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Sun Considers Switching Cobalt to Solaris
cyber-vandal writes "According to this story on ZD in the UK, Sun is considering switching from Linux to Solaris, even though Solaris doesn't actually run on the MIPS architecture." "Ok guys, we bought this company that seems to be doing ok and we want to drive it into the ground as fast as possible. Suggestions?"
Solaris on the Cobalt RaQ and Qubes might not be a bad idea in many ways, from both Sun's and Cobalts point of view. Also, it could benefit the end user as well. Consider the following, just for a moment.
1) Sun needs a foothold the low-end market. A conspiracy theorist could see that Sun is just trying to expand their empire, and with some just cause. Though Sun's competition has been makers of other higher-end systems (DEC, IBM, etc), all these companies have been feeling a loss to x86-based servers running Windows or Linux. In some ways, this has put a very strong line between who rules the high-end and who rules the low-end. However, when it comes to the bottom line, Sun could be making mroe because it is easier to sell more cheaper boxes with a cheaper OS. So, Sun does a couple of things: Make Solaris 8 free (sans media cost) for under eight processors and increased support for the x86 platform as well as addming many popular GNU tools found in Linux, FreeBSD, etc (an ironic fact if you looks at the history of Solaris or SunOS). Now, you say Solaris has x86 support. Yes, but it leaves something to be desired. However, something Sun knows how to do well is write to a very specific set of hardware. Sun writes Solaris for UltraSPARC based servers. There is only very variance in hardware, unlike the x86 world, where it is a hardware goulash. So, Sun takes Cobalt, which is very inexpensive (if you have ever looked inside a RaQ, you'll hate yourself for not coming up with so simple five years ago) *and* only uses a certain hardware. It would be easier for Sun to optimize for the RaQ than to try to make every x86 user happy. They end up with a more stable x86 offering and don't have to change a thing to the already cheap hardware. They are again competitive with the real leaders in the Server market. Face it, Sun can only sell so many mammoth Sun boxes nowdays. Talk to any Sun sales rep. They feel the pinch badly. So in the end, Sun gets with the times in a buisness sense. Produce a inexpensive, stable server with the Sun name, and not have to re-invent the wheel. Though it is too early to see, Sun could be making a step in the right direction an it could also solve a problem the Cobalt is having, stability. As for OS supremacy, Sun makes no real profit in that Microsoft since on their OS. Sun makes hardware. That is their bread and butter, not this stagnantly evolving mish-mash of BSD and System V. Sun changes Solaris to work better on their hardware. They are not big "feature" mongers.
2) Cobalt needs Sun. Now, before you begin to flame me for possibly hinting that Linux uis unstable, that is not what I will be talking about here. Cobalt made a mistake early on, and it wasn't choosing Linux, it was not making a strong push into a hardware platform. Cobalt started on MIPS and went through great pains to make their special version of RedHat 5.2 and assorted packages run on the MIPS processor as well as their highly-flaunted web-based administration software. By RaQ2, they got it somewhat stable and really started selling. However, their were issues with their administration interface and theiur lack of 3rd party support. One was do to a software development platform, the other, hardware.
