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IBM

IBM Kills project Monterey 139

Posted by HeUnique from the very-surprising? dept.
I just got this news - IBM is killing project Monterey. Full story can be found on this page at ZDNET (Smart Partner). This is a bit surprising (if I may call it like this).
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IBM Kills project Monterey More

IBM Kills project Monterey

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  • I asked no other thing (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I asked no other thing,
    No other was denied.
    I offered Being for it;
    The mighty merchant smiled.

    Brazil? He twirled a button,
    Without a glance my way:
    'But, madam, is thre nothing else
    That we can show today?

    -----------------------
    Anonymous Emily Dickinson LIVES!

  • Go ZDNet marketing team! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    First ZDNet has their writers make up FUD (that guy whatever his name was writing about Bugtraq's vulnerabilities counts for Linux and NT) to get impressions.

    Now they're paying Slashdot to write up an article that has so little information that you're forced to click through to ZDNet!

  • Re:Uh why did caldera buy SCO? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    &gt the Unix (TM) brand name

    Nope. That's owned by X/Open aka "The Open Group" [unix-systems.org]

    Caldera does get the source to Unixware & SCO Unix, I think.

    1. The first rule of project Monterey is, do not talk about project Monterey.

    2. The second rule of project Monterey is, do not talk about project Monterey.

    The third rule is that you will use Project Monterey on your first night.

    But seriously, Project Monterey was IBM's attempt to corner the cheese market.

  • Re:READ THE FREAKING ARTICLE (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Nothing in the FREAKING ARTICLE described exactly what Monterey was. Thanks to the guy you just flamed, I now know. Good job.
  • hm
    anyways, its going to really piss off VERITAS
  • I don't think so. HeUnique was an article poster about a year ago, and then disappeared for a while. I have no idea why (moved onto other things, I guess), but it's kind of nice to see him back.

    Bill - aka taniwha
    --

  • Their new Orign 3000 server line uses a cc:NUMA architecure. They hope to run Linux on these someday, but Intel has been jerking them around with Itanium delays.

    Actually in all likelihood Linux already runs on O3k. Certainly it does already run on O2k. Forget Itanium, these machines are available today with MIPS CPUs, which are arguably better than anything Intel's going to produce anyway.

  • You are correct.

    Tru64 was Digital Unix was OSF/1. Ultrix for VAX and MIPS was also BSD based.

    As I recall, DEC wanted to have input into the AT&T/Sun Unix project but AT&T was pretty eager to regain some control of Unix now that its anti-trust was settled and rejected outside input (Or so the story goes at DEC, I was working for DEC at the time).

    DEC and HP were very small companies compared to AT&T, heck HP was smaller than DEC back then, so you can imagine that this made them nervous.

    The OSF project initially planned to use Ultrix as its base for the OSF 1 standard but then giant IBM joined up and OSF switched to AIX.

    I remember everyone saying 'AIX, what the heck is AIX?'

    There were some calls for AT&T to just join OSF and solve the problem but that never happened.

    In the end no unified Unix emerged from either camp and DEC produced OSF/1 based on BSD and MACH 2.5.

    Sun switched from the BSD based SunOS to Solaris, IBM continued to develop AIX and HP went with HP-UX.

    AT&T did nothing of note as a developer but they bought a TON of VAX Ultrix machines helping make DEC the largest Unix vendor in the world at that time (go figure).

    NOTE: I was a young DECie at the time so feel free to take my comments with a grain of salt.
    Heck, your reading this on Slashdot, you should do that regardless.

  • It's great reading all the armchair analysts here on Slashdot.

    SCO is not Monterey. Monterey is not SCO. Caldera purchased the server division and the professional services division. In all of this, Monterey was but a tile in the SCO mosaic. A small one at that.

    Exactly how Caldera is being dragged into this announcement is beyond me. It's like saying Red Hat is clueless because LinuxCare had to lay people off.
  • Um, IBM is a Caldera business partner. They didn't lose anything when the merger was announced. IBM and Caldera actually work closely together.

    The Monterey decision must not have been linked to the SCO/Caldera merger. There must have been other criteria behind the decision.
  • Caldera is to Red Hat as Corel was to Microsoft - a perrenial loser trying to get a leg up on the leader by buying a once-was-could-beena-contender.

    i guess the same could be said about compaq vs sun.

    --
    And Justice for None [geocities.com]

  • montery didn't fail it was the project name. They rebranded it AIX/L so says I who just went to the IBM e-commerce conference.

    Vermifax
  • Anyone else think the AIX/L logo is silly. For those who haven't seen it it is the letters aix in blue with a blue curve over the top leading towards the L.

    Vermifax
  • They are rebranding the AIX kernel (it's Aix L with a blue swoosh over it) It will be system call compatable with linux.(Read very little to no rewritting of code) I expect there will be hickups hence the "little"

    Vermifax
  • And they are making AIX system call compatable with linux. I highly doubt the will open up any AIX kernel code.

    Vermifax
  • It costs a lot of money to develop monterey, or AIX, or any operating system. By embracing Linux, they can lay all their pampered OS developers off. Not to worry too much about them, though, because the demand for competent (and I would say that AIX/Monterey has some very competent programmers) is very high.
  • Well, I'd say you're probably right about commercial Unicies getting folded into Linux. It's simple economics.

    Neither SGI nor IBM make money off their Unicies, the make money off the harware the Unicies run on. So why not bootstrap Linux to the point where you can replace Irix and AIX with an OS other people will contribute to maintaining?

