Sun, Solaris, and Open Source

I was at Usenix 2005, the conference about Advanced Computing, Unix systems, system admins and related stuff. There was an interesting session about Sun actually and I must say I am really impressed. Here are some interesting things I heard. In particular, I'll first talk a little about some key technical enhancements in Solaris and then some cool business/open-source related stuff.

First of all, Solaris 10, Sun's latest addition to their flagship Solaris series is really a very impressive product. It is targeted towards the server market and redefines the expected standards for that particular segment. One of the key things to capturing this market segment is to really win over the people who would be maintaining the system - the system administrators; if your system is easily manageable, problems can be easily backtracked to their roots (yes there are lots of problems in large scale server installations) and promptly fixed - the sysads are on your side. The sysads I believe play an important role in purchase decisions, and they are usually geeky people who get easily seduced by robust, cool(thanks to dtrace and friends) features Solaris 10 has.

In Solaris 10, Sun has introduced a facility called Dtrace (Suraj have you been using it ?) which is believe me one of the most interesting developments in recent times in systems software industry. The idea behind Dtrace is pretty straightforward. Large installation systems are complex and are used in very complex and varied production environments. You just cannot backtrack problems in production environment to the actual piece of code that caused it - there could be tens of thousands of dollars cost associated with temporary downtime of your high end servers. Moreover, it is not a good idea to mess up with otherwise stable machines just to debug them - that really ought to be done in the lab. Dtrace solves this problem by embedding a complete infrastructure to seamlessly debug not only the Solaris kernel, but any application running on top of it while it is still running. The idea is that the debugging infrastructure which is based on "probes" is mostly turned off until explicitly enabled and when enabled gives comprehensive fine grained information about the working of the various components of the system. Dtrace provides excellent support to relate the result of these probes to things people actually understand: applications and users.

I would say Dtrace is a big big win when it comes to the novelty in Solaris 10. A highly hyped system, the ZFS file system (Zetabyte file system) is promising but its release has been delayed. Apart from that, the range of architecture support is another welcome change. You can now get Solaris for any of x86, Opteron (x86_64, EM64T, however u want to call it) and Sparc. Moreover, you can now combine 32 bit and 64 bit components in interesting ways. There are a hoard of other cool features you can find here: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-0547/6mgbdbsme?a=view


Technicalaties aside, there is a substantial creative thought that is going into shaping Sun's marketing strategy come Solaris 10. Software industry is witnessing major strategy changes as the open source movement gets stronger and stronger. Something that is free and is something useful, earns a lot of takers. The key aspect of open source that makes it all work is that you only contribute your 2 cents, but you get in return the 2 cents of each of the thousands other contributors for free. In this way, an open source congregation is nothing but community based software development, just that in this case, the community could be pretty big and diverse, and so are the possible benefits.

However, the story doesn't end here, there is the "free" tag after all, so there are bound to be side effects and in this case they are pretty major ones. The open source movement has a strong following among students and hobbists. It is a fundamental truth of student life: give them something for free, and they will make it work. While students and hobbists are not necessarily as competent as industry "experts", don't forget that they form a huge force sheerly based on their numbers. No offence to Ayn Rand, but one thing that history teaches us is that the community is more powerful than the individuals. This large student and hobbist community find their way into the industry sooner or later, where they are directly or indirectly involved in purchase decisions, and more often than not shape the way the industry is headed. Employees are a valuable asset to any organization and it is in the organization's ultimate interest to keep up their productivity. The fact that a majority of their employees prefer Linux to Solaris is a very strong argument for any company management to favor Linux over Solaris in purchases. Additionally, by doing so the company gets a huge reservoir of Linux expertise essentially for free without having to train the staff ground up.

I must say it has dawned upon Sun that just producing good products is not enough, their marketing strategies have to change. One has to embrace and win over the community to help spread the good word around, and to tap on the potential buyers for their product. Embracing the community is the marketing strategy of the future. But it doesn't have to be open source really, Microsoft has done it in its own way; and of course your definition of community can differ. Open source is one easy and proven approach, which I believe has only shown a small glimpse of what it is capable of.