Sun Microsystems Inc is having another go at being Windows Friendly in the hope that users will buy Solaris servers rather than NT boxes. Does it mean that Sun, effectively the last major system vendor with all of its wood behind the Unix arrow, has rolled over to NT? No, say CTO Greg Papadopoulos and VP marketing Anil Gadre. But isn’t the next logical step simply to cut out the middle man and sell NT itself? No, they reiterate. In which case Sun’s just the latest in a long line of Unix vendors to take a stab at wooing Microsoft Corp customers by hosting NT network services such as authentication, directories and file and print and using AT&T Co’s Unix implementation of LAN Manager. In licensing AT&T’s Advanced Server for Unix – the functional equivalent of NT Server’s network operating system and domain functions on Unix including everything in Windows NT service Pack 3 – Sun is following in the footsteps of Hewlett- Packard Co, NCR Corp, Santa Cruz operation Inc and others, none of which appear to have had much success with it. Sun, which is calling the work Project Cascade, will ship the software later in the year. Sun’s obviously been inspired by the recent settlement between AT&T and Microsoft over their 1991 agreement which presumably gives AT&T rights to NT 5 code (CI No 3,477). Although part of the settlement was that details should remain private, Sun says Advanced Server has already been tested with NT 5 betas. Users at Sun’s Enterprise Computing Forum in New York where the deal was announced were somewhat skeptical, wondering how they’d be able to use their existing third-party NT management tools and support Mac clients with Cascade and noting Sun’s most recent attempt at flirting with NT, the Syntax Inc TotalNET PC-Unix connectivity software re-badged as SunLink, did not exactly set the world alight. The Syntax software translates between NFS and other network file system protocols, enabling Unix to be viewed and accessed by all kinds of network clients. Unix industry executives who’ve already had a go at selling the AT&T work say the problem is the solution always ends up increasing total cost of ownership. Buying a Sun server or upgrading an existing device to support new NT service hosting a la Cascade is going to cost more than buying a commodity NT box, they say. Just compare the price of 1Gb disk for a Dell box and a Sun server; the latter’s three times as expensive. The second prong of Sun’s latest NT interoperability effort is a PCI bus version of the Sbus-based SunPC card which effectively enables users to run a PC within their Sun box. The PCI board incorporates an AMD K6-2 processor and Caldera Inc’s DR-DOS software for hosting Windows – NT not until mid-1999. The final, and more nebulous part of the plan is Sun’s promise to support NT on all of its storage products by year-end. Maybe it would be better off fixing stuff such as incompatibility between the drives used in the storage products and upgrading the A7000 (Encore) technology to Sparc.
