Much of the discussion around Sun's OpenSolaris operating system has focused on comparing it with Linux in terms of open source development communities and processes. Indeed, the relationship between OpenSolaris and Solaris somewhat parallels the segmentation of leading Linux distributions into "development" and "production" releases, i.e. Red Hat Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Novell’s OpenSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. But the key development of this announcement is Sun’s introduction of robust support offerings for its dynamic, rapidly evolving operating environment. Neither Red Hat nor Novell offer formal support for Fedora or OpenSUSE (although Novell does provide free installation support for OpenSUSE). Thus, Sun has broken new ground in the open source OS business model by arriving at a solution that envisions the long-term needs of web-centric enterprises.
It is clear that much of the growth in the market is increasingly being driven by a new class of customer with a set of needs that diverge considerably from those of traditional commercial server environments. Users in this class consider massive levels of scale-out computing to be the normal way to grow capacity, and they rely heavily on proprietary software that is developed internally, which represents the “secret sauce” of their operations. Currently, the leading-edge proponents of this approach are predominantly in high-performance computing (HPC) environments; entertainment and media companies delivering content over the web; firms with web 2.0 business models; and some financial services organizations. Over time, though, their style of computing could impact a variety of organizations, as the lines between software and services start to blur, and end-users become more comfortable relying on remote computing resources that are accessed over the web.
As this segment of the market matures and gears up for operations, its customers are introducing new requirements for how systems should be designed in order to best meet their needs, some of which could send vendors back to the drawing board (as shown by IBM’s introduction of its iDataPlex architecture). Among other demands, these customers are creating a new set of rules for operating systems that will play a central role in their infrastructure. To be relevant in the rising wave of web-based computing, an OS should have the following characteristics:
- Support for industry-standard hardware based on x86/x64 processors, which are taking on ever more demanding workloads as a result of their continuously growing performance;
- Integrated support for virtualization, which is becoming a standard part of IT infrastructures both in hardware and software;
- Support for cloud/grid/utility computing, i.e. the ability for organizations to achieve optimal utilization of computing resources, regardless of their source or physical location;
- Real-time computing capabilities, in which services are performed within a guaranteed time span;
- Open source business models, whereby the OS supplier offers value based on service and support, rather than licensing;
- Choice of release streams, including a relatively fluid version with frequent updates and rapid functional improvements, as well as a more stable version suitable for critical production workloads.
Sun has addressed this last requirement with the first commercial release of OpenSolaris. While OpenSolaris has been available for some time, Sun announced that it will now provide support for the binary distribution of the OpenSolaris code. As a result, Sun now effectively offers its customers a choice of two supported operating systems: Solaris and OpenSolaris. Sun positions Solaris for “high speed developers and development teams”, as well as users who treat the operating system as a source of competitive advantage for applications such as high performance computing and social networking. By contrast, the traditional version of Solaris is intended for IT departments that value stability over rapid innovation.
At the front line of the largest web-based applications, resiliency is typically built into the user's software, so that few reliability features are needed at the level of individual servers. These applications are usually designed to continue processing in the event that servers fail due to outages in hardware or OS software. Thus, Sun’s offering of support for OpenSolaris may not be relevant for many of the cutting-edge web applications that might be deployed on it today. However, today’s web 2.0 workloads are tomorrow’s enterprise workloads representing the corporate backbone. As individual nodes in the cloud are used to host ever more critical workloads that are sensitive to critical points of failure at the level of individual systems, and thus require higher levels of uptime in the OS, OpenSolaris users may start to take Sun’s support offerings more seriously.
Sun offers two levels of support for OpenSolaris: "Essential" and "Production". While the pricing of these offerings has not yet been announced, based on their description, the Production level of support for OpenSolaris appears to be nearly identical to the "Premium" level of support for Solaris (except OpenSolaris Production promises one hour response time for Priority 1 calls, as opposed to immediate transfer for Solaris Premium). Therefore, the pricing of OpenSolaris Production compared to Solaris Premium will determine whether it makes more sense to deploy Solaris (which is free to deploy as well) or OpenSolaris. Compatibility between OpenSolaris and Solaris will also be a critical factor in determining which path customers take as they upgrade, thus controlling the flow of users from OpenSolaris to classic Solaris.
The ability for Sun to drive Solaris into IT infrastructures that are central to customers’ businesses remains a key milestone on its path to long-term success. Although Sun is aggressively optimizing its systems for web-based workloads, software serves as a much "stickier" bond with customers than most hardware, which can be swapped out relatively easy. As Scott McNealy was fond of saying, “users date their hardware, but marry their operating systems”. In the bigger picture, as more and more new businesses are seeded with infrastructures that are based on the web and scaling out, a requirement is emerging for new class of OS with a specific set of attributes, only one of which is an open source development model. Solaris and the leading Linux distributions are all well positioned to deliver these attributes, but Sun’s innovation in the business of operating systems could allow it to leap ahead of others in defining how this critical software component becomes integrated to customers’ organizations.
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