Transitive Ships Solaris/Sparc to Linux/X64 Porting Environment

Published: November 16, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in July, Transitive, a startup company that has created a funky emulation product that allows applications written for one Unix-oid environment to be ported to Unix-oid environments running on other processor architectures, said that it had been working with Intel to make a variant of its QuickTransit software that would port Sparc/Solaris applications to Linux running on X64 or Itanium processors. Now, that product is shipping for X64 platforms.

This means, in theory, that customers with legacy Sparc/Solaris applications--who have maybe 1.5 million servers all told--can think about getting off that expensive Sparc iron and onto cheaper X64 iron running Linux.

Rather than trying to sell the QuickTransit product solely to server makers who want to poach each others installed bases, Transitive has seen the wisdom of charging end users for the software. QuickTransit for Solaris/Sparc-to-Linux/X64 is the unwieldy name of this product, and it is available on an annual subscription basis of $875 per physical processor socket. If customers deploy QuickTransit on VMware or Xen hypervisors, they have to pay that fee for each virtual machine on the server, regardless of the number of sockets. The porting product has been tested at more than 50 Sparc customer sites, many of whom have more than 1,000 Sparc/Solaris servers running legacy applications.

Transitive has made some money by getting Silicon Graphics to use QuickTransit to support Irix/MIPS applications on its Altix Itanium-based Linux supercomputers, and QuickTransit was part of the "Rosetta" environment that allowed Apple to move from PowerPC to Core 2 processors in its laptops and desktops and to Xeons in its Xserve servers in a very quick manner. But end users are where the action is for such emulation software, not server makers. So Transitive has seen the wisdom of setting up a reseller channel in recent months. It now has three resellers: MSI Systems Integrators and Zot in North America and Networld Corporation in Japan. Transitive is also selling the product directly, and is offering a trial version for tire kickers.

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