Sometimes it’s not what’s in a press release or in an announcement but rather what’s not. Yesterday, Sun and IBM announced a “tectonic shift in the marketplace” according to Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun. In essence Sun and IBM announced that going forward Solaris is going to run on IBM servers, starting with the “X” series.

While it is somewhat interesting that Sun and IBM decided to work closer together, after all they weren’t exactly good friends in the past. A closer look at the announcement does beg the question about the omission of IBM’s own Unix operating system - AIX. For the curious pundit this leads up to one question:

Is IBM going to dump AIX?

One could certainly come to that conclusion, after all IBM is kind of facing the same challenges HP was facing - supporting a potpourri of operating systems (Tru64, OpenVMS, Linux, HP-UX, Windows). Big blue is in the same boat, with z/OS, Windows, Linux, AIX and OS/2 (just kidding). Now Solaris comes into the mix, and it get’s even more crowded. I can only imagine what the poor IBM sales guys have to go through when a customer asks them about which OS they recommend. How about the green one?

In a way it’s kind of a logical next step for IBM, and brings the Unix community closer together. Now there are only two real Unix operating systems remaining - Solaris and Linux. It still leaves a choice for customers, and choice is good. No I’m no going into a which one is better than the other tirade.

Related Article:
Most Secure OS

Enter your email address to get Hack Report news via email:

1 Comment(s)

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI

Leave a comment

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website