RSSWindows May Come to Sun Servers
By Ed Oswald | Published July 5, 2005, 1:07 PM
Once thought unthinkable, Sun may eventually offer Microsoft's operating systems on its servers if customers ask for it. This is according to comments made last week by operating platform vice president Tom Goguen.
Currently, the company has no such deal with Microsoft; however, the two companies have taken great strides to work out their differences.
"It depends on what our customers tell us to do," Goguen says. If enough customers want the operating system preinstalled on Sun servers, the company would persue a licensing deal with the company. Microsoft officials would not comment on such a deal.
Sun previously said that customers were free to install Windows on their servers on their own as support for running the OS on its hardware was available from company partners.
Some analysts believe that Sun may strike a licensing deal by the end of this year in order to prepare for the newest version of Windows, code-named Longhorn. Such a move would make sense, allowing the company to iron out any bugs on its own, making running Windows on a Sun product easier for its customers.
Such a move may be confusing to Sun's customers, however. "It might cause some customers to start scratching their heads about Sun's commitment to Solaris in particular," Michael Goulde, an analyst with Forrester Research told PC World.
roderix: Why in the world would Windows need the ability to perform 72-way symmetric multiprocessing? Smart people use clusters anyway.
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Well Win2k _ADVANCED_ SERVER supports up to 32 cpus...and supports clustering, whilest 64-bit win2003 enterprise server supports up to 127 cpus in theory, so it would work...
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Sometimes it makes more sense to scale up rather than out. Many COTS products don't perform well when scaled out.
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What will Windows do if it finds itself running on a 72-way machine?
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Well well well,
hope they are not merging with Microsoft after this.
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Rest assured, they still hate MS--some of their customers want MS on their systems that's one of the only reasons they are even considering this from what I hear.
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Don't scratch your head to hard in that case. People ask for Solaris, but that is cool the two companies are working together. Maybe JavaVM will actually come with Longhorn!
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http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra20/
I don't know about servers, but it appears that their new workstation supports Windows. You do have to buy it separately though, but the hardware is "fully supported".
Solaris 10 is so much better though; I'd rather install Solaris 10 on a Dell or IBM rather than Windows on a Sun Workstation.
By the way, most of Sun's servers run on the Sparc. To the best of my knowledge there is no patch to make Windows run on a Sparc... although the coprocessor cards can "Run Solaris and Microsoft or Linux" on them:
http://www.sun.com/deskt...ts/sunpcipro/index.html
Anyone heard of an OS called "Microsoft" ?
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OEM deals are cheaper for the consumer. Why is this a big deal?
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Before you rant, consider that Sun is only doing this because "It depends on what our customers tell us to do"...MS isn't necessarily twisting their arm about it. Interesting move though--lol would be funny if someone had XP Gold and still used msjava on their machine though lol...
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