Archive for the 'Sun' Category
Friday, January 18th, 2008
Mike Strosaker Takes on Sun’s Predictive Self Healing Claims
Mike Strosaker has a couple points to make about Sun’s claims of predictive self healing relative to Linux. One thing I’ve noticed is that Sun (and Microsoft) always compare one of their features to Linux on Intel/AMD and ignore the capabilities of Linux on Power, Itanium or Mainframe platforms (which, btw are growing faster than Linux on x86). It’s time to wakeup and realize that Linux runs anywhere and takes on the capabilities of the hardware platform.
Check it out Mike’s comparison here for the details: http://zombieprocess.wordpress.com/2008/01/10/predictive-self-healing-on-linux-on-power/
Sun frequently touts their “predictive self-healing” implementation in Solaris 10. I wonder if that bullet point would be further down the list if they were familiar with the error detection, prediction, and correction capabilities of Linux on POWER platforms. In fact, the Linux on POWER implementation precedes the Solaris 10 implementation by at least a year (Solaris 10 was released in January 2005; SLES 8 had this solution for POWER in 2003, and RHEL 3 had it in 2004 at the latest).
Monday, January 14th, 2008
Toshiba Spurs Engine: Cell processors in laptops and TVs … could it be an x86 and Power/Cell race in the datacenter?
There’s always a flood of news coming out of CES, but one that I find interesting that also impacts the server and technology market is a bit of news from Toshiba. As this video shows, Toshiba has embedded a Cell BE processor (yes, the same ones in PS3s) into a laptop and a television. The reason is that the Cell processor is far more capable of handling video rendering and stream computing than a typical general processor such as you find from Intel or AMD.
Now you may watch the video and then wonder ‘what the heck does this imply for the server market?’ and you’d be right to ask. Interestingly, Scott Handy from IBM recently did an interview with The Register and gave everyone the answer. The processor marketplace for desktops, laptops, mobile devices and servers requires huge volumes to provide economic returns to manufacturers. There is a huge capital investment that goes into every generation of processor not to mention all the IP that must be created to advance from one generation to the next. Similar to software sold on CD, producing the first chip may cost $1B and the second chip $500M, and it only gets cheaper as your volumes increase. In order to maintain a processor business profitably, chip makers live off volumes (hence the huge battles between Intel and AMD). Now the problem facing Intel for Itanium and Sun for SPARC is that these server technologies have no consumer application that will drive additional volumes. In terms of volume, the server market is a spec in chip consumption.
Yet the processor market is a rat race – vendors need enormous chip volumes to provide funding for future chip designs and whoever has the most funding, tends to produce the winning chips (see Intel for years despite competition from AMD). In fact one might point to Itanium as Intel’s decline – a chip that never saw the volumes needed to make it a competitive chip. Then as Intel was divesting profits from its x86 chips into Itanium chips, it suddenly found itself behind AMD. For a good grin, take a look at IDC’s forecasts for Itanium and the ‘revisions’ to those estimates. Heck, probably the only person to have worked around Itanium and advanced their career was Ashlee Vance.
Now look at Sun and SPARC and you see what used to be a high volume SPARC or UltraSPARC platform with many 1-4 way SPARC servers going into every datacenter giving Sun ‘good enough’ volumes to invest in future generations of processors. Then comes along Intel and Linux and Windows wiping out low end SPARC volume servers and cornering SPARC processors into a lower volume mid-high end server market. Without the funds for future generations of chips, Sun has to resort to stopgap measures craftily using old SPARC core designs in a Niagara multicore processor configuration. Regardless, that still doesn’t create high volume – the non-x86 server market is actually relatively low volume.
When you look at Power processors in everything from Mars rovers to cars, servers, printers and today it’s used in all 3 gaming systems (Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii). The gaming market alone consumes tens of millions of processors (far more than the server market). The Cell BE processor in the PS3 and IBM or Mercury Cell blades actually have 1 power core (PE) and 8 synergistic processing units (SPEs). The PE acts as a ‘router’ for instructions and data sent to the SPEs. So an application developer write much of the code similar to a power architecture when targeting a Cell based system. (Now I’m oversimplifying processor architectures a ton here, I’ll admit – but the point is not to debate the differences between PowerPC/POWER and Cell PE/SPE units… look at the big picture).
