HP has gone really, really public about its support for Sun’s Solaris 10 operating system by sending out an internal memo. HP has long ‘officially’ supported various versions of Solaris on its Xeon- and Opteron-based servers. Now, however, it’s kind of ready to talk about this support. The company this week ‘announced’ support of Sun’s version of Unix in a statement to staff, according to insiders. The Solaris embrace is being pitched as HP’s answer to disgruntled Sun customers trying to make their way off SPARC systems and onto HP’s x86 kit.
I won’t say there aren’t unsatisfied Sun customers, but at least in relation to HP, the flow has been overwhealmingly from HP to Sun rather than the other way around.
In any case, Solaris 10 has captured further mindshare, which I can’t see how it could ever hurt Sun.
I won’t say there aren’t unsatisfied Sun customers, but at least in relation to HP, the flow has been overwhealmingly from HP to Sun rather than the other way around.
True – in the case of SUN, however, atleast customers know where they stand in the future of SPARC and Opteron – they know that SUN is continuing to support SPARC and develop SPARC futher, even with the new Opteron line up, which is a good thing(tm).
It has been funny, however, when they have one some SUN customers, as Johnnathon pointed out, one was a university with a machine that was 15 years old and hadn’t purchased a thing off SUN in over a decade – it was hardly something to worry about.
In any case, Solaris 10 has captured further mindshare, which I can’t see how it could ever hurt Sun.
It also won’t hurt SUN for this little reason – the customer will still want support, and who is the onlyvendor selling support for Solaris…. Yeap, SUN. So even if hardware isn’t being boughht off them, SUN will still make money selling the necessary support to the customer.
Hopefully with the larger marketshare, there will be more customers out there demanding that software companies support the Solaris platform.
Shouldn’t they be putting more effort into their own os support and compete with Sun or is this just a spin on HP crying, “Uncle”, and the beginning of the end life cycling of HPUX?
Shouldn’t they be putting more effort into their own os support and compete with Sun or is this just a spin on HP crying, “Uncle”, and the beginning of the end life cycling of HPUX?
Is hpux really relevant to this news, given that the support is for x86 machines, where hpux doesn’t go anyway?
Is Solaris x86 the new fad in town?
The reality check is that many of the customers wanting off sparc are actually going over to the Opteron based sun hardware. We have recently made that switch from IBM to Sun Opteron based servers because the hardware platform is more stable allowing us to scale much more effectivly than we could with intel based IBM servers.
… but I don’t get it. Why would you support an OS which is made by your competitor? Yes, I know that it is available for non-sparc processors, but if sun decides to axe solaris for x86, -or- decides to tie it to their hardware, you are left out in the cold.
It makes *more* sense to put more effort into beefing up your own UNIX OS (HPUX and what they got from the DEC/Compaq merger) and market that as a great alternative to sun and solaris – then make easy migration solution available for those “disgruntled” customers.
Seems like post-fiorina HP is making some “interesting” decisions.
There would still be OpenSolaris.
Open Solaris is about as useful an OS as Open Darwin – never seen a computer in production ever run Open Darwin and I’m not going to ever see a computer in production ever run Open Solaris.
Open Solaris is about as useful an OS as Open Darwin – never seen a computer in production ever run Open Darwin and I’m not going to ever see a computer in production ever run Open Solaris.
So says the person who can’t be bothered getting off his fat chuff and reading the roadmap.
Solaris 11 will be 100% based on OpenSolaris – the two will be interchangable.
Besides that, there are already GNU/OpenSolaris distributions, so HP could fix it on its own, if need should be.
But I consider it most unlikely that Sun would abandon Solaris.
Aren’t the legalities of those distributions (at least, Nextena) still somewhat questionable?
http://weblog.ipcentral.info/archives/2005/12/oh_now_i_unders.html
(Yeah, this does seem to side with Nextena GNU/Solaris…)
I side with Ian Murdock as well.
The GPL is clear enough. You can link GPL against non-GPL (incl. proprietary) libraries, but not the opposite.
SkyOS is proprietary, ships with GPL-ed packages compiled against proprietary libraries. And it is perfectly legal. If it wasn’t there would be no GPL’ed applications on Windows.
“Why would you support an OS which is made by your competitor?”
Ehmm, beause if HP sells a server that runs a Sun-provided OS, money goes to HP? A server sold running ‘some other OS’ is still more profit than not selling a server that runs HP’s preferred OS. Sounds like a solid, logical reason to support any OS for which enough customers care about.
“It makes *more* sense to put more effort into beefing up your own UNIX OS (HPUX and what they got from the DEC/Compaq merger) and market that as a great alternative to sun and solaris”
BS. Aren’t both HP and Sun (like so many others) basically hardware vendors (please correct me if I’m wrong on this)? If they sell an OS to go with it, I’d expect them to make some money on that too. But selling (or giving away) an OS that makes the most out of the hardware, is really just a way to ship more boxes, right? Whatever makes their customers happy. If it’s their own HP-UX, nice. If it’s Linux, okay. If it’s Solaris x86, fine. While HP surely has its own favorite, I don’t think HP cares much as long as it helps to boost shipped boxes/profits.