    Steven E. Ehrbar
  • OSF's stated purpose was to unify Unix against Solaris/SysV. The reality was to pay lip service to unification and protect AIX, HP-UX and Digital Unix against Sun and AT&T. Unix unification never happened of course, but it's only now with Linux forcing a de facto Unix standard that the Unix family is finally coming together.

    Steven
  • Monterey is dead. The press releases are just trying to put the best face possible on the situation. Monterey's best bits are simply being incorporated into the next generation of AIX.

    Why? Because with the tidal wave of Linux, especially 64-bit Linux, there was no real point in developing another 64-bit Unix.

    It's that simple.

    Steven
  • How much did Caldera's buy have to do with it?

    Next to nothing. This has been coming together for some time.

    Steven
  • Glad I got the attention of an OpenServer expert of sorts...

    The problem I see is that if creating a SCO System Services Emulation Layer was easy, SCO themselves would have done it for UnixWare. It can't be any easier on Linux, and frankly, I can't expect Caldera to care that much about OpenServer customers except to milk them for whatever possible.

    I guess I'm skeptical about SCO's great "VAR Channel". As far as I can tell, it's a bunch of vertical market apps that are in legacy mode to the extent that the vendors can't/won't port them to anything up-to-date. Which is fine as a 'legacy' revenue channel, but totally a non-issue for the further expansion of Linux or Unixware. What Caldera got in UnixWare is an underpromoted, full-fledged OS which they can push to Unix-friendly x86-friendly Linux shops.
    --
  • IBM puts up with, and makes an enormous amount of money of Windows NT/2000 in services. Much more then they make off of Linux right now.

    All in all, they'd rather have RedHat get their small cut rather than Microsoft, just as long as they get to move their hardware and services. Plus Linux+Netfinity gets them at a portion of Sun's market that AIX+RS/6000 doesn't.
    --
  • It really is true, isn't it? That *BSD is the real operating system and that Linux is just for the anyone but microsoft crowd, eh?

    Really, why should anyone be rooting the demise of an operating system? It could have been promising, being that it was based on such (finer than Linux) other operating systems. It's nt like you said "too bad, we could have learned a lot afrom them" but "whoop, whoop, whoop".

    Even in Linus' interview where he freely admits that linux has faults, even when compared to Windows xxxx. If you want linux to thrive you need to work on it, not just gloat about another OS's shortcomings.
  • How do you figure that? Montery was an experiment. It failed. AIX, (unrelated) like Solaris, currently scales far and above anything that Linux can hope to achieve.

    You need to understand. For linux to have a chance (of corporate acceptance, since that's what you seem to be insinuating here) in the long term, it needs (and that means the developers, distributors and users) to realize that Unix is on it's side. A "win" for Linux by taking something that AIX or SCO had means nothing. You need to stop being concerned with other Unixes and go after the big cheese that you *REALLY* want to target. Windows. Because no matter how you stack things, ANY other unix beats the pant's off of Linux, depending on the situation...
  • It ran beautifully in San Jose at LWCE

  • Re:OSF (Score:1)

    by fcw ( 17221 )
    I heard cynical engineers within HP at the time refer to it as the 'Open Mouth Foundation'.
  • Not that it matters this long after the discussion started, but OS/390 is actually an operating system that runs on the S/390 mainframe. Linux is another operating system that also runs on the S/390 mainframe.

    Just doing my pedantic part.

    --
    Index of Alternative Operating Systems

  • bug (Score:1)

    by cpeterso ( 19082 )

    #include

    int main(int argc, char *argv[])
    {
    printf("hello world\n");
    return 0;
    }

  • First ZDNet has their writers make up FUD (that guy whatever his name was writing about Bugtraq's vulnerabilities counts for Linux and NT) to get impressions.

    That was ABCNews.com, but thanks for playing.
  • (or was that 5L, as it said in the end of the artical)

    So, is IBM going to go all out open-source? I doubt they could get such a deep integration with linux as their talking about without either rewriting it, or GPLing their software. The artical wasn't very clear on their plans.
  • He understood it perfectly: it's great for frying chickens and electrocuting criminals. Where would the great state of Florida be without his contribution to the art of senseless destruction of human life?
  • I just got back from the IBM Tech Conference in Vegas... I wondered why they weren't giving away Monterey T-shirts this year.

    I guess the one I have from last year is now an official Collector's Item....

    Garg
  • IIRC, the i860 and i960 have done ok. Since they were RISC chips from Intel that weren't x86 compatible no one as far as I know used them as a main CPU. They were mainly used as co-processors or embedded cpus.

    Exactly. If you read the linked article, you'd find out that for a time Intel intended on marketing the i860 as a main CPU, and using it to take on the established RISC-Unix server/workstation market. However, after much hype, the final product performed quite poorly, and the chip had to tone its ambitions down to use as a lowly math co-processor.
  • Anyone remember Intel late unlamented 432? The things with Itanium sound awfully familiar...

    Or the i860 [realworldtech.com].

  • Anyone remember Intel late unlamented 432? The things with Itanium sound awfully familiar...
  • "OK, just what exactly is this talking about: specifically, are they going to, say, buy a copy of Red Hat, change some strings, add some apps, and call it "AIX RL"? Are they "rebranding" the Linux kernel? Are they calling their linux distro AIX RL? I'm confused here, but its been a long day. "
    Sorry but linux isn't quite ready to take over for AIX yet, for example it can't scale nearly as far (SMP wise). So IBM is going to try to at first emulate linux under AIX and then later merge the codebases to take the best features from both.
  • Hot Grits, Batman! A Fist Post that has actually been moded as 'Insightful'.