Now, going back to servers you can understand that winning in servers requires a high volume chip that funds future chip development and generates economic profits for the manufacturer. Without funds to invest in future chips, you lose the race. Once you view it all in this light, it becomes easier to see why the Power, ARM and Intel/AMD x86/x64 architectures are far ahead of other RISC or other architectures – they have volume. POWER6 was no small ‘speed bump’ – POWER6 is a fierce chip with raw compute power and system throughput that leapfrogged its competitors. It took economic profits reinvested into chip design over years to create it. Cell is no different. And with Cell and Power having volumes in non-server markets including now potentially Toshiba laptops and TVs, I’ll leave you to place your bets on which architectures will be around in the server market for years to come.
Oh, and I should also note that Linux is the only OS that runs on both the Cell BE and POWER processors ;-) Guess which OS is likely to be around in your next generation server, television, printer and … well if only we could ‘fix’ the desktop/laptop market reliance on a different OS…
Friday, December 7th, 2007
Comparing “open source” projects? Start by asking why does the project exist.
I’ve thus far made no mention of OpenDS and the wildfire reporting that has ensued, but there was one aspect of this situation I commented on to Stephen O’Grady and others on #redmonk when it came out that bugged me. It was a question: “how did it ever get to this point?”. How does a company – a profit seeking company, not a wild tongued developer – even get into an OpenDS situation? I believe the answer is that many people have wrongly assumed that the label “open source” indicates a project is disentangled from corporate affairs. Let me explain.
It’s not my place to determine whether any of the current buzz words today that mingle corporate led open code projects under various licensing and governance constructs are “right” or “wrong”, but I do have a strong opinion that the independent open source projects often have a leg up in building communities, participation, and multi-vendor investment (and often that’s their goal). I also think it’s foolish to expect any single company, commercially led project should behave in any manner other than a commercial business driven by stockholders would. I’m not defending or accusing Sun or any of the OpenDS developers; I’m focusing instead on what fundamental misunderstandings of “open source” may have led to all the hype that’s ensued.
I’ll start by saying I believe the “open” in “open source” projects is not well defined consistently and so confusion abounds when people compare “open source” X project to “open source” Y project. The compare is flawed in that each project may have a completely different reason for existence. Commercially run open source projects are inherently different from non-corporate, multi-vendor, open collaboration projects. That does not mean one is more “evil”, “good” or “bad” but rather that they’re apples and oranges. However, for whatever reason, the ability to view code has led to people lumping them together in the same classification called “open source”.
Linux and OpenSolaris are so different, I cringe whenever I hear people compare them (and yet I get dragged into doing comparisons myself to prove it’s not proper). It’s not that any one approach is by definition right or wrong – they have different reasons for existence. I do believe strongly that “Linux” is a great approach for its community’s goals – but Linux starts with a community, not a vendor’s goals. And so it becomes an issue when you compare a commercially driven project to a community led project – the reason for their existence is entirely different. There are different situations and goals that warrant a different project governance, control, license, and decision making construct for these projects.
Look at Eclipse. For full disclosure, I work at IBM. I’ve also only been at IBM since 2005 so Eclipse “happened” before my time. While Eclipse’ roots trace back to IBM, I don’t believe IBM had a single product that used Eclipse when it was “open sourced”. Some intelligent visionaries at IBM saw that the world needed an extensible IDE and platform for building out the next generation of desktop applications. Eventually Eclipse added Eclipse RCP and today IBM has Lotus Notes, Symphony, Rational, WebSphere and probably other Tivoli and IM tools and products built on Eclipse. Adobe, BEA, Borland, Oracle, SAP (competitors) are all “Strategic Members” of Eclipse and all have products that use Eclipse code (as do many other commercial software vendors). Did IBM intend to make money on Eclipse itself or intend to help its software competitors with code?
What was IBM’s goal then? Could it have been to disrupt the status quo, to change the landscape, foster open standards, build an ecosystem of investors, and ultimately move the industry forward? (something even a vendor as large as IBM could not do alone) I think we all know the answer to that. Just look at the results: a huge membership of Eclipse.org – look at how many of these for profit companies are using Eclipse in their own products. Could Eclipse’ structure be anything other that what it is to have the same impact? I don’t believe so.