Yes, the Cobalt "special sauce" is very perl based, however, their is a nice helpinf of servlets about. Though IBM has made great strides with Java on Linux, they weren't around at the time. The Perl/CGI and Java combo on Linux, from by point of view as a developer, is a match made in hell. I wouldn't do it on any other OS. Also, the JVM support wasn't that great on MIPS either. Overall, scalibility suffered on these boxes. Also, if you ever dared to go beyond their static administration environment, you broke that special sauce. It is not a picnic to fix. Combine this with the fact that many applications (RealServer, Oracle 8i, iPlanet/Netscape servers, Sybase, etc) that run fine on x86 Linux, could not run at all on the RaQs due to MIPS. Cobalt made the change to x86. The migration was an absolut nightmare. They drop all MIPS support on the RaQ3 so they can get better Java support and support more 3rd party apps. Well, they never coudl get a migration package to work between the older RaQs and the newer ones. Cobalt didn't write Linux, of course, they knew how to make cheaop hardware and a very *large* and convoluted web app. Cobalt planned an easier migration to x86, however, never considered all they needed to do to revert the "altered RedHat" back to x86 and make the according changeds to their app. This seems like it would be easy, however, it seems that Cobalt made things harder. I don't believe that they stuck with 5.2 as their base for trhe RaQ3, and it the structure changes broke all their platform-indepedant code they chose not to rewrite very well. Cobalt sales go down since they don't support this mess very well, as they made very little changes to fix this. Cobalt made bad desicions in changing to much of their original formula. Their product suffered. Along come Sun, with an OS that rarely changes general format. Cobalt can do what they do best: make cheap hardware and write a very user-friendly interface to a OS that supports all those lovely 3rd party apps the customers want. Cobalt's formula doesn't take well to massive hardware or software changes. They made that boat. Sun could possible save it from sinking. Was it the best boat? Maybe not, however, Cobalt really wanted the whole thing to be cheap and have the customer touch little of the OS as possible. Cobalt *could* have made their product work just fine on x86 and Linux and made it very stable. They chose not to make that effort. Now, the Java support will be top of the line. Sheesh.
3) Lastly, the customers. These are they people that actually matter in this whole thing. The people who by this to do what they want without having to be geeks. People who want their little mom and pop internet shops or web hosters. They pay for these Cobalt boxes and don't want to worry about their nice user interface not working with the OS or worrying that more hardware changes means they can't upgrade as needed due to bad implementation. They change could benefit the customers. The majority of Cobalt customers don't mess with the OS, since it breaks their pretty interface. This important, since these people don't want to be geeks, they just want get a server online cheaply with the smallest learning curve and have it work right. This could solve that. This is not meant to be a geek's server. This is your mom or dad's server. When Cobalt can't make these servers upgrade smootly, mom and dad cease buying more servers. This *could* be remedied now.
Closing: Sun keeps the RaQ on the x86 path with a static OS. Sun gets their foot in the low-end door. The customers hopefully get what was advertised in the beginning: a low-maintainence, cheap, stable web server that is easy to run and that doesn't require hundreds of hours of pouring over FAQs and arcane tomes to administrate. The catch: Sun. Sun will be new to this market. They could take Cobalt's implementation and make it worse by doing the same thing that Cobalt did: change without forethought. This would include price increase. That would be the worse thing Sun could do, as it would show that they just don't get it. Sun has the ability to make Cobalt's implementation work, as long as the customers get what they pay for in the end. Unfortunatly for Linux fans, it will be without Tux. Could of this been avoided? Yes, easily. Sun may of never came into the picture if that were the case.
No, actually, I don't see an inconsistency here. Microsoft claims that it's server OS can play with the Big Boys; turns out it's harder than Microsoft likes to admit. Sun, on the other hand, backs up most of the claims they make about Solaris.
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Last week, senior Sun executives said that although the firm's strategy with Cobalt has not been decided, they were leaning toward replacing Linux with a version of Solaris that is optimised for appliances.
Although it is tempting to believe that Sun wants to go around and purchase every Linux company and force them to use Solaris, this simply isn't what is happening here.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
Linux isn't faster than Solaris; it's just better optimized for low end hardware. Here's an example. I had an E250 for a tinkertoy server. Two ultrasparc II processors at 300 mhz, 512 megs RAM. When it's doing nothing, log into CDE, and plunk around. It's slow as shit, but responsive. Next, spool up the webserver, Oracle, your appserver of choice, and put some load on it. Next, start grepping through two meg log files. In general, load the crap out of it. Then, log into CDE. It's slow as shit: but no slower than it was running nothing! Solaris soaks load like a sponge. Linux can't scale SMP the way Solaris (and, for that matter, AIX and HP-UX) can. It's improving, and it'll get there eventually, but not at the moment. Also, Solaris has better 'enterprise' class functionality. Want my favourite example? Go onto your production linux box, and fsck the drive. Oops, you have to unmount it or watch it die, right? Now go onto your production Solaris box, and do the same thing. Wow, you can fsck it while it's running! Stuff like that.
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We have net problens, wanted to run ntop on it (we're heavily swicthed, so that's the only place it can go). ntop is not on there, nor can it be built. Linux wasn't designed to be an appliance OS. Not that it's a bad OS (I like it) just the Qube seems very cobbled together if you look just below the HTML UI.