    I'm still waiting for one that's insightful and demonstrates that the poster has read the article.

  • Errr... i was way off... it was to port AIX to IA-64... oops...

    Mark Duell
    • Digital/Tru64 unix remains the only commercial unix that is largely based on the BSD code.

    Where did you get the idea that OSF-1 was based on BSD code?

    From what I remember, OSF-1 was based the Mach Microkernel with an old version of AIX (SysV derived, but older than the SysV that Sun/AT&T were pushing) providing the Unix elements.


    -Jordan Henderson

  • Yes, the later Alliant systems (FX2800) were also based off of this chip. They were extremely fast, but nearly imp[ossible to write good compilers for. The instruction pipeline had a push architecture, whereby you had to actually feed an instruction in to get one out. It was very hard to keep the pipeline fed and thus very hard to realize maximum performance IIRC. I thought that SGI may have also used them in some of the original Reality Engine graphics as the geometry processor, possibly because you could keep the pipe fed with matrice operations if you handcoded it right, but I'm really vague on that one....

  • You forgot to mention that they are more expensive, and don't exactly have the combined marketing channel of Dell, Compaq, IBM, Intel, and every single Linux distributer.

    Expensive, yes, but if I need that kind of scalability and performance now, then I probably won't be able to afford to wait until 2001 or thereabouts until the buggers are out. Then again, unfortunately for SGI, we're an all-Sun shop (for better or for worse), so we'll be dealing with the E10k's for quite a while yet.


    --
  • Which SCO holds a controlling interest in.

  • not quite (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    AIX RL will more importantly be source code and system call compatible with Linux. Any Linux software can then be compiled without any changes to run on AIX RL. From the applications programmer's perspective, writing software for AIX RL will be identical to writing software for Linux. No #ifdef's need apply. No porting required. From the applications programmer's perspective AIX RL is Linux. By making AIX look like Linux, IBM instantly gains for AIX a huge Linux applications base.

    As for using the Linux kernel, IBM will be using the Linux kernel from top to bottom across all major product lines. IBM views Linux as the key strategic operating systems technology for its future.

  • Linux wins again ... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ... and another one bites the dust.

    This is great news. If you read the article you can see that Linux and AIX are the cornerstones of the new IBM. The article says that it is IBM's intention to run Linux everywhere, from mainframes, to minis, to workstations, to PDAs. AIX RL 5.1 will be a version of AIX morphed with Linux.

    Good work, IBM.

  • Re:What is a 64-bit OS? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Going from a 32 bit OS to a 64bit OS means that all the address pointers in (mumble) million lines of C are converted from 4 byte (32 bit) to 8 byte (64 bit). Then you debug for around 2 lifetimes as indexing breaks all over. If you only have 32bit address capability, maximum addressable memory is 4GB (assuming byte addressability) which is a bit of a squeeze these days for Unix big iron so the whole pack of big Unix vendors are going over to 64bit, each in their own way. This is a horrible oversimplification, but if a processor such as Itanium has 64bit address/ALU registers (and this is what is usually meant by 64bit cpu, not bus width a la games consoles) you need to feed it 64bit address pointers. Some cpu architectures can adapt and use both 32/64, some just went 64 bit as a big bang conversion. With regard to Monterey, the desktop/small server has pretty much fallen to Linux in the Unix variant stakes and SCO have decided they have a better business elsewhere. IBM bought Sequent with it's 4-64 procs IA-32 Xeon Enterprise servers (incidentally a 32 bit CPU hacked to 36bits to extend the address space from a 32bit limit of 4GBytes to a 36bit limit of 64GBytes) From an IBM perspective, Monterey has succeeded. As noted in the article they will have a single source base OS that will compile to Power & Intel architectures + they are going for Linux compatibility as far as is sensible. IBM is using the technologies aquired from Sequent to build in NUMA capabilities, again in the article. With the best will in the world, a slick NUMA aware OS is not a minor variation to malloc and it doesn't appear that the Linux community are currently prepared to drop the plan and work on NUMA, 64 processor DSM (distributed shared memory systems) nor to tune Linux IO for multipath fibre IO that can sustain in excess of 3GBytes/second to disk, as Dynix can today. This is not a criticism, just a note that different priorities exist today. In 5 years, who knows. In the mean time, if/when AIX 5 pulls off Linux compatibility it may be binary compatibility for an IA64 server and source for a PowerPC. Seems to win all round for IBM. As for the name, IBM seems to believe that AIX is doing quite well in the market place, so deciding to call the PowerPC/IA64 Unix AIX 5 makes at least as much sense as throwing away all the pre-printed ball point pens and ordering a batch with Monterey (or something else on). Cheers, Crash
  • I beg to differ, sir..

    Monterey was a co-operative porject of IBM, SCO, and sequent..

    Now - all the monterey project goes to the next version of AIX..

    So where do you see the Monterey project alive?

  • I think you are wrong about WinNT 64 being "nowhere in sight." I saw it running in July at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. It may not be ready for release, but it looked like it was at least beta quality. They should have no problem getting it released by the time Itanium ships.

  • In other words, the operating system is a complete commodity and it's cost can be folded into "Services" as a whole. Linux invented this business model, Sun is running with it with Free Solaris, and after a deep breath, Microsoft will survive having it's OS division broken off.

