HE L L H AS F ROZE N AN D IT S BEAUT IFUL

Sun and Microsoft Announce Deeper Alliance

By Omer Qureshi

Introduction
Sun and Microso- form deeper alliance but things were not this rosy, and not too long ago in my past life when we were consolida;ng massive datacenters of a large nancial ins;tu- ;on from IBM (AS400 and e-series) class servers to a Dell + Compaq (HP) WinTel plaNorm and SUN e29000s mix. We always admired SUNs hardware reliability (though a bit pricy) as well as their great pla;num support SLA (also comes with a s;cker shock) and therefore we pushed Sun to seek ways of pro- viding their hardware and its reliability to run Windows commodity workloads. We were told that it will be a cold day in hell when that happens. 7 years and two months later the hell has indeed become a cold place.

Prole
Sun and Microso- has tradi;onally competed on everything and anything well, star;ng from the OS (Solaris Server and Worksta;on), PlaNorm Management + Virtualiza;on, App Plat (Java, JVM, JiNi) and recently on the business produc;vity with StarOce (open source plaNorm com- petes against MS Oce). The An;trust war over JVM (Java Virtual Machine) and MSJVM right to be bundled in Windows made things worst and a major source of pain for the customers, who would liked beaer in- teroperability.

So what made the hell freeze?

Two words market share Sun has been losing on all fronts, on plaNorm with Microso- and Linux and even to IBM mainframe. On App-Plat against .Net (VSTS), BEA (Web Logic), IBM (Eclipse, WebSphere), Oracle and Google (AJAX and APIS) etc in fact the stock price is indica;ve of this demise - on its heyday close to $80 and now a bare $5.50. So back in April 2004, Steve Ballmer and Scoa McNealy shook hands and Microso- also cut a check to Sun for nearly $2 billion and another several billions in so- dollar infusion, the end re- sult Sun would stop its li;ga;ons against Microso- on MSJVM and its distribu;on and instead focus on interoperability in the eld of web 2.0 technologies and plaNorm support and man- agement.

How it might help customers

1. Sun has a great hardware plaNorm (Sun Fire series 64 bit) and Windows Server oering on this plaNorm is great news for the customers 2. Sun is also emerging as a big player on the whole Green Compu3ng turf and can help cus- tomers deploy Windows while reducing their carbon footprint 3. Interoperability on Virtualiza3on Windows virtual instances running as guests on Sun Solaris host OS and vice versa 4. Interoperability on Management Ability to manage Windows Server and client from Sun Central Datacenter suite and vice versa 5. MSJVM (Java Virtual Machine) perhaps return of MSJVM in Windows Vista SP1, Win- dows 7 and Windows Server 2008.