It is amazing the amount of bad vibes towards Sun I see in these postings. Sun is a good company that makes great products. I know that Linux is faster than Solaris and runs on more hardware, but that is not the point. Solaris is still a great OS and for some applications I prefer it over Linux (I would not even try to run Linux on an E10K, even if it was ported). And also lest we forget, we are not dealing with another micro$oft hegemony here. These are the guys who gave us NFS, Sun RPCs and Java. I think that everyone would have to admit that without being a full open source company, they conduct themselves admirably.
And I would not want to have to support 2 OS'es either.
Cobalt, as many people have already stated, now use the x86 platform for their servers. From Cobalts history and reputation of not really being big on supporting older products (or any product really, after they have bee released) I doubt they would retrofit say the Qube 2700s, Qube 2's, Raqs, Raq2s, NasRaq and CacheRaq (all Mips products) with Solaris. I mean why would they make that investment?
The Raq3, and now the Raq4 are the most popular models that Cobalt has. They are both running fairly lame AMD chips. All evidence suggest they will continue to use x86 chips in the future. So I imagine the Raq5, or whatever they end up calling the next ones (Netra Raq perhaps?) would be capable of using Solaris for Intel.
And honestly this would fit in with Cobalt's business model fairly well. Currently they have a really good profit margin--leading the industry apparently. Paying for a license for the OS would be no big deal. And Cobalt hasn't really contributed much to the Open Source community--for example ChiliSoft was recently purchased by Cobalt and their ChiliSoft ASP product is still closed source. While the engineers tend to embrace Open Source stuff, I have a feeling that the upper management may not--the CEO tends, IMHO, to actually go out of his way to have the company adopt propreitary software. So I guess I wouldn't be surprised.
In any case,
-k
True, but if the little Cobalt boxes are running Solaris, than it's easy as hell for people who outgrow their Cobolts to simply copy/paste over to a bit Solaris server and off to the races. Not that it's difficult to port Linux to Solaris, but it's still a powerful lure.
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This might be true. Being Solaris end to end might very well give Sun a strategic advantage, but that is an entirely different line or reasoning than Sun doesn't have the energy to support two operating systems.
have a day,
-l
Here are some background articles on the purchase:
Upside Today
Red Herring
Morningstar
Reuters.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
But only if it is an option. and to think I was just looking at these...
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
It has _always_ been Sun's strategy to concentrate their effort on as few platforms (hardware and OS) as feasible. Sun is quicker than the competition to drop support for old platforms. Sun has been pretty succesful in their strategy, why change it now?
Cobalt was dropping MIPS support long before this, going to pure Intel. Solaris already has Intel support, and is actively supporting the Intel versions.
Solaris on Intel is 99.9% the same source code as Solaris on Sparc. Only the kernel and 64-bit support differs.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
The why? of this is what's bugging me. The only thing I can figure out is that Sun is basically splitting it's hardware market into two tiers: expensive (Sun hardware) vs. cheaper (Cobalt). May that's what they're doing. Aiming Solaris at shops that can't afford top-quality Sun equipment.
To sum up: I think they're aiming at getting Solaris into the lower-end hardware market to compete against Linux.
EMUSE.NET
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
They probably want to control the licensing of OS in the Server, so customers buying Cobolt Servers will be forced to pay SUN for upgrades. So I guess this is good news if you own SUN stock, but bad news if you plan on buying a Cobolt server.
it's the dog food principle. if you can't eat your own dog food, you'll get beaten up in the press. and rightly so. if your OS is one of your core businesses, they you should use it. if your processors are your core business, you should be using them. if they don't replace them, they'll be tacitly supporting linux and x86, which probably isn't in their best interests. it shouldn't matter to the end user -- it's an appliance, for god's sake. it shouldn't be a money issue, because they make the OS & the processesors - if their production costs can't beat the wholesale costs from other suppliers, they shouldn't be in the business. it's not like they have to buy them from themselves -- oh wait, this is sun we're talking about - they do have to buy them from themselves. i haven't seen that much beaurocracy since talking to the IT people down at the our local county government offices...
