Sun votes AMD, puts hatchet into Red Hat Linux

SUN HAD A QUARTERLY powow yesterday, this one sexily named NC05Q2, they sure know how to rope the geeks in. This one, unlike the last one, started out with a whimper, then got progressively more interesting as time went on. The new stuff was all at the end this time, not a good thing when you have been up all night like I was.

Hearing it on the web was a mixed bag, Scott McNealy was in his full on 'Scooter' persona, and the antics supposedly followed, with humorous pictures posted. The audience laughed and clapped, but there was no video, so it was lost on me. Luckily, the Real audio codec kind of sucks at 200kps, so he sounded slurred and drunk, so I got some humour out of it. Thanks Real.

It started out with an attack on Redhat, something which I have no problem with because they are competing. This was quickly followed up by noting that they had 1.3 million or so Solaris downloads, 2/3rds of which were on x86, and then on to open source. They tried to portray themselves as champions of the concept, which is all fine and dandy, but until you can mix and match with GPL, it is really pointless.

Another big theme of the night was government work and sales. Instead of trotting up and touting businesses, they leaned more on the talk of selling to the non-private sector. There were business people also, but it was a fairly distinct change.

But enough of the dull stuff, lets talk about the good, there were several goodies that were demoed, and they sounded good even without the video. The first was the containers that Solaris now has. You can partition a machine into containers, and run an app in a container. If you have extra CPU time, you can move the app to another container on another server, and bump up utilization on any given machine. If it can be done as on-the-fly as it sounded, this could be a very good thing for admins, and if it is scriptable, some 17 year old is going to make a lot of money with an innovative idea or three.

The new and exciting bit was something called N1 System Manager, or basically a remote control program for setting up servers from power on to app control. You can remotely take a server from bare metal in a powered down state, and image an OS from afar, doing a complete setup from a single console. Right now it supports the Sun Opteron servers, and will support the Sparc line in the near future.

You can install Solaris 9 or 10, Redhat 2 or 3, and soon enough Windows. N1SM doesn't stop there though, you can drag and drop apps to machines and install programs and patches with a mouse click or three. All this would be pretty useless without some intelligence, forcing XP service pack 2 on a 2K machine might be fun to try on someone else's machine, but not as much fun if you have to clean up 10,000 of them afterwards.

N1SM has a database behind it so it can help out with the nitty gritty details, you can sit back and while an intern does all the work. If you have another one to bring you drinks with umbrellas, you are a true CIO. All this comes from Sun's grid program, and it is a decent peek under the umbrella of what they will offer people as the service matures. It is priced at $299 a server, or $1 a day for 299 days per server.

Sun will also do this for you from afar. They can manage some or all of it from a Deathstar like room deep in the servant's quarters at chez McNealy or someplace else. It really doesn't matter where they are sitting, you send them money, they manage your servers, all from the grid derived tools. No word on cost here, but you can be sure there will be a dollar per unit cost, they seem to like that a lot.

The last of the interesting things was something called Grid Rack, a cluster in a box. You buy a preconfigured rack of servers, and it comes already assembled. You plug in power and network, and with minimal configuration, you are up and running. Need a datacenter in a hurry? Phone them up and order combo plate #7, the Opteron with Solaris. Next time I need 10 racks of Opterons in my basement, you can be sure I will call Sun. µ