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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...
oh wait....
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.
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.
The FASTEST most powerful machines I can fit in my datacentres.
Simple.
Deleted
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
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 $80/barrel today.
/. today.
Clearly Sun is EVIL on
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Microsoft seems to be making a lot of buddy buddy partnerships for compatibility recently. The novell one made me think they're going to try pulling something, but now they're going for Sun? Hmmm, maybe M$ 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.
Sun has containers.. Sun is also working on other virtualization stuff.. Lets say I need a Solaris box for my DB, and a Windows server for my App.. Do I buy a $10k sun box for the DB, and a $5k box for windows, both with different hardware, warranties and contracts to keep track of, etc, or do I buy a $15k box, put Solaris on it, and Run windows under a VM? Keep in mind that i still need a license to run windows in the VM, so I would rather buy it all from the same company for support and simplicity. Now, after this, do I pay $ for VMWare, or do I use the free Solaris VM software (that sun signed this contract today for), allowing me to spend $15k+$ on the server, and get even more performance... (or just spend less money). Now, I get more bang for the buck, Better hardware performance, and One vendor to go to for ANY Problem on the system! That does sound like innovation (when innovation is defined as not throwing the customer all over the place, pointing fingers at the "other" company, while your critical systems are down!)
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
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)
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.
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.
> What did SUN ever do that was amazing?
Although nothing special by today's statndards: NFS, NIS, and Java, were innovative, and important technologies, at the time.
Sun seems to want to use Linux and now Windows to get their foot in the door and offer other services/hardware.
Botnet creators announced that they would work together with Sun to utilise their new Microsoft capabilities to the fullest extent.
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.
Oh, come on. It was inevitable.
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