Solaris and Windows NT: The odd couple gets cozy
Mixed environments force Sun and Microsoft to make a valiant effort at compatibility
January 1999
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Solaris and Windows NT: The odd couple gets cozyMixed environments force Sun and Microsoft to make a valiant effort at compatibility
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January 1999
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Recent moves by Sun and Microsoft to make Solaris and Windows NT work together more smoothly in the enterprise aren't an indication that the two companies have suddenly decided to make friends. Nonetheless, these compatibility maneuvers should make things easier for IT types tasked with handling mixed NT-Solaris environments. Both Sun and Microsoft have listened to the market and understand that the mixed environment is going to be around for a long time to come. And they both intend to capitalize on it. (3,000 words)
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n November, both Sun and Microsoft announced projects to make Unix and Windows NT
interoperate more smoothly. The companies are attempting to capitalize on
IT environments that have remained heterogeneous despite Unix and Windows NT
campaigns to dominate the enterprise. Sun announced Project Cascade, which allows a
Solaris server to act as a domain server for Windows NT and will appear
as part of Sun's Solaris Easy Access Server in early 1999. Microsoft announced
its Windows NT Services for Unix Add-On Pack (SFU) to provide
NFS, Unix utilities, and other Unix-related features for NT. The pack
provides NT servers with file access, common scripting, remote
administration (via telnet), and one-way password synchronization with Unix
systems.
Both moves came surrounded by clouds of corporate rhetoric about the importance of interoperability in the enterprise. Whatever their motives, it's clear that IT environments will remain mixed for the foreseeable future.
"Today Microsoft is delivering on a promise we made to customers just a few months ago," says Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's director of Windows, who added that Microsoft's objective is "to provide a tool that helps simplify interoperability between Windows NT-based workstations and servers with a preexisting Unix installed base."
This new move toward interoperability is considerably different from previous unimpressive efforts, such as Microsoft's "POSIX compliance" and Sun's software emulators running Windows programs under Solaris. The new strategies represent serious efforts to actually make Solaris and Windows compatible. It's not a simple matter of acknowledging the other's presence on, say, the desktop, and assuming the servers will remain uniform, since this is simply not the case.
"I think Sun and Microsoft have very carefully studied what's going on in the department," says Jean Bozman, a software analyst who follows operating systems for International Data Corp. (IDC) out of the company's Mountain View, CA, office. "Sun has paid a lot of attention to what's going on in the workgroup and hasn't given up on the idea of selling workgroup servers."
IDC's numbers show that enterprises are becoming mixed as NT grows. "NT is selling a lot more volume than all types of Unix combined," says Bozman. However, the IDC numbers show the mixing isn't uniform. Unix OS revenues for 1997 were $2.5 billion versus $1.9 billion for NT.
In 1997, companies paid about $24 billion to purchase hardware to support Unix systems but only about $6 billion for hardware to run Windows NT, Bozman added.
According to IDC's research, NT is making its biggest inroads in what the research firm calls the "entry server space" -- servers priced below $100,000 -- but is not strong in the midrange. However, NT is still growing rapidly, and Microsoft is trying to expand upward into and beyond midrange servers to narrow the gap with Unix. Indeed, the gap will probably grow tighter as Windows NT 2000 and Intel's 64-bit Merced chip arrive between now and 2000; but after delivery it will take at least another year before they establish themselves.
Sun and Microsoft aren't the only ones working on interoperability. Third parties offering interoperability software include specialists like Mortice Kern Systems (MKS), which offers a number of Unix utilities in NT versions; Intergraph, which has DiskShare, a version of NFS for NT; and Hewlett-Packard, which has an NT version of OpenView system management software.
Sun's perspective
"Right from the beginning Sun was founded on open protocols,"
says Tom Goguen, senior product line manager for Solaris software at Sun. "We've
been dealing with third parties and proprietary protocols for years as
well. As a midtier enterprise server and workstation vendor we had to.
There's a long list of products from Sun that support [IBM's mainframe protocol] SNA, for example. Microsoft's networking standards may not dominate the
enterprise, but they do dominate the desktop and we need to find a way to
interoperate with those machines."
For all that philosophy, Windows NT interoperability with Microsoft isn't necessarily an idea Sun embraced joyfully.
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road internally to making what are seen as concessions to Microsoft...Sun would rather that NT would just go away. |
"It has been a long, hard road internally to get buy-in to making what are seen as concessions to Microsoft," says Tom Henkel, a senior analyst at Gartner Group. "Philosophically Sun would rather that NT would just go away."
Practically, Sun has moved to meet NT's challenge in a few key ways. Aside from interoperability, Sun has copied the features that give NT an advantage, most notably ease of installation and management. Sun is also ready to offer Solaris on Intel's new family of 64-bit microprocessors when Merced appears. All three approaches will make life easier for IT specialists in mixed environments.
