Hewlett-Packard is offering users of rival Sun Microsystems’ Solaris operating system $25,000 in free services and equipment as an incentive to switch to Linux-based HP systems. Our Take: It seems HP has decided to jump on the new hype marketing bandwagon, forsaking its own HP-UX, OpenVMS, and Tru64 UNIX in favor of Linux. This is in line with our editorial a few months ago.
HP Courts Sun Customers with Freebies
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…the HP migration program will provide qualified Sun customers with an assessment of porting and migration needs for up to three applications; free porting of one application; use of an HP ProLiant server for up to 30 days; and a storage area network assessment.
This doesn’t really seem like much of an incentive, considering the other high costs of migration. Call me cynical, but I don’t think many will be taking advantage of this program.
I think the majority of Sun’s customers feel less “vendor lock-in” as opposed to being unwilling to settle for a level of support which is less than what Sun provides.
Yet at the same time their doing a road show with SCO?
> I think the majority of Sun’s customers feel less “vendor lock-in” as opposed to being unwilling to settle for a level of support which is less than what Sun provides
>
That depends. If the SUN customer had been planning an upgrade, they might just decide to go with Linux on Intel. In that case, the HP offer could be one good option. Sun has a huge installed base, but a lot of their customers are also finding it cheaper to migrate to Intel hardware. One of the Big ISPs I know recently replaced all their Sun machines with Linux
>>Yet at the same time their doing a road show with SCO? <<
Yep. HP is sponsoring scox’s city to city tour, but HP doesn’t want anybody to know, so HP had scox take HP’s logo off scox’s web-site list of sponsors.
HP also sponsered scox at scoforum.
Hp has also announced that they will indemnify linux users against scox.
Seems like HP is as confused as sunw.
Is there anyone knowledgable who knows what HP is doing and why? Are they thinking of buying SCO and becoming the new holder of whatever Unix intellectual property rights AT&T sold years ago? I would be very interested in knowing.
Regards,
Mark Wilson
> I think the majority of Sun’s customers feel less “vendor lock-in” as opposed to being unwilling to settle for a level of support which is less than what Sun provides
>
That depends. If the SUN customer had been planning an upgrade, they might just decide to go with Linux on Intel. In that case, the HP offer could be one good option. Sun has a huge installed base, but a lot of their customers are also finding it cheaper to migrate to Intel hardware. One of the Big ISPs I know recently replaced all their Sun machines with Linux
If they’re existing customers they might just simply say, “why move from Solaris?”, and simply migrate from their uber Sparc box to a Xeon based server running Solaris and insted of porting the applications, a simple recompile is all that is required.
Hmm, on one hand you have porting and on the otherhand, a simple recompile. Thats a really tough decision, I *MIGHT* need to get back to you with that one 😉
That doesn’t take into account the lack luster support HP has done for Linux, HP-UX, OpenVMS, Digital UNIX, Tru64 and NonStop OS.
Is there anyone knowledgable who knows what HP is doing and why? Are they thinking of buying SCO and becoming the new holder of whatever Unix intellectual property rights AT&T sold years ago? I would be very interested in knowing.
A better solution would be fore SUN, HP or IBM to purchase it, and simply put it out “on an Island” for people to use free of charge and license the source code free of charge under and NDA. If they could agree, a better solution would be to desolve any patents and *BSD the whole source tree for all and sundry to embrace.
walterbyrd (IP: —.rasserver.net) – Posted on 2003-10-04 00:18:53
In a previous message you asked about why Microsoft would want to license UnixWare technologies as they don’t have a UNIX offering. I didn’t have time to post a reply, however, I will now.
Microsoft sells Services For UNIX (SFU), they licensed the UnixWare API off SCO so that they can provide a better migration path for those who wish to move their legacy UnixWare POS (Point of Sale) applications, which is still used by McDonalds and Pizza Hut, to Windows as Microsoft sees one of their battle fronts being the POS market.