It is also important to look forward, not just back, from whence comes thoughts of both IA-64 and SPARC.
One of the significant things Cobalt had was designs for compact-and-hopefully-usable cases and support software; that sort of thing ought to work perfectly well if Sun contributed SPARC motherboards and CPUs to the mix, with compatible form factors. At which point running Solaris-for-SPARC makes perfect sense.
And in looking ahead, the present MIPS chips aren't likely to be viable to the business purpose five years from now, at which point IA-64 might be more likely to be of importance.
The importance of MIPS in all of this is incredibly low, and steadily falling...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Running solaris on one of these would be the death of it. I've played with a 4i with 256MB of RAM and Cobalt's Perl stuff can eat up 70-80% of the processor!
Solaris would make these machines puke and die.
All due respect for Linux but I feel it has been evolving more towards a desktop market and left the server end hanging a bit.
The main impetus that has been driving Linux development has seemed to shift the focus to add layer upon layer of complexity to the kernel,which I do admit has resulted in a better kernel, but also had the side effect that due to the massive array of hardware supported the source has been quite convoluted.
An OS such as Solaris, which has inherently less hardware support than Linux, might be the answer here, provided Sun can keep the hardware spec fairly standardised.
And BTW Cobalt is/was moving away from MIPS towards the IA platform.
--
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Nothing is real but the pain
There is a strong mindshare among Solaris admins that Solaris is a real UNIX, and that Linux is not a "real" UNIX. Sun makes a good deal of money with this perception. Sun is not foolish--they know that if management types realize that low-cost Linux servers can do as good as a job as Solaris for a large number of intranet and internet tasks[1], they will go for a low-cost Linux investment instead of a high-cost Solaris investment.
As it stands right now, Linux is a far greater threat to Sun than it is to Microsoft, since Linux works well as a UNIX server, but yet is not as functional as Windows on the desktop[2].
- Sam
[1] There are things, such as NFS and support, where Sun/Solaris is better, of course.
[2] We're getting there. I think Kde and Gnome 2.0 coupld very well put us there.
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Seems to me that switching to Solaris will save Sun money in support costs, since it means they won't have to train their support staff in Linux administration, but can stick with their Solaris knowledge. Sure, it's new hardware, but they would have that expense if they'd developed the box themselves anyway.
It can send redirection responses instead of forwarding the request, and this is exactly what I see on all IP addresses that www.hotmail.com corredponds to -- it sends redirects to other Local Directors, with "IIS 5" in the header, but without touching any IIS box. That kind of response is hard to miss -- it violates HTTP standard by not waiting for the empty line at the end of the header. Initial redirects cause users to be scattered over a number of hosts where their sessions continue, and those hosts are actually other Local Directors, distributing requests among boxes that appear to be W2K.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
With them owning the hardware and design its easy to port solaris over.
Why re-invent linux in a Solaris shop. Its like microsoft buying them up, you think they would learn linux?
Cornbread
Aint nothing wrong with that.
Sun is the only "Big Iron" UNIX company that is really threatened by Linux. Solaris is one of the big reasons that people keep buying Sun systems. If Linux takes over the "larger iron" world, Sun will have to compete mainly on hardware grounds. If I had the choice of an RS/6000, or a Sun Server, I would choose the Sun, because Solaris (in my opinion) is better than AIX, even though I think the RS/6000 has better hardware and support. If both IBM and Sun "officially" supportd Linux on their boxen, Sun would be forced to compete on hardware, and price grounds. This goes for Sun vs SGI as well, although I know very little about SGI hardware/support.
Sun has a lot to lose by the legitimizing of Linux. IBM, SGI, HP etc. all have a more even playing field again the guys who "put the dot in dot com", if the OS is not longer an issue. I suspect this has a lot more to do with it than the "not having energy to support more than one OS."
Sun has a lot to lose by having products that officially support Linux.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
- more stable
- as fast or faster than
- as supported as
Linux.
This is a case of corporate pride leading to poor decisions.
Sounds more like a case of "The previous article is a case of fanaticism clouding judgement".
