Could IBM Really Buy Sun?
The rumour that IBM are allegedly bidding $6.5 billion to take over Sun has shaken the world of IT. Such immense consolidation hasn’t been seen since the badly received takeover of Compaq by HP. Although IBM and Sun have long battled in the enterprise UNIX space, this deal would actually make a lot of sense to both parties. Let’s have a look at the problems that such a deal could bring to their UNIX product lines.
IBM position their POWER based servers running AIX at the high end, and x86 servers running Linux at the low and mid range. Sun have the excellent UltraSPARC T2 servers at the low end, along with x86 boxes, and SPARC64 servers at the high end. Linux is an option on their x86 kit, but Solaris is the UNIX of preference.
Solaris is really the key offering here. No other UNIX operating system offers the features and scalability that Solaris can offer developers. Full of with technologies like the ZFS advanced filesystem, dtrace debugging tools, Zones, and dynamic reconfiguration, Solaris also has the bonus of feature parity across platforms. Both the SPARC and x86 versions of Solaris have the same tools, work in the same way - they’re built from the same code base.
Several years ago Sun also open sourced Solaris, creating the OpenSolaris project, which has created a thriving community and a number of new features which have been ported back into the main Solaris code base.
Innovation on AIX has been sorely missing, and the clear path here would be for IBM to slowly retire AIX in favour of a consistent Solaris platform across it’s entire product offering. One of the strengths of buying into Sun’s hardware line is the guarantee of code compatibility from the desktop all the way up to the enterprise server. This is a unique feature for IT developers, and one IBM would be wanting to take advantage of.
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