Red Hat vs Sun Battle of Words Heats Up
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&quot;When the elephants fight,&quot; they say in West Africa, &quot;it&#39;s the grass that gets trampled.&quot;. The Linux community is apparently beginning to identify with that proverb, as it watches Sun Microsystems and Red Hat
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The Story: Sun Microsystems has been in and out of the (metaphorical) grave more often than Count Dracula. The one-time king of the Internet servers suffered a body blow when the dot-com bubble burst, and since then it?s been a struggle to keep the company?s name on the buy lists of enterprise IT shoppers. That struggle has been chronicled by endless stories in the trade and financial press with headlines featuring bad puns like ?The Sun is setting.?                                                    Those days are finally, if quietly, coming to a close.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]In less than two years in the CEO?s chair, Jonathan Schwartz has put the company firmly in the black and, after years of bleeding, resuscitated Sun?s flagging software business and storage businesses, and put together a product road map that Morgan Stanley analyst Katherine Hubert calls its strongest in years.?You have to credit Schwartz because he understands the way to combine hardware and software,? says Bud Mathaisel, CIO of outsourced-IT provider Achievo. ?Although Sun?s image slipped from public view, they were making very competitive technology and pricing.?Sun?s line of Galaxy and blade servers are hits across a wide swatch of businesses, and its storage business is growing. Sun has already entered the market for quad-core servers (while rival AMD?s Barcelona remains problem-plagued), and in the next year or so Sun will roll out new server, storage, and networking products. Also, Sun acquired SeeBeyond in August 2007, a $387 million buy that positions Sun to become a vendor of choice in the race to provide the integration tools needed to support enterprises? SOA strategies.The powerful new hardware lineup, plus the enterprise service bus that came with SeeBeyond once again makes Sun core to the datacenter.Not all of the credit goes to Schwartz, of course. His predecessor, cofounder Scott McNealy, poured hundreds of millions into R&amp;D in the dark days of 2002 and created the UltraSparc T1 (or Niagara), the server chip that?s keeping Sun competitive with larger rivals IBM, HP, and Dell.What?s more, McNealy had the foresight to bring back hardware wizard Andy Bechtolsheim in 2004. Bechtolsheim led Sun efforts to design the AMD Opteron-based Sun Fire x64 servers ? better known by their code name ?Galaxy? ? that were key to Sun?s datacenter reentry.The Bottom Line: Sun?s transition from leader to laggard and back to contender has been very painful, particularly because of the deeps cuts in personnel Sun has been forced to make. But the numbers ? four profitable quarters in a row plus record margins ? as well as a growing list of wins, point to a company on the upswing. Sun may not be at the top of everybody?s vendor list, but once again, it?s worth your consideration.Complete list of 2007 underreported tech stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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With new rankings due soon, SGI, IBM and others jostle for bragging rights. Also: Speedy Mac system gets speedier.
