New versions of UNIX under construction near you
By Malcolm Wheatley, contributing editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 6/1/2004 12:00:00 AM
With IBM, Hewlett-Packard (HP), and Sun Microsystems all actively marketing servers that run the open-source Linux operating system, what does the future hold for UNIX?
If you listen solely to industry analysts, UNIX's future looks bleak. Forrester Research, Cambridge, Mass., reports 70 percent of all North American corporations with more than $1 billion in annual revenues use Linux in their operations, and that more than two Linux-based servers are now being shipped for each one containing UNIX.
But the UNIX vendors say this operating platform is far from dead. In fact, all three are working on new versions of UNIX expected to attract paying customers for years to come.
Sun is preparing to launch Solaris 10, the latest version of its UNIX operating system, later this year. This version of Sun's flagship operating platform will run on Sun's own SPARC processor, as well as systems containing the x86 chip—the same hardware that powers Linux and Windows.
Despite Sun's strong commitment to Linux, Bill Moffitt, Solaris product manager, says, "We're investing heavily in UNIX and intend it to be the most technically advanced solution for x86 servers on the market."
Moffitt also says Sun has good reasons for expecting a fair number of users to pay a higher price for UNIX, rather than settling for Linux. "[UNIX] has proven that it's enterprise-ready," he says. "It's more technically advanced, and able to do things—such as predictive self-healing—that the open source community won't catch up with for years."
Spokespeople for IBM and HP echoed those sentiments.
"What sets UNIX apart is its robust feature set, especially compared to Linux," says Brian Cox, an HP business systems manager. "UNIX can scale—with up to 128 processors and one terabyte of RAM on a large platform, it's a big differentiator."
At IBM, the roadmap for its AIX variant of UNIX runs "at least until 2008," says Jim McGaughan, pSeries director of eServer strategy.
"UNIX has undisputed scalability, reliability, and security advantages," claims McGaughan. And before long, he adds, there will be another advantage: granularity. A concept called "micro computing" will see AIX application servers run an application on as little as one-tenth of a processor.
"In today's Linux world, every application server needs one processor; in tomorrow's UNIX world, you need only allocate one processor for 10 applications," concludes McGaughan.
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