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Posted on 05/30/2003 3:37:29 AM PDT by chance33_98
| AlwaysOn: Given your new initiatives, it looks like Sun is shifting its model to emphasize more software in the service side of its business.
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Hewlett-Packard and IBM have both decided to leave their Unix customers marooned in 64 bit systems and not provide them an extension into the 32 bit world. So they’ve got to engage customers in porting and moving infrastructure and trying to make things work. Our strategy has been far simpler: you run Solaris today—it runs beautifully on the server at 64 bit for tens of millions of people—and now you’re doing some lower-end systems development. We want to provide the same operating system, the same infrastructure, same skill set, same application, same IC. So our bet is that in the long run what customers really want is a common platform and a reduction in expense and complexity. Not new platforms, more operating systems, and an increase in complexity.
AlwaysOn: So Sun is still 100% behind Solaris?
Schwartz: We are absolutely committed to Solaris.
AlwaysOn: And it’s not an issue of just milking your installed bases to make a transition?
Schwartz: Absolutely not. You know, I’ve heard it said that Linux obliterates Unix, but leaves Microsoft unscathed. Not true. We’re making headway against Windows on the server because it’s the only other data center Unix that will run against Windows. And then Linux is showing up on this device. It’s running Linux. It’s not running WINCE, it’s not running SmartPhone. There are three million desktops in the world, none of which are going to pay Microsoft any amount of money. So Linux is opening up cash registers, set top boxes, vending machines, automobiles, medical equipment, cell phones. You name it, anything with a presentation to a user is going to be running Linux. So in my belief, Linux will validate Unix on 32 bit systems and really make a lot of headway against Microsoft in the client world.
AlwaysOn: Sun CEO Scott McNealy has said that you also want to be in the lower-cost Linux box business in order to facilitate applications that are more basic. Is that true?
Schwartz: If Scott said it, it’s true.
First of all, people have always said Linux is free; it doesn’t cost anything and it does everything. That’s a fearsome competitor. But now, with the new pricing models introduced by the only two remaining Linux vendors out there, it’s putting a cost to Linux, which is good for us because we can offer a comparison to that cost.
Second, we realize that there are some applications that for the most part don’t require distributed infrastructure. A render farm is a good example—where you don’t really want the overhead of an operating system, and you use the skinniest available. And that’s going to be a box business. I don’t think anyone’s going to make money in the render farm business. I don’t think anybody’s going to make money in the grid engine business, except maybe the software companies, and we’re one of them.
So we will deliver Linux to those customers that want it. We’ll have standard distributions so that they can feel safe that the investments they’ve made are okay. But at the end of the day, CIOs are still telling me that they’ve begun to realize that open source doesn’t equal open standards, because what they write to one Linux no longer runs on another. And what they really want is a uniform, cost-effective, simple to deploy, very high-scale operating platform that runs on 32 bit X86 systems and 64 bit high-end SMP systems. That’s what Sun will deliver.
AlwaysOn: Yet the fact remains that some people are replacing Sun boxes with cheaper Linux boxes. And Linux is growing in market share in terms of the operating system.
Schwartz: Right. There are three operating systems that are growing on X86 right now—Windows, Solaris and Linux. And we’ve got, at last count, about two million units of Solaris on Intel now in deployment. So we’re still moving at a reasonably good clip, driving more and more volume. The fact that we have Solaris on Intel allows me to go back against IBM and against Hewlett-Packard and against some of the installed 64 bit systems and say, “Look, I can deliver to you a robust data center class unit on 32 bit systems. I can get you to move off your 64 bit systems and I can do so with a uniform system stack at a very compelling price. How is Linux going to help you do that?”
But again, we’re not going to give customers only one choice. If they want to run Linux, we’ll allow them to run Linux. We just believe that Solaris on Intel represents a better solution to what we hear them articulating as their principal requirement. They want low-cost, standardized, shared services platforms that can scale and give them uniformity and efficiency.
AlwaysOn: Are you saying that there has been no kind of wake-up call at Sun?
Schwartz: I know this is not the answer that you’re expecting to hear. But our response to seeing the increase in Linux adoption is to view it as an increase in market opportunity, because there are now more X86 systems that we can run Solaris on. And again, Linux isn’t free; it has a price tag. And I think that’s evident now in the marketplace as we’ve begun to see the advanced server revenues begin to show up, because you have to build out technology if you want to stay in business. I think the 'wake-up call' you refer to is really an opportunity for us to take our competitive advantage, which is that Orion stack running on Solaris, and go up against Hewlett-Packard, go up against Microsoft.
This is part 2 of a 3 part interview series with Jonathan Schwartz, EVP of Sun Software. Part 1 was posted earlier this week. Part 3 on Mr. Schwartz's view on the future of software has also been posted.
When it was introduced in 2002, Solaris 9 included volume manager software, another item that had previously cost extra. Solaris 9 4/03 updates this package, which lets a server communicate with several storage systems as if they were one, with the ability to employ a volume as large as 2,000 terabytes.
The previous limit was 1 terabyte, said Bill Moffitt, group manager for Solaris product management, in an interview. A future version of Solaris will include updated Unix File System software that also can span a 16-terabyte range, he added.
Systems Admin here...anybody else?
I was building two sun servers a bot ago, 1u in size, 2 hd - compared to the 450 I have at home these are pretty slick (although, I have 20 hd versus 2, mine takes up half a rack! gotta get me one of those small ones soon, running out of space at home.)
Most of them actually. We have 2 data centers locally, and more elsewhere. Some boxes have hundreds of millions $ flow through them daily, solaris ones of course, so we are darn careful to insure up time through clustering, backup networks, etc and so on. It's all pretty well done here.
I am finally getting into the networking side of things too, which will add to the work (most all of which I can do from my laptop). Hope to have the ccnp in august, which basically means they will find more work for me to do ;|
Wanna be Penguified? Just holla!
Got root?
I has one Slackware machine that ran nearly 500 days without a reboot. It was loaded most the time doing dbs work. Had an external DPT raid array. The only reason we shut it down was to move it across the room.
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