Yet again hell freezes over. As if Apple’s switch to Intel wasn’t enough, Sun has announced that IBM is going to sell Solaris on its blade servers. “IBM has agreed to sell Sun’s operating system with its BladeCenter servers in “the coming months,” according to an IBM spokesman. This is quite the surprise given IBM’s contentious relationship with Sun. IBM’s services organization, however, does do a large amount of business selling Sun servers and Solaris, which may have helped seal the deal.” Jonathan Schwartz announced it in his blog as well.
Solaris is brilliant, so it’s a good move by IBM I’d say… and ofcourse brilliant for Sun as well =)
The next thing we’ll hear is that Microsoft makes Internet Explorer for Linux [which would yield howling indignation on the latter part’s community, of course].
What is this going to do for Sun’s servers? Aren’t they going to compete with themselves?
What is this going to do for Sun’s servers? Aren’t they going to compete with themselves?
No. Sun does not sell blades, and IBM is putting Solaris on blades only.
They did, at one time, have IE4 for Unix.
Fire up the time machine!
The next thing we’ll hear is that Microsoft makes Internet Explorer for Linux [which would yield howling indignation on the latter part’s community, of course].
IE was avaialable for Solaris and for SGI. They withdrew the SGI version before they withdrew the Sun version because SGI was insufficiently manipulable. iBCS would have made both of those versions available to Linux and the BSDs as well. If there were any complaints about it I missed it back in the day when it would have been happening.
Of course the Mac, Solaris and SGI versions of IE didn’t have the security issues of the Windoze version due to architectural design that prevented it, i.e. they designed such a small market that they were unable to attract attackers [NOT!].
All versions of IE run under WINE.
I still don’t hear any howling…
Perhaps I’m not listening correctly. Any suggestions?
Acutally IE was available for Solaris and HP-UX: http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=2477
At one time I had IE installed “for laughs” on a SPARC 20 and a HP 9000 712/60.
Thank you for that info. I was unaware of IE for HP-UX.
What is this going to do for Sun’s servers? Aren’t they going to compete with themselves?
IBM doesn’t care. They sell a Blade or multiple Blades and make money on the sale and Sun “sells” Solaris for free, i.e. puts some effort into the product and makes no money on it. It’s a win-win for IBM and a free ride for Solaris unless they are paying IBM to image Solaris onto the Blades.
If it was me I’d charge the customer to put the Solaris image on the Blade.
“[,] Sun ‘sells’ Solaris for free, [and sells the support contracts for Solaris for lots of money]”.
You forgot the important part. This is what Sun is counting on in this deal. They’re not just giving something away, they’re making a marketing presence that will hopefully boost their bottom line.
It’s not a free-ride for Solaris, it’s a money-making opportunity for Sun. Think of the clients that IBM sells to. These customers are willing to spend the money to have a neck to choke when something breaks.
Being a services business implies that they must be willing to provide what the customer requires. If that’s Solaris, so be it.
One of the fears of hiring IBM though, is that you’d mysteriously end up with several zSeries with DB2 when all you wanted to do was set up a small database
lol, ain’t that the truth
this world sucks
> this world sucks
I agree. What can we do about it? Any thoughts?
I used to have a friend (he killed himself) who always said, “Life is so strange!” The question he could never answer was: Compared to what?
I suggest that the Original Poster write back when he finds a world that doesn’t suck.
This might seem strange, but you have to keep 2 things in mind : first IBM makes it’s money selling hardware and second they have never been known to bet on just one horse. So why wouldn’t they keep Solaris on hand as a possible alternative to Linux on Intel, after all it won’t cost them anything and could get their foot in the door at some traditional Solaris shops.
Besides I can just hear the IBM salesmen now: we’ve got some really nice *low-end* servers with Linux or Solaris here, however you might want to take a look at our *high-end* servers running AIX on Power (or Linux if you must.)
after all it won’t cost them anything and could get their foot in the door at some traditional Solaris shops.
It’s going to make things very interesting where I work when the next upgrade cycle hits the server room.
The inhouse stuff is served off of whatever box Systems puts its hands on and it runs whatever OS Systems decided was best suited to the task. (We’ve got 2 flavors of Linux, OS9 and XP Pro running back there.) The public, high traffic stuff is served off of three Sun “pizza boxes” and a “mini fridge” running Solaris.
Next time — provided Systems has determined that Solaris is still the best solution — it’s possible that we may end up with “pizza boxes” from IBM and a “mini fridge” from Sun.
I never understood why IBM never make an x86 port of AIX, which is also a good Unix operating system (and better than Solaris I.M.H.O).
I don understand why help to make Solaris x86 more popular when IBM give much code and make investiments on linux.
