| Sun teams with Ubuntu on datacenter servers |
May 30, 2006
On May 30, Sun Microsystems Inc. and Canonical Ltd. announced that the upcoming release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support), aka Dapper Drake, will be supporting the UltraSPARC T1 processor on Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers.
For Canonical, this represents a leap into the high-end datacenter server market. While Ubuntu is extremely popular with Linux enthusiasts and on the desktop, it has not been well known as either a commercial or server distribution.
Recently, however, Ubuntu, through Canonical, has been embracing the business world.
"Ubuntu is arguably one of the most important -- if not the most important -- GNU/Linux distribution on the planet and will soon blaze new trails in support for SPARC-based servers," said John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president of systems in a statement.
"There has been a vibrant community working with Ubuntu on SPARC for some time. Given the broadening of our offering from desktops to servers, and the power and promise of CoolThreads servers, official support for SPARC was a natural fit with our upcoming enterprise-ready release of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS," added Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu.
This next release of Ubuntu is due out on June 1st. It will include a dedicated server edition with an extended support period to meet the needs of enterprise customers, ISVs (independent software vendors), and hardware vendors. With this release, SPARC will become one of Ubuntu's officially supported server architectures.
The operating system itself will remain free of charge, and includes free security updates for all officially supported architectures. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS will be supported for five years. Canonical will also offer technical support for SPARC-based systems on a paid, commercial basis.
Through the OpenSPARC initiative, Canonical and the Ubuntu community were given open access to the design of the UltraSPARC T1 processor and quickly completed the porting process. The release of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution on UltraSPARC T1 processor-based systems comes a mere ten weeks after the open source release of the chip design.
In an interview, Shuttleworth said, "We'd looked into SPARC and our original plan was that we'd support older SPARC systems, but some months later OpenSPARC made porting Ubuntu so much smoother and faster than we had anticipated, that we decided to support Niagara's multi-core, multi-thread architecture first."
Looking ahead, Shuttleworth can see Ubuntu being ported to older SPARC designs. He is "very confident with our relationship with Sun. Ubuntu and Sun see the marketplace in similar ways and Sun is taking a leadership position in free software."
The Sun Fire T1000 server starts at $2,995, and the Sun Fire T2000 Server starts at $7,795.
Canonical's technical support for Ubuntu on SPARC servers starts at $700 USD per year for a single machine. This includes 24x7 support in both English and French.
According to Shuttleworth, customers can go to Sun, its resellers, or Ubuntu to purchase the new SPARC/Ubuntu systems.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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