Microsoft sells Services For UNIX (SFU), they licensed the UnixWare API off SCO so that they can provide a better migration path for those who wish to move their legacy UnixWare POS (Point of Sale) applications, which is still used by McDonalds and Pizza Hut, to Windows as Microsoft sees one of their battle fronts being the POS market.
The McDonalds I worked for had the registers running DOS 5 and the POS running DOS 6. No upgrade in their eyes, they are cheap bastards 😀 Nothing like taking an order on a busy day and then have a nice memory dump on the screen
(If you wonder why the registers run DOS 5, they had issues when upgrading last time so they are sticking with what works)
Like what CooCooCaChoo said about Sun, HP, or IBM buying out SCO. I can really see IBM doing it, because they would need it more. I no longer follow IBM, but last time I checked their only real income is from their mainframes, so owning the licenses would make sense to me. Both Sun and HP have a lot more products than IBM (I may be wrong, thought IBM went back to Mainframes around the time OS/2 died)
IBM’s real income is actually from Intellectual Property to the tune of $3 billion a year in licensing of the LARGEST patent portfolio (with a legal department to match) in the US.
This is not to mention their growing UNIX server business, which is slowly overtaking Solaris and HP-sUX. They have a very powerful chip, the Power4 (a derivative of which is known as the G5 in the Power Macs, and another derivative which is in the new mainframes), which makes you say “Itanium Who?”, especially when it runs Oracle 9iR2.
Then you have the mainframe and software business, which is a license to print money.
Then you have their PC and laptop division, which is actually popular with the corporate types. I know of at least one place that is buying ThinkPads instead of Dells for the laptops, even though they have a deal with Dell for the desktops.
IBM already has their own UNIX, which is why SCO is pissy. They’re trying to litigate for dollars by going against IBM. IBM’s also making Linux run on “All of The Above”. Combine this with a CEO who is a professional litigator (and these people are more common than you think), several companies scared to all heck of Linux (Microsoft, Sun, HP, CAI), a little bit of a budget to pay lawyers, and a little bit of a budget to put out press releases, and you have the current SCO situation.
Regarding Itanium, lets also remember that only 16,000 Itanium servers have actually shipped vs. the number of “legacy” RISC UNIX ones.
SUN is going to do much more for Linux than HP or IBM. If SUN becomes a victom of a hostile takeover however than the IT industry is going to remain in the dark ages where it is now.
Just a slight correction: IBM no longer has a PC division, only laptops.
Just a slight correction: IBM no longer has a PC division, only laptops.
Yes it does. They’ve outsourced the production but apart from that, they still have a PC division. It isn’t big nor does it make huge money but it is a good trojan horse for them to push their enterprise services to customers.
>>Like what CooCooCaChoo said about Sun, HP, or IBM buying out SCO. I can really see IBM doing it, because they would need it more. <<
If IBM didn’t want scox at $20 million market cap, I doubt IBM will want scox at $200 million market cap. IBM has made it very clear that they have no intention of buying, or setteling with scox.
>>SUN is going to do much more for Linux than HP or IBM. If SUN becomes a victom of a hostile takeover however than the IT industry is going to remain in the dark ages where it is now.<<
Not sure I understand. Why is the IT industry in dark ages, and how will sunw lift IT industry out of the dark ages?
I think the majority of Sun’s customers feel less “vendor lock-in” as opposed to being unwilling to settle for a level of support which is less than what Sun provides.
Also, unlike HP, SUN doesn’t suffer from architecture “swings”. With HP, first it is PA-RISC, then it Alpha and now it is Itanium. Wake me when HP finally have a set roadmap layed out that won’t change overnight.
Atleast SUN has stuck with their products and customers rather than selling out and simply becoming yet another Wintel vendor with 0 innovation 0.5% profit margins, and quality that would make any IT person crindge.
The architecture swings comment is rather non-sensical. HP never planned to support Alpha. We’ve known that Alpha was dead ever since the merger was hinted at. So its really just a PA-RISC to Itanium transition. SGI is moving to Itanium too, so I don’t really see the big deal.
