UNIX Special 2: Players this side

INDIA: In the key findings of its fifth annual 2010-11 Unix Server Vendor Preference Survey by Gabriel Consulting Group, IBM and HP are seen taking first or second positions in the majority of categories.

As the report spots, IBM dominates the system performance topics along with the overall technology and technical roadmap areas. HP topped both IBM and Oracle on the systems management, real-world manageability, and service categories. Oracle had a few wins but finished behind HP and IBM in most areas, as Dan Olds, Principal Analyst explained about the highlights of the survey.

This report focused on vendor selection trends among 306 enterprise data center managers responsible for data centers of all sizes.

In another report by Gartner, mapping server shipments in the second quarter of 2011, in Asia Pacific HP remained the leader in shipments with 27 percent of the total market and IBM led by revenue with 37 percent share. In terms of vendor landscape, HP (37 per cent), IBM (30 per cent) and Dell (nine per cent) emerged as the top three vendors this quarter, in terms of revenue.

A sprint over the past of UNIX will tell us that UNIX has quintessentially been deployed for tougher workloads than Linux and Windows, for more demanding, uptime-heavy and high-pressure scenarios.

Hence it becomes a reasonable for banks, manufacturers, and telecommunications companies. May be the reason why IBM and HP will not call it a day any soon. As experts point out, the growth at IBM and HP takes the spotlight away from speculations that UNIX is no more an upbeat market.

There are no chances of retiring yet. Be it IBM-specific derivative AIX, or HP-UX, there’s lot riding on the poster child of yesteryears yet, despite the fact that both the players have boarded the LINUX plane also, and as strongly.

If Windows is what it takes for e-mail, print and file-sharing services, or certain other vanilla applications, Linux is what we hear when it comes to sharp network computing, or firewalls and proxy servers.

So while IBM has been known to channelise notable time and investments to pump up capabilities of its UNIX-based Power Systems line, incidentally at a time when rivals could not keep up and helped IBM gain more market; the question now is different.

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Would the top three players (IBM, HP, and Solaris) continue to invest in organic or inorganic ways in UNIX? Or would the price-discount advantage due to competition between the big UNIX three continue as x64 gains more steam?

Yes, says Dan Olds.

 “The remaining three UNIX vendors will continue to be very aggressive when it comes to pricing. I don’t see any of them slacking off in terms of system and O/s development. This is a profitable business for all three and they won’t abandon it anytime soon, if ever.”

Interestingly, HP switched from PA-RISC architecture to Intel Itanium system for selling UNIX systems, while IBM veered off to Power server line. Now with the much talked-about Oracle-HP face-off over Itanium support, it would be quite a different game for HP-UX.

But not many dovetail with such speculations.

Dan Olds thinks that Oracle dropping future version support for Itanium has had nearly the effect that Oracle hoped it would.

“I think that Oracle hoped it would be a death blow to HP-UX based systems — but I think it’s had an even more negative effect on Oracle, it’s caused a lot of mistrust with current Oracle customers. I think this move has backfired on them.”

He argues to explain that the majority of development is centered on the x86 platform, for obvious reasons. But there is a lot of commonality between Linux and UNIX, and porting a particular application isn’t all that difficult these days. And then there are lots and lots of applications that will never and should never run on commercial UNIX. These commercial UNIX systems are data center mission critical systems, they won’t be called upon to run many of the workloads that run on x86 servers.

The market also has another breed of players like Solaris, Xeon and Opteron server platforms, or  Apple’s OS Lion. Here again analysts do not see a very strong impact to the damage of UNIX.

“I really don’t see Apple’s operating systems making much impact in enterprise data centers. They might be a factor in very small firms, but I don’t see it showing up in any sort of significant way otherwise.” Dan Olds feels.

He also believes that the pace of technical development will continue at about the same rate, meaning that, in many cases Xeon or Opteron chips might have better raw performance than SPARC, Itanium or POWER processors (although POWER has done the best job at consistently out performing Xeon/Opteron chips).

The market is changing though, and yet it is to everyone’s advantage.

A peek into Gartner’s number-crunching shows that from a form factor perspective, high density servers (which Gartner calls skinless servers) were preferred by Internet companies in building their cloud infrastructure.

Blade remained a higher growth category compared to other form factors, rack optimized and tower, as a preferred platform for virtualization in large and mid-size businesses.

HP led the blade server space with 48 per cent of revenue and 39 per cent of shipments.

The chessboard may be changing its contours but the stakes are still the same and so are the moves between the knights and the kings as always. For now, UNIX is still in the game.