[SPARC T4-4 Chassis Image, Courtesy Oracle]

Oracle SPARC T4-4 - USB Boot & Install

Abstract

UNIX Systems Manufacturers originated their markets as workstations, during a time when they used 32 bit systems and the rest of the PC market was concentrating on 8 and 16 bit systems, and some CPU vendors like Intel use segmentation to keep their 16 bit software alive while struggling to move to 32 bit architectures. Some of the original servers were stacked workstations on a rack in a cabinet. The former high-powered video cards were merely ignored, as remote management needed command line interfaces. Engineering quickly determined that console access needed to be built into a new class of systems: rack mounted servers. These early servers offered boot functionality from Network and Disk. One such boot capability was from USB Disk.This capability was later carried onto other chassis that Oracle would manufacture, such as the SPARC T4-4.

Creating a USB Boot Stick from Solaris

The USB port can be used to create a Solaris 11.4 USB Boot Stick from Solaris, after inserting a SanDisk USB stick into the front port next to the DVD Drive:

T5120/root# echo | format -e | grep -i SanDisk
4. c7t0d0 <SanDisk'-Cruzer Fit-1.00 cyl 1945 alt 0 hd 255 sec 63>
5. c8t0d0 <SanDisk'-Cruzer Fit-1.00 cyl 1945 alt 0 hd 255 sec 63>

T5120/root# ls -al *usb
-rw-r--r-- 1 dh127087 staff 1217341440 May 3 19:38 sol-11_4-text-sparc.usb

T5120/root# time dd bs=16k if=sol-11_4-text-sparc.usb of=/dev/rdsk/c7t0d0s2
74300+1 records in
74300+1 records out

real 8m57.25s
user 0m0.47s
sys 0m13.99s

T5120/root# echo "par\nprint\n" | format -e c7t0d0 | tail -14 | nawk '$NF!="0" && !/partition/'
Total disk cylinders available: 148 + 0 (reserved cylinders)

Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks
0 unassigned wm 0 - 147 1.13GB (148/0/0) 2377620
2 unassigned wm 0 - 147 1.13GB (148/0/0) 2377620

T5120/root#

This USB stick can now be tested from, from OpenBoot Firmware

Oracle SPARC T4-4

The Oracle SPARC T4-4 is a server with a 4th generation OpenSPARC processor. The SPARC T4 processor was manufactured to the same process size as the SPARC T3 CPU processor, but the core was upgraded, so equivalent throughput could be reached with half as many cores, at the same processor speed. The T4-4 Chassis comes with a Lights Out Management (LOM) capability referred to as Integrated Lights Out Management (ILOM.) Most remote systems management work can be done from the LOM. The system, when looking at the front of the chassis: the T5120 has 2x USB ports next to the DVD drive on the right and 2x USB ports located in the back left corner.

Attaching to the ILOM

The ILOM can be attached to via TCP/IP, if previously configured, or over a serial port.

T5120/user$ ssh root@sun1234-ilom
Password:

Oracle(R) Integrated Lights Out Manager
Version 3.2.6.8 r128095
Copyright (c) 2018, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Hostname: ORACLESP-1207BDY075

->

Insert USB Boot

The USB boot flash stick should be inserted into a powered down chassis, to boot from firmware.

-> show /system power_state actual_power_consumption

/System
Properties:
power_state = Off
actual_power_consumption = 37 watts

Power Up Chassis

After the USB boot stick is inserted, the chassis should be powered up from the ILOM.

-> start /SYS
Are you sure you want to start /SYS (y/n)? y
Starting /SYS

After the chassis is powered on, once the power usage increases, attach to the console

-> show /system power_state actual_power_consumption

/System
Properties:
power_state = On
actual_power_consumption = 1384 watts


-> start /SP/console
Are you sure you want to start /SP/console (y/n)? y

Serial console started. To stop, type #.