Very few Eclipse “members” actually make money on selling the Eclipse code itself – they generate revenue using Eclipse in their products and extensions of the code. These members also reduce cost through collaborative, community based shared development. There are economic drivers and business value moving Eclipse forward. The revenue has moved from selling the IDE or RCP code to selling ancillary products/services leveraging and extending the code. What part of Eclipse Foundation does IBM own and control at Eclipse.org? Answer: None. How many times does “IBM” appear in the Eclipse Foundation Governance Bylaws? Answer: 0. With this independence, the Eclipse community has chosen Eclipse’ future, moving towards the needs of member users, towards innovative new developments, and ultimately has created a very malleable, extensible codebase upon with hundreds (maybe thousands) of products rely – whether IBM liked it or not.
It amuses me to see the OpenSolaris community now in a riff over Sun naming the Project Indiana OpenSolaris distro… well… OpenSolaris (second time’s a charm?). As a corporate company can decide, Sun has chosen to own and control all of the copyright and trademark IP, the Solaris architecture decisions, governance appears to “report” to Sun, Even the OpenSolaris community’s “Constitution” mentions Sun Microsystems, Inc. and is marked with a Sun copyright at the bottom. Sun employees hold 6 out of the 7 Governance Board seats, and all of the opensolaris.org infrastructure is owned and managed by Sun. Anyone who does contribute code must first sign over copyright to Sun, the company. This is not “like Linux” at all and it irks me when people compare them as if they’re similar products that should be compared.
So what standing does any “community member” have to tell Sun not to name Project Indiana what Sun wants to name it? This is not a “Foundation” or independent not for profit project. Sun is ultimately in this to make money on the productization of Solaris (why… after two years are there no competing commercial *Solaris distros as we see with Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, Ubuntu, etc?). The only group with standing to tell Sun what to do is Sun’s stockholders. It could only have been delusion or sheer blindness that led some community members to overlook that OpenSolaris has a different reason for existence and hence differing goals and mission as something like Linux. You cannot and should not compare them and you absolutely should not assume one “should be” like the other.
Look at the results. Start with how many people have contributed code to OpenSolaris (and look at what they’re contributing if you have time). OpenSolaris is Sun’s own project – I can confidently state there is no outside development of any significant substance directing the architecture of Solaris / OpenSolaris different from what Sun the company would have done anyway. Two “community developers” (Juergen Keil and Richard Lowe) account for nearly 40% of all accepted contributions – just two developers. Only 84 developers have contributed anything at all – ever (including small typos fixes, accepted or not). Outside contributors must have a Sun employee review, approve and integrate their code. And after two years, it seems some are starting to just realize, this Sun controlled model may not be the best approach. Those who do suddenly “wake up” have been relying on a false assumption. They assume OpenSolaris exists for them or should be like Linux or some other “open source” project they know about – and the reality is, it never was. It’s all about Sun’s stockholders.
What about Linux? There are approximately 2,000 Linux kernel contributors to each release alone (this does not include the massive work going on above the kernel). Looking at the commercial contributors to Linux, you will find a “who’s who” of IT and electronics vendors (also take a look at the LF membership). With Linux, copyright of the Linux kernel code is retained solely by the authors, there are many non-profit foundations supporting the components of a Linux distribution, and because decision making is merit based by community members, no one company controls (or stops) what goes in. Step back to the start of Linux and it’s obvious the intent for this project’s existence was very different than Sun had for OpenSolaris.
So returning to the subject of the post, I have come to the conclusion that much of the “open source” hype and “hurt feelings” are rooted in fundamental confusion about what “open source” means especially in single-vendor led and controlled projects. The only reason anyone should be surprised by anything Sun does with OpenSolaris, OpenDS, or any of the other Sun open source projects it controls, is because that person has fundamentally created an expectation that access to source code meant more than just that – and that is a flawed assumption.
Commercially led projects are created for commercial reasons. “Community members” should not force their own expectations on these projects or they’re likely to see disappointment, frustrations, and unnecessary hype when the company does something counter to what is expected. The same holds true for other companies as well, including IBM. Consider this Q&A about commercial project expectations from Stephen O’Grady back in June:
Q: Do you think that this Open Commercial Development represents an ideal hybrid of open source and commercial development philosophies?