    Unfortunately for Microsoft, their other big cash cow, MS Office, is also soon to become a commodity. It might take a few years, but Linux and the Gnome Foundation are looking to cut off Microsoft's air supply completely. A Free, cross-platform, component-based, office suite is soon going to be available, and Microsoft is going to suffer. The fact that Microsoft has become addicted to astronomical profit margins and a constant increase in their stock price will only exacerbate the problem. They can't let go of either Windows or MS Office (because it would affect their revenue too much in the short term), and yet they aren't going to be able to compete with capable free software products forever (especially at their current price structure).

    In the end it is going to be practically impossible to make money selling commodity software. But that's OK, software will still get written, it simply will be written by hardware or service based "solution providers."

  • i860 (Score:2)

    by ksheff ( 2406 )

    IIRC, the i860 and i960 have done ok. Since they were RISC chips from Intel that weren't x86 compatible no one as far as I know used them as a main CPU. They were mainly used as co-processors or embedded cpus. SGI had a high end graphics board that used 12 i860s for doing the 3D transformations. Whether they still use them or not, I don't know.

  • I didn't read the link until a while later. It's funny how the marketing hype for the i860 is so much like that for Itanium. Oh well..I hope they have better luck this time.

  • Possibly the editors are aiming for maximum bottom-feeder no-think-just-post reactions (more comments, more banner views, yes?). The title you gave your submission just didn't have that. "IBM Kills Monterey" seemingly does.

    --
    "Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"
  • WinNT64 isn't "nowhere in sight." It runs, albeit slowly and really flaky. Hopefully Linux runs better than it (no experience there) but with Itanium getting closer to shipping, the landscape is looking pretty bare for operating systems.
  • By killing Montery, IBM has dropped a huge bomb on Intel and it's Itanium. With WinNT 64 being nowhere in sight, and other pro UNIXs being quite far off, the death of Montery hits Intel really hard, since that means the only OS that will run on it in the near future will be Linux.

    Monterey died with the SCO sale, I suspect. There's been much hype, but I haven't read of anyone seeing a preview release. Oh well! I guess that's vaporware!

    Linux will run on Itanium, and 64 bit to boot. Though I bet with a bunch of bugs. For example, Alphalinux is just a mess on SMP EV6 systems. I've seen it crash horribly on 4 CPU ES40s while performing NFS ops; looks like some sort of cross CPU spin lock contention which leads to deadlock. Yuk. But I bet it'll be fine on single CPU Itanium systems. And Linux is ubiquitous, which even at hype Monterey lacked. Plus, I suspect that between 2.4 and 2.6 we'll get the enterprise features we expect from commercial UNIX running properly on Linux; I want: decent NFS support, a functional automounter, pervasive threading throughout common system libraries and applications, a display server which supports antialiasing (actually a better display model would help -- how about "display postscript"?), and a logical volume manager... that would help.

    You could probably look forward to NetBSD/OpenBSD porting to Itanium soon after release. And after that expect Sun to chime in with Solaris. But, like Solaris/Intel, I'm sure it will be a pale imitation. :-)
  • Here you go:

    http://www.ibm.com/servers/monterey/overview/ [ibm.com]

    The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.

  • Yup, that's true. The popular jab at the time was that OSF really stood for "Oppose Sun Forever."
    --
  • from project to project 'cause Big Blue really *enjoyed* canning projects!

    Hey, at least Chairman Lou killed our project in a keynote!

    InfoSage was pretty solid for the time, though definitely overpriced for the market...

    Your Working Boy,
  • SCO had a lot of VAR contacts. VAR is a big part of Caldera's strategy.

    Note that with all of the bad blood SCO had in the Linux community there is no way that SCO could push Linux to that channel. Caldera can. :-)

    Cheers,
    Ben
  • You mean SCO 'owns a controlling interest' in The Open Group? I'd be astonished if this were true - the Open Group is an industry consortium, and no single vendor would be allowed to 'own' it, let alone dominate it.

    The Open Group owns the Unix brandname, i.e. if you pass its conformance tests you get to call your product Unix.
  • By all means get pedantic, but get accurate as well :)

    * S/390 = System/390 = the hardware architecture for current mainframes

    * LPAR = hardware partitioning for S/390, can run multiple OSs within these partitions rather as with VM/390.

    * OS/390 = Operating System/390 = the OS formerly known as MVS, runs most mainframe sites. Interestingly, it has a complete Unix API built in (not a separate mode), albeit in EBCDIC not ASCII.

    * VM/390 = Virtual Machine/390 = the virtual machine hypervisor that can run many different OSs at once, including OS/390, CMS (single user OS, runs in a whole VM dedicated to one user, quite nice to use), and of coures Linux.

    OK, that's enough pedantry... I'm not a real mainframe person, I just used to run Unix on an Amdahl mainframe once.
  • I thought this was OSF/1 based? At one time DEC called it DEC OSF/1 I think. The earlier DEC Ultrix was BSD based, though.
  • > Digital/Tru64 unix remains the only commercial unix that is largely based on the BSD code.

    I'm guessing BSDi is also based on BSD too :)
  • Wouldn't this be a logical thing since SCO is now owned by Caldera? Why would caldera continue to fund the further development of another UNIX variant, along with IBM who is fully behind Linux now too? It would just be rather odd that two Linux centric companies would together develop another OS to compete with themselves...
  • That goes both ways too. Caldera apparently feels that UnixWare plus the Linuxy GNU/KDE/Gnome/XFree stuff will appeal to Linux users who may have grown out of the Linux kernel. (Clustering, lots of CPUs, etc.)

    This is a risky strategy because now it's unknown if Caldera is fully supportive of $49 Linux, or are they trying to upsell you to $Thousands UnixWare. Hopefully they'll cut the UnixWare price.

