SUN SWATs

Left to interpret the order of the universe, IBM would have you believe any IT decision maker with the least bit of common sense would choose to migrate from Solaris to Linux any day: And they have the SWAT team to do it.

    
  by Nancy Cohen    
     
  As we move into 2003, migration continues to be one of IBM’s favorite words, right up there with “WebSphere” and “autonomic.”  Why would one want to work with proprietary Unix when Linux—oh, so open and modular—can run on anything, from mainframes to Intel processors, to personal digital assistants, to embedded systems? And why would one fear taking risks in adopting Linux, when there’s so much case-study evidence, leave alone analyst assurances, that Linux is commercially ready for business?

Left to its own rhetoric, IBM loves to speak the language of Solaris-Linux migration because IBM believes it has first landing rights as the vendor to lead a Solaris customer switch to Linux. IBM, after all, has put so much forward in products, partner incentive-building, and events in the name of Linux and open standards. IBM, after all, is the first to point out that the Intel platform is the fastest-growing platform, and Linux, the fastest-growing server OS. With the momentum on buyer requests for “Linux Intel” servers, IBM is throwing its weight behind a Solaris-to-Linux migration mantra to gain market share.

Back in June, in an interview with The Linux Line, Rich Michos, the Vice President & Business Unit Executive Linux Servers, laid it on the line: As the proliferation of Intel architecture and Linux continues, Intel/Linux will draw more applications, and that increase in the number of applications will further propel volumes. All the while, the relative performance of Intel/Linux will continue to improve vs. other alternatives.

“But it's not enough just to have an Intel/Linux play,” said Michos. “We believe shipping Intel/Linux high-volume is critical to IBM. As you know, Sun is a major competitor of ours and they've challenged us a bit over the past years.”

A bit? By August this year, IDC’s figures showed that Sun held 69% market share for global shipments of Unix workstations. In a Sun press release, an IDC research manager was quoted as saying, “Its [Sun’s] continued dedication to the UltraSPARC technology and Solaris operating environment resonates with its core technical audience.”

In that same month, however, IBM went further into target practice on Sun Solaris when it launched an all-out migration program for moving businesses off Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Unix servers to convert to Linux systems built around Intel processors. As part of the push, IBM referred to its “SWAT” team, special troops who have been behaving as migration guides. They are deployed to hand customers their step-by-step blueprints for moving to Intel-based IBM models running Linux. The announcement explained that this Solaris-to-Linux program includes a total-cost-of-ownership analysis that compares the two environments and assistance from IBM in migrating databases, applications, storage devices, and other technologies.

 
         
 

IBM also announced it would help software vendors convert their Solaris-based applications. These Linux migration experts work closely with IBM sales teams. Their drawing power is that, being skilled in working with various operating systems, they can quickly prepare an assessment of the customer's Sun Solaris infrastructure. They hand customers a step-by-step plan for transitioning to a Linux environment on an IBM server platform. Team members include system architects, project managers, database administrators, and operating system specialists.

 
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Daniel Frye, director of the IBM Linux Technology Center, admitted in August at LinuxWorld that this was a direct assault on Sun. Does the intent bear good results? In a recent interview with Open, IBM’s Michos says businesses are attracted to Solaris-to-Linux migrations for a number of reasons:

“There’s total cost of ownership, there’s performance, and there’s the fact that we have an open standards-based implementation.”

In fact, Michos doesn’t see IBM per se as the eroding factor for Sun. Michos says that if anything is hurting Solaris, it’s the business customer’s attraction to open standards. “The only reason we’re having this conversation is open standards,” he asserts. “That is the one, key reason driving the migration. Businesses get more connective tissue with the open standards that Linux brings.”

Connective tissue? That is the kind of talk that sits well with a business like the on-line brokerage, E*Trade. Earlier this year, E*Trade said it would migrate its customer-facing platform to an open Linux environment and that the new servers would be replacing Sun servers running Solaris.

