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IBM Virtualizes Sun Out of Market

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A few days ago IBM Announced Plans to Acquire Transitive.  I wrote about Transitive’s Solaris Application virtualization technology recently, it is a wonderful way for companies to maintain their investment in Solaris based applications while minimizing their dependency (risk) upon Sun.

IBM’s purchase of Transitive is a brilliant strategic way to further minimize a competitor in the market while not forcing a painful forklift upgrade upon the customer base.  “Sure, we’ll sell you new IBM X86 based hardware, and then we’ll simply continue to run all your Solaris apps within the Transitive virtaulized wrapper.  Upgrade those applications at your leisure when (and if) it makes sense.”

Virtualization continues to be a game changer in more ways than originally expected.

Virtualize Your Solaris Apps with Transitive

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I recently came across a very interesting application virtualization technology that I thought would be of interest to a number of my readers.  Transitive QuickTransit for Solaris/SPARC to Linux X86-64 allows you to wrap a native Solaris application in a virtualization wrapper so that the application can be run on X86 Linux OS.

Transitive’s Henry Kwok, Systems Engineering, explained this best:

“QuickTransit is a cross-platform virtualization solution that allows applications compiled for Solaris/SPARC to run on Linux or Solaris/x86 without any changes to the binary. We use a technology called DBT (Dynamic Binary Translation), which is very similar to Java JITs, i.e. we generate native instruction at run-time and specially optimize the frequently executed portions.

It is important to understand that this product is orthogonal to the VMware virtualization approach, in that we do not migrate entire systems (i.e. OS and everything else), but instead are focused on the application level. There is no Solaris kernel or OS running. Instead systems calls are mapped to Linux systems calls. “

As I have walked around my customers, I notice pockets of Sun boxes here and there. I know customers would love to be able to migrate those systems to their enterprise standard virtualization technology of VMware.  Well, with Transitive it appears that now they can.

(Note:  I have had no direct or indirect experience with Transitive’s technlogy.  Mileage may vary, consult your doctor before starting any excercise regiment, yadda, yadda, yadda…)

Next Level: Application Virtualization

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There has been a number of announcements over the past few weeks in the area of Application Virtualization, most notably VMware’s release of ThinApp.  With the ability to wrap an application in a virtualization container and then run that virtualized application as a stand alone executable, virtualization has been taken to the next level.

As I have been talking to enterprises about application virtualization, a base understanding of why this is important is always needed.  The simplest example of where application virtualization can be used is when you think of the need to have two different versions of the same application.  Image you are a QA tester testing a web based application.  Usually, you verify that the web based application works with both IE 7 and IE 6 or now Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.  In the past, you had to have two machines (physical or ideally virtualized) with each browser installed since they can’t live together on the same machine.  Talk about overhead.  With application virtualization, each version of IE gets placed in the virtualized wrapper and becomes a standalone executable.  Allowing you to run both apps at the same time on the same machine.

Moving to a more complex example, think about virtualizing most of your core applications across an enterprise.  If each application is a stand alone executable, what happens when a user accidentally deletes one of the library files for the application?  First off, this wouldn’t happen because they are all placed in the virtualized wrapper.  But if it did, all IT has to do is tell the user to download the virtualized app again from a central repository.

The cost savings for IT administrators of the desktop can really start to add up.  These include:

  • Less disk space requirements since the virtualized application is compressed
  • Savings in admin hours just from not having to reboot Windows after an application is installed; virtualized applications don’t require a reboot to install, just copy to the machine and run it (or run it from a USB key).
  • The elimination of the re-builds or re-installation of desktops due to user’s accidentally corrupting an application; the self contained virtualized apps can’t be corrupted like a natively installed one.
  • A reduction in troubleshooting application conflicts since each application lives in it’s own virtualized world.

When you take each of these areas of time saving and extend this across 20k, 50k, 200k desktops the time savings starts to have huge impact to the efficiency of an Desktop IT organization.

Stay tuned as I get more real world examples…

(Disclosure: I am currently employed as a Global Accounts Solutions Consultant at VMware.)