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Sun to Come Out Swinging at Linux

Sun to Come Out Swinging at Linux

Sun CEO Scott McNealy on Monday is going to try to ease on out from between the rock and a hard place that he finds himself caught in by positioning Solaris x86 as the answer to the market's low-cost computing desires instead of Linux, his chief enemy, and, oh, yes, Microsoft too.

Industry toffs familiar with the days-old strategy compare it to Custer's Last Stand and Don Quixote tilting at windmills and claim Scott can't possibly turn back the inexorable Linux tide threatening to drown him and Sun.

The problem with Sun's thinking, they say, is that it discounts the operating system and believes it's only the enticement of cheap commodity hardware that's responsible for its losses. It ignores the allure of open source and Linux's horizontal scaling, clustering and distributed file system.

Sun forgets that Solaris x86, which it ironically mothballed there for a while last year, isn't the same as Sparc Solaris, which takes advantage of the Sparc chip's reduced instruction set and its machines' backplane.

Anyway, Scott on Monday is supposed to tout Solaris x86 as the number one Unix for the x86 - in other words screw Linux - being as it is enterprise-class, military-grade (a distinction it earned four years ago), a nifty Java platform and refreshed on a predictable quarterly release schedule thanks to Sun's recently conceived "train model."

Sun has reportedly had some problems getting a Greek chorus of industry friends in line for Monday's shindig at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art because it's leading with Solaris x86 and reducing Linux to an afterthought. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is supposed to turn up and presumably he'll have his dancing shoes on. He'll have to considering Oracle has turned such a solid Linux partisan lately.

Apparently Scott's not going to have much to say about x86 hardware. He's reportedly supposed to limit his spiel to the existing LX50 and not mention the new x86 LV blade server he's got coming up next month.

More Stories By Maureen O'Gara

Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara

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