{0} ok

Note: If the chassis was recently started, the ability to access a prompt does not really occur until after the actual power consumption rises to an expected level.
Note: if the "ok" prompt does not appear, press [RETURN] or [ENTER] key

Select USB Port

When a SanDisk USB Flash Sticks are plugged into the USB ports located to the right of the DVD drive, they can be seen at the OpenFirmware prompt, and can be selected into a copy-paste buffer, for easy use.

{0} ok show-disks
a) /reboot-memory@0
b) /pci@700/pci@1/pci@0/pci@0/LSI,sas@0/disk
c) /pci@500/pci@1/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@3/SUNW,emlxs@0,1/fp@0,0/disk
d) /pci@500/pci@1/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@3/SUNW,emlxs@0/fp@0,0/disk
e) /pci@400/pci@2/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@3/SUNW,emlxs@0,1/fp@0,0/disk
f) /pci@400/pci@2/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0/pci@3/SUNW,emlxs@0/fp@0,0/disk
g) /pci@400/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8/pci@0/usb@0,2/hub@2/hub@3/storage@2/disk
h) /pci@400/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8/pci@0/usb@0,2/hub@2/storage@2/disk
i) /pci@400/pci@1/pci@0/pci@0/LSI,sas@0/disk
j) /iscsi-hba/disk
m) MORE SELECTIONS
q) NO SELECTION
Enter Selection, q to quit: h
/pci@400/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8/pci@0/usb@0,2/hub@2/storage@2/disk has been selected.
Type ^Y ( Control-Y ) to insert it in the command line.
e.g. ok nvalias mydev ^Y
for creating devalias mydev for /pci@400/pci@1/pci@0/pci@8/pci@0/usb@0,2/hub@2/storage@2/disk
{0} ok

Note: the USB stick in position "h" (this lettered position may change as new USB sticks are plugged or unplugged) has it's device name copied into a "copy-paste" buffer by selecting "h"

Boot Solaris 11.4 from USB

After shutting down the OS, while on the console port, attempt to boot from 11.4, which is too new:

Install Solaris 11.4

UnConfigure / Configure

Solaris 10, offered an option to perform a "sys-unconfig", to restore an OS back to factory settings. In Solaris 11, this has been replaced with another option called "sysconfig configure -s" or "sysconfig configure -s --destructive" to destroy the initial user home account to also be destroyed.

This option is good if moving a chassis to a different location.


Abstract:
The SPARC architecture is perhaps the first and longest lasting open and mainstram computing architecture in human history. In Ocrober 2012, Network Management published a reminder for people to attend the "SPARC at 25" event at the Computer History Museum. In November of 2012, Network Management published an short article pointing to the replay of the historic events: SPARC at 25: Past, Present, and Future. Diana Reichardt published an article "SPARC at 25" in the bi-monthly printed Oracle Magazine, covering the event.

In 1987, a small startup called Sun Microsystems developed its own microprocessor, called SPARC, and introduced the Sun-4, the first computer based on the new chip. On November 1, 2012, many early SPARC team members, along with Oracle President Mark Hurd and Executive Vice President of Systems at Oracle John Fowler, convened at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, for SPARC at 25: Past, Present, and Future. This event provided a look back at the history of SPARC and the early days of Sun. Stories from the participants, including all of the company’s founders, illustrated the complex nature of systems design and the challenges of launching a high-technology company in a fiercely competitive industry.

The on-line reprint is no substitute for the written article, with it's high-resolution pictures of the event. This, of course, is no substitute for the video of the actual event, whose link was published in the former Network Management article.

SPARC 25th Anniversary Highlights
If you do not have the time to watch the video of the creators of SPARC, on this 25th anniversary - Oracle published a highlights clip which is under 30 minutes. The highlights include current captains of industry, guiding SPARC today.
Explore the SPARC Time Line
Diana included a link at the end of her article titled "Explore the SPARC Time Line" which leads to an amazing timeline of events surrounding SPARC, that no person interested in systems should miss!

