| Sun Microsystems Inc. said today it will
provide native Windows NT services on top of the Solaris operating system through an
agreement with AT&T Corp. Sun made the announcement this morning at an Enterprise
Computing Forum in New York. In November Sun will
offer early access software based on AT&T's Advanced Server for Unix that provides
native NT services on Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6 for both SPARC- and Intel-based systems.
Code-named Project Cascade, the software is compatible with the services in Windows NT 4.0
Service Pack 3 and includes security, authentication and the Windows NT Directory Service
and File System.
Sun Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos said that
half of all NT servers installed provide file and print services. Although Sun provides
those services now through its Sunlink product, they are not native.
"Sunlink serves NT and Mac and Novell clients off a
Solaris server and performs administrative tasks using the Solaris domain," he said.
"This is a different focal point-it puts us right in the middle of the NT
environment, so we can replace NT servers with Solaris servers and keep the administration
model as the NT administration model."
Papadopoulos said the other half of NT servers are
installed for running Windows applications such as Exchange or BackOffice. Sun can run
native Windows applications on the desktop through a SunPCi coprocessor card, also
announced today, and invites Microsoft Corp. to port its applications to Solaris.
AT&T sued Microsoft Corp. last year for holding back NT
5.0 source code for the Advanced Server for Unix. AT&T recently settled out of court for
money, not source code, according to sources.
Most other Unix vendors already resell Advanced Server for
Unix under a different name as a component of their various Unix offerings. Nearly all of
the ASU resellers-Data General Corp., Digital Equipment Corp., Groupe Bull,
Hewlett-Packard Co., ICL Corp., NCR Corp., and Siemens Nixdorf Informationsysteme AG-are
Microsoft enterprise partners, although NCR and Siemens have also licensed Solaris on
Intel.
Papadopoulos said the AT&T settlement should not affect
Project Cascade.
"Over the next couple of years, especially with the
Y2K problems, people are locking down on NT 4.0. Also, although Microsoft is adding a
whole pile of new services for NT 5.0-such as transaction monitoring and how clustering
takes place-they are layered on top of the NT 4.0 protocols, so it's not as big a
transition. The most significant of these services is Active Directory, but that will be
ported to Solaris."
Server-side Java is an additional weapon in Sun's
arsenal, Papadopoulos said.
"NT's principal penetration is in the workgroup and
workgroup services, and that's what Project Cascade goes after," he said. "It's
an open ballgame as to what people will use for the infrastructure to write heavy-duty
enterprise applications. Microsoft is a 'wannabe' with NT 5.0, and they're competing
head-to-head with Enterprise Java Beans and CORBA."
Sun, of Mountain, View, Calif., also announced that its
entire line of storage products will connect to NT servers by the end of the year.
Sun (SUNW) can be
reached at www.sun.com. |
