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A few thoughts through the SUN product line: (Anyone else got ideas that I missed?) SPARC - likely gone.. IBM will probably stick with Power. JAVA - might b

A few thoughts through the SUN product line: (Anyone else got ideas that I missed?) SPARC - likely gone.. IBM will probably stick with Power. JAVA - might be good for it.. IBM are big supporters of java, with Eclipse, IBM JRE's, etc MySQL - interesting dilemma - IBM have DB2 CE or whatever it's called as a free DB engine - mysql is not at DB2 level (yet) by any stretch - but if it's good enough - then is it a revenue threat Solaris - IBM have an awesome NIX variant in AIX. Of course - that's why they now push Linux so much.. :P Not sure what would happen to solaris here... DTrace - obviously kept - maybe linux/aix porting? (we can hope) ZFS - again - you'd assume they would keep it. Disk Storage - The thumper, etc seem like pretty good products.. IBM have some storage kit developed internally (DS8000 etc) - and some I believe is OEM.. I think that some gear like the Thumper might be able to replace the OEM gear... (Would also be quite nice behind an SVC) StorageTek (Tape Drives) - These will need some consolidation (although again - some of IBM's kit is OEM) - but at the top end - I would have said that the SL8500 (Sun's) trumps the TS3500 (IBM's) at the high end - so that could be dramatic.. Intel/AMD based servers - I'd guess they'll keep them seperate for as long as they can - eventually standardising down to one of the two lines? (Or perhaps spinning some/all out to Lenovo or someone like that?) OpenOffice - since IBM are pushing it (or a badged variant of it) as Lotus Symphony - you'd assume it would be sticking around... HPC - I can't see IBM dropped BlueGene - but I've got no clue what Sun are really doing in the space... (from wiki: In 2006, Sun built the TSUBAME supercomputer, which was until June 2008 the fastest supercomputer in Asia. .... Ranger has a peak performance of over 500 TFLOPS, and is currently the 6th most powerful supercomputer on the TOP500 list (November 2008).) And Wikipedia has a nice listing of all the goodness of sun hardware: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Sun_Microsystems_hardware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Sun_Microsystems_hardw...

alecco 18y ago
IBM is focusing on services, this is all about getting those juicy support/operations contracts.
razzmataz 18y ago
I could always imagine the solaris code base being dumped on a group like ISC or something...
- tptacek 18y ago
  Why is that a win? Roughly the same group of people are involved in BSD.
gtufano 18y ago
Solaris is way better than AIX, and a Power port is half done (historically there were a Power version). I don't know really, but IBM could choose to drop linux or, my hope, merge solaris and linux... this would be terrific, if backed by a behemoth like big blue.
- rbanffy 18y ago
  That's about all the good I could see coming from this marriage. I hope Sun gets back to its feet by itself.
adrianwaj 18y ago
There is a whole vendor ecosystem around high-end SPARC/Solaris systems, especially in financial services and telcos. It could take a number of years for these corporations to move onto IBM gear if that was the key. Dropping SPARC completely would be foolish, better just rebrand everything to IBM and take it from there. Think Compaq, now think Sun.
- tptacek 18y ago
  That's been true of every other architecture that was inexorably marginalized by x86. You're right that IBM isn't going to unceremoniously drop it. But it's dead, and good riddance.
  - adrianwaj 18y ago
    I remember McNealy admitting they underestimated 32 bit architecture and placed too much on 64 bit. Another error might have been overvaluing its vertically integrated SW/HW solution technically and financially, and not commoditizing it quickly enough through open-source and hardware cloning. Spreading one's wealth goes against one's better judgement often, but the rewards come back in unseen ways.
    - tptacek 18y ago
      In Sun's case I think it's simpler than that: SPARC hardware carries a steep premium over commodity x86, a good chunk of that premium is actually intended to pay for Sun's software stack, and Sun simply hasn't executed well enough on the software side to merit the premium. Sun did a lot of engineering stuff "right" in the late '90s, and again over the past couple years: they were first to market with a mainstream-grade MP kernel and first to market with a mainstream 64 bit OS, and recently they have ZFS and DTrace to talk about. On the other hand, I think you could have predicted probably starting in 2001 that nobody was going to pay that much for large-scale MP, 64 bits, and advanced filesystems; the entire server market swung to web stacks, which scale horizontally and move most of the systems management burden into a DBMS and out of the Adrian Cockroft and Chris Drake systems engineering realm where Sun has excelled. I really think that if you compare the systems-level innovation at Apple to the systems-level innovation at Sun, Apple comes out ahead. And systems-level innovation isn't even their core competancy.
rjurney 18y ago
ZFS - you'd hope they would set it free! Linux Kernel inclusion ftw!
- rbanffy 18y ago
  CDDL is already free. I would love if it were GPLv3, but, again, this wouldn't help Linux a bit.
  - nailer 18y ago
    I would love it too, but why don't you think GPLv3 ZFS would help Linux? It's good technology, the license just isn't GPL compatible.
    - rbanffy 18y ago
      Because Linux is (and will be for the foreseeable future) licensed under GPLv2, which is incompatible with software under v3. There are also some issues on driver architecture that make ZFS and the Linux kernel a tough match.
      - nailer 18y ago
        Point taken.
    - cookiecaper 18y ago
      btrfs is supposed to one-up ZFS anyway, and that's going into mainline as experimental with the imminent release of 2.6.29. I'm not sure how btrfs and ZFS they compare, just know that btrfs is being developed since Linux has been unable to get ZFS.
snorkel 18y ago
JAVA - Can we please have SWT controls built into the standard JRE? Or at least add some new controls to Swing?
- ShabbyDoo 18y ago
  Yes, this will put an end to the absurdity of the Sun/IBM Java fights. I predict that NetBeans will die and SWT will win out over Swing. What about Websphere vs. Glassfish?
  - wmf 18y ago
    Can you say "Websphere Glassfish Edition"? IBM already has two different app servers called Websphere; what's one more?