    Of course, when the inherited the VAR channel, they also inherited SCO UNIX (OpenServer). My understanding was that SCO wasn't having much luck getting the customer base off of OpenServer and onto UnixWare. Maybe Linux will be a better sell, but having a 'legacy' customer base can be a real pain in the ass. (Ask Compaq, who bought DEC for the services business, but ended up becoming DEC after finding that VMS and DEC Unix couldn't so easily be swept under the rug.)

    --
  • This is doubly a good thing for Linux.

    A) Its one less competitor, and it looks like IBM will be pushing Linux (and AIX) instead.

    B) Depending on how the implemetations of Trillian and the Linux on 64 bit AMD go, you may be able to very easily run code on either version of Linux, whereas Monterey would lock you into using Intel hardware.
  • IIRC, the i860 and i960 have done ok. Since they were RISC chips from Intel that weren't x86 compatible no one as far as I know used them as a main CPU.

    Not quite. Stardent, Oki, and Stratus all had equipment using the i860 as a CPU. They were actually pretty good, except for one thing that eventually killed them: they had a really weird (two-issue, IIRC) instruction pipeline that was hard to code for, and compilers generally weren't up to the task. If you could write code for them they performed rather well, but most people couldn't and hence got only mediocre performance out of them.

    As for the i960, it was actually pretty nice - much more elegant architecturally than any other Intel offering IMO. The i960CA was actually developed specifically for BiiN to use in large-scale multiprocessing, but of course that died and everyone forgot about it. C'est la vie... et c'est la mort. ;-)

    Using the i860 as a CPU always seemed a little odd to me, but the i960 - especially the C or J series - might have made a very good main processor.

  • No, it should really read: IBM kills Dynix. IBM owns Sequent (them of the Dynix OS) and has been selling it pretty agressively as an enterprise platform (and it is a good one too). Well, Sequent has always used x86 processors --Monterey was supposed to unite AIX and Dynix, breathing life into the Sequent line post-IA64.

    So basically they're killing Dynix (it was supposed to die) and substiting it with AIX RL (Linux). I.e. Linux is getting its first, official mainframe/micro line --yeah you can run it on RS/6000s, but you can also run plain AIX. In a coupla years you will *only* be able to run AIX RL on IA-64 Sequents...

    engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
  • Without an enterprise level OS (or at least one that traditional IT techs PERCIEVE

    Umm... HPUX.

    ---- ----

  • I wonder how much Caldera's purchase of SCO had to do with this..

    Remember, this was a joint venture with SCO.
  • umm.. it is actually good. Monterey was an effort to create a unified(sco, ibm,...) unix platform(like we need one more) that would run on most popular server platforms(IA-32, IA-64 and Power). Now that they have linux(that already runs on these platforms) this is not necessary and the resources devoted to creating something that users would have to pay big bucks for can be directed to something more useful(such as linux development). There would have been serious overlap with Project Monterey and linux anyway so why compete against a huge open source movement when you can join it.
  • The problem I saw at two sites with existing OpenServer Unix servers is that the path from OpenServer to UnixWare was very rough.

    The two are similar enough to let you get a false sense of confidence, but far enough apart that you could get into real trouble in the lower-level code or (my specialty) comms scripting.

    Think of it as working in a shop that supports both the old SunOS and Solaris. Sure, they're both Unix from Sun...

    Anyway, if Caldera is smart, they'll gin up a Linux that "emulates" OpenServer, then push that as the next logical step. Nice smooth progression, easy conversions, etc.

    Oh, and don't forget - SCO has a legitimate (more or less) training and certification program. Being able to say "I know SCO, SCO says so" may not be as lucrative as a Microsoft certificate, but it is something the Linux world doesn't appear to have ... yet.

    Meow
  • The goal of project monterey was to create a stable enterprise unix for an intel platform. This was accomplished in AIX for the IA-64 platform. I submitted this story a couple days ago as well

    2000-08-14 16:42:51 AIX 5L for IA-64 (articles,ibm) (rejected)

    but for some reason it got rejected...
  • Point well-made. However, if we want to get really pedantic, the system OS/390 is either an operating system or a platform, and VM is a meta-operating system (or operating sytem) that runs on system OS/390 and Linux runs under VM. :-) Gosh, these IBM folx are strange, but they do good stuff sometimes.
  • AIX 5L will run on IA-64. Read the article.


    +++

  • Secondly, OS/400 is far superior to Solaris

    The fact that Sun is destroying IBM in the unix market has little to do with technical issues - the Sparc architecture itself is far behind. Its marketing pure and simple. Sun has a coherent end-to-end marketing story - Solaris on Sun Sparc hardware, IBM doesn't - they're beholden to too many platforms.

  • The not-Sun and not-MS crowd (HP, IBM, SGI) have woken up and finally smelled the coffee - those who present a unified single solution, win.

    Expect each vendor in this group crowd to dump its proprietary unix. HP certainly will if it wants to revice its flagging unix-systems division - which in this quarter was only a fraction of HP's reported earnings. SGI pretty much already has adopted linux full-fledged (not sure if this, or SGI, even really matters), and IBM looks like they are on their way.

    They really don't have a choice - Sun is as much of a threat to these vendors now as MS, and McNealy is going to be as much as a cut-throat as Gates about killing off the competition (who I garner he never really cared for anyway).

    Fragmentation-for-features was only ever worthwhile when unix was being marketed strictly to brainy IT folks buying high-end equipment only. Now its entering the mainstream and marketing matters. The fragmented approach simply doesn't jive when you are trying to tell a coherent marketing story.

