IBM targets Solaris with Linux initiative

IBM has decided to lend Red Hat a helping hand in its struggle to wrest server operating system market share from Sun Microsystems. The two companies announced a range of initiatives last week designed to lure users of Sun’s Solaris operating system over to Red Hat Linux.

IBM’s System and Technology group will begin offering free migration assessments to Solaris customers who want to know more about the costs and benefits of moving from Solaris to Red Hat Linux. Over the past year, IBM’s AIX group has sponsored about 500 such assessments for Solaris and HP-UX users, and the company now hopes to complete up to twice as many Linux assessments by year’s end, said Scott Handy, vice president of worldwide Linux at IBM.

Big Blue sells both Red Hat Linux and Novell’s Suse Linux on a wide variety of its hardware, including its xSeries, pSeries, and zSeries servers. These initiatives, however, were designed in partnership with Red Hat, Handy said. Red Hat Linux is also offered on servers from other hardware vendors.

IBM has also been working with 22 financial services software vendors, including Cameron Systems and TimesTen, to help them port their Solaris products over to Linux. To date, these vendors have moved 33 of an anticipated 48 total applications over to Linux, Handy said.

For its part, Sun has gone out of its way to attack Red Hat’s Linux distribution, calling it an incompatible variation, or also “fork,” of Linux.

Meanwhile, Sun has promoted Solaris on AMD’s Opteron microprocessor as a technically superior alternative to Red Hat Linux.