alecco 18y ago

IBM is focusing on services, this is all about getting those juicy support/operations contracts.

razzmataz 18y ago

I could always imagine the solaris code base being dumped on a group like ISC or something...

tptacek 18y ago
Why is that a win? Roughly the same group of people are involved in BSD.

gtufano 18y ago

Solaris is way better than AIX, and a Power port is half done (historically there were a Power version). I don't know really, but IBM could choose to drop linux or, my hope, merge solaris and linux... this would be terrific, if backed by a behemoth like big blue.

rbanffy 18y ago
That's about all the good I could see coming from this marriage. I hope Sun gets back to its feet by itself.

adrianwaj 18y ago

There is a whole vendor ecosystem around high-end SPARC/Solaris systems, especially in financial services and telcos. It could take a number of years for these corporations to move onto IBM gear if that was the key. Dropping SPARC completely would be foolish, better just rebrand everything to IBM and take it from there. Think Compaq, now think Sun.

tptacek 18y ago
That's been true of every other architecture that was inexorably marginalized by x86. You're right that IBM isn't going to unceremoniously drop it. But it's dead, and good riddance.
- adrianwaj 18y ago
  I remember McNealy admitting they underestimated 32 bit architecture and placed too much on 64 bit. Another error might have been overvaluing its vertically integrated SW/HW solution technically and financially, and not commoditizing it quickly enough through open-source and hardware cloning. Spreading one's wealth goes against one's better judgement often, but the rewards come back in unseen ways.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    In Sun's case I think it's simpler than that: SPARC hardware carries a steep premium over commodity x86, a good chunk of that premium is actually intended to pay for Sun's software stack, and Sun simply hasn't executed well enough on the software side to merit the premium. Sun did a lot of engineering stuff "right" in the late '90s, and again over the past couple years: they were first to market with a mainstream-grade MP kernel and first to market with a mainstream 64 bit OS, and recently they have ZFS and DTrace to talk about. On the other hand, I think you could have predicted probably starting in 2001 that nobody was going to pay that much for large-scale MP, 64 bits, and advanced filesystems; the entire server market swung to web stacks, which scale horizontally and move most of the systems management burden into a DBMS and out of the Adrian Cockroft and Chris Drake systems engineering realm where Sun has excelled. I really think that if you compare the systems-level innovation at Apple to the systems-level innovation at Sun, Apple comes out ahead. And systems-level innovation isn't even their core competancy.

rjurney 18y ago

ZFS - you'd hope they would set it free! Linux Kernel inclusion ftw!

rbanffy 18y ago
CDDL is already free. I would love if it were GPLv3, but, again, this wouldn't help Linux a bit.
- nailer 18y ago
  I would love it too, but why don't you think GPLv3 ZFS would help Linux? It's good technology, the license just isn't GPL compatible.
  - rbanffy 18y ago
    Because Linux is (and will be for the foreseeable future) licensed under GPLv2, which is incompatible with software under v3. There are also some issues on driver architecture that make ZFS and the Linux kernel a tough match.
    - nailer 18y ago
      Point taken.
  - cookiecaper 18y ago
    btrfs is supposed to one-up ZFS anyway, and that's going into mainline as experimental with the imminent release of 2.6.29. I'm not sure how btrfs and ZFS they compare, just know that btrfs is being developed since Linux has been unable to get ZFS.

snorkel 18y ago

JAVA - Can we please have SWT controls built into the standard JRE? Or at least add some new controls to Swing?

ShabbyDoo 18y ago
Yes, this will put an end to the absurdity of the Sun/IBM Java fights. I predict that NetBeans will die and SWT will win out over Swing. What about Websphere vs. Glassfish?
- wmf 18y ago
  Can you say "Websphere Glassfish Edition"? IBM already has two different app servers called Websphere; what's one more?