HP Promotes Transitive Tool to Port Solaris Apps to Integrity Servers

Published: June 28, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It was definitely only a matter of time before Hewlett-Packard or Intel ponied up the development cash to get Transitive to create a variant of its QuickTransit emulation environment that would allow Solaris applications running on Sparc server platforms to run in emulated mode on Itanium-based servers running Linux. HP announced that it was working with Transitive to create such a product at its Technology Forum meeting for customers and partners in Las Vegas last week.

Transitive announced back in March 2006 that it was being paid by Intel to create a variant of QuickTransit to host Solaris/Sparc applications on X64 servers running Linux, and by July of last year, that product began shipping. The new QuickTransit for Solaris/Sparc-to-Linux/Itanium product that HP and Transitive announced last week is a variant of last year's code, but tuned to run on Itanium instead of X64 servers and tuned specifically for HP's Integrity line of servers. Neither company has said that the code will work on other Itanium-based servers, such as those offered by Fujitsu, NEC, or Unisys. Up until now, Transitive's business model is to get one vendor of one platform to attack another vendor's platform, with the X64-Linux host environment for Sparc/Solaris applications being an exception that is not only available on all X64 platforms, but available through a reseller channel for customers instead of through server bundles with specific server vendors.

HP says that it will sell the QuickTransit for Solaris/Sparc-to-Linux/Itanium product through its Developer & Solution Partner Program and that it will collaborate with HP to promote the use of QuickTransit. HP's Integrity customers will also be able to buy the product directly from Transitive through its online store and through Transitive's network of resellers. This new Sparc-to-Integrity porting platform for Solaris applications running on Linux will be available in July, and it will cost $875 per populated Itanium processor socket on the Integrity boxes; in virtualized environments that use the Integrity VM hypervisor, customers have to pay $875 per virtual machine instance on the Integrity machines that are hosting QuickTransit and the emulated Sparc applications running atop Linux.

Sun backed the use of QuickTransit in May, partnering with Transitive to create a variant of the product called QuickTransit for Solaris/Sparc to Solaris/X86, which will be used to help customers with legacy Solaris applications move over to X64-based servers. This variant of QuickTransit is expected to go beta in July with general availability in September. IBM has also announced an environment based on QuickTransit called PAVE, which is also in beta and which allows 32-bit Linux applications compiled for X86 processors to run on Power-based servers running Linux. (PAVE is also due later this year.) Silicon Graphics uses QuickTransit to host MIPS/Irix applications on its Linux-based Altix servers, and Apple Computer used a variant of QuickTransit to create the "Rosetta" emulation environment that allowed Mac OS/Power applications to be ported seamlessly to Intel's X64 processors running Mac OS in the new Apple hardware lineup.

Thus far, IBM has been hesitant to partner with Transitive to create variants of QuickTransit that would allow its Power-based servers to host HP-UX and Solaris applications from a variety of chips (PA-RISC and Itanium for HP-UX and Sparc and X64 for Solaris), but this seems like an obvious move for Big Blue. And so does hosting mainframe applications on Power-based servers, which is something the company has got to be thinking about, if not actually preparing for market.

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