As others have pointed out, cobalt was moving to x86 anyway. Doing a comparison on that basis,
1. Solaris is certainly not going to be LESS stable than linux.
2. There's probably not going to be more than a 10% performance difference either way.
3. How could solaris be "[less] supported [than]" linux? By SUN? That's just silly.
Just a few months ago, I worked for an ISP that transitioned over 1000 commercial web hosting customers from a DEC box and a sun E450 to 3 Cobalt RAQ's.
Within DAYS of making the transition (painful to be sure), we were already hacking apart the way the RAQ's handles some of the CGI, and apache aspects of site hosting. We were also making custom scripts for system admin tasks that we needed to change some from the way the RAQ's web admin interface did things.
While this could be done in solaris as well, it would have taken a little more work, and of course someone more knowledgable with solaris. We had that manpower, but not all people do. Plus, if you are forced to switch your hardware to Solaris for continued support, you then have to fix any and all custom work you did, with most likely LIVE customers, and in a hurry.
As they are, the Cobalt boxes I have worked on are a BREEZE to configure and maintain, I would like to ask this VP, WTF is the point in changing it?
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It should be common sense to consider using your own OS when you make such an acquisition. Perhaps Sun will replace Linux with Solaris. Or they could leave Linux. They could scrap all Linux and Solaris and run FreeBSD. The point is, the decision has not been made yet.
....something that you are missing out on. Sun bought Cobalt to make its stake in the server appliance industry. Server Appliances are low cost, light hardware boxen that any PBH can come in and set up. I seriously doubt that Sun would take that product and add expensive hardware to it. This would take them right back out of the Server Appliance industry.
I am a Cobalt employee (thus the AC posting).
Everything we are being told by the people at Sun is that they bought us because we know what we're doing in the server appliance marketplace. They didn't want to have to try and get in on the ground floor like all of our competitors. There are no, repeat NO plans to discontinue Linux as the OS on our servers. (Which are now AMD-based, BTW -- MIPS CPUs were only in the RaQ1/RaQ2 and Qube1/Qube2).
IMHO, I would think that you would see an addition to our product line at some point down the road which had a Sparc chip, or possible Solaris. But not at the expense of the x86-compatible market.
Don't believe any^H^H^Heverything you read on ZD news stories. And remember, this deal was just announced a week ago. There are an awful lot of unknowns to be worked out, but everyone at Sun seems to be genuinely excited about the acquisition, and plan to use it to extend their marketshare in the datacenters, not to try and squash Linux in favor of Solaris.
Ok, ok...so the title might be a bit trollish/flamebait...
<disclaimer>I used to work for a Cobalt Authorized Reseller, and I didn't like their gear </disclaimer>
If you've ever tried to use a cobalt machine to anything besides what it is designed for, you're in for a treat. PERL is usually broken (have to manually fix files that are standard in most other PERL implementations). There are a number of bugs in their web interface, and their implementations of most services are non-standard or just funky enough to make it pretty annoying.
The cobalt mentality is also pretty closed in general and support is lacking in response time.
These boxes aren't built for hackers, their built to be canned solutions for Linux neophytes and web-farm admins that don't want to get into the nitty-gritty. Switching to solaris would be a net change of 0 in my book, as most people using cobalt equipment don't care anyway. If you don't want a toaster-like solution, don't buy Cobalt Networks gear...it's underpowered and overpriced.
This comment is wild and rambling. I hope someone else says something similar, but more coherantly. I apologize.
-fp
one would think that if they're going to replace Linux with Solaris, then they basically have to replace all the firewall, NAT, and system administration tools that go with it. So they're left with a box, processor, memory, and hard-drive. So why did they buy this company in the first place? Wouldn't it have been cheaper to just come-out with their own mini-firewall, server, cube-like thing?
// TODO: fix sig
What do you think most corporations do? You buy a competitor to implement their products into your own... or to elimate them. There is no middle ground.
Obviously Sun wants to support their [paid] OS more than a [free] OS. One drives profits to the company, the other doesn't.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Ok I guess we've all decided to give up the 'right tool for the right job' idea and ram linux down the throat of every system and every problem:
Ok guys, we bought this company that seems to be doing ok and we want to drive it into the ground as fast as possible. Suggestions?