IBM have two faces in respect to free software.
The next “hell freeze” news will be “IBM will sell blades with SCO Unixware¨ .
…(and better than Solaris I.M.H.O).
You got to be kidding.. Say a “feature” AIX has over Solaris.. not HARDWARE related, of course.
AIX 5L <– “L” stands for….cha cha chan… go check groklaw.com about it 😉
And yes, you said so. IBM has two faces in respect to free software! (of course!!)
Volume Manager?
no, the next “hell freeze” would be “IBM agrees to buy SUN”
The Sun shareholders are in a fight with sun management right now to get rid of the posion pill, so that there is the possibility of that happening.
Keep in mind that IBM sells almost as much sun stuff as sun does.
Wouldn’t that be a hoot!?
Especially if IBM bought Sun’s 10 year indemnification to Microsoft!
Solaris rocks.
I have not much to say about AIX, but one OS i would like to see on x86_64 is SGI Irix.
> this world sucks
I agree. What can we do about it? Any thoughts?
I’ll setup the m-l
.
We have Sunray workstations at school and server running Solaris. Every student hates it.
1) Console sucks: PgUp and PgDown scroll terminal instead of e.g. text in text editor.
2) OpenWindows and CDE suck. They’re useless. It’s faster to run anything from terminal that from OW menus.
3) Ping sucks. Who the hell wrote it ? It only shows “Website is alive”. I know there’s option, so you get “normal” messages, but why it isn’t enabled by default ?
4) OpenWindows/CDE can easily make you exceed your quota limit and you are even unable to login to delete temporary files. You have to login from someone’s else account using ssh or su
5) Having no setsid command sucks.
……
Solaris is not restricted to CDE. There is a official GNOME package. BTW. Blame the lack of features on or admin, not Solaris.
Talk to your sysadmin. None of your points are real issues, each is easily overcome… Some you dont even need your sysadmin’s help with..
Just exactly what version of Solaris are you running? Sun hasn’t shipped OpenWindows since Solaris 8 (OpenWindows was replaced with Gnome 2.x in Solaris 9).
The problem with the quota is not a CDE issue, it is an administration issue, quotas can be increased. And if you are running out of space maybe you need to determine why and fix it.
GNOME 2.x was optional in Solaris 9.
The JDS is largely optional in Solaris 10, CDE still gets installed by default.
Solaris still has the awful dtlogin.
Gnome for Solaris 8 was optional, for Solaris prior to the 8/03 Release it was optional. Solaris 9 8/03 Release it replaced OpenWindows (I know this because I can choose between CDE and Gnome using the Sun Ray on my desk) and the Sun Ray server we have uses Solaris 9. See this for more info:
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-2703/6miblfpen?q=gnome&a=view
Solaris 10 CDE and JDS are installed by default, you select which one you want to use by selecting at first login or through dtlogin. And what is wrong with dtlogin?
At my school, our Sunrays run Solaris, and they installed Kde 3 as the desktop environment. No complaints here. It’s very nice, although I wish they’d upgrade from Kde 3.0.0 as it’s a little on the buggy side.
This is excellent for Sun because they are basically trading brand-name improvement vs. a market wich they won’t enter, dunno about IBM (I doubt that there’s a large customerbase who’d buy blades just because of Solaris).
Customer “So Mr. Sunsalesrep we have a bunch of IBM stuff here why would we want Sun stuff”.
Mr. Sunsalesrep: “Sun stuff perfectly integrates with IBM stuff, don’t you know that IBM is even running Solaris now ?”
Customer (naive one): “Deal”
This is excellent for Sun because they are basically trading brand-name improvement vs. a market wich they won’t enter, dunno about IBM (I doubt that there’s a large customerbase who’d buy blades just because of Solaris).
I don’t get it. IBM is offering Solaris as an option becuase a large enough base of it’s customers want it. Why else would that do it? Because of pressure and arm twisting by Sun? impossible.
The only conclusion is there is a demand and IBM wants to meet it. Funny becuase when Solaris 10 came out IBM said there was no demand for it on x86. Schwartz posted something on his blog that the which the linux guys used to bash sun. Hell indeed froze over.
Is IBM abandoning the Linux wagon?
Or knows more and spreads it’s interests just in case?
Or both?
IBM sells Red Hat Linux, SUSE Linux, AIX, now Solaris, Z/OS, Windows Server and numerous other systems….why would adding Solaris to an already impressive list mean they were all of the sudden dumping Linux?
Is Sun abandoning Solaris by selling Linux on their servers? What about HP with HP-UX? About the only vendor abandoning anything right now is SGI, who is essentially abandoning Irix FOR Linux. Oh, and don’t forget SCO, who officially abandoned their Linux business and unofficially abandoned their Unix business in favour of extortion schemes and litigation.
