Sun has announced a new set of products and services targeting developers, startups, and internet companies seeking to build and deploy their web infrastructure on Solaris 10. The three offerings are Solaris Express, Developer Edition, Solaris + AMP (Apache/MySQL/PERL or PHP), and an expanded Sun Startup Essentials program.
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Member since:2005-07-08
I think you underestimate the value of some of AIX's features. Although my AIX skills are rusty, the ability to create LPARs and manage resources is nothing to sneeze at considering Linux does not have those capabilities, or if they are present, they are not "production quality".
We are in the process of building a SunFire 4800 (production) and a V480 (development) using Zones and Containers to limit access to CPU's in order to support a lower cost Oracle licensing model. Enterprise features don't come cheap, and for demanding customers Solaris and AIX will be there to meet their needs.
There is no doubt that AIX is specalized, but it was the easiest flavor of Unix I ever administered (thanks to smitty and pimpworks.org). If it came down to me using a Unix variant other than Solaris I would use AIX before HP-UX.
Member since:2005-07-06
Hmm, I always get a bad feeling everytime I see HP-UX; not that its a bad operating system or anything, but the way it is treated by HP.
Give HP's relationship with Microsoft and its willingness to bend over to meet Microsofts demands on any occasion, I question the long term road map of HP-UX when compared to other offerings out there.
Its like Compaq and when it bought two stella companies, Tandem and Digital, then ran them into the ground; same thing is occuring with HP, HP-UX and their new management; focus on quarter to quarter sales than long term, and how a relliance on Microsoft for future growth will leave them in a tricky situation.
Member since:
2005-07-08
In the platform market, there is tremendous value in targeting commodity hardware. Solaris is an excellent example. Maybe Sun didn't need Solaris on x86 in order to continue funding their SPARC offerings, but it has certainly helped a great deal. Solaris seems like less of a niche platform now that it has an x86 port, and OpenSolaris has also increased the awareness of Solaris as an alternative to Linux. I'm not privy to the internal discussions (and if I was I wouldn't comment), but I would imagine that the recent moves to broaden the target market and brand strength of Solaris are quite troubling for IBM.
AIX on System P, on the other hand, is a niche platform in both perception and practice. With every product generation, the target market moves uphill to a smaller and smaller niche of customers that absolutely need the best performance for their massive database workloads. There was an Itanium port for AIX (the infamous Monterrey Project that was implicated in the SCO suit), but that turned out to be the gold standard for niche platforms (i.e. nobody wanted it).
At this point there's really no turning back. Most of what makes AIX excel in its market is tied to the capabilities of System P. Scale it back to the x86 feature-set, and you have what amounts to a somewhat more sophisticated off-shoot of Solaris with horrible hardware and software compatibility and vanishingly small developer mindshare.
My theory is that there's a race going on between us System P guys making UNIX systems big and mainframe-like and the System Z guys making mainframes accessible to more of the enterprise market via Linux. Then you have the BladeCenter folks that want to make discrete AIX, Linux, and Windows systems fit in the same box with centralized management.
The market for a big, virtualized UNIX machine is getting squeezed on the low end by the blades and on the high end by the resurgence of the mainframe. It's nice to have an option between discrete UNIX blades and Linux on the mainframe, but this market is threatened by the late arrival of viable x86 virtualization (if they can make it manageable, that is).
With this competitive landscape in mind, I envision blades and the mainframe as the winning horses. The former solves the pressing problem of consolidating the management of discrete cross-platform workloads, and the latter solves just about every problem in IT... as long as you can afford it and your workloads are Linux-compatible. P will continue to live in the form of P blades, but AIX seems to be going the way of the dodo bird, destined to be replaced by Linux. Solaris will be a viable Linux alternative for blade environments, while Linux rises from the 386 to conquer the biggest enterprise mainframes.
I won't be out of a job, though, since I'm known as the "Linux guy" of my department. They'll probably just move me to Z, and as long as they let me stay in Austin, I'm fine with that.
Edited 2007-03-10 06:31