Newsmaker: Firing up IBM's Unix business

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With Niagara, Sun has aggressively pushed performance-per-watt and multicore processors that run lots of instruction threads. IBM has chosen with Power to use many fewer cores and many fewer threads. Do you think that Sun's strategy has any merit or are you confident that heavy cores are the way to go?
Mauri: Multicore is something that we pioneered, and you'll continue to see us make great strides in that area. We've also had multithreaded systems for a long time. I'm really comfortable that we've got a winning strategy. I don't expect some big switch from IBM's point of view surrounding this.

Power6 is another dual-core processor, correct?
Mauri: Yes, Power6 will be dual-core.

And do you think you will go quad-core with Power7?
Mauri: We're looking at higher levels of cores for chips, as we demonstrated in the Cell processor. That's clearly demonstrating multiple cores and being able to run a high amount of workload.

One interesting change you made with the Power-based systems in recent years was the addition of Linux as an operating system. What are your long-term ambitions for Linux--versus your version of Unix, AIX--on Power?
Mauri: That's good question. People have been asking us that for since 2000, when we started really talking about our Linux strategy.

We want Linux to have a great home on the Power architecture. We will continue to contribute to the open-source development of Linux, as well as all of the packages that surround Linux, to ensure it performs well on Power. But as we have said, AIX is our flagship on System p. We've invested a lot in it. Nothing scales as well as AIX. Nothing is robust as AIX. It leverages all of our virtualization technologies and, quite frankly, most of our customers worldwide have bet their business on it. We're going to continue to invest in AIX and continue to enhance it.

So is Linux a red-headed stepchild? If AIX is the flagship and the priority, why should customers mess with Linux on Power?
Mauri: Linux on Power can be used in conjunction with AIX, running virtually next to one another on a single box. So for consolidation, you (can) bring in some Linux workload.

Sometimes, customers are consolidating and taking out Sun Solaris, and they decide to convert those Solaris workloads over to Linux. We're also seeing Linux very healthy and happy running on Power in some standalone applications where the customers decided that Linux was good enough--for instance, some of the things we've been doing recently with Sybase and their IQ product.

We're going to treat them both properly and support them both. There doesn't have to be an absolute, one or the other. The customers that want both, and we see good return on investing in both.

Do you ever consider open-sourcing AIX the way Sun is open-sourcing Solaris?
Mauri: No, we're not. I think that OpenSolaris is a little bit of a game Sun is playing to try to get good PR. But I don't think it's in the spirit of true open source.

We have been very happy to get directly involved and contribute to Linux and Apache and the Eclipse Foundation. We're not going to open-source AIX. It's best run on the current model, where we have the expertise. We enhance it. We work closely with our customers to listen to their requirements. But in the end, it's best that we control that source code.  

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