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Acronym mayhem Sun Microsystems has come up with its own version of the certified LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) software stack. It won't take you too long to spot the difference.â¦
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Confusion at Club Badgeware Analysis Should you believe Red Hat's claims that its new Exchange marketplace for "open source business applications" contains nothing but open source business applications? We say "no" - since not even Red Hat appears to have a good answer for this question.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Red HatÂ has scheduled a March release for RHEL5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5), the latest version of its open-source operating system, while it tries to fend off new competitive threats from OracleÂ and the Microsoft-NovellÂ partnership. Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens discussed the RHEL5, the competition, the Fedora Project, and other issues with IDG News Service. Following is an edited transcript of the interview, conducted this week at the InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum in San Francisco: IDGNS:Â RHEL5 comes out in March. What are some of the features that will move virtualization forward and keep Red Hat competitive? Stevens: RHEL5 is a scalable, full native 64-bit platform. In the second quarter of 2005, there was a crossover point where more 64-bit x86 systems were sold than 32-bit systems. So there is this untapped (64-bit) capability within the IT shops as many systems are still running 32-bit applications on 64-bit systems. With RHEL5, we aim to help allow IT and independent software vendorsÂ to realize the power of 64-bit computing on these multicore architectures. There is a lot of untapped capability in performance there, so we aim to help that. As to virtualization, it comes as an integrated feature set for RHEL5. IDGNS: How has the move by Oracle to undercut you on the price for its Linux support and the partnership between MicrosoftÂ and NovellÂ affected the direction you are taking Red Hat as CTO? Stevens: It hasn't really affected the day-to-day activities because Red Hat is focused on creating value for customers. We have developed really close relationships to understand where we need to drive technology to make a meaningful impact on their businesses. We focus on the fundamentals, not on something else. If you start to think about what is going to create revenue for the company versus what's going to create value for the customer, you're thinking about it the wrong way. Our results for the last quarter show that we are largely unaffected. We look at the vibrancy of the Fedora Project, our open-source community. Fedora is Red Hat's vehicle for bringing advanced technology really quickly to end-users. The last release of Fedora has been out for about four months, and we are averaging more than 100,000 downloads a week and 1.5 million downloads total. Compare that 100,000 a week to Oracle with their release of Oracle Linux. We reach in seven hours what they reached in their very first month of releasing that source code. With the Novell-Microsoft deal, we continue to believe interoperability is important. We didn't see anything new and meaningful in that interoperability agreement. With RHEL5, we're going to show rich compatibility between Windows and Linux. We already have that. We are absolutely open to and willing to work with Microsoft under an interoperability agreement but one that does not require our customers to pay anÂ intellectual property tax on Linux. IDGNS: What are your projects for the coming year besides RHEL5? Stevens: We'll continue an initiative we started last year around AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol). It's going to transform how you manage messaging systems in grid environments. We'll be bringing that to a bunch of (test) customers this year. AMQP is about allowing you to have data sources and data feeds that can scale across grid environments. IDGNS: What else? Stevens: We're leading the work in Linux around predictability with a project called Real Time. It's not just about dropping latency, even though it does that. It's around how we get determinism. It's really critical that the workloads you're running, whether its multimedia playback or transactions, know that there is a sort of boundary on the completion of transactions. Real Time is basically a rearchitecture of how the Linux kernel does locking and scheduling. We've had a team working on this for the past year and a half and we will be working with customers under a proof of concept through the course of this year.
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One of the minor ironies of the Linux world is the slight disconnect between the mantra of &quot;choice&quot; the most ardent advocates use to make the case for a multitude of graphical interfaces and the state of the North American enterprise Linux market, where a
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Scott McNealy isn&#39;t throwing barbs at Microsoft anymore. But the chief executive of Sun Microsystems still has choice words for IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Red Hat Software and other rivals.
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Investor's Business Daily - The hippy ethic championed in early ads for the Linux operating system is giving way to good old competitive rancor as Red Hat   and Novell   launch warring campaigns.
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Sources close to the vendor say an intense, high-level debate continues about Sun&#39;s open-source Solaris plans, which were first announced in June.
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Software maker Red Hat Inc. CEO Jim Whitehurst said Friday Â his fourth day on the job Â that he's angling for a showdown with much larger Oracle Corp. and Microsoft Corp. over leadership in open source products.
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Novell's SuSE software is set to join Red Hat as a server option. Also: Is AMD in Dell's future?
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With new rankings due soon, SGI, IBM and others are jostling for bragging rights. Also: A speedy Mac system gets speedier.
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Linux software company Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT) has entered a partnership with Unisys (NYSE: UIS), maker of high-end servers. The alliance will allow Unisys to offer a more tightly integrated server package comprising hardware, software and the services to support it.
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Could become corporate developers' best friend Red Hat has announced the beta release of Red Hat Developer Studio, the new Eclipse-based IDE for the Red Hat family of solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.â¦
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InfoWorld - Red Hat and Novell will ratchet up their one-on-one competition in the Linux operating system wars next month when each company delivers significant upgrades to their respective server-based products.
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But middleware will make it chatty Analysis The debate over who in the Linux camp will next get into bed with Microsoft is back on, after Red Hat's chief executive admitted to holding patent talks.â¦