So if they don't use Linux, its bound to fail is that what you're trying to say? Solaris is a great operating system and for some things its better, yes I said better, than Linux. Is Linux better than Solaris at other things, yes it is. But I've yet to read a post in the comments that has any insightful revelations as to why Linux is better than Solaris on the Cobalt machines. Just a lot of Linux hype. I'll back up the fact that maybe they should go to Solaris with some facts:
1. Sun will stand behind and support their OS with one of the worlds largest software engineering force. If a customer had a problem with the Linux OS what would their options have been? Post to a newsgroup? 'Ask Slashdot'?
2. Solaris has tools that make developing operating system level software for a new platform that Linux can only dream of right now...ie the Solaris Kernel level debugger.
3. Solaris is proven. While this is some fact and some opinion the truth remains Solaris/SunOS were running stable and secure servers when 99.995% of the world had yet to hear of Linus Torvalds.
It just really disheartens me when I hear everyone screaming how monopolistic Microsoft is and how blindly people follow them and then I read comments as I did here. For those of you who made comments like the one I quoted above without fact to back it up, you're no better than the M$ fools you make fun of on these very pages. Blind advocacy does nothing to support the OS you're so fond of. For those of you who did use reason and facts to back up your comment/opinion on the subject, I apologize for the rant.
And for the record, I do use Linux at home and encourage Solaris usage for the servers at work.
Actually they run two layers of Cisco Local Directors. www.hotmail.com box _is_ Local Director (configured with "Server:" line in its header saying "IIS"), doing redirections to all other Local Directors, who in their turn do load-balancing over unknown (however probably ridiculously large if they needed two layers of Local Directors) number of Windows 2000 boxes. That configuration probably would work at existing load even if they had PC/XT running DOS 2.20 as servers.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Specifically, it states:
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Exactly how is NetBSD any more secure than Linux, except for the fact that it includes less?
If they were concerned about security, they'd run OpenBSD, which runs just as well on the MIPS architecture.
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For Sun, it makes a lot of sense to stick with Solaris as their standard UNIX platform. Some reasons why:
Certainly, Linux excels at a whole host of areas where Solaris may fall a little short. Mostly in user space; as far as the kernel goes VFS (providing IPX/SPX, SMB, DevFS...) is probably one of the few things that stands out. In user space, especially in nice/solid/automated distributions like Debian, there is a tremendous ease of keeping your system the slickest it can be, and at the same time, most secure - something you have to work a bit harder to achieve under Solaris.
That said, the market that caters to those demands is mostly saturated, and for Sun to do what they do best - rock solid backends and network-oriented systems - they are better off sticking with Solaris.
Clearly you have never used SolarisX86.
"2. There's probably not going to be more than a 10% performance difference either way."
See answer above.
"3. How could solaris be "[less] supported [than]" linux? By SUN? That's just silly"
Spoken like someone who has never had to wait on hold for Sun technical support (who they were paying through the nose), or eat dirt over a bug Sun has labeled "SORRYWEDONTFEELLIKEIT" in their bugbase...
Dont just naysay Linux. Especially if you've never even tried the competition or made a serious comparison. On MIPS, Solaris doesn't exist, and believe me, is very unlikely TO ever exist. That's probably a good thing. On X86, Solaris is a JOKE - with terrible app support and a really flakey, bloated kernel. Let's not even talk about security out of the box, let alone the awful way they've configured it or how INCREDIBLY expensive eveything is... let alone your precious "corporate support"... and, last but not least, Linux smokes Solaris on sparc hardware.
Solaris is the Windows of the Unix world. I have nothing against Sun, I love their hardware and I am a huge Java fan. But their Unix... blows.
Put that in your crack pipe and smoke it.
We're on the road to Tycho.
...and now we have to hear Taco's stupid-assed comment, "Ok guys, we bought this company that seems to be doing ok and we want to drive it into the ground as fast as possible. Suggestions?"
Hey Taco/Slashdot - get with it, huh? There's more to life than Linux, gadgets and Star Wars.
That is only true for the machines you mentioned. Other current cobalt products running on MIPS include:
All Qube Models
All Nasraq Models
All CacheRaq Models
I imagine, however, they'll be moving future versions of these products to IA32 architecture soon enough.
