Left on its own to interpret the order of the universe, IBM would have you believe any IT decision maker with any common sense would choose to migrate from Solaris to Linux any day: And they have the SWAT team to do it. With the momentum for Linux Intel servers, IBM is throwing its weight behind Solaris-to-Linux migration to gain market share. Read the article at OpenMagazine.
SUN Swats and Solaris-Linux Wars
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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When you go with Sun:
1. The machines are far more expensive.
2. Support is more expensive.
3. Consulting is more expensive.
4. Maintenance and hardware upgrades are more expensive.
5. Software is more expensive.
6. SPARC is slow, especially for the price.
7. Sun does not update their machines very often.
The numbers in the article are simply astounding!
It is no big surprise then:
“In numerous cases we have removed dozens of Sun servers and replaced them with one or two IBM machines, running Linux. That has to be very frightening for them.”
As I said in a different article, the biggest threat to Sun today is Linux.
Only time will tell if Sun’s big, fat, and lazy company culture can change in time to save the company from extinction.
– Red Pill
The biggest threat to Sun is IBM PUSHING Linux, not Linux itself.
While Linux is, in fact, an important system, it’s the might of IBM behind Linux that will help give it more traction than Red Hat ever will.
IBM gives Linux a great amount of credibility.
Nobody else out there is pressing Linux as hard as IBM, certainly no other large hardware manufacturer (Where’s HP? Where’s Dell?) or large systems integrator. IBM has both, hardware and consulting/integration expertise to put it all together and a budget to market it.
But Linux is simply a “band wagon” for IBM. It is interesting that they identify it differently from “Unix”. They sell Linux AND Unix servers. Linux is supposed to equal cheap. But put cheap software on expensive hardware with expensive support contracts, and you still end up with an expensive system.
So, IBM is a powerful marketing force using the Linux name to get their foots in the doors of IT departments, but it’s not what they’re really selling.
Back in the Pre-PC days, IBM was King.
I think with the money and marketing power that IBM has, combined with the power, stability, and cost savings of Linux, IBM may again become king.
I used to work on IBMs big iron and really loved it.
“When you go with Sun you get…”
When you go with Linux / x86 you get:
1. No quality assurance.
2. OS upgrade nightmares.
3. Lousy scalability (ask Google… What are they at now… 11,000 Intel boxes?)
4. Lousy SMP support (compared to Solaris which can scale to over 64 processors per box).
“5. Software is more expensive.”
Not true for the following reasons:
1. Solaris is free
2. The same OSS apps available for Linux are available for Solaris. And if they aren’t, they can be with a simple recompile using Sparc GCC.
3. If you want the big workhorse stuff like Oracle, it’s just as expensive for Linux as it is for Solaris.
“Only time will tell if Sun’s big, fat, and lazy company culture can change in time to save the company from extinction.”
People like to say this a lot, but no one can provide any evidence. I have yet to see any major companies migrating their data warehouses off of Sun and over to Linux. It just isn’t happening. So where are these compellling numbers you talk about?
Sure, Linux may well cost less than Solaris but the report that the article is based on is absolute garbage. I can make up a document that proves that a Chevette can do more work than a 10 ton dumptruck at 1000th the cost but that doesn’t make it realistic. Hopefully the CFO’s are halfway intelligent enough to see what this really is…marketing FUD and hype. Unfortunatly I’ve dealt with some real dimwit CFO’s
I guess we’ll expect IBM to stop selling their Pseries machines next, or at least kill AIX right? NOT.
Oh and Linux zealots, THIS IS NOT A SLAM ON LINUX. Linux is rather periphery to the actual report.
Well, if most CFO’s were halfway intelligent, why would Windows be king of the hill?