Living and working in Scotland we are privileged to have such wonderful countryside on our doorstep. As Mrs. Ferry usually annexes our car for short trips to "ladies who lunch" dates, I often find myself on public transport. This is no great hardship, as Scotland boasts some of the most picturesque train journeys in the world.

It was with this thought that I boarded the 0914 from Haymarket to Dundee, travelling over the Rail Bridge and up the Fife coast along the Forth Estuary. It’s a beautiful line, marred only by my destination – Dundee, city of Discovery and the wee jakie capital of Europe.

After dodging the junkies at the station, I was lucky enough to sit through a presentation from SUN during a visit to a customer. Although Microsoft and SUN have settled many of their differences this was the first time I have had the opportunity to sit in on a talk from our partner in co-operatition.

Scotland has long been a stronghold for Microsoft competitors such as Novell and SUN. Perhaps its something to do with the gulf stream, the low winter sun at these latitudes or the dogged focus on outdated ideas like independance, but Scotland’s IT decision makers till now have favoured lost causes. I’m sure SUN and IBM plants in Linlithgow and Spango valley have something to do with it too.

SUN Sparc-based servers running Solaris have remained the server platform in many larger Scottish enterprises long after the rest of the world have switched on to the better price/performance of other x64 OS/hardware combinations. A large financial institution I worked with until recently continues to deploy 32 bit Windows despite being entitled to deploy Windows x64 for applications which would make give them far greater performance, at the same price point and with a minimum of user re-training.

Clearly AMD Opteron x64 multicore processors and budget vendors like DELL have been nibbling away at SUNs SPARC business. So what I heard from SUN was total focus on the SUN x64 server range. SUNs ranges of discrete servers and blade clusters sound like beautifully engineered machines, but must be difficult to shift in a world where DELL are shipping much cheaper 4 socket AMD multicore servers. SUN tout their x64 range as a great platform for Solaris, Linux (red hat and SUSE), VMWare and Windows (in that order!). Their server consolidation story was familiar, referencing the 15% processor utilisation of typical servers, and the opportunity to consolidate these to bigger scarier SUN boxes using their proprietary Solaris partitioning technologies (if you only want to consolidate Solaris) or VMWare (for multiple OSs and versions).

Server consol through virtualisation sound great for low perf and legacy servers, but it only addresses the hardware support issue by enabling retirement of the poorly utilised servers. The real challenge is in how to manage multiple Virtual images, and how to manage the guest OSs and applications. SUN partnering with VMWare, and focus on XEN open source virtualisation is understandable given their competing position with Microsoft, but it leaves them with no story around how to manage the full software stack of Hardware/Virtualisation layer/OS/Application.

When a customer chooses to virtualise production services, the imperatives are the overall availability and performance of the service. Focussing exclusively on the OS virtualisation layer (e.g. VMWare's focus on expedient deployment of an OS image) does nothing to manage the availability of the Exchange, SQL or Citrix application service. Thus it is important to deploy virtualisation in the context of the toolset you will use to manage the overall application. Virtualisation alone makes life more complicated, not simpler!

Consider the Exchange example - IT professionals need management tools which give a single picture of the performance and health of all the Exchange services, any failures in the underlying hardware, the charachteristics of the Virtualisation layer, and what the multiple virtualised OS images are up to.

As Virtualisation becomes a commodity (moving into the Linux and Windows OSs) customers choice of virtualsation layer will be more about the strength of management tools moving forward. Only Microsoft have a complete story with System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Operations Manager....maybe an opportunity for a closer partnership with SUN J