-fp
We went with Cobalt because they offered incredible integration and preloading services crafted to our specifications. If the OS switches to Solaris, lots of our existing software won't run without convincing our suppliers to compile it for SolPliance OS or whatever they want to call it. If they even _let_ anyone do that.
Good thing we're investigating other suppliers of point-and-drool rackmount servers.
Our tests showed that on almost any parameter you could name (memory consumption, context switch time, IO performance, reboot performance), Solaris was generally a factor of TWO slower.
About the only thing solaris was quick at was shutting down :)
Yeah, but they're trying to unify them. That's what Windows Milennium is about, migrating users to a single OS that will come in editions that range from Professional (desktop workstation) to Data Center (high-end OLTP and DS). That's the plan, anyway.
IBM manages to drive OS/390, Linux, Windows, AIX, OS/400
The reality is that AIX and OS/400 divisions of IBM actually compete with each other, and that IBM are huge enough to have the resources (and the locked-in legacy customers/revenue) to hedge all their bets. Besides, if you need an S/390, then you really need it, and nothing else will do.
SGI manages to drive Irix, Windows, Linux
Must be some definition of "manages" that I'm not familiar with :0)
HP manages to drive HP/UX, Windows, Linux
OK, that's a fair point, but see IBM. HP are huge and have their fingers in many pies.
Compaq manages to drive Tru64, Linux, Windows, VMS (or is VMS dead yet?)
VMS is far from dead, and Compaq is still a roll-up of Compaq and DEC.
Why does Sun not have the energy to drive more than one operating system when its competition does
If they can unify on a single OS, then they potentially have a strategic edge that their competitors can't match. For example, SGI are busily trying to port Irix features to Linux, Compaq want to move VMS features into Tru64. If Sun can add features to all it's platforms simultaneously, that's reduced time to market, and higher quality right there.
Might help the boxes gain acceptance in shops that are mostly Solaris.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
This will stop their eroding market share in the name brand server market. That is importaint to their stock holders.
They may simply kill the RAQ now that they have it. They could have the same goals that IBM had when they introduced the PC, it wasn't to have a product to make lots of money but as a tool to move a larger customer base to the big iron.
Now would be a very good time for someone to start selling a product that competes in the RAQ area.
Here's how it is on a Raq. Each virtual site directory is owned by httpd, and owned by a group created for that site. httpd, admin (the webmaster basically, you don't use root to maintain web content), and any site users belong to that group. Works well in theory, but once you have more than 30 virtual sites on one raq (there's one here that has 56) then the admin account stops working, and you need an admin2 to belong to the higher numbered groups, then an admin3, and so on. This is because you can only belong to 32 groups in Linux -- and only 16 in BSD, and the same problem probably exists in Solaris. Any more groups after that are ignored. This is the pie in the face of those who believe groups are adequate to replace ACL's.
... none of those are here now, and til then I am kludging around the situation in various ways, none of them particularly elegant. I'm not even fond of POSIX ACL's, since you can't centrally edit their definition like you could on even PRIMOS. Imagine a user-defined group and you're close.
Solaris has ACL's which just don't have that problem. You can put an ACL on a dir, and create the same effect as the setgid bit with it as well, having all files and directories created under that dir also inherit it.
Yes, yes, ext3, xfs, jfs
Normally I'd jump at the possibility of solaris on a raq, but I really don't care much for the interface. Webmin is already far more functional, faster, and less cumbersome. And though cobalt is a little closer at having its interface integrate the tasks of managing virtual hosts and their DNS records, its interface is simply too slow to bother with. Raqs are nice for office workgroups, but they may as well just be another form factor for a qube, and just as bad a fit for a ISP.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
C'mon . . . no one saw this coming? A big company buys out a smaller company and then trys to incorporate it's products into the new domain. It's the way of the business world. Maybe it'll suck (read: Hotmail) or maybe it will actually work out. Solaris isn't really that bad if it's administered right.
--
Sun doesn't care about Linux. They never did. Nor open source software. They GPL'd Star Office because it wasn't worth paying developers to work on a product that can't compete in the Windows space. Or maybe to be a thorn in Gates' side..
