Solaris 10 on System x and BladeCenter: A Lot of Noise, Little Money

Published: August 3, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As I report elsewhere in this issue of The Unix Guardian, IBM has finally launched a broader line of Opteron-based System x rack servers and BladeCenter blade servers. And, as Sun Microsystems has been crowing about for several months, Big Blue has actually begun offering official support for Sun's Solaris 10 operating system on its BladeCenter servers. But, oddly enough, it may not be all that much of a big deal in the end.

Jeff Benck, vice president of development in the System Technology Group, who managed the creation of the five Opteron-based servers that IBM previewed this week and which it will ship as soon as Advanced Micro Devices ships the "Santa Rosa" Rev F Opterons, is not all that keen at this point of putting Solaris on the new machines. "Many of Sun's former customers have moved their workloads to BladeCenters already using Linux, and a number came to us and said that while we had moved 80 percent of their workloads over, supporting Solaris would help them move the other 20 percent. And I did that. But for the larger market, in many cases the applications are not on Solaris on Opteron yet. We did the Solaris support, and it quieted down the noise, but it didn't generate much money."

That said, as those Solaris applications are ported to the Opteron processor, a case can be made that it is smarter to attract some Sun customers by putting Solaris on System x servers--since it is Solaris and their own applications that these customers are interested in preserving--and it is a more interesting way to take on Sun in the Opteron market.

And if IBM really wanted to make some trouble, it might join the OpenSolaris project, hire some of those thousands of ex-Sun employees, and create its own variant of Solaris for X64 and Power processors, including a paid-for support structure. This way, IBM could attack Sun and get all the money. If IBM were not engulfed in all its Linux-related woes with SCO Group, Big Blue might have long since done its own Linux distribution, too.