Conversations with Oracle Innovators
Q&A with Rick Hetherington
By Diana Reichardt

Rick Hetherington, Oracle’s vice president of hardware development, manages a team of architects and performance analysts who design Oracle’s M- and T-series processors. Hetherington’s team tracks the performance of these designs in great detail, from the moment they are conceived until they are released as products. In this interview, Hetherington explains the design process and how the team’s day-to-day work is focused on what SPARC customers will have in their data centers three to five years from now.

Conversations with Oracle Innovators
SPARC T4 Deep Dive With Rick Hetherington
By Diana Reichardt

Rick Hetherington, Oracle’s vice president of hardware development, manages a team of architects and performance analysts who design Oracle’s M- and T-series processors. In this interview, Hetherington describes the technical details of the new SPARC T4 processor and explains why he thinks it is going to be an eye-opener for the industry.

Other fairly recent Oracle Magazine articles published by Diana include:

FEATURE
Complete Power
By Diana Reichardt
Oracle Magazine: May/June 2011

SPARC hardware and the Oracle Solaris operating system: High-performance engine for mission-critical apps

COMMENT: Analyst’s Corner
The SPARC/Oracle Solaris Platform Evolution
By Diana Reichardt
Oracle Magazine: May/June 2011

SPARC hardware and the Oracle Solaris operating system: High-performance engine for mission-critical apps

AT ORACLE: News
SPARC Torches Benchmark
By Diana Reichardt
Oracle Magazine: March/April 2011

Oracle’s new SPARC Supercluster, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud T3-1B, and Oracle Solaris 11 break records and set new standards for performance and availability.

Diana's writing is a pleasure to read.
Concluding Thoughts:
No modern computing professional should be without the background and understanding of the history of computing from this period of time. The future always has elements of the past hinting forward. SPARC is no different, in this case - many of the ideas in modern computing history would not have ever existed, had it not been for SPARC innovators. More innovations are sure to come.

Vendors, Systems, and Processors Update

Normally, we don't release a consolidated update on the industry more than once a month, but there has been some significant updates.

Hot Chips Logo


IBM: POWER up?
By the time HotChips 24 arrives, POWER 7+ should be about 1 year late, as Fujitsu SPARC remains #1 for over a year in the HPC charts.

Is IBM really going to talk-up POWER 7+, one year late, without releasing it? It is looking a lot like what happened to Sun Microsystems with their ROCK processor, which was killed not long after there were multiple presentations on it, around the time of Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

IBM will also talk about their zNext processor, whatever that might be. Will POWER 7+ ever see the light of day?

Oracle: The SPARC is HotAround the time the industry was expecting IBM POWER 7+, Oracle release the SPARC T4 processor.

About 1 year later, during the same time that IBM will be talking about POWER 7+, Oracle is projected to release their SPARC T5 processor. The industry is hoping that Oracle will fulfull it's projection to release SPARC T5 in 2012, about 6 months ahead of time on their roadmap.

The SPARC T5 is supposed to be a glue-less 8 socket processor, adhering to SPARC V9 open standard, certified by SPARC International. Different extensions are projected to be included, such as Oracle RDBMS number calculations in hardware and compression engines... both which will dramatically increase the performance of Oracle RDBMS's.

With the increase of Oracle RDBMS's also comes the dramatic increase in performance of software with embedded databases (which is basically everything enterprise grade.) Oracle has determined to sit on the top of the Enterprise Software performance stack and SPARC seems to be the delivery mechanism.

Why is Open Standards important in platforms? When a single vendor comes under pressure and can't deliver (i.e. IBM POWER 7+) - other vendors are free to "pick up the slack", earn a little money, and produce something of additional value for the consumer.