A: It all depends on your expectations. If the idea is that some of the benefits of open source – be they community QA and bug reporting, feature suggestions, and so on – will be realized via this model, then yes. If the intent, however, is to build a vibrant, open source style community, a la Eclipse, then the answer is no, it isn’t.
It all starts with having the right expectation. Is Sun at fault on anything with OpenDS or OpenSolaris? Hey, no one’s perfect, but who can know for sure? Some may point to poor communication of its intent and goals for the projects (and improper comparisons to Linux). Too often I see Sun executives trying to position OpenSolaris as “like Linux”, but those who do research and homework, will likely understand the reality the hype-driving-community often ignores. Is this the “holy grail”, “silver bullet” answer to squash the hype? Absolutely not; communities will speculate forever. However, it’s easier to stay out of the hype if your message is consistent and clear.
You might be wondering what kicked off this massive post today? The answer is odd, but it was a quote from Bruce Perens in an El Reg article. In case any of the above post left my position to question, I agree with Bruce and this quote seems a great place to end.
“In general open source is only going to work if you let it be a community led project. Sun has had a hard time learning this, and some of their open source projects have had a hard time getting outside contributors, because Sun has insisted on owning the whole thing,” Perens said.
Sunday, October 7th, 2007
Ashlee Vance from The Register Interviews Mark Shuttleworth
I saw this just before I went on a road trip back to NY this weekend and burned it to a CD. I’d recommend taking the time to listen to Mark with special focus on the parts where he describes what it takes to have successful outside contributions for open-commercial projects. There is also plenty of discussion on the “troubles” with OpenOffice and outside contributions as well as desktop Linux. And of course, there is the usual Reg-humor to keep the discussion lively.
http://www.theregister.com/2007/10/04/open_season_four_shuttleworth/
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007
Ohio LinuxFest 2007 was a LinuxSuccess
The crew organizing Ohio LinuxFest in their spare time… must be glad to have their spare time back this week! What a show, and what an effort by the regional Ohio LUGs that put on this event.
It’s been a few years since I last attended and at that time, I don’t believe I even registered – I just popped in, went to a few talks and left. But at that time there were maybe a couple hundred people there. I heard estimates that over 1,000 were in attendance although that figure seemed to underestimate the full number of people there. A couple of the speaker hall sessions were absolutely packed (and they were big halls). Ohio LinuxFest gives LinuxWorld a pretty big challenge. It was great to see all the regional corporate supporters but I was a bit surprised by all the “big IT” vendors with booths. There were sponsors from Google, IBM, HP, Novell, Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Vyatta and even Sun (although they seemed to be using Linux to try getting visitors to listen to their Solaris story).
Some of the sessions were fantastic, others less so but on the whole, it was an outstanding lineup of speakers. “Maddog” was a speaker and did a great talk on computing off the grid. Grega… wow, what energy for usability. Somehow I ended up being an impromptu speaker at an “IBM Virtualization” session. I was followed by Alena from IBM who did a great job covering the details on how NationWide uses Linux on an IBM System z mainframe with z/VM for their mission critical web based systems. Alena had a last minute “laptop issue” (ahem… Windows) but we were able to copy her presentation onto an USB key and present from my Linux laptop (Linux saves the day… again).
The special prize for those who made it was the untold number of great ideas, best practices, and partnering or finding others in similar situations that these networking events create. I actually met someone with a similar background who went to law school and passed the bar, he moved to D.C. as an attorney and he’s now managing IT systems for the federal court systems. He was looking to start consolidating some of the applications they run in every court onto a central system (mainframe most likely).
Anyway, here’s an obligatory picture from the show (apologies for not having my good camera with me). I encourage anyone who will be near Columbus next year to check this event out – it was a great show, a great place to meet others working in the Linux/FLOSS arena, and overall a great time. And somehow this whole event is put on by volunteers – truly amazing.
Note the body density in this picture – this place was packed.
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007
IBM breaks open the Office lock on customers, offers a path to and open standard with new, no charge Lotus Symphony
Lots of news since I left for Europe. The trip was amazing (photos and maybe videos coming soon). But since I left, OOXML failed in ISO, the EU rejected Microsoft’s appeal, SCO filed for Chapter 11, and IBM joined OpenOffice.org as a significant contributor (35 developers).
