BSDI Acquires Telenet System Solutions

pestel writes: "BSDI has acquired Telenet System Solutions, a hardware supplier that sells systems built using BSD. You can see the press release over at Daily Daemon News. Good news for BSD people looking for hardware from workstations to huge servers." Built using BSD? Well, built for BSD rather. Interesting news for VA Linux; remember, competitors in the rearview mirror may be closer than they appear...

Comments

Re:Yahoo and Linux

[jabbo]

I do not work for Yahoo and cannot speak for them.
Don't work for Google either, although one of my
friends now does. You'd probably be surprised to
find out who #7 on the web is -- that's us.
(MediaMetrix numbers -- we bounce around slightly
above Amazon and below Lycos most months) I'm not
sure that senior management would be real pleased
with me bashing Sun (or MS, for that matter) so
I'll leave it to interested parties to figure out
the rest. I simply use a Yahoo! email address
because I like their spam filtering services.

Yahoo has a long history of avoiding complexity
wherever possible, and BSD (along with flat files,
manual indexing, and their pile-o-netapps setups)
fits in with this strategy. They're cool cats.

Google takes a different approach. They take
Linux, hack it up a bit, and scale like you would
not believe. My friend who works there called me
up a couple weeks ago asking about using IP
multicasting to broadcast boot images. That's
pretty sick -- think on it for a moment. I hope
the stock market treats them as well as they
deserve to make out -- we tried to buy them and
they told us to go to hell (they want to IPO).

I don't know why Google likes Linux, but between
them and Yahoo!, both OSes should be healthy for a
long time to come. eg. Yahoo is big enough to
(apparently) get Oracle to do a build on FreeBSD,
although I can't confirm that (just something one
of the Walnut Creek guys passed along way back).

If you don't need FreeBSD's slight performance
edge, or need something in the Linux kernel that
isn't supported by BSD, then you should use Linux.
FreeBSD is just better for networking and I/O,
really. But that covers a lot of ground...

Also, I've seen some very strange things happen
when using Linux on loadbalanced servers doing
DSR. FreeBSD boxes in the same setup have always
worked great. Just another minor quibble.

Networking, licensing

[jabbo]

Two very obvious reasons leap to mind:

1) the free-er BSD license -- do whatever you want
with the code, just give credit where it's due

2) superior networking performance -- I'm an admin
for one of the 10 largest sites on the web. We
have large numbers of both FreeBSD and Linux (and
Solaris) boxes in production. To be perfectly
honest, FreeBSD is the fastest, most reliable,
most configurable OS I have encountered so far.
I run Linux at home for no particular reason other
than I'm too lazy to switch; however I have found
that FreeBSD offers so many compelling advantages
as a single-purpose server that I deploy mostly
FreeBSD boxes where there is not a compelling
application forcing us to use Linux or Solaris.

And I'll probably switch over to FreeBSD at home,
too, maybe waiting until 4.1 comes out to be safe.
On laptops and such it makes sense to run Linux;
on a firewall, OpenBSD. But for maximum performance on web and mail servers, FreeBSD rocks
the house. Don't take my word for it -- try it
yourself. Many of the Apache and Qmail developers
run FreeBSD as their primary platform, and that's
not an easy bunch to impress.

FreeBSD is to Linux as Postgres is to MySQL ;-).
(which would bring us next to Solaris -> Oracle)