Fujitsu: SPARC On Top Today, Intending to Stay On Top
Fujitsu has a long history of producing SPARC CPU's, both for Sun Microsystems as well as for themselves. Fujitsu manufactured the first Sun SPARC processor, manufactured high-end systems for Sun and Oracle for the past half-decade, and has been holding the #1 performance spot on the HPC 500 list.

Fujitsu released several iterations of their own SPARC CPU for massive super-computer (SPARC64 VIII fx, SPARC64 IX fx) Linux systems, as well as processors high-end (SPARC64 V, VI, and VII) Solaris systems. During HotChips 24 - they are projected to talk about their SPARC64 X processor!

The industry is hoping for a Solaris variant, based upon OpenSolaris fork like Illumos, to unify the Fujitsu and Oracle platforms, but there are no rumblings about that.


AMD: Embedding ARM in x64?
After reading about the Dell inclusion of ARM as an enterprise blade platform, the only thing more shocking would be the inclusion of ARM in a mainstream CPU vendor. Well, that day has come: ARM is coming to AMD Opteron.

The use ARM in the AMD world seems to be targeting virtual computing. The TrustZone feature of ARM may prove interesting for booting hypervisors or providing DRM (digital rights management).


HPC: Battle of the RISC's
Intel and AMD systems long ago took the top HPC spots. There was a general movement towards using graphics card co-processors to boost scores with specialized software. Some thought that the inclusion of ARM would help for future HPC systems, but with Fujitsu SPARC sitting on the top for a year, without any special co-processors, one may wonder whether graphics card vendors and special co-processor vendors have decided to sit out the super computer market, for awhile, since Fujitsu keeps upping the performance of their long-living SPARC open architecture.

Network Management Connection
With the rise of SPARC and ARM, one may wonder the impact for Network Management. ARM seemingly sits on most mobile devices, which all need to be managed. SPARC seemingly sits on the fastest Enterprise and HPC Systems. Network Management tool vendors will need to leverage these capabilities or at least manage them. Proprietary Intel is the volume proposition. AMD is the second-sourcing proposition for the proprietary Intel platform.

No network management vendor ignoring Intel, AMD, ARM, or SPARC are worth their weight in printed code.

System Vendor - CISC, RISC, EPIC Update

Abstract:
Since the decline of the Motorola 68000 CISC processor, RISC processors had been on the rise, to eventually be re-challenged by Intel with the release 80386 (and future models) with a Motorola-like flat memory model. UNIX vendors had standardized on the 68000, migrating to the RISC processors, and occasionally moving back to Intel. There has been the prediction of the decline of RISC, the loss of major processor families like ALPHA and MIPS, decline of POWER, rumor of end of EPIC processor family of Itanium by Intel, but some level of diversity surprisingly continues.

IBM Update: Power 7+
In 1982, IBM released a 68000 based workstation, based upon a 32/16bit processor. There was a decision to move to x86 on PC form factor, leveraging an existing relationship between Intel for the 8088, reducing cost by using an 16/8 bit processor, and gaining ready 8 bit part availability. This started the business PC market. IBM started to design their own RISC chip, called POWER, for their own UNIX workstations. The POWER multichip CPU modules were physically huge and very costly to manufacture - gluing together multiple chips onto a single carrier socket, limiting production quantities.

Apple-IBM-Motorola consortium started manufacturing PowerPC processors, bring POWER RISC architecture onto Apple desktops through simpler manufacturing process, but Apple discontinue it's use, not long after Apple purchased NeXT (this is the point where IBM POWER lost the desktop market.) In January 2008, IBM starting using QuickTransit, to provide x86 Linux software on their proprietary POWER processor, later ending in IBM purchasing Transitive. IBM almost purchased Sun, which would have allowed IBM to acquire SPARC, the industry volume leading commodity [non-multichip module] RISC and Solaris, the industry leading UNIX OS vendor.


