President and COO of Sun Federal Bill Vass' Weblog

Thursday Dec 20, 2007

A First Look at Trusted xVM - Windows Running on Top of Solaris

You need to take a look at these pictures from John Weeks cell phone (that's why they are low res). As you may have seen from some of our xVM announcements, you can now use the Sun xVM Server to host Windows, Linux, and other versions of Solaris while using Solaris as the control program in Dom0. Because Solaris is a trusted operating system, John was able to run a fully virtualized WinXP instance in a DomU with a customized xVM/Solaris configuration that allowed connectivity from a Solaris Trusted Extensions labeled zone (PUBLIC) running in Dom0.

What's unique about John's experiment is that it's all running on a single system loaded with Solaris Express CE build 79, no Citrix, VMWare, or SGD...Just Solaris and WinXP!

Posted at 10:24AM Dec 20, 2007 by BVass in General | Comments[2] | Permalink

Tuesday Dec 04, 2007

Solaris vs. RHEL Comparison

I have been an open source advocate since my time at the DoD. When I was a CTO for the US Army PERSCOM, I was running over 380 Linux servers in production in 1993, when Linux was very young. Everyone thought I was crazy back then, but it worked great as a file server and web server platforms on 486s. I even replaced Solaris with Linux on Sun SPARC 3000s because it was faster than Solaris at the time, that didn't make many friends for me among the Sun sales folks.

In 2000, my wife's career forced me to leave the DoD and move to the west coast. I looked at many companies at the time, and Sun had always been a big open systems supporter. They also seemed to have the "smartest" technical people of all the companies I looked at. I took a job with Sun in 2000 and worked in Sun IT later taking over as Sun's Chief Information Officer.

As soon as I arrived at Sun I started pushing for open source and for Sun to get more involved in Linux. It was not until Jonathan Schwartz and Greg Papadopoulos started pushing along with me that we really got serious about it. I do think we were a little schizophrenic about open source for a while, with all our work on BSD, Apache, Mozilla and Open Office, then on the other side keeping Solaris closed.

That all changed about 2001, and we started internally on the path of open sourcing Solaris, and then later, embraced it all the way across all our products. It took over 5 years to open source Solaris because we had to indemnify every line of code (prove that we wrote it) and / or pay off the companies we licensed it from (we paid out over $200M to make that happen with Solaris).

Today, all our software is either open source (under an OSI approved license) or is in the process of being open sourced. We have committed at the top leadership (Jonathan / Greg / Scott/ Rich Green ) to this direction. We have been committed to this for over 3 years and you can see the proof as we have released Solaris, DTrace, Glassfish, ZFS, Java, Dir.... and we are in the process of open sourcing mail/cal, Identity, and JCAPS. Even our Sun Ray code is going through the open source process.

So at this point, we are completely committed across the company to open source. We are even open sourcing our hardware...you can't get more committed than that.

I would like to see the US Government even more committed to open source than it already is today. Some of them have started building "bonus points" into program RFPs for people that present an open source solution, and I would like to see that across ALL the RFPs. Open source is well established in the Intell and DoD communities because of their concerns about security (open source being more secure), but there are still a lot of IT leaders in other parts of the U.S. government that don't really understand open source or its advantages. I would also like to promote open formats and standards across the Federal government....it's good for security, it's good for the US, and it's good for the tax payers...

Lots of customers ask me about Sun's commitment to open source and Linux. Let me be VERY clear that Sun is completely committed to make sure Linux is supported across our systems and software platforms. All our open source software runs on top of Linux, Solaris, and Windows. And we don't just support one version of Linux, to us "Linux" means Ubuntu, Debian, SuSe, and RedHat.

There are many great things about Linux, and we love to see Linux grow, because it grows open source and choice. However, we also believe there are many great things about Open Source Solaris. Both operating systems are really Unix based, both are open source, both are multi-platform, and both are OEMed by a number a major hardware manufactures. A bunch of our customers have asked me, "OK, if Linux is great and Open Source Solaris is great, how do they compare?" So, let me give you the best information I have on comparing some of the features of both operating systems. I am using RedHat Linux only for comparison, other distributions may have different features. I welcome feedback and "corrections" to the UPDATED chart, as I get them in the comment section of my Blog I will research them and correct them in the table to make sure it is as up to date as possible.

Posted at 03:41PM Dec 04, 2007 by BVass in General | Comments[7] | Permalink

Tuesday Oct 16, 2007

The Truth (or Lies) About Webinars...OR, What happened to the HP Way?

Many of you watch, participate in and gather information through watching Webinars. Many Webinars are even co-branded by several well-known IT and public sector magazines with respected editors as moderators.

However, the truth is that while publications may be putting their names on the line with their sponsors, the publications are not performing the due diligence or fact checking that would be done for any story posted on their web site or published in their print versions.

Many of you probably know, but I wanted to remind you, that most of the Webinars you see are nothing but glorified advertisements...one-sided discussions funded by the company whose logo is usually part of the Webinar title and whose executives are the major participants.

Yet, even advertisements should be held to certain minimal standards. The most minimal standard being – telling the truth. Recently, HP purchased and produced a Webinar with eWEEK that focused on Solaris to Linux – The Path of Painless Migration.

Now, I fully understand all good marketing strategies “spin” messages and highlight your company’s positives while focusing on your competitors’ negatives. Many times the positive aspects about a competitor are omitted. However, competitor characteristics should not be misrepresented.

The recent HP Webinar stated that Sun’s Solaris operating system is not open sourced. Someone might want to tell the more than 11 million people who have downloaded the Open Solaris operating system or the more than 60 thousand members of our Open Solaris Project.

The HP Webinar also stated that shipments of Sun’s SPARC servers were declining and cited a 2005 IDC report. Yet, wouldn’t you think you would quote the 2006-07 IDC report, which is already available? The current report states that SPARC shipments are actually increasing. But, I guess HP doesn’t want the facts to get in the way.

These inaccuracies are just the tip of the iceberg. Many other untruths, including the notion that Solaris is more expensive than HP, were propagated in the HP Webinar, so I would like to call on my friendly counterparts at HP to contact me and discuss it in depth.

The truth is, for the same hardware, at the same support level (two socket X86 server for three years), HP is $1059.84 and Open Source Solaris is $599.00. I don't know what kind of math HP is using, but the last time I checked, $599.00 was less than $1,059.84. Maybe HP is starting to have trouble with their calculators, or maybe it's just that Reverse Polish Notation.

I also call on publications, as the wall between advertising and editorial becomes more porous, to protect their reputations by performing more thorough reviews of their branded Webinar content – especially when their reporters are moderators!!

As a company that invests in Webinars, I welcome similar scrutiny of our Webinar content by our publication partners. At Sun, we have one requirement for all written, verbal and video content -- claims are backed by facts.

I’d like to talk to our competitors to advise them on how to launch such an initiative.

Now to dispel some other myths about Solaris, take a look at Jim Laurent's blog.

Posted at 08:36AM Oct 16, 2007 by BVass in General | Permalink