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Sun's John Fowler touts the Intel deal

23.01.2007
The agreement by Sun Microsystems Inc. and Intel Corp. to work together on product development, announced Monday, will bring improvements in how Solaris operates on Intel's chips, according to John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president for systems. Those improvements will arrive in OpenSolaris, the open source version of the company's operating system. Under the new agreement, Sun will begin selling Intel-based systems while the two companies work to optimize Solaris on Intel's platforms. Fowler talked about the agreement and what it means after the deal was unveiled. Excerpts from that interview follow:

What kinds of improvements can users expect in how Solaris operates on Intel boxes? There are several things: taking advantage of advanced power management features, we will work directly with Intel to reduce power utilization of servers at different workloads. The second thing we are going to work with them on is on I/O performance. Intel platforms have some I/O acceleration features, and together with Intel's help we can integrate changes in Solaris that greatly improve the efficiency and the performance of I/O on those platforms. The third area that we can work on is on reliability. Solaris has this feature called self-healing which is the ability to properly handle problems in the hardware and then continue to operate. Together with Intel we can actually integrate changes in Solaris to make it work particularly well on Intel platforms so we have a really high degrees of reliability.

When will these improvement appear? Will they be available in the first server products due to be released this year? Where most of these changes will appear is actually in OpenSolaris first. And so they will start appearing during calendar 2007. It's basically going to be a continuous thread of innovation, not just some big bang.

What other things will you be doing? Are you going to try to create scale-up platforms? What we're saying is that we are going to collaborate on greater than four-way systems -- and that can be a whole bunch of different activities -- making sure Solaris works well on them, as well as designing systems around them. Beyond that, I'm not going to go into any details of what exactly we are doing because I don't want to disclose any future product plans at this time.

What will this mean for the Solaris update schedule? We just released Solaris update 3 and as we start to integrate changes that we work on together with Intel, they will just roll into the regular updates.

Sun has sold some server products already that were Intel based... Yes, we used to have the LX50 server and the V60 and V65 servers, both of which were dual processor servers. We discontinued selling those in 2005.