It was noted in Network Management end of August 2011 that POWER 7+ was late. March 2012, Sony appears to have abandoned IBM POWER - this is when IBM POWER lost the gaming market. April 2012, IBM POWER 7+ was a half-year late. May 2012, IBM POWER 7+ was 7 months late. June 2012 - POWER 7+ is now 8 months late. Multi-chip modules are much simpler to bring to market, over chips designed into a single piece of silicon. For IBM to be so late, something bad must have happened. This does not bode well for AIX users.

HP Update: Itanium
In 2007, HP licensed a Transitive's QuickTransit, to provide Solaris software for HP's Intel based Itanium servers. Transitive made HP a global distributor in 2008, right before IBM bought Transitive, killing HP's path to move SPARC software onto x86 Linux or Itanium HP-UX. Itanium was the first, and possibly last, nearly mainstream Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (or EPIC) CPU architecture.

February 2009, HP describes Project Blackbird - HP acknowledges Solaris leading UNIX in United States, Itanium is on a "death march", HP considers purchasing Sun/Solaris. December 2009, RedHat kills Linux on Itanium. April 2010, Microsoft kills Windows on Itanium. December 2010, HP-UX was booting under Intel x86 - Project "Redwood" suggested a "last" Itanium chip in 2014, while recommending funding to move HP-UX to Intel x86.. On March 2011, Oracle stops new software development on Itanium. In November 2011, The Register described HP's Project Odyssey - building high-end Intel x86 systems, map Itanium HP-UX features to Intel x86, giving away Itanium/HP-UX software technology to Linux (not available under Itanium), and enhancing Windows with Microsoft. On May 30, 2012, HP revived an old slide dating back to June 25, 2010 from Project Kinetic, where HP-UX and other HP [OpenVMS and NonStop] operating systems will remain under Itanium, but with a twist: socket-level compatibility between Itanium and x86; a new UNIX will run under both Itanium and x86; driving mid-range features into Intel, Linux, and Windows.

The HP-UX, OpenVMS, and NonStop operating systems look dead because of their dependency on the doomed Itanium, whose architecture seems to have a trajectory to be moved to x86 while the OS's will have their features given to other operating systems. The movement to Solaris might be too late, unless HP decides to fix it's technology gap by partnering with an OpenSolaris distribution, like SGI did (see next section.) HP really needs something like Solaris Branded Zones, to encapsulate all 3 OS's.

SGI Update: OpenSolaris???
This is a most unusual update. In 1982, SGI was founded, selling UNIX IRIS Workstations using Mototola 68000 processors. Their OS eventually became AT&T System V - branded as IRIX. In 1986, the MIPS R2000 processor was released and incorporated into SGI workstations. In 1991, SGI went 64 bit with MIPS R4000 processor. SGI abandoned MIPS and moved to Intel Itanium, with their first Itanium workstation in 2001. In 2006, SGI abandoned Itanium for Intel x86, stopped developing IRIX. Rackable purchased SGI in 2009, renaming the entire company back to SGI. One version of the fall of SGI was recorded here.

Why go through all this effort, to remember Super Computer and Graphics Workstation creator SGI? It seems SGI is started to investigate UNIX again. SGI is using Nexenta for their SAN solution. Nexenta is based upon Illumos, formerly based upon OpenSolaris, which is the basis for Oracle's UNIX - Solaris 11. SGI embraces Solaris x86, for a portion of their solution, as HP considered in Project Redwood.
Dell Update: ARM???
The only thing stranger than fiction is reality. Dell would normally never appear in an article like this, but as other vendors are exiting the non-Intel x86 CISC marketplaces, Dell is about the only systems vendor who seems to be expanding out of the Intel x86 CISC market!


Now, May 29, 2012 - Dell announces a RISC machine, based upon the ARM processor! Project Copper was bundled under Dell's Enterprise web site tree, which is an indication where they are interested in pushing this new product. Will Dell learn from mistakes by IBM and HP, or corrections by SGI - by bundling a Market Leading UNIX... in the form of an OracleSolaris variant based upon Illumos?

