Sun Microsystems, SuSE Link Up To Sell Linux

ChilyWily writes "Reuters is reporting that Sun Microsystems Inc. has agreed to resell and support closely held German software firm SuSE's version of the Linux operating system, the leading variant in Europe, the companies said on Friday. This agreement follows a similar one in May between Sun and Red Hat Inc. While I'm happy to see Sun's finally beginning to warm up to Linux (aka if you can't beat 'em, join 'em strategy) I wonder if this is too late for Sun?"

Gateway adding Linux support

[Anonymous Coward]

According to ZDNet [com.com], Gateway will start offering Linux on Monday on some of its servers as well (though they've picked Red Hat).

Re:Sun tax?

[Anonymous Coward]

They sell linux on their intel machines, not on sparc. Sun will sell you a dual proc intel machine running linux. Go to www.sun.com for more info.

Is this new?

[edunbar93]

While I'm happy to see Sun's finally beginning to warm up to Linux (aka if you can't beat 'em, join 'em strategy) I wonder if this is too late for Sun?

What do you mean, "finally warming up to Linux?" They've been selling it in their Cobalt products [cobalt.com] for years.

Re:Sun tax?

[nemaispuke]

I don't know where you get your information on Solaris, but the downloaded version of Solaris 9 4/03 runs quite well on my dual processor Ultra 2! And mpstat shows 2 CPU's! To be "legal" with Sun you need to purchase a license based on the function of the machine you intend to run Solaris on (either Intel or Sparc). Prior to Solaris 9, Solaris 8 Intel could handle up to 8 CPU's out of the box. I am sure that is probably still the case, you just have to pay for the licenses if you use Solaris Volume Manager, multiple processors, etc.

Re:Um No

[Znork]

If they have any separate licensing necessary for Linux then they may not distribute Linux. The GPL prevents distributing GPL code together with code that is licensed under terms not compatible with the GPL.

SCO can try to license their alleged 80 lines in whatever way they want. The problem is you just are not allowed to distribute the other millions of lines together with those 80 lines in any case. Which means any license to do so is worthless.

Sun should give up on sparc

[Billly Gates]

First off the versions of Linux provided are for some amd blade servers. Sun is experimenting at this stage to see where the market is.

The sparcIII was years late and already obsolete when it hit the market. SparcIV has been delayed which also gets in the way of the upcomming sparcV which supposed to come out late next year.

The sparcIV supposed to be just as fast as a pIV and a sparcV is going to be even faster. However by the time the sparcIV comes next year it will already be obsolete as well.

Also sparcs are expensive.

My solution would be to switch to AMD64. They are cheap, really fast, and Solaris has already been ported. They can keep their expensive bus technology and only use the cpu's in exchange from sparc's. Or even better just use hypertransport and reduce the costs.

They should also look at the powerpc970 and 980'd. Unfortunately no version of solaris exist for those platforms. AMD64 would probably be a better bet.

Sun's are expensive and underpowered. Commidity hardware makes sense.

Yay!

[stevey]

I'm glad of this - I run several Oracle installations on Solaris and a couple of small ones on SuSE.

SuSE and Redhat are the two platforms that are certified by Sun, and I had been worried that they'd drop the SuSE support when they got into bed with RedHat more.

Happily it looks like that's not going to happen which is good for me.

(Now if we could only get somebody to pay for Sun to certify Debian ;)

Solaris 10

[dodell]

Well, I've got Solaris 10 alpha test CDs. Solaris 10 is coming out and has some killer features. I don't think this is an "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" situation at all. Sun has spent years developing and marketing Solaris/SunOS, and I don't think they'll stop here. It's very profitable for them to sell a true UNIX OS.

I imagine it's also just as profitable for them to do support/development for Linux. And I think that they're expanding, not downsizing or rethinking an entire business model.

They're not so pro linux

[tvm662]

Sun boss, Scott McNealy has been hitting the new quite a bit lately. Sun might have struck a deal with SuSE, but Scott has recently warned companies "Don't touch linux without legal guarantees" [infoconomy.com] He's had lot more things to say including calling Gates and Ballmer dropouts,

BRILLIANT ... absolutely brilliant

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a wise move by Sun!

Suse provides 64bit Linux, so Sun has a chance to sew up the Quad Opteron server market.

Now how about a Quad Opeteron Workstation with an AGP slot? Sun ... hello? ... remember how you started? ... The very best workstations!

Re:it never too late

[Kenja]

Your right, why run on a platform that scales to 128+ CPUs with 16megs of cache per CPU when you can run on a consumer platform that cant scale higher then 4 CPUs and has poor IO?

Have you ever realy used Sparc systems? The things are tanks, no matter what sort of work load I throw at them they just don't stop. On a single task a PC will be faster, however under heavy load the PC just falls apart.

