Glenn Weinberg, Vice President, Operating Platforms Group Elaborates on the Solaris 10 Launch
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Q & A Glenn Weinberg, Vice President, Operating Platforms Group Elaborates on the Solaris 10 LaunchFriday, December 10, 9:00 AM PT Q: With the Solaris 10 launch over, what's the next big thing that we can expect from Sun? A: First off, let me say the Solaris 10 launch was a huge success for Sun and the Solaris community. We're seeing a ton of excitement around the innovation in Solaris 10 and how it's delivering extreme performance, reducing costs and complexity, and increasing utilization. Now that we've officially launched Solaris 10, the Solaris team is finalizing details regarding open source Solaris, including the license model. We're really looking forward to the opportunity to work with the broader Solaris community to define the future of Solaris together. Q: Why did Sun decide to make Solaris free? A: The decision to offer Solaris 10 free for commercial use is aimed at increasing the overall Solaris user base and creating opportunities for customers and partners. Additionally, we're opening up new opportunities for developers to help drive innovation in Solaris. The availability of open source Solaris will only further this goal. With the new business model, Sun is helping to drive down TCO and offer more choice and flexibility through specialized subscription services. This model means customers can pick and choose the right support for their business. I think it's also important to emphasize that by expanding the market and developing new opportunities we expect to generate more revenue through Solaris subscriptions than we were previously generating from Solaris RTUs. This is a business model change, not a giveaway. And it's actually a model that all platform software is moving to, with the vendor providing a free distribution and offering value-added services and support for revenue. Some examples include MySQL, JBoss, and Linux. Q: You took on this role running Sun's Operating Platforms Group about six month ago. What are your main responsibilities? A: I am responsible for the strategic direction of the Solaris and Linux platforms. Although this may seem like a somewhat schizophrenic position to be in, there really is a lot of synergy. Solaris and Linux have a huge amount in common. They both spring from the same roots and both are based on the same philosophy of open systems, open standards and the innovation that this drives. Q: Does this ever cause a conflict of interest? A: All the time! But it's actually a good thing. Look, would I prefer that all of our customers use Solaris? Yes. We think Solaris is the best option in most cases. But I'm a realist and Sun has a business to run. Some of our customers have chosen Linux and we are very clear in providing this as an option running on Sun hardware. We'll also work with customers to make sure that whatever OS they choose their business runs as smoothly as possible. Q: Why do you think Solaris is the better option? A: Solaris is simply a superior enterprise-class operating system, and with Solaris 10, we have introduced revolutionary new technologies that are going to raise the bar even further. Solaris 10 includes new features such as Containers, DTrace, Predictive Self Healing and ZFS and is bringing new levels of system utilization, data management, and security to the data center. We have closed the performance gap between Solaris and Red Hat on 1- and 2-way systems. Our networking performance and scalability are second to none. We are giving customers the choice of Solaris on a lot more platforms at last count, over 270 x86 systems were qualified to run Solaris. We're making Linux interoperability easier for customers in mixed environments, too. Using the Linux Application Environment coming soon to Solaris 10, customers can run their Red Hat applications unmodified on Solaris. For example, you can have a system and by the way, it doesn't matter whether it's a single processor, two-way, four-way or whatever - thats running Red Hat Linux apps on Solaris in one container, secure and isolated, and then a variety of other applications on other containers on that single box. Customers get all the benefits of Linux, plus the security and reliability of Solaris on their existing x86-based hardware. Q: Does the OS still matter to customers? A: Yes, the OS matters it's not done; there is a significant amount of room for innovation, and the right OS can be critical to the success of any organization that depends on high performance, reliable computing platforms. The OS matters because of the unique position it holds: it sits immediately above the system level, and can optimize performance and mitigate faults. It sits immediately below the application level, and can add additional stability, security, performance and functionality to existing applications. The right OS matters because problems in the compute world are not getting any easier. The amount of work, the reliability of the work, the security of the work, and the cost of the work can be strongly affected by the OS. Also, the unique position between applications and the hardware means that the OS has a direct impact on the efficient use of system resources. For example, using most current operating systems data centers typically yield about 15 to 20 percent efficiency from their hardware. Solaris 10 with its new Containers technology can drive this up closer to 80 percent. Q: What are the hot burning issues that are keeping you up at night? A: My top priority right now is successfully launching Solaris 10. We're in the final countdown now and it couldn't be going any better. And I have to take a moment to thank my world-class, world-wide team for making that happen. We recently reached a milestone of more than a half million installations of Software Express for Solaris. Lots of people and organizations are now previewing Solaris 10 and validating the fact that this is one really outstanding product! Companies like Dartmouth College (which, I must mention, is my alma mater), the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, Thomson Financial, and many others. This is really gratifying, especially after putting almost 3,000 engineering years and half a billion dollars of R&D investment into it, but we still have a lot more to do, especially in the area of open sourcing Solaris. Q: Is Sun really serious about open sourcing Solaris? A: Absolutely! Jonathan Schwartz confirmed it in June and Sun recently hosted an Open Source Summit, including more than 200 Sun engineers (a number of whom were Solaris developers) and a host of outside community members to get their inputs on this effort. We are also in the process of running a pilot program. It is definitely going to happen. I couldn't hold my engineers back even if I wanted to. My engineering team believes in this. Really. Q: Will it compete with Linux? A: That is not our intention. Open sourcing Solaris is really a long overdue recognition of the existing Solaris developer community. Our first goal is to quantify and enfranchise this community, enable it to grow into a thriving open source Solaris community and expand the application market around it. We want to create an open community atmosphere where developers can collaborate freely among themselves and with Sun engineers but remain unencumbered by Sun "corporate." We want to encourage the community to grow into new markets, such as start-ups, embedded, appliances, customization, entertainment, universities, scientific computing, etc., as well as typical UNIX strongholds in large enterprises and governments. This is not an "attack" on Linux. In fact, if anything we want to foster cooperation and compatibility between the Solaris and Linux platforms and their proponents, while also providing customers with more choice in the marketplace. Q: When will it be available and how will it be licensed? A: Our goal is to provide downloadable, buildable open source Solaris bits on day 1 when Solaris 10 becomes available. We're still working to determine the license model, in consultation with both the Solaris community and the broader open source community. Although I can't tell you the specific license model yet, I can tell you that we are absolutely committed to open source Solaris being truly open and released under an OSI-approved license. We'll be announcing more details as soon as we can in the coming months. |
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