More virtual processing magic from Transitive

As I was getting ready for my flight to chilly Salt Lake City, I happened across a note from those industrial sorcerers over at Transitive. I hope that I'm not boring you with information about this company. The post, Transitive virtual processing magic, which looks at Transitive only came out a few days ago.

As one might expect, they reminded me that Transitive technology is the basis of the Rosetta software built into all of Apple’s x86-based Macintosh computers, and it also forms the basis of IBM PowerVM Lx86, which is available for IBM’s System p range of enterprise servers. Furthermore, they asserted that their products have been shipped in more than 10 million computer systems worldwide. While it's really hard for me to verify that shipment number, it is still impressive. If you'll remember, they've recently had joint announcements with both HP and IBM.

So what's new?

This time, Transitive is shipping QuickTransit fro Solaris Customers. Here's how they describe their newest offering.

QuickTransit^® for the Solaris™ operating system (OS) on SPARC^® to Solaris on x86/64 systems. This latest version of QuickTransit^® represents a welcome solution for enterprise customers that have deployed the Solaris OS on x86 operating systems, since it allows them to immediately run many thousands of additional applications. Customers that have opted to deploy the Solaris OS on x86 hardware platforms from Sun, IBM, HP, Dell and others can deploy QuickTransitfor Solaris/SPARC-to-Solaris/x86-64 to immediately benefit from running the large and diverse range of Solaris SPARC-based applications that have been developed by independent software vendors (ISVs), open source developers and internal application development teams.

Snapshot Analysis

While not the answer to every virtual processing problem, what Transitive is doing is really quite interesting and is making many folks' lives a bit easier. Some colleagues have been using the Rosetta software for quite some time and really didn't know how or why the applications they used to use on their PowerPC-based Macintosh computers worked on their Intel-based Macintosh computer. Transitive is the answer.

Organizations wishing to make a switch from one UNIX to another to meet their overall objectives may no longer have to go through a painful and extensive conversion process to get the the applications and tools they developed onto the new platform.

What would it be like if people could move their mainframe applications, applications from their midrange machines and applications from their industry standard systems into virtual environments and then host them all on a single unified hardware platform? It would make the lives of facilities managers a great deal simpler.