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UNIX Special 3: x86 vs UNIX

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CIOL Bureau
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INDIA: The rise of commercial Unix systems coincided with — and fueled the rise of — the networked economy that began in earnest in the mid-1990s. At one point there were more than twelve vendor-supported Unix variants enjoying varying levels of market acceptance.

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Economic forces like the cost of developing custom hardware and software, along with fighting for ISV attention and market share, winnowed down the market to three major players: HP, IBM, and Oracle. Competition from increasingly capable and less expensive x86-based systems pushed commercial Unix servers into a high-end, mission critical workload role.

That’s how Gabriel Consulting Group’s survey describes the rise, the strutting walk and the struggling steps that UNIX has seen since its birth.

While some in the industry press and pundit ranks seem to think that the commercial Unix market is irrelevant, GCG thinks they’re overlooking a large segment of IT infrastructure — one that is critically important and still growing, albeit not as fast as x86-based systems.

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So what is this x86 challenge after all?

Gartner’s second quarter server shipment report tell that all server categories, including RISC/Itanium UNIX, mainframe class and x86-based, attained positive revenue growth on year on year basis in second quarter 2011.

However, the x86 server segments continued to gain market share in both shipments and revenue, compared to both last quarter and the same quarter last year. This segment represented 65 per cent of total revenue and 98 per cent of total servers shipped in Asia Pacific, compared to 61 per cent and 97 per cent in the second quarter of 2010.

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As it turns out, x86, with a revenue share of 69 per cent this quarter, emerged as the leading market driver, which is driven by various factors such as virtualization, workload migration from other technologies such as UNIX.

Changing enterprise behavior around x86 lead to an annual x86 shipment growth of 23.1 percent in the same time frame, which is in line with the global trends. On the other hand, UNIX market observed an annual revenue decline of six per cent, as compared to last year though this market performed relatively better as compared to last quarter, fuelled by server procurement in Banks and public sector organizations.

As Charles King from analyst firm Pundit-IT pointed out in a report, X86 continues to chew into the low end of the UNIX market. Looks like that x86 continues to grow in capabilities and it will continue to keep pressure on UNIX. The performance gap will continue to narrow, as these experts see. The proverbial yawning gap between IBM's Power servers and x86 servers has been shrinking with every quarter.

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UNIX has been facing many potholes. And for some strong reaons. It’s so-called fall or dip in popularity can be attributed to slower release cycles, UNIX wars, slow evolution of standards, latency issues, portability issues, flexibility, skills shortage, costs, server consolidation issues etc.

But there’s other side of argument too.

Dismissing UNIX is like saying that the rapid sales growth of fuel-efficient cars makes SUVs and trucks useless dinosaurs, when in fact there is a need for the bigger rigs. Passenger cars are never a good substitute for every transportation need, GCG contends in the report.

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The argument is apparently substantiated by what the report numbers hint at.

In the key findings of its fifth annual 2010-11 Unix Server Vendor Preference Survey, a vast majority view their commercial UNIX systems as strategic platforms. More than 50 per cent of the respondents said that three-quarters of the apps on their UNIX systems are mission critical. More than 80 per cent say that half of their UNIX workloads are critical.

These systems support core business processes that enable both basic and high-level functions. They often host the massive relational databases that sit behind web interfaces, invisible to most users. These systems have to provide predictable performance and high availability even when under extreme load.

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There’s more that makes UNIX tick, if one extrapolates the same argument further.

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Having control over your own operating system, middleware, and hardware gives the commercial UNIX vendors the ability to integrate these components very closely — which pays big dividends in terms of performance, usability, availability and throughput. This is why x86 systems tend to trail commercial UNIX in terms of features and functions, as Dan Olds, Principal Analyst, GCG explains it.

Why are IT shops still so reliant on UNIX, he asks. Applications and reliability/scalability (64 per cent and 51per cent, respectively) were the main reasons cited by respondents. Other reasons included cost considerations, hardware vendors, ease of application integration/development, interoperability, uptime and security.

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But systems are defined by much more than just the speed of the processors they contain, as he correctly underlines. Having control over your own operating system, middleware, and hardware gives the commercial UNIX vendors the ability to integrate these components very closely — which pays big dividends in terms of performance, usability, availability and throughput. This is why x86 systems tend to trail commercial UNIX in terms of features and functions.

Yet, there’s more than what meets the eye.

While UNIX looks to be healthy for the foreseeable future, vendors won’t be happy to see that customers are still stubbornly refusing to standardize on a single UNIX flavor, GCG also mentions.

Vendors, being vendors, have trouble understanding this. But customers generally have good reasons behind these decisions, ranging from technical and skill considerations to the belief that they don’t want to rely on a single vendor for systems hosting important workloads.

The key challenges for commercial UNIX vendors are two-pronged, told Dan Olds when asked to highlight the top issues it is facing.

“First, proving (not just talking about) the value of their platform vs. x86 alternatives. They need to talk about throughput and workloads vs. what can be generated by other systems. They also need to discuss costs, and put forward a case showing that the higher acquisition cost of UNIX systems is more than counterbalanced by, for example, lower management costs, higher throughput, higher utilization rates, or higher availability.”

Now there’s a pot at the end of the rainbow that could belong to just about anyone who captures it first. UNIX, or x86 or just any player who knows how it play it right.