The architecture swings comment is rather non-sensical. HP never planned to support Alpha. We’ve known that Alpha was dead ever since the merger was hinted at. So its really just a PA-RISC to Itanium transition. SGI is moving to Itanium too, so I don’t really see the big deal.
The diffence is that MIPS development is still occuring at a good pace and their workstation and servers (with 512+ CPUS) are competitive with what is out there.
As for HP, why purchase from HP? They offer Itanium but their main push is Windows 2003. What happens if you want UNIX? don’t think that HP is going to continue to support HP-UX or OpenVMS for the long term. There was a study recently (government discussion paper) as proof to why investing money into an Itanium/UNIX solution from HP is a bad idea.
As for Itanium, wake me when you don’t have to pay an arm and a leg for a workstation and when I can go to a distributor like VST or Melco and by the Itanium CPU and motherboard from them to assemble servers and workstations myself for resale.
It is not good what is HP doing. HP has no such quality then Sun Microsystems. Sun Microsystems is leader and will be leader in future!!
Solaris is more better then Linux!
> It is not good what is HP doing. HP has no such quality
> then Sun Microsystems. Sun Microsystems is leader and
> will be leader in future!!
Why is it “not good”? Since when was competition not good for Sun or HP? More to the point, Sun Microsystems seems to be in financial trouble — if it doesn’t get it’s act together it won’t be a leader (and it won’t exist in the future either, at least in its current form).
However, if HP’s products are inferior to Sun Microsystems’ products, then Sun has really nothing to worry about.
From HP anyway. 😉
> Solaris is more better then Linux!
Right now, for the server, it probably is. However, as Linux matures this may very well not be the case. Seems to me that HP is banking on the future with Linux than UNIX.
I don’t know what you mean by “quality” and “leader”. In terms of hardware, HP definitely has better (ie. faster AND more robust) hardware than Sun ever had.
Speaking of software (OS), Solaris definitely has still some advantages over Linux, but Linux is catching up very quickly … and has support for AMD’s x86-64 architecture already!
I’ve been using many SPARC, UltraSPARC, Alpha. PA-RISC and Itanium systems, and – I admid – the Alpha were probably the poorest quality of them all, but they were soon followed by the SPARCs and UltraSPARCs, then much later SGI and then HP.
Alphas suffer from defective cases, poor quality of the Floppy/CD-ROM drives and incompatibilities with e.g. the PCI bus system. If Alphas are working however, the’re great …
SPARC servers/workstations have a big problem with memory … the first thing I would do after getting a Sun is replacing the RAM and the hard disks.
SGI has mainly some problems with their plastic cases (cracks, broken parts), but it usually doesn’t effect the usability of the product. They are usually quite good quality.
HP’s system are build like tanks. That’s maybe a disadvantage in some people’s minds (not portable), but these systems are almost indestructible.
I cannot speak of IBMs workstations/server since I never used them, but in terms of reliability SPARCs are not the best!
SPARC servers/workstations have a big problem with memory … the first thing I would do after getting a Sun is replacing the RAM and the hard disks.
Funny how every problematic SPARC server people claim to have all boils down to the fact that they took the cheap way out and bought incompatible third party memory and components. That is why there were issues with the UltraSparc 440Mhz, and that is why you saw problems.
There has been only *ONE* bug found in the UltraSparc III CPU, which has been fixed in later releases. Compare that to the continuing long list of Pentium 4 and Xeon bugs that plague releases and workaround by Windows kernel changes released via windowsupdate.
As for their UNIX/PA-RISC, I wouldn’t trust a HP solution for as far as I could throw their CEO. Heck, I have more trust in Dell! atleast you know what they have done and always will do. With HP, they’re constantly swinging between the Windows, HP-UX, OpenVMS and Linux branch, depending on which is the darling of the media spot light for that week.