Emulation ?

Oh no … i see it coming. The next hype that will lead analysts to tell us, that Sun is dead fish in the water. Transitive announced an emulator for Sparc/Solaris on Linux on Xeon/Itanium. Well, surely it´s an technical archievement, but it´s a nice solution for a niche problem. Why it´s a niche ? You have to think about the following points:

• Solaris is commercally available for x86, x64, EMT64 and SPARC.
• When you really want to migrate from Sparc to x86 grab a copy of Solaris for x86 and recompile your code. No big deal. There is even a guarantee for this: Solaris Source Code Guarantee Program. Hey, it´s Solaris and not Linux with it´s everchanging interfaces.
• When you have a programm on Solaris 7 on Sparc and want to run it on Solaris 10 on sparc, well, get a copy of Solaris 10 and simply run the programm. And there is a gurantee, too: Solaris Binary Application Guarantee Program
• The single big issue with emulated environments is the following simple questing: Will you ISV support your programm on an emulated environment or will he tell you to install the programm on the real thing and come back afterwards?
• With Solaris Container for Linux Application you can do a similar thing, only the other way round: Running Linux applications directly on Solaris with all advantages of Solaris. Give it a try with Opensolaris.

So, what problem does it really solves ? As I said before a niche problem: You have an old selfwriten application on an old SparcStation 1, lost the source and the only way to get the developer back is to go to the graveyard with a shovel excavator.
It will surely not lead to a “even more massive server consolidation than we have seen to date” because it doesn´t solve real problems and open new ones instead.