  • Digital's mistakes are legendary (mostly the continuous waffling other whether to support Vax or UNIX and not enough resources to do both), but it appears that Sun may be headed down that same road (Free Solaris for $99, use Linux at the low end, migrate to Solaris at the high end).

    When do this strategy emerge? Every indication is that Sun is backing Solaris on Sparc as their single unified strategy.

    As for Compaq, their only hope now is large corporate contracts. Dell has largely pushed them out of the direct/consumer market, and their recent stumbles have given consumers the impression that they are no longer a leader despite their size. As you know, the company has also had some extremely questionable financials in the last two years.

  • Take a look at Sun's market share and their stock price. They aren't too worried about linux just yet. In fact, its IBM who should be worried about Sun virtually locking up the midrange like Microsoft has the low end.
  • before Linux, we had a dozen Unix variants (and thus the need for portable software),

    No, before linux you had very few ISVs willing to even bother trying to get their products on any unix platform.

    This is a good thing.

  • IBM killed it for the reason that it was too expensive to develop, they were the only ppl to support it, and Linux was more cross compatible. However, i wouldn't be suprised if they created their own linux distro instead, that would be packaged with their stuff. Somehow I don't think IBM will put up with having to use 'other people's operating systems'.
  • You've missed my point completely, well done! When IBM comitted to Monterey Caldera wasn't in the picture, and IBM was only just starting to look at Linux. Now Caldera aren't going to be interested in continuing the project as they are a Linux company so IBM has lost it's partner. IBM are also heavily into Linux (including the Trillian project to port Linux to IA-64) so probably aren't much interested in it either.

  • only commercial BSD OS? tsk. (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18, 2000 @02:47PM (#844144)

    Whaaat? MacOS and NeXTStep before it were totally BSD...right from the beginning. BSD through and through.

    In fact...Steve Jobs, the great visionary, "Edison of our times", _INVENTED_ BSD...HE CAME UP WITH THE WHOLE IDEA!!! IT WAS HIS _GENIUS_!!!

    ...and you WinTel bozos STOLE IT! Just like you STOLE everything else from Apple!

    Curse you!

  • What they should do... (Score:3)

    by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Friday August 18, 2000 @06:59PM (#844145) Homepage Journal
    Merge the AIX and GNU toolchains; take the best of each. GPL the stuff that came from the AIX source. Then optimize the AIX kernel for all that super high-end hardware, and use Linux for the lower-end boxen. The result: one operating system, with a choice of two kernels, each optimized for different hardware.

    The reason it might not make sense to simply tune Linux up to the high end hardware is that Linux could end up like Solaris: a real performer on computers with many CPU's, but at the expense of having so much SMP overhead that it runs slow on computers with one or few processors. For Linux, which is currently a Microsoft-killer on commodity single-x86 boxen, this would be a very bad thing!
    --

  • It's a good thing (Score:3)

    by sarsipius ( 24297 ) on Friday August 18, 2000 @02:29PM (#844146)
    Project monterey was just a project to get AIX running on an intel architecture.
    This project was a success, so now they will be integrating AIX and Linux. The AIX libraries and so forth will be compatible with the linux libraries, etc. This will allow programs that were written for linux to compile on AIX with little or no modification. This is a great thing for linux, and shows that big blue is standing behind linux.

    Now, if we can just get them to support a few more distros....

  • Article should read: IBM kills Itanium. (Score:3)

    by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Friday August 18, 2000 @03:22PM (#844147)
    By killing Montery, IBM has dropped a huge bomb on Intel and it's Itanium. With WinNT 64 being nowhere in sight, and other pro UNIXs being quite far off, the death of Montery hits Intel really hard, since that means the only OS that will run on it in the near future will be Linux. Now, while Linux will probably handle the lower-midrange end of the market pretty well, Solaris it ain't. Without an enterprise level OS (or at least one that traditional IT techs PERCIEVE as enterprise level) to go along with it's enterprise level CPU, Intel is going to hit up against quite a barrier with it's already screwy Itanium project.

  • Re:Article should read: IBM kills Itanium. (Score:3)

    by ToLu the Happy Furby ( 63586 ) on Saturday August 19, 2000 @12:23AM (#844148)
    Not being up to snuff in SPECfp is a marketing problem. Considering the chip is being marketed to Database Admins and not Quake Players, it's not so much a real world problem. (Where the lack of cache would be.)

    The SPEC suite is heavily biased towards server/workstation apps. SPECint, for example, is moderately biased towards database benchmarking. Indeed, while SPECfp may have little to do with database speed, it also has nothing to do with Quake--it tests entirely double-precision floating point, while 3D engines tend to use exclusively single-precision floats. In any case, all the SPEC tests are known for testing cache hierarchy gruelingly.

    In short, SPEC scores are entirely relevant to a chip's database performance, as well as its web serving performance, and most certainly to its performance in scientific and workstation applications. These are the fields Intel is pushing for Itanium, and the fact that it will not outperform its desktop chips on the SPEC benchmarks means it will probably never be released. What SPEC is particularly not good at measuring is desktop application performance (unless you include compiling as a desktop PC activity); the only truly desktop-oriented benchmark in the entire suite is a speech-recognition test.

    Itanium's performance (or lack thereof) is indeed a huge real-world problem.

