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Nov 18

IBM Buys Transitive

GeneralPost by Mike DiPetrilloAdd comments

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IBM bought a company called Transitive today. I’ve gotten a flurry of emails after the announcement asking what this means for VMware. I actually think it’s a great thing. I’ve been a big fan of Transitive’s technology for many years now. In a nutshell they allow non-x86 applications like those running on SUN Sparc systems to run on x86 systems. This is traditionally called “emulation”. The Sparc command set is emulated in software by Transitive so the native Sparc app continues to run. It’s really, really neat software.

Why does this make sense for IBM? Several different reasons. The biggest one I think is competition with SUN. IBM competes a lot with SUN for the larger applications in the datacenter. Now that they have Transitive they can take those Sparc apps that were tied to SUN hardware and move them over to IBM hardware. Of course in order to do this you’ll need IFLs on your IBM mainframe and enablement licenses. IBM gets revenue and they get rid of their competition at the same time. It makes complete business sense.

What does this mean for VMware? I really think it’s great for VMware as well. IBM has been a long time and very strong partner with VMware. There’s nothing saying that IBM won’t continue to partner with VMware with the new Transitive software. Now you can bring all of the greatness of IBM servers and storage as well as the power and flexibility of a VMware environment to all of those Sparc apps that are running around the datacenter.

All of this may not be a solution for everyone. There are several datacenter owners that I know that are very tied to their SUN hardware. I can’t blame them – the stuff just runs. However, even before our current economic situation companies were looking at how to streamline their operations and save money. For the cost of SUN maintenance alone you could retrofit your environment with a pretty nice IBM-VMware-Transitive environment.

Time will always tell how these things play out but you now have a strong VMware partner with a great piece of technology. I for one wouldn’t want to be working for SUN right about now.

I’d be interested to hear other’s comments on if they think this is a good thing for IBM or not.

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  • >Of course in order to do this you'll need IFLs on your IBM mainframe and enablement licenses

    Mike, for the records, I don't think Transitive technologies allows SPARC applications to run on mainframes. You might be confusing platforms here. We did work with Parallels to develop PowerVM Lx86 .. which is an emulation environment that allows non-POWER applications to run on POWER based hardware (not mainframes).

    That's what we have been doing in the past, I don't have any inside about what we are going to do with it.

    Massimo.
  • Thanks, Massimo. I think that's exactly where the two are merging in the IBM world. According to the press release:

    "Transitive technology is currently included as part of the IBM PowerVMTM software designed to help customers consolidate their x86 Linux workloads onto IBM Systems."

    Maybe you can help shed more light there. If you do find out more please let us know. Thanks.
  • This just in from a contact at IBM. I was looking for some clarification on what the existing Transitive-IBM relationship was. This adds some good insight.

    PowerVM is the virtualization feature for IBM POWER-based hw (Guests supported: i (aka OS/400) + AIX + Linux for Power).

    PowerVM comes with different SKUs depending on the features you want to enable. One of these features (which I am told it's included in ANY PowerVM SKUs) is Lx86.

    Lx86 is indeed the Transitive product so Transitive sw doesn't run on top of Lx86 ... it's the same thing.
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