Microsoft Fights Unix, Linux with Free SFU

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you can't beat 'em, emulate 'em--and give it away for free. This is Microsoft's very smart strategy in both dealing with the opportunity presented by the vast Unix server base and taking seriously the threat presented by the growing Linux base. The jump from Unix to Linux is relatively painless compared with the jump from Unix to Windows. The new Services for Unix 3.5 is about closing that gap.

Since 1998, Microsoft has been peddling a toolset called Services for Unix for its Windows server implementations. While early versions of the software were a hodge podge of utilities that Microsoft licensed from third parties to give Unix-style Network File System (NFS) and scripting features to Windows, so that Windows machines could share data with Unix boxes, Microsoft's acquisition of Software Systems in September 1999 gave Windows what amounts to a Unix-alike development and runtime environment. The latest release of the Windows tool, SFU 3.5, which was announced a few weeks ago at LinuxWorld in New York, was announced with a special low price designed to attract the attention of Unix and Linux shops: zero.

You heard right: You can get a Posix-compliant Unix environment for Windows that supports over 2,000 Unix APIs and that has many of the same open source development tools that Unix and Linux gurus create programs with, for free, from Microsoft. The question now is whether customers will go for it. A number of independent software vendors have used earlier SFU tools to port their Unix code to Windows, and with the improvements in SFU 3.5, that job will be a little easier. With Services for Unix, ISVs that have Unix or Linux applications (generally in C or Fortran) can continue to build their applications on their existing platforms and then port updates to the SFU environment on Windows. Customers with their own Unix applications can obviously do the same.

There is a vast installed base of 32-bit Unix and Linux application code out there, and Microsoft wants customers to port it to Wintel iron, using SFU 3.5. While Unix RISC processors have been available in 64-bit mode since the mid-1990s, the dirty little secret is that a lot of code--particularly home-grown C and C++ code--is still running in 32-bit mode on the machines. Very little of the Linux application code has been ported to 64-bit mode, since Linux has only recently gone to 64-bit memory addressing. This means a lot of the code running on expensive 64-bit Unix iron can be ported to relatively cheap Pentium-based Wintel iron and run inside SFU 3.5. For those who do have 64-bit Unix applications, Microsoft is supporting SFU 3.5 on its 64-bit implementations of Windows Server 2003, so even these applications can move to Itanium or Opteron platforms.

SFU 3.5 has improved support for the Unix Network File System, created by Sun Microsystems and commonly used in all Unix distributions, and the Unix-alike environment also now sports a full Unix scripting environment and over 300 Unix utilities. The open source GNU compilers and software development kit run inside SFU 3.5, and Microsoft has tested the interoperability with Solaris 7 and Solaris 8, HP-UX 11I, AIX 5L 5.2, and Red Hat Linux 8.0. The odds are that SFU can interoperate with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0, the latest version from that company, as well as with SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.

Porting Unix and Linux applications to a Unix-alike environment on Windows is important, but the other thing that SFU 3.5 does is to allow Unix system administrators and programmers to use the tools they know to control Unix applications that are running on Windows. In theory, SFU 3.5 could be at the heart of a server consolidation strategy in which Unix, Linux, and Windows applications are all collapsed onto a Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 environment. The issue, of course, is how well those Windows environments can juggle multiple applications. The popular Unix environments have very sophisticated job schedulers and workload managers, and Linux 2.6 is getting pretty decent at this, too. The Windows platform has certainly improved with Windows 2003, in juggling more applications at the same time, but it remains to be seen how well it can handle Unix and Windows applications at the same time.