CTO, Joshua Levine, talks in terms of 300 servers being replaced and moving to a commodity operating system to provide better cost efficiencies. Various systems including servers from IBM, Fujitsu, Compaq, and Dell running Linux are intended to permit E*Trade to get vendors competing on merits, says Levine. E*Trade tapped IBM’s Global Services to help them migrate.

Weather.com, the online division of The Weather Channel Enterprises Inc., was one of the earlier Solaris-to-Linux migration wins for IBM in particular: The company decided to switch from Sun servers running Solaris to IBM systems running Linux. For the Atlanta-based site facing up to 30 million hits a day, using Linux would mean they could cheaply add servers for performance as needed. For the CTO of Weather.com, adding a server running Linux for one-third of the price it would otherwise cost him was too good to pass up.

Banco Mercantil, one of the largest banks in Venezuela, was also a Solaris-to-Linux success story, having announced an initiative of server consolidation that would involve moving applications running on Sun Solaris over to Linux.

 
         
 

IBM's Michos sees companies continuing to look at moving their installed base from Solaris to Linux. “I would say the numbers of businesses overtly switching from Solaris to Linux through our initiative are in the low hundreds. Through early adopters like Shell and Dresdner Kleinwort, business people see Linux as the real deal.”

Of course, the total cost of ownership feature attributed to Solaris-Linux migrations is an attention-getter for IT executives. According to a study that appeared in July by the Westport, CT-based Robert Frances Group on the total cost of ownership for Linux, an average $74,475 TCO over a three-year period is attributed to Linux, while the same TCO for Solaris is $561,520.

So what is Sun doing to counter the migration offensive? Its recent Linux support announcements acknowledge that Sun is on to the momentum of Linux, but without abandoning the Solaris operating system.

On the other hand, one might consider what Rich Michos said back in June in The Linux Line interview, about how Sun’s actions toward Linux show that Linux is marginalized inside Sun “because they don't really view Linux as core to their business. They know it's a threat, but they haven't quite figured out what to do about it, and they're sorting it all out. Consider that every day, for 10 years, when a Sun rep or reseller woke up in the morning, the story has been Solaris on the low end, Solaris in the middle, and Solaris on the high end.”

Michos does not deny that Sun will leverage Linux in competitive situations when they must. Michos says, “In numerous cases we have removed dozens of Sun servers and replaced them with one or two IBM machines, running Linux. That has to be very frightening for them.”

For now, probably the most unsettling war cries against Solaris are not coming from Somers but via little e-mail messages in the sharing spirit of the collaborative Open Source community, as system administrators step back to assess the results of Solaris conversions to Linux and relay the news to compadres:

“We have converted from Solaris 8 on SUN 4500 to RH 7.2 on IBM boxes. MAJOR cost savings…

Thanks,
Rick Carroll
Lead System Administrator
E*Trade Financial”
—August 28,2002 e-mail

Click to read a roadmap for Sun from a systems Integrator.

 
LINUX TCO SNAPSHOT
IBM offers visitors a copy of a study in PDF format that shows how much greater the TCO of Solaris is compared to Linux. The study, titled Total Cost of Ownership for Linux in the Enterprise, by Robert Frances Group, Inc., is dated July 2002.

In that study, the costs are as follows:

Three-Year Total Costs of Ownership
Operating
System		 Year 1 Year 2 Year3
Solaris $421,718 $491,619

$561,520
Windows $91,724   $141,193 $190,662
Linux $49,931   $62,203  $74,475

IBM talks about Sun-IBM Linux “migration” because migrating is the way that businesses actually move over to Linux. They don’t leap from one platform to another; they migrate in carefully planned steps.

Nick Davis, IBM UK’s Linux solutions marketing manager for EMEA, says that the transition from Linux evaluations to full rollouts is by necessity gradual and protracted. Once a customer chooses to move from Solaris onto an IBM Linux server platform, work begins:

Migrating Solaris operating system, databases, applications, and servers, as well as storage, networking, and security systems.
Testing the new infrastructure, one unit at a time and all systems together. This is followed by a final acceptance test, run by the customer.
Deploying the infrastructure into production by populating databases with customer’s business data.
Financing pieces of the infrastructure—hardware, software and services—through IBM Global Financing.