Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz aired the idea of porting Solaris to two additional architectures during his 20 July earnings concall. “We’ve begun looking at Solaris on Power as well as Solaris on Itanium as a way of delivering incremental volume,” said Schwartz, who apparently believes that POWER and Itanium support is just the Solaris volume exopansion solution Sun needs.
Solaris to be Ported to Itanium and POWER?
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Eugenia Loli
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Solaris on Power… nice joke. The IBM people must be laughing still now.
As for Solaris on Itanium, they buried it a few years ago, what are they going to do this time around? It’s the HP people who must be laughing about that one.
Coming next: Solaris on ARM and Solaris on Alpha…
That’s just the volume expansion solution that Sun needs.
Sun launced AMD Opteron workstations today. They start at $2,000 and come with Solaris 9.
http://www.sun.com/w1100z
Now what is this Linux program people keep talking about? :p
Hey Jimbo,
In your trolling you forgot to include this info about the workstation about supported platforms:
Solaris 9 HW 4/04 OS (x86 Platform Edition)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS v3 – x86
Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS v3 – AMD64
Microsoft Windows XP (WHQL-certified) (customer-provided)
Solaris on Power… nice joke. The IBM people must be laughing still now.
Oh, I don’t know about that. IBM is bending over backwards to popularize the Power/PowerPC architecture as a standard in it’s own right. If Sun wants to sell Power based servers, I’m sure IBM will be more than happy to accomodate.
Further, Solaris on Power gives IBM yet another OS to offer on their P-series servers in addition to AIX and Linux (and OS/400, as the next iteration of I-series and P-series will share the same architecture). IBM makes their money on hardware and middleware, they aren’t picky about what OS their customers use.
I’m sure IBM and Sun will be able to work out some kind of accomodation.
“Sun launced AMD Opteron workstations today. They start at $2,000 and come with Solaris 9.”
It seems they charge $100 extra for a 32-bit Solaris 9 license (single CPU). If you want it installed, it’s an extra-extra $360. The keyboard is extra, too: $45.
You can probably mail-order a similar or better configuration for about half the price, shipping costs included.
Nothing special about these Sun prices, though. It’s the same marketing strategy that ran their x86 hardware sales to the ground, now testing on their AMD64 hardware. :p
He was joking, no need to fire back.
Solaris on Power… nice joke. The IBM people must be laughing still now.
it’s possible however, that Sun might decide to go down the Apple road and licence a similar chip that’s in those G5s to build yet another workstation.
it’s not too farfetched an idea…
IBM makes their money on hardware and middleware, they aren’t picky about what OS their customers use.
not true, or rather– it doesn’t work that way:
if you want tech support, IBM (and any other company for that matter) expects you to be using currently supported OS.
What people may not be aware of is that in the dim and distance past Solaris ran on the PowerPC architecture and was a supported version of Solaris – this was back in the Solaris 2.5.1 days.
Scuttlebutt has it that they dropped support for PPC as the one guy who was maintaining the architecture specific guts of the PPC port left due to being annoyed with IBM continually changing the PPC spec he was working from.
Have a look at the list of operating systems shown at
http://sunsolve.sun.com/pub-cgi/fileFingerprints.pl?mode=coverage
Absolutely true.
Now on the Itanic2 side of the story, I really dunno hows things going with sales and stuff about it. The HP_Integrity line seems very stable and I heard they are going good on sales, so that might be the reason for porting over to Itanic2.
And of course, gimme more Niagara!
Damn, I still have a copy of Solaris 2.5.1 for PowerPC (Limited Availability release) if someone needs further proof.
On what systems does it run? Only on IBM, or also on Apple?
Cut the crap, compare that machine to what IBM offers, it comes off as a bargin. The pricing is comparable to what Apple and IBM offer, and as for the cost of Solaris, its chump change if you’re a business,
Depreciation of assets, government rebates etc. make something like this machine a VERY cheap investment.
Also, if it means that people will decide to remain with SUN rather than move away, then its a good move in the long run.
What I hope is that they get their act together and get JDS out on the desktop ASAP.
AFAIK, the p-Series (RS6000) and i-Series (formerly known as the AS/400) already do share the same hardware.
Would really like to see Solaris / DTrace on Power.
Would be great for Java environments.
I’d like to be able to run Solaris on a Powerbook also.
A dual boot Mac OS X / Solaris would be one great system.
> A dual boot Mac OS X / Solaris would be one great system.
A better system would be the MAC GUI/desktop on top of Solaris.
Jim
“Scuttlebutt has it that they dropped support for PPC as the one guy who was maintaining the architecture specific guts of the PPC port left due to being annoyed with IBM continually changing the PPC spec he was working from.”
Nah. The PPC specs have been very consistant within IBM, ever since the creation of the basic architecture, so that explanation is just crap.
More likely, the project was dropped because it didn’t make sense at the time, just as it doesn’t make sense now.
Now about people leaving Sun: sure, when your stock options aren’t worth a nickel, plus there’s pressure to get rid of 20% of the workforce every year, sooner or later those that can find a good job elsewhere move on…
Solaris 2.5.1 for PowerPC ran on IBM PC830 and 850 – two aborted PCs with PowerPC chips. This was back in the OS/2 for PowerPC and Windows NT 4.o PowerPC timeframe.
(It might have run on a RS/6000 model 43p which is basically a PC8x0 with a SCSI card)
It also ran on some obscure Motorola PPC box but no apple machines from the documentation I have.