IBM is facing the exact same problem selling AIX boxes as Sun/Oracle and HP do selling their Unix hardware and OS, so why would IBM have been a better fit to buy Sun?

I think Sun was (mostly) acquired to prevent Java IP being sold to other, more nefarious parties (such as MS or patent trolls). Both Oracle and IBM were (and still are, though to a lesser extent) heavily invested into the Java ecosystem. Sun OS/Solaris has historically also been the reference O/S and platform for big-time installations of the Oracle RDBMS.

No, Oracle at the time was big on the "fullstack" play, and thought Sun hardware could provide the last piece of the puzzle: selling absolutely everything to a business, from metal to apps and services, in one neat box. Java would have been safe with IBM too, that wasn't much of a worry - although I'm sure Ellison hoped they could leverage it against competitors invested in it, like they tried to do with Google.

The enemy #1 for Oracle at the time was SAP, which they couldn't force out because it's another cancer (the lock-in is huge); so they developed a strategy of buying loads of ecosystem apps to "surround" it. At that point, they could sell the database and apps in one package, and then slowly erode sap away. Hardware was a natural addition to that strategy.

Unfortunately they borked execution. They didn't invest properly in making solutions ready-made, so after you bought a (very expensive) box, you still had to pay tons to consultants to set it up, making it uncompetitive on the whole. The industry shift to cloud did the rest. Now they're way too busy turning into "bigger Salesforce" to care about metal.

Exactly. Oracle+Sun allowed 'vertically integrated' solutions with their Engineered Systems. You could literally buy your entire rack, software, storage, infiniband, even the network portion (Oracle has copper ethernet switches believe it or not) straight from them. It would be under one contract for support etc.

I meant it more in the sense of how an old friend/rival could respectfully carry their casket to the grave, as opposed to the way Oracle desecrated and devoured the flesh of the corpse.

Where's the profit in that?

That Oracle is moving to Linux on Sparc tells you they still think there is an enterprise business that Exadata/x86 couldn't win (after years of destroying Solaris). IBM+Sun would have been most of the E-biz and those customers would have been more comfortable with Oracle as just the DB provider.

Solaris on PPC existed at various times, IBM could have provided a convergence path for the Fortune 500, AIX/Solaris/Linux/Java all on PPC.

It was actually a close thing, but someone else will have to write that story.

SPARC died the moment every developer had a good enough x86 desktop running a Unix flavor (and Sun decided it'd be happy not to build desktops anymore). At that point, we cease to imagine deploying our stuff in SPARC. We test on x86 and make it run well on x86 before it gets compiled for SPARC.

At that point, unless the SPARC hardware has some definitive cost/performance advantage, we'll buy x86. SPARC is for legacy.

Same applies to POWER, BTW. How many new apps have you seen in the past 10 years that were designed for POWER?

What accelerated it even further was when Linux went 64 bit and hardware improved to the point where it was a suitable replacement for big iron Solaris (the SunFire 6900 for example). That was around 2005 from memory.

And the 6900's features with regard to HA in the field fell well short of advertised.

Now you can get a Linux box with 4Tb of RAM so no-one should buy Solaris over Linux.

Now you can get a 24TB, 192-core beast that fits within 7U rack. That same chassis will probably go way beyond that with newer Scalable Xeons.

And you could cram even more x86 cores with up to five Xeon Phi coprocessor cards, while Intel's supplies last.

https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/7U/7088/SYS-7088B...

Sparc is also effectively dead. Solaris and Sparc exist as ongoing projects only to the extent Oracle is contractually required to maintain them--e.g. to Fujitsu. If you accept that Solaris is dead, then by the same evidence Sparc is dead. If you believe Sparc is still viable, then by the same evidence Solaris is still viable.

> ... why would IBM have been a better fit to buy Sun?

IBM Services do a lot of support work for Solaris around the world.

But yeah, other than that it doesn't make a lot of sense.

Agreed. I think IBM would have fixed the licensing issues that kept ZFS off Linux and would have kept Solaris Open Source, perhaps with a better license. It's tragic that Sun went to Oracle and not IBM.

s/IBM/SAP/