The SUN has set and you can barely see it through WINDOWS.
Lately I have been reading a lot of articles on the current happenings of Sun Microsystems. For years now, I have always had a soft spot for Sun Microsystems and despite all the struggles that they have been through, deep down I can feel that their end is approaching. If not the end, at least a complete remodel of their company will be taking place to cater to their recent investments in technology.
Now before I continue with this I wish to highlight a few statistics: recent reports have shown that year-after-year the Linux Operating System has taken a firm hold in the overall enterprise market. As of 2008 it had been holding a share of at least 13.4% (according to recent IDC reports). UNIX Operating Systems on the other hand report 32.7% usage in the same market. Combined (46.1%), Linux and UNIX out-weigh Microsoft’s share of 36.5%. I am filled with joy when I see that every year Linux increases its share by an average of 10%. With leaders such as Red Hat, Novell and Canonical, I see an even stronger future for the Linux Operating System.
Sun’s recent struggles have clearly shown the strong influence and adoption of open source software and they never displayed any issues to admit this and conform to it. While these statistics show the operating platforms within the enterprise industry it does not give us any hints on the percentage in usage of open source application running on these platforms and within these architectures.
As of 2007 (coincidently after the announcement of ZFS, dtrace and openSolaris), Sun’s stock prices and numbers have declined at a rapid rate. Revenue goals are not being matched and to help boost the usage of Sun products, more focus has been given to the open source community. Sun acquired mySQL and have been doing very well with the Open Office suite. ZFS and dtrace have been open sourced along with the Solaris Operating System. In desperation they began adopting open source so that Sun can still remain as an entity if not anything else. As long as users use mySQL or Open Office there will still be a need for Sun Microsystems. But at what cost? The focus has been dramatically shifted and emphasis has been placed on the cheaper and scalable Intel architecture as opposed to SPARC. In November of 2008 the company announced that another 5000-6000 positions will be cut. Is this giving us a glimpse of the future of Sun? Are they reshaping their company for a newer business model?
In the past couple of years their marketing has been doing nothing but driving features. Sun has barely been staying afloat because of their pushing of features and they have not held back on attacking others in the process. In the blogs of Sun employees I have seen the majority of attacks directed towards the Linux Operating System; most of which are misinforming cheap shots.
Why use anything else when you can use ZFS? Honestly, Linux has made great strides in providing enterprise class file systems/volume managers with emphasis on high availability/performance and they continue to do so. This includes device-mapper/LVM2 and the widely hyped btrfs. Note that I have seen a project to port device-mapper to openSolaris. And dtrace? Systemtap is a much worthy opponent for the Linux platform.
How long will this strategy allow them to survive in what has apparently become the jungle of Linux and Windows? Windows itself suffers from many flaws that prevent it from being a true enterprise class solution. Its I/O subsystem suffers dramatically with regards to performance and how I/O requests are handled. The NTFS file system is also one of the most horribly designed and non-scalable file systems out there. It was designed for client usage. Given time, I still see the growth of the Linux Operating System in the enterprise environment.