Their Death is Near

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a SCSA and I have to say their death is near. Not from Linux, and their in ability to grasp it's importanance, but from their hardware. Sun has traditionally been the low cost Unix machine. They were the first in the sub $10K, $5K, and $1K Unix servers. I got a blade at work... It was like getting a Celeron POS... I could get a better Dell with Red Hat for far less $$$.

With IBM planning to introduce their powerPC chip for the entry level market. And to run Linux or AIX on those servers, Sun will have to do something pretty hoot'n fast to catch up. $3,500 for an IBM powerPC 4 proc box! I'm saving now. And with some luck, I will have built my very LAST X86 box.

Re:Is this new?

[Biolo]

Exactly, and of course there is their membership and adoption of Gnome, involvement with Apache, etc. Not to mention that they were the most open of the Unix companies, they effectively open sourced SPARC right at the beginning. Fujitsu make and sell their own line of SPARC chips and servers [fujitsu.com], because of this, and www.sparc.org [sparc.org] is still a real entity because Sun continues to support it. NFS, NIS, Java, and a whole host of core unix things we take for granted today all came about because Sun invented them and open sourced the specifications if not the code. Sun goes on about Open Systems, and are one of the few that really mean it, even if they don't go as far as a lot of people, including some insiders, would like.

Re:Why not DEBIAN??

[brsmith4]

To moderators:

The parent is not flamebait material. Just because you use debian or love debian does not mean you have to mod a post flamebait. This is the absolute truth. I did not say that debian suxors or some bullshit like that, I stated that debian is NOT very attractive in the corporate sense due to support and what some would call bad "marketing".

That said, debian is a solid distro and has contributed great things to the open source world. I have no ill will toward the debian project.

Perhaps restating this line

Because, the only way to get any relatively new packages or software for debian is to go with their distro that is dubbed "unstable". Who the hell in their right mind would do that?

As:

Because, the only way to get any relatively new packages or software for debian is to go with their distro that is dubbed "unstable". What unknowing corporate executive, in their right mind, would take that chance?

would clear up any confusion.

Re:Throughput Computing

[mihalis]

heir hardware may soon fill the performance gap

Perhaps the throughput computing stuff will be great, but until then, Sun has a bit of a problem in their traditional markets, because their cpus don't deliver competitive bang for the buck in the workstation and small server markets any more. This is where they grew all the mindshare which got them a lot of success. Since they announced US-IIIi at 1GHz, Apple/IBM came back with 2GHz G5. I am fairly confident a dual 2GHZ G5 Powermac is a better unix workstation for many uses, especially for the money. Sun does not ship AGP graphics cards, and hence is cut off from the majority of high-end graphics solutions. My job involves a product which uses fast 2d graphics on both Windows and Solaris, and it's just a dismal comparison between any Sun desktop product and the competition. Even their "high-end" workstation is very disappointing (fiber channel disks are a waste in a desktop, firewire support virtually absent, poor 2d graphics performance, hell, mediocre outright cpu performance).

Re:What's the point?

[mihalis]

This is ridiculous. Parity is cheap now, any decent PC vendor can sell you a machine using ECC SDRAM.

Meanwhile, of the three Sun machines I've had from new at work in my current job, the Ultra 10 blew a disk, the Blade 1000 had a fp bug (US-III 750Mhz) and blew a disk, and my v240 has both an ethernet bug in all four NICs, and had to have the power supply replaced before it would boot for the first time as a brand new machine.

I don't buy the hardware quality theory for Sun any more. Sure, the metalwork on my Blade 1000 is very nice, but then VAXes were built like tanks too.

aka if you can't beat 'em, join 'em strategy??

[antis0c]

What?? I don't know what corner of the world you live in but Sun Microsystems software is in use quite a lot still, and still beats Linux when it comes to server market share.

I work for a large data hosting company which shall remain unnamed so I don't get a memo with a copy of the NDA and privacy policies I signed, that has somewhere around 15,000 - 20,000 servers. We primarily offer 3 basic managed systems. Windows 2000, Sun Solaris, and RedHat Linux.

Of the servers about 55% of them are Compaq servers running Windows 2000, 40% of them are Sun Solaris servers, and a whopping 5% of them Compaq servers running RedHat Linux.

Who's beatin' who huh?

* Of course I believe Linux will eventually surpass just about anything, that or a fork of Linux or another open source project. But as it stands now, Sun Solaris is still one of the major UNIX operating systems in the market, and will remain so for years to come.

Re:Throughput Computing

[n3rd]

Hyperthreading uses unused parts of the processor to act as a second CPU is how it was explained to me by a friend who works at Intel. So if X is waiting on Y then X can be used for another task while it waits for Y.

What Sun is doing is putting multiple fully functional CPUs on a single die. Think of it as a single Pentium 3 Slot A cartridge that contains 10 Pentium 2 CPUs.