Does an enterprise or manged service grade OS exist for ARM?

In June 2009, a release of OpenSolaris for ARM hit the wild. An example of the OpenSolaris booting on ARM was blogged. October 2009 the web page was created for the release of OpenSolaris for ARM - bringing the leading UNIX to the ARM processor family. Doug Scott mentioned he was reviving a port of OpenSolaris to ARM in October 2011 for ZFS on an ARM based SheevaPlug. In October 2011, ARM announces V8 processor release, migrating ARM from 32bit to 64bit architecture - which is where the OpenSolaris variants have all moved over to. Dell has an excellent opportunity.

Apple Update:Intel and ARM
This is, perhaps, one of the most interesting computer companies in history. Starting with 8 bit 6502 processors, they move to the Motorola 68000 CISC for their high-end publishing workstation, which they called the Macintosh. After kicking out the CEO & founder, Steve Jobs, Jobs started NeXT computer, based on Motorola 68000 processors and a UNIX core.

NeXT migrated their UNIX OS to Intel and went from being a workstation vendor to an OS vendor. Apple desperately needed a modern OS and almost went out of business. Apple purchased NeXT (getting the former CEO Steve Jobs back.) The combined company produced a UNIX based desktop with an OS called MacOS X (Macintosh Operating System 10 - based upon a NeXT Step UNIX OS core) placed on top of a PowerPC chip (designed by Apple, IBM, Motorola consortium - called AIM alliance.) Apple almost merged with Sun several times, collaborating on OpenSTEP (an open-sourced NeXT OS) during various aspects of this history. Soon, Apple created the iMac and the company started to turn around.






Most recently, Apple went through another migration - moving MacOS X back to it's NeXT Intel code base. Apple started to regain profitability and then they invested in a new set of consumer products. First, was the iPod, then the iPhone, then the iPad. Many of these new devices were based upon the ARM RISC processor, based upon MacOSX, but it was branded iOS. At this point, Apple exploded, becoming the number client vendor on the market, growing to such an extent that they could buy Intel with the spare cash they had on hand. Apple did the nearly impossible: created a new RISC based UNIX ecosystem based upon nothing.

Oracle/Sun: SPARC & Solaris Update
Early on, SUN built their platforms on Motorola 68000 family, as did most workstation vendors. They experimented with x86 for a short while, discontinued them.Solaris 9 was released on Intel, where Intel based UNIX vendors like NCR started migrating to Solaris from their SVR4 platforms like MP-RAS. Solaris 10 was released only on SPARC, Solaris was open-sourced as OpenSolaris (for both Intel and SPARC), and Solaris 11 was released on Intel and SPARC after Oracle purchased Sun. Interestingly, Solaris was being ported to PowerPC for a short period of time, with designers working on a OpenSTEP interface, during a time when Apple was not doing so well. Various Solaris variants, based upon the OpenSolaris project have hit the marketplace, with more distributions being released regularly.

From Sun's early history, Sun had traditionally been a 32 bit UNIX workstation vendor, migrated to a 64 bit UNIX workstations, moved from desktop UNIX workstations to UNIX servers, created the ultra-thin SunRay client to replace UNIX desktop workstations based upon 32 bit MicroSPARC, and surprisingly migrated their SunRay platform from MicroSPARC to ARM. Various releases of OpenSolaris had briefly touched ARM, but Solaris had primarily remained focused on SPARC and Intel with the SunRay's being a firmware based system.


As variants of RISC and the one EPIC processor have been found to be losing mind share, there have been two major exceptions: SPARC and ARM. Oracle continues to make thin-clients based upon ARM, with no roadmap. Oracle committed to a 5 year plan on SPARC, which has been executed either on-time or early for multiple processors. The SPARC T4 brought fast single-threaded platform with octal cores in 2011. A few months away, the SPARC T5 processor will bring 16 cores (again) to the SPARC family from Oracle, with features including compression and Oracle number processing in hardware.


