Transitive's magic - Solaris/SPARC Apps and Hyper-V

In the past, I posted about one of the important requirements of the next generation datacenter (NGDC), the ability to consolidate diverse applications on a unified hardware platform. Both IBM (see What would a next generation datacenter look like?) and HP (see HP and the next generation data center) and have annoujnced systems clearly designed to be that unified platform. Both companies are relying on wizards at Transitive (see Transitive QuickTransit - Hardware Virtualization that Takes the Pain Out of Migrations) for the critical hardware/operating system virtualization layer. Transitive has taken another step to assist organizations implimenting the NGDC in their own IT infrastructure by announcing that Solaris/SPARC applications can now be made to run under Microsoft's Hyper-V on industry standard systems.

Here's what Transitive has to say

Transitive® Corporation, the leading provider of cross-platform virtualization solutions, today announced that its award-winning QuickTransit® software will run within Hyper-V™, the Windows Server 2008 hypervisor released this month by Microsoft. This innovative product combination will allow enterprise customers to run Solaris/SPARC applications on the latest Windows-based servers without porting or recompilation, resulting in cost-effective new solutions for scalability, high availability, disaster recovery and legacy application re-hosting.

Here's how Transitive describes the process of running Solaris/SPARC applications under Hyper-V

To run native Solaris/SPARC software on Windows Server 2008 requires deployment of a guest operating system such as Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 in a Hyper-V virtual machine, with Transitive’s QuickTransit 1.5 for Solaris/SPARC-to-Linux/x86-64. A broad range of Solaris/SPARC executable files can then be run within that virtual machine, and these applications can interoperate with native Windows applications running on the same server. All of the considerable benefits of server virtualization, such as consolidation and rapid provisioning, are thereby available for legacy Solaris/SPARC workloads migrated from older RISC-based hardware.

Snapshot Analysis

Large and medium sized organizations have long struggled with the challenges of maintaining the datacenter. Adding to this challenge is the fact that a typical datacenter typically looks like a museum of computer technology. Applications developed 30 years ago are still in use on current systems. These established applications provide input and support to newer applications developed 20 years ago. These 20 year old applications in turn, provide input and support to applications developed 10 years ago and so on.

So, new technology is typically installed along side of older technology rather than totally supplanting it. Functions may be moved to newer equipment as it becomes available but, it is unlikely that 30 year old functions will be rewritten.

So, what does the CIO do to reduce the cost and complexity of maintaining all of those diverse types of hardware? One approach has been to seek out new applications and then incur the expenses of the hardware/software conversion and retraining staff to use the new applicatons. Many CIOs would love to be able to select a single hardware platform and run all of the old applications in virtualized form rather than dealing with the chaos an application replacement can produce..

Addressing this need is what Transitive has been about since its formation.

Now that the QuickTransit product that virtualizes Solaris/SPARC applications in a Hyper-V environment, can versions of their other QuickTransit products be far behind?

It's clear that this announcement, along with others made by Transitive and its partners, offers CIOs a path to the benefits of the NGDC.