Today, though, IBM also announced Lotus Symphony – a no charge set of office productivity editors (you may be familiar with Microsoft Office’s Excel, Powerpoint, and Word – they’re very similar). IBM’s Symphony suite, like OpenOffice allows users to also start transitioning to OpenDocument Format (ODF). The new suite is NO CHARGE (yes, the nice way of saying “free” without implying “cheap” or “dumbed down”). These are the real deal, the same editors that come bundled with Lotus Notes 8 and the work on Linux or Windows (although I prefer Linux). The URL to download them is here:
www.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony
The interesting thing now is that Microsoft Office costs what… $X00 and you can get the IBM Symphony suite for $0. Symphony handles Word, ODF, and many other formats (including PDF output)… Microsoft Office… well… not so much. Symphony is even cheaper than StarOffice (unless you go through GooglePack)
Take Symphony for a test run – there’s no charge – and keep an eye out because I can absolutely feel OpenOffice and by proxy Symphony are going to see great advances in their evolution going forward.
A nice quote from Steve Mills with a relation back to Linux:
“IBM is committed to opening office desktop productivity applications just as we helped open enterprise computing with Linux,” said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Software Group. “The lifeblood of any organization is contained in thousands of documents. With the Open Document Format, businesses can unlock their information, making it universally accessible on any platform and on the Web in highly flexible ways.”
Friday, August 24th, 2007
SUNW == JAVA, yes, it’s true.
So I guess Sun really did change it’s ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA… personally given how much they’ve been touting open source software, communities, etc. I would have personally chosen something different (“OPEN” was my suggestion to a few yesterday). Considering Sun’s growth in Linux according to the analyst firms, perhaps “LNUX” could have been a better choice ;-)
JAVA… hmmm… what does the word JAVA convey these days? I’m not sure I’d pick JAVA… but then again, I’m not the CEO of a public company.
Thursday, August 23rd, 2007
Linux user community growing by “orders of magnitude” is a problem, says Sun…
http://www.cio.in/news/viewArticle/ARTICLEID=3589
“Over the last five or 10 years, orders of magnitude more people in the world know Linux environment than know Solaris. This is a problem,” said Ian Murdock…
Why again is this a problem? (Update: please also see the comments, where Ian points out, “I said it’s a problem for Solaris adoption, not that it’s a problem in itself.”)
It’s great to see Linux growing – a real challenge to Microsoft even – it’s only a problem when you’re hanging onto a legacy platform… not sure I can agree ;-) Just think of where Windows would be had Linux never happened… I doubt anyone would argue that without Linux, Solaris would have posed just as much a threat…
After all this time, Sun still has not figured out how to leverage Linux rather than just try to kill it… what a lost opportunity – not to mention, a disservice to shareholders. At least Marc Hamilton, Sun vice president of marketing for the Solaris group, is able to recognize where the growth is:
Also during the meeting, Hamilton said the company continues to see rapid adoption of Intel servers running Linux.
Thursday, August 16th, 2007
The Register: “IBM embraces – wtf – Sun’s Solaris across x86 server line”
Guess even IBM can surprise people at times. A lot of people at Sun and IBM put a lot of hard work into this and should be commended for what was not a clear path at times ;-)
As expected a number of people have overplayed the significance (flame wars abound I’m sure), but once the dust settles, things should be clearer. And also remember, this support is not entirely “new” (check out the date).
I’ll link to El Reg simply because Ashlee as usual made me laugh:
http://www.theregister.com/2007/08/16/sun_ibm_solarisx86/
Oh, and one last thing: Solaris is a binary operating system that comes with a commercial license so please remember that when some people misinterpret Solaris to be some open source activity.
Thursday, August 16th, 2007
Sun, IBM and My Little Pony
I don’t know where The Register gets its insanely creative ideas from but this one was funny – where do they find these crazy YouTube videos? More to come on clearing the speculation today…
IBM has a half-assed, similar deal in place today where it will let Sun support Solaris x86 running on IBM’s blades. Perhaps Schwartz played this video for IBM’s brass and convinced them to adopt the HP way.
Sunday, August 12th, 2007
Google adds StarOffice to Google Pack – weird?
