The Unix Guardian--Fujitsu-Siemens Finally Does Solaris on Primergy

Newsletters	Subscriptions	Forums	Safari	Store	Career	Media Kit	About Us	Contact	Search	Home

Volume 8, Number 24 -- June 19, 2008

Fujitsu-Siemens Finally Does Solaris on Primergy

Published: June 19, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Well, this was a decision that has been a long time in coming, and one that probably should have taken maybe 35 seconds in a meeting maybe four years ago when it must have been pretty clear that Sun Microsystems would be backtracking bigtime and supporting Solaris 10 on X86 and X64 platforms. But, no matter how long it took, Sparc and Solaris insider Fujitsu-Siemens, the partnership of Japanese server maker Fujitsu and Germany partner Siemens, is now officially supporting Solaris Unix on its Primergy line of X64 servers.

The move by Fujitsu-Siemens follows moves by Hewlett-Packard more than a year ago to support (but not preinstall) Solaris on select numbers of its ProLiant family of machines. Last summer, IBM and Sun inked an OEM distribution for Solaris, allowing Big Blue to preinstall it on machines as well as sell support services for Solaris on its System x line and, potentially, put Solaris on mainframes and Power platforms. (These projects are still under way, apparently.) Last fall, Dell, which is looking for every edge it can find to cut deals with customers and cut out the competition, offered support for Solaris 10 on several PowerEdge machines.

It is hard to say why Fujitsu-Siemens has dragged its feet on this Solaris-on-X86 and then Solaris-on-X64 issue, especially considering that the company designs its own Sparc chips and is obviously very keen on Solaris, which is the only operating system that runs on Fujitsu-Siemens' Sparc Enterprise and PrimePower servers. (Ditto for Sun's variants of those jointly developed boxes, which are really Fujitsu boxes as we all know, and its Sun Fire UltraSparc-IV+ predecessors and Sparc T2 alternatives.) Supporting an operating system on a platform is expensive, not just because of certification but because of ongoing support and the constant nag of updated drivers and new peripherals, processors, and other hardware that people put into the box. Over the years, when I crabbed at Fujitsu-Siemens executives about Solaris support on Primergy, they said that when customer demand was there, they would do it; but we both knew that such support would eat into PrimePower and now Sparc Enterprise Server profits, since X64 iron is, by its nature, less expensive than Sparc iron. But some trends are inevitable, and while there is nothing wrong with Sparc iron, Sun's Sparc volumes continue to drop and its X64 volumes keep growing; it is hard to imagine Fujitsu-Siemens' Sparc volumes are growing, even if it can command a premium for these machines.

It takes a critical mass of customers and applications to compel a vendor to support a hardware platform with its operating system or an operating system vendor to support a hardware platform, just because of the labor intensity of the operations behind that support. This is why Windows only runs on X64 and Itanium chips these days--and only a special version of what used to be called Datacenter Edition is available with Windows Server 2008--why IBM doesn't support AIX on X64 chips, why HP doesn't support HP-UX on X64 and why it killed off Tru64 Unix, and why Dell just goes with the flow. As of the announcement of the Fujitsu-Siemens support for Solaris on Primergy, over 950 different X86 and X64 servers have been certified to run Solaris 10 (compared to 96 Sparc systems) and over 4,000 applications have been certified to run on the X86/X64 variant of Solaris (there were, at one time, over 12,000 Sparc/Solaris applications, so I have been told, but I suspect some hyperbole here). That 4,000-strong application count is about as good as it gets these days in the enterprise server racket. There may be something close to 14,000 Itanium applications, but they run on HP-UX, Windows, Linux, OpenVMS, and NonStop, and believe me, Itanium cheerleaders are double, triple, quadruple, and quintuple counting when an application spans from two to five of those platforms.

"Having supported Solaris on Sparc systems for some time now, Fujitsu Siemens Computers has deep experience with service and support of Solaris," explained Jens-Peter Seick, senior vice president Enterprise Server Business in the EMEA for Fujitsu Siemens Computers, the European arm of the partnership. "As we expand support to Primergy servers, we'll leverage this experience to provide immediate benefits to our customers. Furthermore, offering our customers choice and streamlining their purchasing and deployment experience are of paramount importance to Fujitsu Siemens and this new agreement with Sun allows us to do just that."

The exact financial details of the multi-year OEM agreement between Fujitsu-Siemens and Sun were not announced. Fujitsu-Siemens is only supporting the latest release of Solaris 10, the 5/08 update, on the Primergy servers. Solaris will be preconfigured on the Primergy machines, if that is what customers want. Exactly what machines, I am not sure, and I can't find a document that shows which ones.

So, maybe Fujitsu-Siemens will now port Solaris 10 to its PrimeQuest Itanium boxes? (I just wanted to see if you were still listening, and now you need to stop laughing.) Remember that Sun originally embraced Itanium, like every other operating system maker did, and was ready to put Solaris 8 on the chips but killed the distribution because the Itaniums were initially way under expectations and very, very late to market. And hence, IBM and SCO pulled support for AIX and UnixWare, Sun pulled support for Solaris, and Microsoft has been a tepid (and practical) supporter of Windows on Itanium, leaving HP as the big cheerleader with HP-UX and a few mainframe platform providers (like Bull, Siemens, and NEC) supporting their operating systems on Itanium.