IBM gaining Linux customers at Sun's expense
Despite all the hype associated with a never-ending Linux versus Windows battle, it's Unix, and specifically Sun Solaris that has felt the most pressure in the server operating system landscape.
While I doubt that Solaris will completely languish long-term under Oracle's watchful eye (in fact, it may well flourish), there is little question that Sun's ups and downs in the recent past have made customers look to alternatives.
At a recent IBM analyst meeting, Inna Kuznetsova, director, Linux strategy, told attendees that the Linux business is strong and growing.
- In the past three years, over 1,800 customers have migrated from competitive platforms to IBM, and nearly 50 percent of those IBM wins included Linux.
- IBM doubled their number of Sun customer wins between first quarter and second quarter 2009.
Much of the growth comes from IBM's close relationship with Red Hat, which allows IBM to play all sides of the fence in terms of OS suggestions to their customers.
This comes at a time when Novell has decided to invest further into OpenSUSE, adding full-time staff to the project team. As The Register noted, it's a bit shocking that it's taken this long for Novell to properly fund the effort, but it seems like an obvious time to take advantage of the market opportunity as Solaris and OpenSolaris are potentially on the ropes.
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Dave Rosenberg dishes up "Software, Interrupted" with nearly 15 years of technology and marketing experience that spans from Bell Labs to multiple start-up IPOs to open-source enterprise software companies. He is co-founder of MuleSource and currently serves as the general manager of Hardy Way. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can contact Dave via e-mail at softwareinterrupted@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @daveofdoom. 
And not that Oracle had to buy the Sun to fork its (Open)Solaris.
For example, ZFS is unusable for anything except locally attached, integrated disks. Sun's "sales engineer" people will sell you all day long on ZFS as the holy grail but once you've spent the $100,000 and implemented your system the real Sun engineers scoff, "ZFS only works reliably on local storage. If you want to use it with SAN devices you wasted your money." This was after we spent months and tens of thousands of dollars implementing a ZFS-based SAN system, mind you. The very first time we tested the SAN failover the entire ZFS filesystem was utterly destroyed due to one or more bugs in the Solaris kernel. I spent 90 hours straight being transferred from time zone to time zone working on recovering my ZFS volumes. One of the ZFS engineers himself tried to help and declared it unrecoverable. Great. It did the one thing the Sun sales engineer assured me was never possible with ZFS: it completely destroyed _all_ of my data in a single act.
Sun makes awesome x86-64 servers. Software is not one of their strengths.
A UNIX-clone (e.g. Linux) is one thing ... but a real UNIX system (e.g. (Open)Solaris) is something much different.
e.g. Solaris had 64 CPU scalability (the real big iron stuff, not the wacky multi-computer clustering) back in 1996. Back then Linux was on entry level SMP systems.
While Linux was growing from someone's bedroom in northern Europe and then entering the commercial world through the back door (prior to IBM "embracing" Linux), Solaris was satisfying real world solutions backed by real world warranties. The good thing now is that the innovative OpenSolaris is open-source.
Linux attempts to clone technologies from Sun, not vice-versa.
(Open)Solaris is the preferred OS for all of Sun's hardware (workstation, low/mid/high-end servers, storage servers and enterprise servers) while the same cannot be said for IBM/AIX and HP/HP-UX combinations.
This just adds much more credibility to Sun.
Rather than trying to get Sun accounts on technical merit, IBM/HP were spreading FUD about Sun/Oracle merger to scare Sun clients away from Sun and towards IBM/HP.
How credible/desperate is IBM/HP now ?
* Sun's x86 hardware is competitive on price and service with Dell.
* If the Sun x86 hardware is running Solaris, Sun really do support the whole stack properly.
* We were happily running Red Hat on Sun hardware and Solaris on Dell hardware in a few cases. It's fine, y'know.
* Solaris 10 shows Sun sees Linux as the competition.
* Solaris 10 has DTrace, ZFS and zones, which are really really cool and useful. Linux has various virtualisation schemes, but none as integrated as zones.
* Generic open source software tends to be written by people who think "cross-platform" means Red Hat *and* Ubuntu, so needs way, way too much kicking to get working on Solaris. After a while you just start keeping a Linux box handy even if you'd rather run it on Solaris.
* Using Sunfreeware packages and resolving dependencies by hand is a world of pain. Blastwave/OpenCSW is the only way to live, i.e. a Linux-like repository system. I'm extremely happy OpenSolaris is going in this direction too. Wish they'd just used .debs, but hey.
Summary: Solaris is still good and has fight in it. DTrace has no Linux equivalent. ZFS may be beaten by btrfs when that stabilises. This may or may not be enough to compete with Linux effectively.
Is Linux cheaper than solaris? NO
Is Linux more advanced than solaris? NO
(just read up on Linux Hugepages, even Solaris 8 was more advanced(10 yrs ago)... not to mention ZFS, Zones, DTRACE)
Every time I am on a Linux box I feel like going back in time.
- by aastinko August 19, 2009 7:49 AM PDT
- Hey, as long as they are gaining them, that is all that matters!
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