What Would An IBM Sun Byout Mean For Their UNIX Servers?
The rumour that IBM are apparently offering $6.5 billion to take over Sun Microsystems has shaken the world of IT. Such massive consolidation hasn’t been seen since the poorly thoughtout buyout of Compaq by HP. Although IBM and Sun have long fought in the enterprise UNIX space, this deal would actually make a lot of sense to both companies. Let’s have a look at the problems that such a deal could bring to their UNIX product lines.
IBM market their POWER based machines running AIX at the high end, and x86 machines running Linux at the low and mid range. Sun have the excellent UltraSPARC T2 machines at the low end, along with x86 boxes, and SPARC64 machines at the high end. Linux is an offering on their x86 kit, but Solaris is the UNIX of choice.
Solaris is really the crown jewel here. No other UNIX OS is close to the features and power that Solaris can offer IT departments. Full of with technologies like the ZFS advanced filesystem, dtrace debugging tools, Zones, and dynamic reconfiguration, Solaris also has the bonus of feature parity across platforms. Both the SPARC and x86 versions of Solaris have the same features, work in the same way – they’re built from the same code base.
Several years ago Sun also open sourced Solaris, creating the OpenSolaris project, which has developed a thriving community and a number of new features which have been ported back into the main Solaris code base.
Innovation on AIX has been sorely missing, and the obvious path here would be for IBM to slowly retire AIX in favour of a consistent Solaris offering across it’s entire product offering. One of the strengths of buying into Sun’s hardware line is the guarantee of code compatibility from the desktop all the way up to the enterprise server. This is a unique selling point for IT consultants, and one IBM would be wise to take advantage of.