I wonder how much this choice has to do with Sun’s old agreement…
Nonetheless, a good step in the right direction for open document standards. I’m a bit surprised (or let down) that the Google option for editors seems lacking in “surprise”…. or web+offline app delivery mostly…
Tuesday, July 24th, 2007
Enterprise Linux Log: “OpenSolaris users group to Ian Murdock, Sun: You’re missing the point”
If you watch my space here regularly, you probably would not be surprised that I find community reactions to something like this both interesting study and at the same time amusing. Jack Loftus wrote the article but it seems another colleague of his was in attendance. I was in attendance at this meeting as well (yes, shocking I know – my first one… and probably last). What I witnessed was in-line with what the article describes. In all fairness to the “Solaris camp”, it’s hard to see what value a Project Indiana is going to bring to the OpenSolaris table other than to make it more like Linux and perhaps closer to Linux in areas Linux users take for granted (package management, install, usability). But what does that offer the Linux crowd that Sun is obviously trying to steal (hint, Linux users already have these benefits…)? At the same time, does it really help the Solaris user? So while it takes Sun two years likely to get Indiana viable, Linux will only improve on what it already has in that time, and so what benefit will be there in 2009/10?? Further, this is just Sun – OpenSolaris is Sun-only – it’s one vendor… when did open source community users start contributing to vendor-dominated projects (hint, they haven’t).
I can say good luck Ian but I certainly do not envy his challenge ahead – especially when it was evident the NYC Solaris faithful were not exactly asking or waiting for Indiana to help them. I was not impressed by Indiana. I’d instead call it the Solaris Makeover Challenge. Oh wait, maybe IBM has already done that. :-)
I was slightly to actually offended at some of Ian’s jabs at Linux that are now the Sun “party line” and I suspect Ian knows full well these FUD lines are not entirely true (my how things have changed from being the LF CTO…).
Ian made it clear [now that he's at Sun marketing Solaris] that the only reason people use Linux is “because they couldn’t afford Sun workstations and Linux was free” and “that’s how Linux happened”. HA! I started using Linux because Windows 95/98 were horrible. Yes, free also played a part but just because things are free does not mean millions of people use them (look at all the BSDs, MINIX, Evolution, etc, etc). Then the other shameless argument was “Linux breaks compatibility” which is a small, small % of the use cases out there – sorry, doesn’t fly – not to mention that many of those “Linux breaks” are actually modernization technologies which the lack thereof are the same reasons Sun users are flocking from Solaris (hint, when did you last see a modern Solaris shell? Solaris in HPC?). Shameless because I also thought that was Ian’s job at the FSG…
Another interesting point from Ian was that he flat out stated that multiple distributions is the greatest weakness of Linux… which I tend to think of as a benefit. While we’d have to agree to disagree on this point, I’d like to think that if one Linux vendor is asleep at the wheel (takes 8yrs for the next release) or perhaps does something that I don’t like (i.e. partner with X company) then I have choice – I can switch with relatively very low pain from one Linux distro to another (perhaps just over time). I’ve seen customers do this successfully – they didn’t receive the support they expected and tests with other vendors proved other Linux providers better. It’s not that there was a problem with Linux or even the vendor, it’s that vendors interface customers through people and sometimes people make mistakes. Switching lets you avoid poor performing people.
Just think… what happens when you only have 1 source for you platform (think Windows, Solaris). Have you seen Windows or Solaris “fall asleep at the wheel” and maybe “milk customers without reinvesting”? I think that’s what you’ve probably seen since 1999. Remember when Sun launched Solaris 8/x86 only to take x86 support away? Then bring it back again in Solaris 10???
Sure, Sun flashed DTrace and ZFS onto the Solaris user base and wowed them with something modern… but if Solaris is so powerful and modern, why does the license prohibit publishing performance results? Linux is the opposite – Linux creates competition, drives competitive and cooperative investments and in the end customers get choice from competing vendors. And with Linux – it may not be the distributors competing that benefits customers – it could be Motorola competing with Apple needs feature X and to get feature X into Linux, Motorola invests in X which is later picked up by Red Hat and Novell. It could be the maker of the fastest network card on the planet trying to tweak Linux’ TCP/IP stack that makes Linux have superior networking performance… Something to think about…
Anyway, a snippet from the article that I recommend reading:
The user’s group meeting last night all but confirmed this was precisely what was happening – at least with OpenSolaris users in NYC anyway. Ken Milberg, Linux site expert and contributor to this blog, said some audience members started to notice that Murdock’s plans for OpenSolaris were starting to resemble Red Hat’s strategy with Fedora. It didn’t gel. “Sun pretty much admitted that this strategy made sense, and more or less were admitting that is was time they starting talking about an ‘innovation strategy’ too,” Milberg said. Thing is, the Sun users kept saying they were already satisfied with OpenSolaris.