“(..) if sun decides to axe solaris for x86, -or- decides to tie it to their hardware, you are left out in the cold.”
Wrong! There’s nothing stopping other companies from selling support for Solaris, and nothing stopping you from buying such support, or modifying the OS to suit your own needs. The source is out there, you know (OpenSolaris). And while its license may prevent you from doing some things with that source (ask a lawyer, I’m not one), running Solaris on x86, getting support for that (from Sun, or elsewhere), or making your own fixes/tweaks are not among those.
Not that Solaris x86 is likely to go away anytime soon BTW, quite the contrary. And for the long term: how do you know where your favorite OS will be in say, 5 or 10 years from now? That’s a long time in the fast-moving IT world.
It would be pretty amusing if HP started releasing their own distribution of OpenSolaris.
Maybe they’ll bring back the Alpha processor…
Maybe they’ll bring back the Alpha processor…
Holy crap, how did you connect those two dots? Solaris isn’t even available for the Alpha.
Solaris isn’t even available for the Alpha.
My guess is that HP has access to compilers that will emit Alpha code. (^; OpenSolaris isn’t available completely in source yet though so it wouldn’t be a no-brainer by any means. There are still encumbered binary portions that cannot be released as source. But given that HP has a few programmers and engineers on staff it isn’t impossible that they could cobble something together to fill in for the binary-only portions.
The real issue is that as of today Alpha is dead. It doesn’t seem reasonable that they will create an OpenSolaris for discontinued hardware unless they are likely to get lots of support contracts for it. That seems so unlikely that considering the possibility of an OpenSolaris coming from HP is only wishful thinking.
On the other hand I can conceive of a GNU/OpenSolaris for Alpha being a likely possibility.
I guess who is “reinventing” itself is Sun and HP is just “recopying” others as their efforts to revamp HPUX, Tru64 and OpenVMS seems a bit “retiring”. Shame on them, as they really had a wonderful mix of products and, when under the control of “mighty” and “insightful” Carly, just throw, or almost, all them in a garbage dump. I hope they really get out of the big hole they dug for themself. That is what happens when good and talented people get screwed by poor management.
guess who is “reinventing” itself is Sun and HP is just “recopying” others as their efforts to revamp HPUX, Tru64 and OpenVMS seems a bit “retiring”. Shame on them, as they really had a wonderful mix of products and, when under the control of “mighty” and “insightful” Carly, just throw, or almost, all them in a garbage dump. I hope they really get out of the big hole they dug for themself. That is what happens when good and talented people get screwed by poor management.
Unfortunately I think you can blame Carly for the dead end position that has put HP into the situation where by it will basically have to out-Dell Dell to win customers.
Personally, I would have loved to see some high end hardware, EFI firmware, Opteron processor, and OpenVMS being loaded onto it – not trying to supporting clones (aka non-HP hardware), but creating a compelling solution using the best ideas from the commodity world, and coupling it with the best operating system out there.
Same could be said for HPUX to a lesser degree – with that being said, a strong joint venture between SUN and HP would be alot better for both parties than HP and SUN trying to go it alone and compete against Dell – the masters of volume, or IBM who can easily take a massive loss in hardware sales and make it up via selling services to the same customer.
The problem with Carly, she basically got all of HP’s IP and products that differentiated itself from its competition, threw it in the bin, and some how expected HP to differentiate its product line up, purely on price – sorry, thats a stupid business decision.
I think one of the reasons is that HP will go head to head with IBM and become a service provider, not just a hardware vendor, so they’ll ship whatever the customer wants.
Therefore, they are seeking help from HP to smooth the transition from a proprietary Solaris platform to HP standards-based servers by enabling some legacy Solaris environments during the transition
Fromt the article – SPARC is an openstandard; much more open than x86, which is merely a dejour standard that everyone hobbles along supporting.
Solaris isn’t proprietary – its fully UNIX 2003 compliant, and most of it is already opensource, with the next wave of source to be released soon; if there is a company pushing proprietary gear, it would be HP and their continued love affair with Microsoft – pushing Windows when ever they have the opportunity, be it on a desktop or a server.
As I understand the terms, x86 is a de facto standard (it’s in fact a standard, though not officially), wheras SPARC is a de jure (formal, official) standard.
POSIX, for example, is a de facto standard. It was created to basically codify existing behaviors and call that a standard- SVR4 and bits of BSD/SunOS became the standard. A de jure standard would be something like CSS2- a system intentionally created as a standard.
Or, for that matter, ODF (de jure (hopefully)) versus Microsoft Word (de facto).