  • Re:Uh why did caldera buy SCO? (Score:3)

    by tylerh ( 137246 ) on Friday August 18, 2000 @02:46PM (#844149)

    The Unix (TM) brand name

    A nice, tree hugging logo [sco.com]

    Title for Tom Cruise's next movie: "MI3: The Santa Cruz Operation"

  • No. Caldera has no clue how to beat Red Hat (Score:3)

    by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Friday August 18, 2000 @04:10PM (#844150)
    Caldera is to Red Hat as Corel was to Microsoft - a perrenial loser trying to get a leg up on the leader by buying a once-was-could-beena-contender.

    It won't help Caldera

  • As predicted... (Score:4)

    by chuckw ( 15728 ) on Friday August 18, 2000 @02:54PM (#844151) Homepage Journal
    I was wondering when this would happen. We're just seeing the beginning of Linux displacing proprietary OS's. As a consultant friend of mine predicted 5 years ago, the commercial Unicies simply won't be able to keep up with the innovation and "heart and mind" support of a world wide effort.

    Note to Microsoft: We're stealing a page out of your playbook. The software doesn't have to be good to be successful, it just has to be popular. We're doing one better though, we're also making good software in a good way and we've got the support of the people you tried to ignore. The CIO's are the wrong people to be pandering to!

    Monterey was a good idea and it'll be even better when folded into Linux. Soon I predict that all of the best parts of all the commercial Unicies will be folded into Linux...
    --
    Quantum Linux Laboratories - Accelerating Business with Linux
    * Education
    * Integration
    * Support

  • Re:what is monterey? (Score:4)

    by sirinek ( 41507 ) on Friday August 18, 2000 @02:22PM (#844152) Homepage Journal
    Monterey is supposed to be the "unified" UNIX developed together by several of the vendors who fragmented it early on in the 90's.

    Slashdot has had a few stories about it, notably one here [slashdot.org]

    siri

  • Re:Article should read: IBM kills Itanium. (Score:4)

    by mrdisco99 ( 113602 ) on Friday August 18, 2000 @03:46PM (#844153)
    Actually, no...

    The new version of AIX announced will be available for IA-64. This essentially renders Monterey unnecessary.

    Check out IBM's fact sheet [ibm.com] on the new AIX. This has more relevant info than the ZDNet article.

    By the way, I submitted this link the other day, but it got rejected...

    +++

  • Description of Monterey (Score:4)

    by tylerh ( 137246 ) on Friday August 18, 2000 @02:27PM (#844154)
    Monterey [ibm.com] was a consortium [ibm.com] of IBM, SCO, NUMA-Q, and Intel to deliver an enterprise-grade unix for Itanium( aka, IA-64, Mercred).

    An interesting bit was the cc:NUMA architecture for high end clustering. I wonder what will become of it?

  • Uh why did caldera buy SCO? (Score:4)

    by evilned ( 146392 ) on Friday August 18, 2000 @02:19PM (#844155) Homepage
    Honestly, is there anything left of SCO worth Caldera shelling out the money it paid?

  • Monterey would have been negligable anyway... (Score:4)

    by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Friday August 18, 2000 @03:38PM (#844156)
    IBM can't kill Itanium because it was never going to really breathe any life into it - the potential market for Moneterey was small and getting smaller.

    Like it or not, a lot of people are lining up behind Itanium and Intel is still the unquestioned emperor of the microprocessor market. They'll do fine without Monterey.

  • Monterey is not dead (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18, 2000 @03:35PM (#844157)
    Monterey is very much alive. The only thing that is going on is that the RELEASE name is changing from Monterey/64 (on IA64) to AIX 5.0 (or AIX-L, with the "L" standing for the ability to run Linux IA64 binaries). SCO will probably ship "AIX 5" for IA64. It is NOT the case that IBM is going to be using the Linux kernel. One thing that was supposed to happen that might get dropped is support for UnixWare IA32 binaries on IA64.
  • No, article should read: IBM notices Itanium is dead.

    Heads up, folks: Itanium is never going to come out in volume. It's years late and horribly underperforming.

    The design was finished over two years ago, but it took Intel over a year to go from finished design to tapeout. This indicates that the original design ran into huge problems and required many many revisions when they tried to translate it to actual silicon. The total on-die cache of Itanium is paltry a 128kB, less even than the crippled cache on a Celeron; this indicates that the core logic of the chip took up much much more die space than they planned, and they only had enough room for a token cache. (As the chip is an in-order design and its primary functions involve high data throughput, it needs more low-latency cache than an out-of-order chip, not less.) As recently as 2 months ago Intel was claiming they'd be selling Itanium systems by now. That would mean volume production of 800 MHz and higher chips. At Linuxworld last week, only 1 of the demonstrated systems had chips running over 500 MHz. That means Intel is having some serious, serious problems with their fabbing--they can't even get a couple demonstration chips running at 800 MHz, much less volume production. Think about that for a second--Itanium is supposed to be Intel's new flagship server chip, yet they can't even give it as much on-die cache or even as high clock speeds as their slowest Celeron?? Talk about embarrassing.

    All these signs, plus Intel's ever-increasing delays on the chip, point to the fact that Itanium ran into design problems so serious that the project is in fact dead. Since they've built up so much hype behind it, though, Intel will keep announcing delays until they can finally claim that the reason they're not debuting Itanium in volume is because McKinley is just around the corner. (Expect a McKinley paper launch in 2H '01, with volume by the beginning of '02.) Indeed, some rather credible rumors eminating out of Intel now include that 1) Itanium is yielding so poorly that a relayout and critical path trim will be needed before it could possibly yield 800 MHz in volume; 2) the current versions are suffering from an errata in the power management circuitry which is limiting their clock speeds; and 3) Itanium is in fact yielding ok, but the extraordinarily complex compilers needed for EPIC are currently producing such slow code that Intel needs to pretend they can't make the chips to save face. Obviously all three aren't true, but the chance that one is is pretty high.