Solaris Easy Access Server is Sun's name for this new bundle of user-friendly enhancements.
"Easy Access Server is a collection of features and previously independent products targeted at workgroup and desktop computing environments," says John Fanelli, product line manager for Solaris. "It includes SunLink PC which provides file and print service to any type of client: Windows, Macintosh, or OS/2. We provide NetWare, LAN Manager, and AppleTalk protocols natively on Solaris. This allows clients to do file and print serving from Solaris Server without additional software. There is nothing to add to the system and nothing to do differently. Solaris can integrate seamlessly with clients and provide reliable and scalable file storage."
Cascade is based on AT&T's Advanced Server for Unix, which a number of Unix vendors have already licensed to provide Unix-NT operability. What Cascade will add to the mix is transparent support for native Solaris services, such as file, print, authentication, and directory in NT-Solaris networks. In addition, Fanelli says, it will allow users to interact with NT servers on a peer-to-peer basis, or even use NT clients without an NT workstation.
"Combine that with SunLink PC and we feel we have built a better NT server," Fanelli says.
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Cascade will allow users to replace multiple NT servers with fewer, more powerful, Solaris servers. |
In fact, according to Goguen, Cascade lets system administrators use NT tools to manage their NT environment. "It generates the same error codes [as NT does]," he says. "You can even edit the registry using the Regedit tool. Usermanager on your NT workstation can be used to add users to the environment and if the primary domain controller happens to be Cascade you're none the wiser."
Sun is hoping that Cascade will allow users to replace NT servers with fewer, more powerful, Solaris servers. NT typically falls behind Solaris and other Unix flavors in scalability, reliability, and the capacity to handle multiple domains on the same server. As a result, NT enterprises tend to employ multiple servers in place of one Solaris server.
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Sun and the cheap server
However, the most likely use for Cascade and similar technologies isn't to
eliminate NT servers, but rather to let them operate in a mixed environment
with Sun servers. One of the driving forces for heterogeneous
networks now is the proliferation of cheap servers. Everyone from
Compaq to the white-box (unbranded) outfits are offering entry level
servers in the $2,500 to $3,500 price range. Typically these servers have
6- to 9-gigabyte hard drives, a Pentium II processor running at 300 megahertz or so, and
32 megabytes of RAM. They aren't fast and fancy, but they meet a
need for departmental servers or dedicated servers for e-mail, Lotus Notes,
and such. They're also almost exclusively NT boxes. Although Sun's
low-cost line of Enterprise SPARC servers, such as the 250 and 450, have
been successful, they're still priced too high to make them attractive
as cheap servers.
In theory, companies could replace several of these NT servers with one or more Solaris servers. Technically this is an attractive solution and one that would reduce administration costs.
"We're seeing an interesting trend here," Goguen says. "As IT management becomes more centralized and focused on delivery of services like e-mail and Lotus Notes, as companies start to recognize the economies of scale in, say, pulling Lotus Notes up to the corporate level, they start to need machines that are larger and able to run more applications."
But for now the appeal of cheap, ad-hoc, dedicated servers is strong. Several factors combine to bolster this appeal: ease of purchasing because cheap servers often come in below the thresholds for line-item budget approval; level of control because they're usually housed entirely under the department rather than MIS; and their relative simplicity of setup and administration compared to multiservice departmental servers. None of these, except perhaps the last (which is debatable), is really a technical advantage. The advantages are organizational and political, but significant nonetheless.
Flies in the ointment
Cascade's biggest problem for the time being is that it's late -- and not only in
shipping.
"What Sun has done is reasonable, they just waited way too long to do it," says Gartner Group's Henkel. "The Advanced Server for Unix software has been around for some time now," Henkel points out, noting that the software has been licensed for a number of other versions of Unix. "[AT&T] has done this deal so many times Sun could have used a drive-up window."
Another problem with Cascade is that it's based on AT&T's Advanced Server for Unix, and AT&T won't be offering a version of the product for Windows 2000. Under the terms of the Microsoft/AT&T settlement reached last summer, AT&T has agreed not to pursue an NT 5.0 port of Advanced Server for Unix.
"This means that the software Sun incorporated into Solaris has for all intents and purposes a useful life of NT 4.0," Henkel says. "So the issue here is that Sun has to find another source [for NT interoperability] -- either another product or they need to find sources for the pieces that aren't supplied, things like Active Directory [Microsoft's improved directory services for Windows 2000]. Either way, that implies some disruption."
How much impact this will have on Solaris-NT interoperability is a different question. Sun's Fanelli points out that Active Directory is an all-or-nothing proposition. If you want to use Active Directory and its services, you have to convert all your systems, servers and desktops, to Windows 2000. "Unless there's a complete swap out people will continue to use the domain controller model," Fanelli says.
A total migration would be unlikely if Windows 2000 is the disappointment many analysts are expecting.
