But Wait, There's More

Solaris on Power Is Closer Than You Think

A few weeks ago, Sun Microsystems' president and chief operating officer, Jonathan Schwartz, blurted out during a financial analyst conference call that the company is considering porting its Solaris Unix variant to IBM's Power family of processors, which are used on the pSeries/p5 Unix boxes and the iSeries/i5 proprietary midrange machines. While Sun immediately backpedaled on the idea during the call (Sun's chairman and CEO, Scott McNealy, said emphatically that Schwartz's statement was not a product announcement), We have inside sources that say Sun is a lot further along in getting Solaris on Power than either admitted.

Far from being just an idea, our Sun sources tell us that the Solaris on Power project is somewhere between 80 and 85 percent complete. Considering that Solaris is a variant of the BSD line of Unix, probably with a lot of Java code mixed in, recompiling Solaris to run on a Power4 or Power5 box is probably not very tough. Getting it to run well might be, however.

But now, with the advent of the Virtualization Engine hypervisor for the eServer i5 and p5 servers, Sun probably needs IBM's help to properly make Solaris a peer of OS/400, AIX, and Linux on the Power servers. And Sun would need IBM's help to certify Solaris on the many different machines that it sells. Sun might even be willing to do all of the porting work itself. Sun's competitor and partner in the Sparc server market, Fujitsu Siemens, pays Sun to port and certify Solaris on its own PrimePower Sparc clone servers. It seems unlikely that IBM will pay Sun to do a similar port to Power. But Sun could pay IBM to let it do the port, and maybe even give a little ground in the open sourcing of the Java programming language in exchange. We'll see if any of this comes about. The odds are probably low, but Solaris on the eServer p5 and i5 could happen.

HP-UX to Get Java Enterprise System Support; Is AIX Next?

Sun Microsystems has been talking up its middleware software stack, which is an amalgam of homegrown Sun and acquired Netscape software, over the past six months, but the Java Enterprise System is only available on Sun's own Solaris Unix platform and the open source Linux platform. Last week, Sun announced that, by the beginning of next year, it will offer Java Enterprise System, which consists of Web servers, identity managers, J2EE application servers, and other middleware, on Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX Unix variant and Microsoft's Windows platform.

Although Sun has not talked about Java Enterprise System support for IBM's AIX is a logical next move. For all of the talk about WebSphere within IBM, only a relative minority of the 150,000 AIX shops in the world are running WebSphere in production. While AIX supported the Netscape Web servers and some of the other middleware products, Netscape, then AOL, and now Sun have not focused their attention on AIX support as they each, in turn, controlled the Netscape stack. But for the $100 per employee per year that Sun is charging to license the entire Java Enterprise System stack, this might be just the kind of software and price that will get AIX shops excited about a non-IBM alternative to WebSphere.

Sun Experiments with eBay

Sun Microsystems continues to try to use eBay auctioning as a way of gauging enthusiasm and setting prices for its new servers and workstations. Sun did this when it first launched UltraSparc-III machines, in late 2000 and throughout 2001, and it is now doing it with Opteron-based Sun Fire servers and Sun Java workstations.

Sun announced yesterday that it will host auctions on eBay for two-way Sun Fire V20z servers with Solaris 9 licenses (valued at $3,045); bidding starts at a penny, and the auctions end today. Sun is also auctioning four-way V40z servers, a two-way configuration with a value of $9,995, and a four-way machine worth $24,995. The Sun Java Workstation W1100z (uniprocessor) and W2100z (two-way) are also being auctioned off, with bids starting at a penny, and special bundles of servers and workstations with software and support rolled in are also being offered.

In June 2004, Sun tested bids on a workstation with Sun's developer tools, and got hundreds of bids with an average price of $3,000 for the machine. Last week, when Sun launched its V40z server, it announced an eBay auction, and the company says that it got almost one hundred bids on the machine with an average selling price of $5,500.

Fundtech Ports Global Payplus System to AIX

Fundtech, an application software provider in Jersey City, New Jersey, that specializes in payment, cash management, and settlement systems, announced that it has ported its Global PAYplus system to IBM's AIX operating system. The Global PAYplus system, used by banks and other financial institutions, is already supported on Sun Microsystems' Solaris and Microsoft's Windows server variants. Incidentally, Fundtech operates the largest multinational fund transfer service in the world, based in Switzerland.

HP Preps for HP World Trade Show

Hewlett-Packard will host HP World, its annual user group conference and expo, in Chicago between August 16 and 20. The second most powerful person within HP, Ann Livermore, will be giving the keynote address. Livermore is executive vice president of Technology Solutions Group, a result of the merger of HP's servers, storage, software, and services units earlier this year. HP expects that 7,000 attendees, including customers and partners, will attend the show. The Interex and Encompass user groups, spawned from HP and Compaq/Digital respectively, are co-producers of HP World. Some 150 HP partners are expected to attend the event to show off their wares.

IBM Buys Cyanea for Systems Management Wares

IBM last week acquired a little-known private software company called Cyanea to bolster its Tivoli systems management software suite.

Cyanea, which is based in Oakland, California, and has only five employees, is a three-year-old company that has already partnered with IBM. In fact, IBM resells the Cyanea/One application performance management software as an adjunct to its WebSphere middleware, which Big Blue calls the WebSphere Studio Application Monitor, which is available on zSeries mainframes. Cyanea/One manages and tunes the performance of Java applications on mainframe and other platforms, as well as tuning applications written in the CICS transaction monitor and hitting IMS flat-file databases. The software also has predictive capabilities that allow system administrators to deal with problems before bottlenecks cause application performance to degrade.

IBM plans to integrate Cyanea into its Tivoli division, and it will hook deeply into the WebSphere middleware stack and eventually be woven into the Rational toolsets from IBM so that application coders can do deep performance analysis of applications on host-based systems like mainframes and iSeries boxes as well as on Windows, Linux, and Unix systems.

IBM Wants Students to Bolster Skills with IBM, Open Software

Time and time again, it has been shown that the technologies students are exposed to in college IT courses are what they prefer to implement once they become working IT professionals. The seeding of technologies in schools is, in part, how Unix, Macintosh, Windows, and Linux all developed a cult following that turned into real markets. While IBM loves Linux and Java, it wants students to be familiar with its interpretation of those open technologies, and to that end Big Blue has launched the IBM Academic Initiative to provide universities with WebSphere, DB2, and other software products, as well as new BladeCenter and Power5-based servers, at a deep discount if they promote Java, Linux, and other open technologies.

These discounts on software complement Scholars Portal, which makes 40 IBM software technologies available to university faculty members so they can use IBM code in their courses. IBM says that 8,000 instructors have signed up for the portal to date. IBM has plans to make larger "Squadron" Power5 servers available to instructors and students remotely through a "virtual loaner" program.