There is nothing suggesting IBM is dumping Linux. IBM is a services business. They don’t care what you use, as long as you are paying for their support.
There’s no PPC port of Solaris.
Because Solaris on the Power5, now that would be *sweet*.
Thats what Polaris is all about.. Take a look att http://www.blastware.org
From the Blastware page:
Pegasos II with 1GHz G4 processor
512MB DDR RAM
1) G4 is NOT a Power5 or a G5.
2) The G4 design cripples the maximum bus speed and bandwidth. IIRC, the fastest bus speed for a G4 is 167mhz, so you don’t get the full advantage of DDR.
Not to knock the G4 (I’m posting from a dual 867) but really, compared to the heavylifting a G/Power5 can do?
“Is IBM abandoning the Linux wagon?
Or knows more and spreads it’s interests just in case?
Or both?”
IBM is still on the Linux wagon. But IBM is also smart enough to be on the AIX wagon, the Microsoft wagon, and now, the Sun wagon. The more wagons there are, the happier IBM becomes because a) they are solution integrators and b) no OS vendor will be able to strong arm them. But don’t worry, there is still plenty of room for Linux. IMHO, in an ideal world, marketshare statistics should look this: Windows 35%, Linux 25%, Solaris 18%, FreeBSD 17%, AIX 5%. On the desktop, it should look like this: Windows 60%, Linux 30%, MacOS 10%.
no, on a ideal world, it would be:
servers: Windows 10%, Linux 25%, FreeBSD 25%, Solaris 20%, AIX 20%
desktop: Windows 30%, Linux 30%, OSX 30%, Others, 10%
being mostly a home user with very little experience with solaris, what are the typical architectural advantages of the solaris operating system? I know it has a number of enterprise features, but can someone spell that out? How does it stack up to Linux in terms of general scalability? I’m speaking in terms of the x86 version of solaris, not ultra.
Basically Solaris just rocks. Their threading model is awesome, and tooks some real thought to come up with. I know me and all my friends creamed when they open sourced Solaris, with the thought of getting to see the source for such a beautiful piece of engineering. Also, DTrace is the stuff, you can track down problems like never before. Sun’s elegance in coding and design is like Apple’s elegance in hardware and interfaces.
i think i positioned a valid question…
my usage has been on the desktop primarily, i.e. i can’t afford a sun ultrasparc. and my experiences with x86 solaris 8 was horrible, back then nothing was really supported, not even the j2ee reference sdk (1.3.1).
and they killed x86 support for a year or so, but now it’s back. i haven’t tried 9 or 10.
so i’ve seen at work a few ultras with 16-32 cpus, which is not what i’m interested in, i’m more interested in the capabilities for say regular server activities and clustering under x86.
let’s say for this server environment:
database (mysql or oracle)
application server (weblogic)
email (2000 users)
apache (1000 users)
multiple nfs shares
200 users for development using c and java compilers
is there any advantage of using solaris versus linux x86 in such an environment?
What kind of machines are you looking at running this stuff on? I think the hardware you intend on using would be the limiting factor rather than the OS. And how do you intend to cluster these machines, with Veritas Cluster or another commercial solution or through a project like Sun Grid Engine (http://gridengine.sunsource.net/)?
First, it is Solaris not slowaris. If you don’t want to be treated as a troll drop slowaris. What in particular are you trying to do, since every feature of Solaris 10 SPARC is available for x86 except the maximum number of CPU’s that Solaris 10 x86 can use (21 vs 144 for SPARC).
How it stacks up to Linux is dependent on what you are going to run on the machine. Is this a desktop machine or a server? Being more specific would help a lot.
It’s not your father’s slowlaris anymore, it’s called Solaris now! As “mostly a home user” not sure why “enterprise features” and “scalability” are so important to you? Looks like a tr*11, walks like a tr*11 maybe?
Anyway, if you really want to know do alittle reading
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/
should help enlighten you.
“I never understood why IBM never make an x86 port of AIX”
AIX on x86
Actually I have a very old copy of AIX that runs on IBM PS/2 (x86) machines. Still have the dozens of install floppies. The machine that ran it, was used as a RIP for a large-format printer.
It was another one of the many forgetton flavors of nix.
Noone apparently is understanding that IBM doesn’t care what software runs on the stuff. They are a HARDWRE and CONSULTING based business. They’ll install anything. Buy their hardware, and ask questions all the time. That’s all they care about. That’s where their bottom line comes from.
…what about IBM’s AIX? Isn’t that O.S. still supported by IBM? I think it’s strange of them to support a rival enterprise O.S. when they have their own…kinda like shooting yourself in the foot…