Industry

Where Goes the Sun?

Commodity systems, and intense pressure from an intense competitor are working their magic on Sun, but it's hard to say where they'll end up. Frankly, in comparison to Sun, SGI's, HP's and IBM's plans are obvious. Is Sun eliminating SPARC and moving to AMD's X86-64 architecture, or just eliminating the cost of research and development? What role does Solaris play on their hardware?

Sun has kept Solaris/x86 mainly as a hedge option and to satisfy clients who don't like operating systems that only run on one hardware platform. Then last year Solaris/x86 was discontinued for a few months, only to make a sudden re-appearance with the AMD agreement and the introduction of the V20z. Now, despite their assertions to the contrary, I expect Sun to move AMD chips up the line into their mid-range systems — though these entry-level systems are more than competent enough for 90% of applications.

However, the viability of any platform is largely determined by the available applications. Sun attempts to address this problem with the Java Virtual Machine, but the world has addressed it with open source software and Internet standards. Who cares what your mail backend is if it speaks SMTP? Closed-source databases and custom scientific applications are the only things left which cause trouble in the portability paradise. Specifically, does Oracle run as well on Solaris/x86? (The Oracle Database Appliance, on HP hardware running Solaris/x86, was a non-starter.) What competitive advantage, if any, does Solaris/x86 have over Linux?

As far as I can see: none.

12:24:46 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry