HP Puts Solaris on More X64 Servers, Partners for Solaris Emulation

Published: February 8, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It might seem like Hewlett-Packard can't decide to love or hate rival Sun Microsystems. This week, HP significantly broadened its certification for Sun's Solaris 10 operating system on its ProLiant rack and tower servers and BladeSystem blade servers. But on the other hand, HP has partnered with Transitive to jointly engage with Sun's customers to see how they might deploy that company's emulation technology. What HP loves, you see, is the money that some Sparc shops want to spend as they migrate to X64 iron.

HP's announcement that it was broadening support of Solaris 10 to its current generation of servers that use Intel's Xeon server processors is intended to demonstrate that what Sun is promising by the end of this year--namely, "Galaxy" Sun Fire servers that use Intel chips--HP already has.

"Sun is late to market with Xeon chips, and we are right here, right now," explains Jeff Carlat, director of software marketing in HP's Industry Standard Server division.

The announcement was also timed to coincide with Sun's Analyst Day, when Wall Street moves over to San Francisco--or watched from streaming video--a dozen speeches all day about Sun and its plans to grow revenues and get real profits.

Specifically, HP is now supporting Solaris 10 on its BladeSystem BL20p G4, BL460c, and BL480c blade servers, the ProLiant DL360 G5, DL380 G5, and DL580 G4 rack servers, and the ProLiant ML570 G4 tower server. And with the addition of these machines with the already certified Opteron-based machines from last year and even earlier 32-bit X86 machines, HP supports three dozen different machines--a more diverse portfolio of X86 and X64 servers that Sun itself supports Solaris on.

According to Russ Coombes, software strategy manager in the ISS division, HP (or more precisely, Compaq and then HP) has been certifying and supporting Solaris on ProLiant servers since 1996. But neither Compaq nor HP has made Solaris a peer of Windows and then Linux, which is preconfigured on the servers. But if Solaris grows in popularity, and enough customers demand it, then HP will consider the possibility.

Neither Carlat and Coombes gave any indication that HP would give Solaris the tier-one status that Windows and Linux have on ProLiant and BladeSystem boxes. It will take a lot more than 7 million downloads, the number of Solaris licenses that Sun has distributed since launching Solaris 10 two years ago, to make that happen. It will take a lot of key customers and resellers asking HP to go the full step and offer preconfigured Solaris 10 on servers and full status as a peer on systems management tools such as Systems Insight Manager, which only runs on Windows and Linux boxes (but which does have agents to monitor and manage some features in Solaris 10). Any prebundling deal would presumably include a revenue arrangement between HP and Sun to jointly sell and offer tech support for Solaris on X64 servers. HP would want to get a slice of the Solaris support revenue stream, which would be better than getting none. That's what HP gets today because Solaris is freely distributed and tech support is only available through Sun itself.

What HP seems most concerned with, according to Carlat, is selling X64 servers to companies that either have to use Solaris or prefer to. "We are seeing very strong customer demand for customers who want to migrate away from Sparc, but there are still a significant number of Solaris loyalists," says Carlat. "They are content and happy with Solaris, but they want to move to ProLiant or BladeSystem servers."

Carlat says that through various migration initiatives--mostly involving Linux on X86 and X64 ProLiant servers but also using HP-UX on Itanium-based Integrity servers--the company generated more than $1 billion in revenues from Sun Sparc/Solaris migrations from the beginning of 2004 through the end of 2006.

Not all applications can be moved to the Solaris-X64 combination, particularly applications that were written for earlier releases of Solaris and that are tied very tightly to the iron. Which is why HP also announced its joint sales engagement partnerships with Transitive, whose QuickTransit emulation software has been used by a number of systems makers to allow applications on one chip architecture and operating system combination run on another platform.

QuickTransit is, for instance, at the heart of Apple Computer's "Rosetta" emulation environment, which allows Mac OS X programs written for the PowerPC platform to run unchanged on Intel's Core 2 chips and Xeon processors. Silicon Graphics also uses QuickTransit to support applications written for its MIPS chips and Irix Unix variant on its Itanium-Linux Altix supercomputers, and IBM is using QuickTransit as a means to eventually support Linux applications compiled for X86 and X64 chips to run on its Power chips. In March 2006, Intel partnered with Transitive to support the creation of QuickTransit variants that would allow Sparc/Solaris applications to run on Linux/X64 servers, and that software shipped in November 2006. HP is partnering with Transitive to jointly sell that software to prospective customers, but is stopping short of embedding it into its Xeon-based servers, as Apple has done.

So who are the potential customers who want Solaris on ProLiant and BladeSystem machines? The usual suspects in the Solaris base, who just so happen to also be the early adopters of Linux on servers from a few years ago: companies in the financial services, pharmaceuticals, and telecommunications industries. Coombes says that the Solaris 10 shops that HP is selling into with Solaris on HP iron like its blade servers and its four-socket Xeon boxes in particular.

Even though HP could also push a variant of QuickTransit that would port Sparc/Solaris applications to the Itanium-Linux combination, Coombes says that HP currently has no plans to do this. If QuickTransit turns out to be a competitive wedge it can use in Sun accounts, you can bet this will change. And it doesn't take a genius to figure out that Sun would be wise to get a variant of QuickTransit that moves HP-UX workloads running on PA-RISC and Itanium processors and AIX applications on Power processors to run on Solaris machines based on either Sparc or X64 processors.

Selling bullets to all of the vendors fighting in the server market is, of course, Transitive's marketing plan.

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Cool Stuff: Transitive Emulates Server Platforms on Other Iron

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