New Solaris key step in Sun strategy
By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
May 22, 2002, 1:05 PM PT
(http://news.com.com/2100-1001-920593.html)
MENLO PARK, Calif.--New technology built in to Sun Microsystems' new operating system is key to the company's long-term strategy for making collections of computers act like a single, mammoth machine
From the article:
"...Zander divides up revenue and assigns it to hardware and software categories, he said.
"If we ever did report revenue for software business, you'd be stunned. We'd be one of the largest software companies on the planet today," Zander said.
"People say you buy a Sun server and get Solaris for free. No, you don't," Zander said. "The hardware is free as far as I'm concerned; we just charge $200,000 for Solaris." ..."
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In Solaris 9, containers will let administrators define how much processor power, memory and network bandwidth can be used by groups of computing processes called tasks. But in the future, containers will let tasks run anywhere in groups of servers, not just on a single machine--the core idea behind the N1 strategy Sun unveiled in February.
IMO, this is a huge breakthru development for SUNW and puts the competition on the defense to quickly integrate a similar feature in their UNIX/LINUX versions. BEA systems may be most vulnerable.
Novell announced something similar ("Novell pushes Web services standards" news.com.com today in a Web directory standard but it does not even approach the full integration that Sunw has achieved and available now.
I think the market has under estimated the importance of this new feature in Solaris 9.
EKS |
