Archive for the 'Solaris' Category
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).
Thursday, June 7th, 2007
HP continues at the all-you-can-eat Solaris buffet
HP made some announcements around making it easier to assess the savings from migrating workloads from Solaris to HP’s Integrity platform (that’s the Itanic platform)… I’ll bet they migrated 95% of those Solaris systems to x86… not Itanic…
What caught my eye was HP seems to have been at the Solaris migration buffet as long as IBM.
For example, Van der Zweep said that HP has migrated $1 billion of infrastructure from Sun to HP infrastructure since 2004.
$1 billion is a hefty sum of revenue…
Friday, May 25th, 2007
“Checking out Nexenta GNU/OpenSolaris”
Thursday, May 17th, 2007
iTWire: “Solaris can never be Linux”
Not sure Ian’s “Project Indiana” announcement went over as expected…
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/12116/1090/
Whenever I hear the words Sun Microsystems and open source mentioned together I can’t help but laugh.
The latest bit of spiel which juxtaposes these words comes from a credentialled person – but the words are extremely tired.
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