Meanwhile, Sun has announced support for Active Directory in one form or another, although the specifics are still unclear. One possibility would be to write its own set of hooks to connect Active Directory to the services already in Solaris, which Fanelli claims would be straightforward. The underpinnings of Active Directory are DNS and LDAP protocols, he points out. And Solaris supports those today in standard format.
Sun is in a better position to utilize Active Directory than most AT&T licensees, who may face difficulties without a version of Advanced Server for Unix for Windows 2000. Goguen points out that Sun didn't just incorporate Advanced Server for Unix into Cascade, it has been extensively reworking the product, and is thus better prepared to engineer it for Active Directory.
"We'll be leveraging special threading technologies and so forth to optimize it for the Solaris platform. We will be including things like Full Moon [Sun's clustering technology] in phase two. We are owning the product and technology, not just OEMing it."
Sun is meeting the ease-of-use issue head on. Solaris 7 includes InstallShield, an installation program familiar to all users of Windows products. The choice of InstallShield was not accidental. It fits in with what Goguen calls "NT familiarity," which is one of the ways Sun is making interoperability real.
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for "NT familiarity," which is one of the ways Sun is making interoperability real. |
"On the surface, NT administration looks really easy," he says. "When you dive into it, it's fairly complex and you have to know who the audience is and who you're talking with. At the level of day-to-day administration (adding and dropping users and such) NT has a reputation for being very easy to use. Serious system administrators tend to have quite a different view, of course, but most system administration involves the kind of scut work where NT shines."
This is where NT familiarity comes in. Letting low-level employees do basic administrative chores in a Windows-like way is not only easier on them, it also takes a load off higher level administrators.
"There is a desire by companies to move some administration chores out to the people impacted by the administrative changes," Goguen says. "If you have a new hire, why not just have the department secretary access a wizard and create the new user account? These are things you can do to make life easier and reduce the cost of ownership."
InstallShield is being rewritten in Java, which is used in a number of other places to make Solaris 7 easier to manage.
Microsoft's challenge
Microsoft's major effort at interoperability is the Windows NT Services for
Unix Add-On Pack, which was announced in November. It bundles a number of
interoperability products from Intergraph, Mortice Kern Systems (MKS), and
others. The Network File System (NFS) came from Intergraph. MKS
contributed its version of the Korn shell and a package of Unix utilities
for NT. In addition, Microsoft has established a Web site for NT customers
who are integrating NT Workstation into their Unix environments.
This is a rather un-Microsoft approach. Jeff Price, Microsoft's lead product manager for Windows NT Server, says that "Microsoft has probably put more components into its operating system for interoperability with other operating systems than any other vendor," and points to interoperability services, such as those for NetWare in NT. Still, traditionally Microsoft has maintained that it can supply a complete enterprise solution and has promoted that notion with things like 1997's Scalability Day event. According to Microsoft, you could run the entire enterprise on Windows products and avoid interoperability altogether.
In 1998, Microsoft has become much more realistic. Like Sun, Microsoft found itself losing sales because it couldn't interoperate smoothly with Unix systems like Solaris. In February of last year, Microsoft started talking about interoperability seriously on its Web site. It put up a document describing approaches to letting NT work in a Unix environment. Comparing that February document to Microsoft's approach in November is illustrative. In February, Microsoft was talking in terms of third-party products almost exclusively. It mentioned NT's built-in interoperability features, such as support for TCP/IP and telnet, but it concentrated on products from companies like Intergraph and MKS.
The Windows NT Services for Unix Add-On Pack (SFU) announced in November is still based on third-party products, but now Microsoft is owning the solution by offering a comprehensive, Microsoft-supported package containing these products.
Meanwhile, of course, Microsoft has mounted a major effort to make Windows 2000 much more scalable, reliable, and focused than Windows NT 4.0.
"On a broad level for Windows 2000 Server we're trying to raise the bar on things like reliability, scalability, and interoperability," Price says. "We're looking at the major usage scenarios that customers encounter when they employ our servers." That includes things like better file and printer sharing and remote access for networking.
Windows 2000 faces major challenges. One of them is the sheer amount of new code. Windows NT 4.0 runs roughly 10 million lines of code. The numbers normally quoted for Windows 2000 are between 30 and 40 million lines of code. That means three-quarters of the operating system is going to be, in effect, new and susceptible to bugs.
To its credit, Microsoft has changed its schedule several times in an effort to get as many of the bugs out as possible, and it says it still has at least one more beta version to go before it releases the final version of Microsoft Windows 2000, with which it intends to set a new standard for bug-free code.
For the time being, however, Microsoft has to face up to living with Unix in heterogeneous environments. How long will different operating systems have to coexist? "Probably forever," says Goguen. "It's just a fact of life."
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About the author
Rick Cook is based in Phoenix, AZ, and divides his time
between writing science fiction fantasy novels ("full of bad computer
jokes") and writing about high technology.
Reach Rick at rick.cook@sunworld.com.
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