And yet Sun and Murdock continued to lay out the case for Project Indiana, to “mixed results,” Milberg said. One unidentified attendee reportedly blurted out “all this does is help Sun, what does this do for someone using Linux?”
Thursday, July 19th, 2007
MBM: Sick of the Solaris FUD train on Linux scalability? DaveM has some thoughts…
I noticed Dave Miller is getting a little sick of the Solaris FUD about Linux. Unforunately, Dave does not seem to have figured out permalinks yet so you have to actually scroll way down the page to get to his two posts “Solaris scalability…” and “The Solaris FUD machine continues…” (update: I was pointed to the direct URL below)
http://vger.kernel.org/~davem/cgi-bin/blog.cgi/2007/04/10#bonwick_scalability
Some choice quotes from Dave regarding Sun’s FUD that Linux “doesn’t scale” are below. I’d also add that over 77% of the world’s largest scaling supercomputers now run Linux – not Solaris. Topping that is the fact that 8 out of the 9 systems SUN places in the Top500 (look at NEC/Sun too) run Linux and you can see which platform Sun chooses for scalability! Anyway, back to Dave:
Last time I checked, Linux scales the crap out of Solaris. Regretfully, Solaris cannot make use of the advanced SMP scaling techniques Linux has such as RCU locking, but that disappointment is no reason to spread the FUD around like this.
The one thing everyone knows for sure is that the only real consequence of Sun openning up Solaris is that now the entire world gets to watch how glacial Solaris development is compared to Linux and how miniscule the community behind Solaris is.
What you have to understand is that they aren’t specifying how large this new machine is, but since we know that they’ve been running Linux on 1024 cpu machines for quite some time at SGI you can be sure this machine is likely enormous. And here’s the punch line, Solaris has never even run on a 1024 cpu system let alone one as big this new SGI system, and Linux has handled it just fine for years.
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007
Oracle 11g for Linux is Here
Saw this today: http://www.oracle.com/features/hp/oracle-database-11g.html
Ok, I added the “for Linux” b/c I’m sure they still support all the usual platforms. I actually saw this today and thought… hmmm… what will happen to all those 10g (or pre-10g) Solaris, HPUX and Windows systems when those customers go to upgrade? Solaris and SPARC are on their way out, Windows = Microsoft and Oracle hates that, and HPUX is on a rotting Itanium vine and many users wouldn’t dare go there… I suspect with Oracle going to Linux as its primary OS of choice (RHEL based) we’ll probably see yet another round of thousands of systems moving onto Linux.
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007
Panthers, p51′s, OpenSolaris, and Ubuntu
From the front lines over at Christopher Mahan’s blog (love the Panther analogy btw):
I simply think that Solaris the product is not self-sustaining, that Open-Solaris the open-source project is hobbled by needs of compatibilities and binary-only bits, and that Indiana the distro is aiming to be where Ubuntu is, or at best where it was two years ago.
Thursday, June 28th, 2007
Even Sun chooses Linux over Solaris for high performance
Found this section of Roland Dreier’s blog discussing Sun’s new Constellation system quite humorous:
One other thing I noticed is that the Sun press stuff is billing the Constellation as running Solaris, while the actual TACC page about the Ranger system says the cluster will be running Linux. I’m inclined to believe TACC, since running Solaris for an InfiniBand cluster seems a little silly, given how far behind Solaris’s InfiniBand support is when compared to Linux, whose InfiniBand stack is lovingly maintained by yours truly.
Did you know that of the 7 systems Sun placed in the Top 500, 6 of those 7 are running Linux and only 1 runs Solaris? Who said “Solaris is a better Linux than Linux”?
Wednesday, June 27th, 2007
The current crop of Linux distributions, Ubuntu, Fedora and Solaris 10…
I often tell those who ask about Solaris and (or vs) Linux to just download Solaris 10 and give it a try… see for yourself, why listen to me. It appears Indigo Jo did just that all on his own. From Indigo’s blog:
As things stand, it’s not worth it for any Linux user to migrate to Solaris 10, even if it is free.
