As expected (CI No 2,257), Sun Microsystems Inc last week won mainframe supplier Amdahl Corp as an OEM customer for its Solaris Unix operating system. Amdahl and Sun’s SunSoft Inc software unit will add extensions derived from Amdahl’s UTS mainframe Unix to the Solaris Enterprise Server system and will work on unbundled security, on-line and distributed management technlogies. As part of the deal, which will eventually see a mainframe Solaris replace UTS, Amdahl is also to begin reselling Sun’s SparcCenter 2000 and SparcServer 1000 systems immediately. First enhancements to Solaris are expected to find their way into version 2.4 of the SunSoft operating system, due in the second quarter of next year. It seems likely that the environment will be up on Amdahl’s own range of Sparc-based workgroup and enterprise servers that the company is expected to detail by the end of this year. Furthermore, Amdahl president Joe Zemke said the agreement with Sun would not jeopardise its recently announced plan to develop a common Unix operating system environment with sister company ICL Plc and its own dominant shareholder Fujitsu Ltd, which he described as having a much more long-term focus. SunSoft still hopes to pick up Amdahl’s relatives as Solaris OEM customers – part of Sun’s ongoing challenge to Novell Inc’s UnixWare gambit: Fujitsu already supplies Solaris on its Sun-built S-Family workstations and its own Sparc boxes, and the two agreed some time ago to accelerate interoperability between Solaris and Fujitsu’s UXP/DS Unix implementation. Sun would also like to snare Amdahl sister company ICL Plc for Solaris, something that it has been trying to achieve for ages says president Scott McNealy. He claims ICL would save a great deal of money, if it took Solaris, but it still regards itself as a European provider of value-added Unix system software.
