IBM in talks to buy SUN

Well not two days after I say how their cloud innovations may be too late in coming for SUN... now IBM is in talks to purchase them. How very interesting.

This potential deal is interesting on multiple fronts.

• RISC (Not Risk as in risky but RISC as in Reduced Instruction Set Computer) This potential merger creates a big home for the remaining non-Intel chip guys. While HP does have their own this combination of fanatical Sun worshipers and the IBM "tried and true"ers is a potentially strong combo. Very different audiences and users though with one driven by tech innovation in Sun users and the other in the "never been fired for picking IBM" mentality.
• Java - Not a lot of the press on the topic brought this up. I guess because it is a shared standard and all that rigmarole. The reality though is that Sun still drives Java in a lot of ways. IBM on the other hand has been a big Java pusher on multiple fronts for development tools, open source etc. This could be a big deal. Of course there is always the gotcha side of the new languages such as SCALA coming up in popularity for the many-core problem.
• Open Source - Sun was big big in the .com era and went down when the .com boom went up. Since then they pushed into Open Source fairly successfully and actually have several software products that they are responsible for that have decent success. Grid, MySQL, even Solaris (a religion among some by itself) are big software assets. Of course the hard part is that IBM has their own efforts in these areas.
• People Logistics - If Sun has an office somewhere, so does IBM. The overhead portion of this could be a big savings opportunity. Not geeky though so I will stop there.
• Competition - Some of the press has stated this is a response to Cisco's entry into the data center space for servers. I doubt that but it does narrow down the big data center players. HP, IBM... ... well...

All told I think this could be good for Sun and IBM. If done right. (isn't that always the trick though... if it works everyone is a genius if it doesn't they were doomed from the get-go.) It gives me some hope for these products and companies for the future and in any case it will be fun to watch.

More cloud updates

Since my last post I have been sent a few and read a few other articles that I thought might be worthy of note related to what clouds are and why it is important.

Sun's CTO Greg Papadopoulos did an interview with Informationweek and discussed some of the efforts that SUN has going on. One of the biggest items of note in that article is the new Drizzle product coming out of the MySQL work. There are many articles and blog posts on the topic as well but the gist is that it is an effort to Cloud-smarten MySQL. Seeing how "MySQL gets used, people only use a subset of the relational capabilities because it has a horizontal scale and there are all these concerns that go into large-scale deployments. So Drizzle sort of strips back down to a small core and then builds up the distributed capabilities." I have made no secret of my feeling that Data is no longer relational. So I think this is encouraging news though as seems to be the case lately with SUN it may be too late for MySQL.

(Aside... Greg Papadopoulos and David Douglas recently co-authored Citizen Engineer: A handbook for socially responsible engineering. Though it is not yet available you can check out an interview with David Douglas on the book and engineering at the Mercury News. Personally I find this to be a refreshing take on the responsibility of Engineering as a profession and all of the personal and corporate responsibility that should go along with it.)

As if they noticed Microsoft pushing cloud tech Amazon announced a few new items in their own cloud initiatives. The ability to reserve capacity for known needs. They also expanded the ability of Windows based services in another Amazon zone. All of this from a company that sells stuff, proof that necessity is the mother of invention.

Solaris vs. Linux

As mentioned in my post Sun gets a new spark I recently had the opportunity to visit with some of the folks from SUN and get some visibility into the efforts they have under way. One of the things that this visit caused me to ponder was Solaris 10. When Sun open sourced Solaris I wrote it off as the death throws of a previously strong giant and it made me sad. I originally cut my Unix teeth on Solaris and did a lot of work with it as the stable foundation on which to build open systems. However, as Linux came into its own I have also been one of those folks who has systematically been replacing Solaris in the data center with Linux. For the most part going with the masses to Red Hat but with occasional forays into others as well.

Some developers that I know have stuck with Solaris for their development environments even through the Linux craze due to tools that they liked. Originally I had gone the other way, moving development environments to Linux and deployment environments to Solaris. Solaris in prod for stability and Linux for tools and speed in development.

With the new innovation going into Solaris, things like ZFS, zones and Grid it gives pause. The difficulty now is that everyone and their kid sister has run Linux, known Linux etc. There is a wealth of Linux talent out there and the Solaris admins are much harder to find. Of course Red Hat has been getting more proud of their products and pricing their support accordingly which also adds to the mix. With all of the recent silliness from Microsoft on their FUD around Open Source and indemnity clauses things get even more interesting. (I personally am of the belief that if they thought they could win they would already be in court... but I am sure the FUD is the real goal)

So given your choice... which would you pick?

SUN gets a new spark

I recently had the opportunity to go out to California and visit SUN. It was just a short period of time but it was an information packed couple days. We discussed topics ranging from Sun GridEngine to strategic direction, from Developer Tools to hardware threading.

I was particularly happy to see that SUN appears to have obtained a dose of humility. Where their previous corporate strategy seemed for a while to be "ABM" (Anything But Microsoft) they are now focusing on understanding their spot in commodity markets and differentiating based on service. The previous approach and Scott McNeely's top 10 lists was certainly entertaining it didn't do much to further the companies goals.

SUN has now taken a page out of the RedHat handbook on making money with Open Source and are trying to make money with service differentiation. I had written off the initiative to Open Source Solaris as the dieing throws of a declining giant. But listening to the vision that they have and what innovation Sun is now building into Solaris 10 with things such as ZFS and Virtualization such as Zones.

Their approaches with Silicon and drive to innovate there was also interesting. They now sell Sun boxes with AMD and Intel processors. Talk about Cats and Dogs living together. We even discussed a current effort sun is working on with Microsoft for a large system provider where they are serving real time video off of Sun hardware running Windows. ... Let that sink in for a minute...

Another interesting point that was brought up was how Moore's Law and fitting more onto the same bit of silicon applies to RISC chips as well as CISC chips. Since RISC is smaller (Reduced Instruction Set) they can then fit more processors on the wafer. So they are legitimately talking 32 and 64 core processors. Talk about the need to thread your application. Initiatives such as Niagara and Victoria Falls also provide low energy approaches.

Just read some of the press of the days for a glimpse of some of what they have been up to.