Indigo Jo also seems to have chosen Fedora 7 over Ubuntu which is an interesting twist of late… I’ve heard of a couple (literally 2) people moving back to Fedora – not a trend by any stretch, but I like v7 and might eventually move one of my systems to Fedora to leverage the Xen/KVM workloads… maybe…
Monday, June 18th, 2007
Europes top optician, Specsavers migrates EVERYTHING to Red Hat Enterprise Linux
URL: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39287602,00.htm?r=1
Did you ever wonder why Microsoft and Sun are creating as much FUD about Linux as possible these days? Here’s something you don’t see that often, but represents the value companies are reaping from Linux. A market leader in Europe is migrating everything to Linux – Windows and Solaris all migrating to Linux. An interesting point was that Vista pushed them into this direction!
And what server hardware are they running their operations on? Fujitsu-Siemens, Intel based servers (yes, they’re supposed to be the “other half” of the Solaris/SPARC equation..). This is a great story for Linux and for Red Hat.
Who are they?
Specsavers has been voted Britain’s most trusted optician by Reader’s Digest, and claims to be the market leader in contact lenses. It is also the largest provider of home-delivery contact lenses in Europe.
What are they doing?
Britain’s leading optician, Specsavers, has migrated from Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in all its 830 stores.
The chain says it has already seen a reduced need for maintenance and improved reliability in a radical across-the-board shift from Windows 2000 to the open-source operating system, with some sources quoting a six-figure sum in licence-fee savings alone. The company is also phasing out Sun’s Solaris on its head-office servers in favour of Red Hat.
“With our new store system, every single business-critical application is running on Red Hat, from the till to the test-room hardware,” said Nigel Spain, Specsavers’ global architecture manager. “We were convinced that Linux would have a major positive impact on our business and Red Hat has delivered exactly what it promised.”
Saturday, June 16th, 2007
IBM and RHEL5 achieve highest level security rating
This is big news in the federal sector and has a lot of applicability to many of the financial sectors these days. The government is “red” hot on Linux and this only positions RHEL even better.
Red Hat Linux has received a new level of security certification that should make the software more appealing to some government agencies.
Last week IBM Corp. was able to achieve EAL4 Augmented with ALC_FLR.3 certification for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, putting it on a par with Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Trusted Solaris operating system, said Dan Frye, vice president of open systems with IBM.
“This is the highest level of security function that anybody has,” Frye said. “We have delivered LSPP functionality in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and we have certified that at the EAL4 level of assurance.”
Tuesday, June 12th, 2007
Linus Torvalds Takes on OpenSolaris, GPLv3, Sun’s “open source” initiatives
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/6/12/232
Some choice predictions from Linus on Sun, OpenSolaris, and GPLv3 rumors. It’s easy to imagine that I agree with Linus here – Sun tends to talk open source, but walk closed/controlled source. (hence, low developer participation – remember Sun’s participation buzzword??) I’ve said it before, so nothing new here from me – I’ll let Linus do the talking ;-)
Some choice quotes:
– first off: they may be talking a lot more than they are or ever will
be doing. How many announcements about Sun and Linux have you seen over
the years? And how much of that has actually happened?- They may like open source, but Linux _has_ hurt them in the
marketplace. A lot.
…
- Ergo: they’ll not be releasing ZFS and the other things that people are
drooling about in a way that lets Linux use them on an equal footing. I
can pretty much guarantee that. They don’t like competition on that
level. They’d *much* rather take our drivers and _not_ give anythign
back, or give back the stuff that doesn’t matter (like core Solaris:
who are you kidding – Linux code is _better_).
- They may release the uninteresting parts under some fine license. See
the OpenSolaris stuff – instead of being blinded by the code they _did_
release under an open source license, ask yourself what they did *not*
end up releasing. Ask yourself why the open source parts are not ready
to bootstrap a competitive system, or why they are released under
licenses that Sun can make sure they control.
…
So to Sun, a GPLv3-only release would actually let them look good, and
still keep Linux from taking their interesting parts, and would allow them
to take at least parts of Linux without giving anything back (ahh, the
joys of license fragmentation).
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