Sun’s vision is to make Solaris on Opteron an industry leader. Unlike IBM and HP, which treat Opteron like a second-source Xeon, Sun invested in unique engineering that leverages Opteron’s superior performance and power utilization characteristics while meeting enterprise expectations. Sun’s Opteron systems are not the vendor’s cheap seats reserved for those who can’t afford RISC. Sun is as serious about AMD64 as it is about Sparc.
Sun also stretched its neck out -- way out -- by daring to differ with the seemingly universal consensus that Linux is the path paved with gold. Is there a compelling reason to abandon Unix? Maybe the qualities that made Unix an enterprise mainstay still exist. Linux faithful mock Solaris with the adolescent nickname “Slowaris,” but I challenge critics to find one instance among the innumerable huge-scale Solaris deployments where decision makers are considering a switch to Linux for speed’s sake. The only intelligent argument in favor of taking Unix down was that it was closed source. So Sun took the bold step of open sourcing its crown jewel, Solaris, to take the “proprietary” millstone from around its neck. Now Solaris is the only one of the Big Three Unixes that is open source.
Sun kicks ass.
