings (the same binaries can run in a personal workstation or laptop or in a supercomputer).
Just like Intel has been doing?
Centralized naming services (NIS, NIS+), descentralized file services (NFS) included implementations sharing device drivers across networks (RFS, now sadly deprecated).
Credit where due. These were impressive feats at the time, and I'd forgotten they were SUNs.
Modular, scalable, servers (predating Google's swappable computers by several years).
Eh.
Solaris 10 (for anybody hat knows what it does, thsi should mean enough said really).
I guess that leaves me out.
You're confusing the 386i with the 386 co-processor board that Sun made available for its 680x0/SPARC workstations. I think the latter could run DOS and maybe Windows programs.
The East coast engineers who developed the 386i also came up with a number of enhancements to SunView, such as its nifty hypertext online help system.
Sun also tried to straddle the fence with WABI, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Application_Binary_Interface , an early WINE-like attempt to reimplement the Windows ABI for SunOS and later Linux.
Earlier still Sun tried to network the fence when the acquired TOPS, a company that sold a fairly nice networking layer for Macs and later PCs. But they attempted and failed a marketing-driven merge of TOPS and NFS. At the time networking PCs was an unreliable joke. Sun could have been Netware, delivering reliable popular printer and file sharing for PCs running Microsoft OS! They could have used that market success to drive additional network innovations built on their RPC layer. But Windows for Workgroups would have nonetheless begun the inevitable decline of non-MS networking software.
=S