    Meanwhile, McKinley (which, not so coincidentally, has been designed almost entirely by HP) looks on target to hit its rather impressive performance objectives, if a little late. MS--whether by choice or necessity--has decided to wait for McKinley before releasing NT-64, rendering Itanium pretty much dead anyways. If the compilers turn out ok, McKinley will probably be able to compete on a performance basis with Sun's US3, and maybe even IBM's Power4. (The Alpha 21364 will cream it, but what else is new?) Meanwhile, Itanic looks to be slower than a Celeron for integer code and about even with a high-end P3 for fp; the P4 if not the GHz P3 ought to beat it handily even in the rather server-oriented SPEC suite. Having your $3000 server chip beat in SPECfp by your mainstream desktop chip is an embarrassment Intel will never allow, even if that means not releasing Itanium at all.

    Who would buy such a chip? Almost no one. The only Itanium boxes ever sold will be to ISV's who need development platforms for McKinley, and large corporations who want to prepare for McKinley. And they can all be served by development systems and engineering samples; there's no need for volume production of a chip that's only going to be used for development and validation.

    And that's why this announcement is not a surprise. IBM accomplishes four things with this: 1) they associate themselves more with Linux, which is becoming a bigger part of their strategy these days; 2) they disassociate themselves from the Itanic, which is a bit of an industry joke; 3) they shift the emphasis to their upcoming Power4 architecture, which looks to be quite good and a worthy competitor to anything IA-64 will produce for a while; and 4) they still keep IA-64 compatability for the future, albeit less emphasized from a PR point of view.

    All in all a smart decision. And not a surprising one.

  • Linux top to bottom (Score:5)

    by tmu ( 107089 ) <todd-slashdotNO@SPAMrenesys.com> on Friday August 18, 2000 @02:17PM (#844159) Homepage
    This is not actually that surprising. IBM has a stated goal of making linux run on every piece of hardware and every platform they sell, from the top of the line (OS390) to the bottom (intel-based netfinity line, I guess).

    So there are two things going on here: 1) IBM has their own version of Unix that's quite good but not doing very well in the marketplace. 2) IBM has decided that Linux is the way to unseat Sun's dominance of the midrange server market.

    Given those two facts, supporting yet a different version of Unix designed primarily for the Itanium platform (regardless of what they say about also running on the Power chip) doesn't make any sense. Even IBM has limited resources.

  • warning: high BS factor (Score:5)

    by gammatron ( 120978 ) on Friday August 18, 2000 @02:25PM (#844160)
    from the story:
    IBM's multifaceted moves to Linux go a long way toward opening up the company's commercial code base. This is a far cry from the IBM of old, which once teamed up with Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment Corp. to create the Open Software Foundation (OSF), whose sole purpose was to splinter Unix and protect its members' respective proprietary OSes.


    Bullshit. The purpose of OSF was to unify against the looming threat of SunOS/AT&T SysV integration - it would do excatly the opposite of protecting "its members' respective proprietary OSes." Sun eventually parted ways with AT&T, and OSF withered. DEC was the only company to actually release OSF for its hardware. IBM and HP eventually went with a SysV strategy anyway; Digital/Tru64 unix remains the only commercial unix that is largely based on the BSD code.
    --

  • Montereywas the AIX port to IA64 (Score:5)

    by tylerh ( 137246 ) on Friday August 18, 2000 @02:19PM (#844161)
    Monterey was the joint effort of IBM, SCO, and two others to port a high-end, enterprise class unix to Itanium (IA-64). The excitement driving the buzz was that Monterey looked like the migration path for AIX.

    Looks like Linux inherits all that buzz.

    GO TRILLIAN [linuxia64.org]

  • Well Duh - Monterey was never really alive (Score:5)

    by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Friday August 18, 2000 @03:33PM (#844162)
    Monterey was really one of IBM's worst ideas in recent memory, and harkened back to an earlier time (early 90s) when IBM seemed unable to gauge public demands.

    I amazed that they even ever saw SCO as a viable partner - the corpse of SCO has been floating from door to door looking for some poor sucker to take it in and break it down for spare parts. Caldera finally was suckered. Ransom Love looked quite clueless telling the audience in San Jose that Linux alone couldn't do it - that somehow SCO's dead product line was needed to complete its promise to customers. What hooey. SCO will be like WordPerfect, a forgotten power that drifts from buyer to buyer. Caldera needs to realize that customers want to hear a coherent marketing story - having a linux company come out and tell people that linux is inadequate is not what I would call a compelling marketing story. This doesn't surprise me one bit - Caldera has never known one thing about marketing their own product (the "Business Linux"???? what the hell is that????).

    Anyway, back to IBM. Its nice to see finally that the potential market for AIX on IA64 is likely too small to address as a strategic issue. Customers are tired of parallel product lines that somehow address high-end, midrange, low-end, in some bizarre drivel that never makes any sense. Look at Compaq's worthless unix marketing plan regarding Tru64 and Linux.

    IBMs major problem has always been that it considers itself too big to commit to any one platform. This is why still to this day IBM has marketing issues. Look at Sun - they have one product line and one OS - a Sun customer always knows what end is up with that company and the Sun commitment is always coherent. This is why Sun is going to continue being the number one unix vendor, for better or for worse, even though IBM's product lineup is likely superior (just impossible to see in continuity).

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