Monthly Research Update

Experton Group Weekly IT News

Sun's Opening Moves Likely to Close its Hardware Sales

By: Jerald Murphy

Officials from Sun Microsystems, Inc. have recently announced their latest version of the Solaris Operating System. In other news, Sun has partnered with IBM Corp. for both an OpenSolaris prototype for mainframe computers, as well as joint work on an Open Document Format (ODF) toolkit.

Focal Points:

• Officials from Sun recently announced that their latest major update to their operating system Solaris 10. The new update, dubbed Solaris 10 10/08, includes updates focused around system enhancements, improved compatibility with Intel Corp. chips, and expanded virtualization capabilities. The main system enhancements focus around Sun's file system ZFS, which now has the ability to be the boot file system, as well as being the sole file system used. Officials said they now have a closer partnership with Intel, which has allowed them to improve server energy efficiency and better input/output (I/O) performance. New enhancements to virtualization include Solaris containers, which make it possible to transfer workloads from one system to another, and support for multiplex I/O, which yields significantly better I/O performance.
• Officials from Sun and IBM have announced that they are going to make available the open source code for the OpenSolaris operating system that runs on the IBM System z mainframe computers. The code has been built with the help of consultants from Sine Nomine Associates. IBM and Sun recently demonstrated a prototype version of OpenSolaris that ran successfully on IBM System z platforms. This will allow companies that have developed applications in C or C++ that is currently running on Sun hardware to easily migrate these applications onto OpenSolaris running on System z. This is likely to appeal to financial services companies that both use mainframe systems as well as a lot of custom developed Solaris-based applications. Companies can get a copy of the prototype operating system here.
• IBM and Sun officials recently announced the Open Document Format (ODF) Toolkit Union. This is an open-source project that is intended to make it easier for application developers to use ODF. Engineers at Sun will contribute code for the initial application programming interface (API). IBM officials said that they will soon follow with their own code contributions from engineers out of IBM's Lotus division. IBM officials also announced that future versions of its Symphony productivity suite will be done exclusively in ODF 1.2 and the OpenOffice 3.0 code base.

Experton Group believes Sun is making the right decision to increase to use of open software to the user community. One of the key ways to increase the support and use of Solaris is to make the code open and free, and then drive for value-added support for ongoing operations and application development. The partnership with IBM makes sense, since most financial service companies have both Sun and IBM servers. However, this partnership will certainly come at the expense of Sun hardware sales to these companies, which will adversely impact the long-term success of Sun hardware. IT executives should evaluate the Solaris prototype on a separate logical partition and evaluate as a way to reduce space needed to run Solaris-based business applications in the enterprise.