Written by The revelation that IBM are allegedly offering $6.5 billion to take over Sun Microsystems has shaken the world of IT. Such massive consolidation hasn’t been seen since the badly received 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 opportunities that such a deal could bring to their UNIX product lines.
IBM market their POWER based servers running AIX at the high end, and x86 servers running Linux at the low and mid range. Sun have the excellent UltraSPARC T2 servers at the low end, along with x86 boxes, and SPARC64 servers at the high end. Linux is an option on their x86 kit, but Solaris is the UNIX of choice.
Solaris is really the key offering here. No other UNIX OS is close to the features and scalability that Solaris can offer IT departments. Packed 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 code, work in the same way – they’re built from the same code base.
A few years ago Sun also open sourced Solaris, creating the OpenSolaris project, which has built a thriving community and a number of new features which have been merged back into the main Solaris code base.
Innovation on AIX has been sorely lacking, and the clear path here would be for IBM to gradually retire AIX in favour of a consistent Solaris offering across it’s entire product range. One of the strengths of buying into Sun’s hardware line is the promise of binary compatibility from the desktop all the way up to the enterprise server. This is a compelling feature for IT professionals, and one IBM would be keen to take advantage of.