Fujitsu: SPARC64 Update
Fujitsu is another interesting company, in this article. They did not organically grow into the UNIX movement from Motorola 68000 processors, like most other industry players - Fujitsu co-developed with Sun into the RISC UNIX market.
SPARC was developed by Sun Microsystems in 1986. Fujitsu fabricated the SPARC 86900 developed by Sun Microsystems, the first SPARC V7 architecture. SPARC International was founded in 1989, standardizing the 32 bit SPARC V8 multi-vendor architecture, creating the first non-proprietary RISC mainstream platforms. Andrew Heller, head of the RS6000 POWER based UNIX workstation group, left IBM and founded a new company in 1990, HAL Computer Systems, to develop a SPARC processor. In 1991, Fujitsu donated significant funding for a 44% stake, in return to use SPARC chips for their own systems. In 1992, the SPARClite was produced by Fujitsu. In 1993, Fujitsu purchased the rest of HAL, making Fujitsu the sole driver behind SPARC systems. The 64 bit SPARC V9 architecture was published in 1994 and Fujitsu shipped their first system in 1995. Fujitsu actually beat Sun to market with the first 64 bit SPARC processor.

While other CPU architectures were proprietary, with various corporations suing one another (i.e. Intel suing AMD) - SPARC brought a level of openness to the industry where vendors could cooperate (and occasionally bailed each other out, spreading the risk, while sharing the rewards from the UNIX market.) During a time when Sun's SPARC development pipeline ran dry, Fujitsu provided SPARC64 CPU's for Sun & Fujitsu high-end platforms. Sun purchased a third-party SPARC development house Afara Websystems, produced the T line of SPARC processors, and jointly sold the SPARC T line with Fujitsu. Solaris is standard on all of these platforms.


Fujitsu continues to push ahead with SPARC on their own platforms, holding the fastest computer in the world for over a year. What makes this a special SPARC is that Solaris is not at it's core - rather Linux is. It seems rather amazing that Linux departed from Intel Itanium, in order to become the OS of choice for the fastest computer in the world, on a Fujitsu SPARC platform.
In Conclusion
IBM POWER is barely breathing, with their latest road mapped CPU being so late that POWER is almost irrelevant, placing tremendous pressure on AIX. Intel Itanium vendors have been abandoning EPIC family for a half-decade with the final vendor closing it's shop. HP-UX is bound to Intel's EPIC Itanium, which is basically dead, with HP announcing development of an unknown new UNIX OS (hopefully, a Solaris fork based Illumos distribution.) Dell is releasing their first RISC platform, without an enterprise UNIX OS, hopefully they will investigate a Solaris fork Illumos distribution. SGI, who abandoned Intel's EPIC Itanum and their UNIX, is partnering with Solaris fork Illumos based distribution on Intel x86.

Oracle has been executing on SPARC, scoring highest performing industry benchmarks. Fujitsu continues to execute on SPARC, holding highest performing super-computer benchmarks. At this point, there is great opportunity for Solaris forked Illumos distribution - if they can get their act together to support SVR4 industry standards.


The UltraSPARC family of processors could be a bridge for Illumos developers to offer Fujitsu SPARC64 support on the fastest computer in the world. OpenIndiana may be closest to being able to offer such, not to mention get paid for older system support via resellers and new system support from Fujitsu (where Oracle shows little interesting in making Solaris run today.)
ARM offer great opportunities to extend Solaris family of architectures on the server, especially for Dell, who needs an enterprise OS. Of course, HP needs a new enterprise OS under the Intel platform.

If Illumos developers fail to understand how pivotal this point in time could be - this could be the end of an era and they would only have themselves to blame for their short-sightedness in not executing on the OpenSolaris source code tree during a very short time period where they can shine the brightest.