How unix affects your MCP career

As a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), you need to take note of a couple of recent news items in the unix world and examine how that might affect your career.

The first is that unix giant Sun Microsystems is struggling big time. A lot of companies are struggling, but it seems worse at Sun, where they recently announced that they were restructuring, and as part of that effort doing a massive layoff of 5000+ employees, which represents 15% of their global workforce.  This is one of the largest tech company layoffs this year. 

According to a published article:

The moves are a response both to the recent economic crunch, which has hit Sun harder than other tech companies, and to a longer-term trend in which customers are buying more lower-cost commodity systems and fewer of the high-end proprietary servers and systems that were Sun's flagship products for many years.

"We're taking sharp, decisive action to align ourselves to a new economic reality, and also to amplify our investment in the way the world is heading," Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz told the Mercury News, while expressing confidence in the company's future.

He said the reorganization will boost Sun's efforts to develop lower-cost servers and storage appliances . . .

So what does that mean to you?  A couple key things  here:

• The trend is toward lower cost servers and commodity systems (you can translate that for many customers to mean that they are moving to Intel based systems running Linux or Windows)
• As companies like Sun struggle, there will be many projects to migrate from Solaris to Linux or Solaris to Windows.    Engineers who are "multi-lingual" and know the unix language as well as the Windows language will do very well. The same holds true at the Database layer, and there will be many projects to migrate from Oracle to SQL Server.

The second news item to be aware of is Microsoft and Novell's ongoing partnership that seems to be gaining strength.  This was first announced in 2006, but has recently been extended to Microsoft's virtualized environment (Hyper-V).  Dell and other channel partners have also jumped on the bandwagon to support this effort, so it seems to be gaining momentum and good for both companies.

According to the official FAQ, Novell and Microsoft are working together in three primary areas to deliver new solutions to customers: virtualization, web services management and document format compatibility.  The emphasis is on interoperability and supporting solutions that are win-win for both companies. 

How does this affect your career?

• Understand there are natural synergies between Windows and Linux since it runs on the same hardware platform (Intel and Intel-compatible chipsets).
• Because it runs on the same hardware, it often makes sense to have the Windows Sys Admins also act as the Sys Admins for the Linux systems
• There is broad industry support for Linux. You can buy a Linux support contract from Dell, IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and many others.  The old worry that "you can't get support for open source" is long gone.
• Systems Engineers who can meet the multiple needs of their customers by understanding and performing Unix to Windows engineering, troubleshooting, and migration will be very valuable to their companies, and will do better in the marketplace than a technological purist who only understands Windows.

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• Careers
• Microsoft
• commodity systems
• interoperability
• Linux
• Novell
• Sun Microsystems layoffs