Sun probably has a marketing dept. that insists on being able to say their server appliances are powered by the same 'high-powered' OS that the big iron is.
I have nothing against Solaris, there are a few features I actually like, but I don't see how a new Solaris port to MIPS could possibly be:
- more stable
- as fast or faster than
- as supported as
Linux.
This is a case of corporate pride leading to poor decisions.
Marc
Although everything before the raq3 is MIPS and had many problems with software compatability, my raq3, and the raq3i and raq4's are all x86's running linux. Fairly straight forward compatability. Don't think that solaris is such a hot idea, though....
Cobalt RaQ 3 & 4 servers have AMD K6-2 processors
(According to many of the ISP's I've considered for dedicated hosting.)
I actually think its a good business decision. First of all, Cobalt was planning to dump MIPS in favor of x86, Sun is more than likely going to follow through with that plan. Once that change has been made it will be much more economical for Sun to use Solaris for Intel than Linux for a number of reasons.
1. Sun already has an army of people highly skilled in Solaris administration and application development.
2. Sun can provide low-cost appliances to smaller companies and as the customer's business needs grow, easily sell them on an upgrade to "beefier" hardware.
3. Sun can make all the modifications they want to the OS without having to disclose those modifications.
4. Sun will gain an even larger share in the web server market.
It sounds like a pretty good move to me.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
My sentiments exactly. When did Linux become so much better than it's brother unix, Solaris, that we simply assume everything has to be Linux?
Oh, and a good suggestion to drive Cobalt into the ground? Forsake actual developement of new technology in order to support GPL'd versions of all often done old technologies. Like Unix.
-Ben
Its just FUD coming from linux zealots who can't stand to hear that commercial unix might actually be better for a certain job. *cough*andover.netrunssolarischecknetcraft*cough*
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
One of Sun's senior VPs (Andy Ingram) said:
Why does Sun not have the energy to drive more than one operating system when its competition does?
I'm a big Sun fan. From what I've seen only IBM (with AIX) can compete with Sun in the enterprise class open systems niche (though HP might have something with Superdome). And I don't know that the move to put Solaris on the Cobalt line is necessarily a bad thing. However, I don't understand the suggested reasoning put forth by Sun at all.
have a day,
-l
But you're right, Sun is one of the "big boys" and the other big boys are comfortable across several operating systems, why not Sun?
Bleh!
If consumers really don't care what OS it runs then why the switch to Solaris? He says it is because they don't have the resources to support two operating systems... Okay I'll buy that... oh but he also says they have been working on a specialized version of solaris for devices such as these.
F /...
Oh! So what really happened was Sun has this new stripped down embedded form of Solaris and purchased cobalt to use as the hardware for this new product.
Thats weird... since Sun usually rolls their own hardware as well as software. Changing times, these be.
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Solaris/FreeBSD/Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
Find the manager for eToys and hire him.
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From the article:
"Cobalt's [devices] are true appliances," Ingram said. "You do not care about the operating system. If we were to convert these over to Solaris, the end-user wouldn't care. We don't have the energy to drive two operating systems."
Right. One of the reasons that I bought into Cobalt's products is was that I COULD buy them and set them up without a fuss, but the option was there to modify the OS and software even though it wasn't supported.
I fear that if they port Solaris to the product, I won't have that kind of access anymore.
As for porting it to MIPS, that's only for the Qube series. The RAQ line of servers runs AMD processors. Solaris x/86 will fit, I think (though I've never run it on anything other than Intel chips).
"All those tubes and wires and careful notes!"
"All those tubes and wires and careful notes!"
If you want to change kernels and drivers and core libraries, why do you have a Cobalt in the first place? A Cobalt has below-average hardware in a turnkey package for hosting or core workgroup services. Sure, you might add a database, some Apache modules, ssh and so forth. But why buy a Cobalt if you're going to forego their support and OS updates?
Crikeys, you'd still be able to install a compiler and so on. 95% of Cobalts are run vanilla. Now that they've been adding PHP, MySQL and ChiliASP to some models, that number will go to 99%.
I can think of a few dozen vendors you'd get a better hardware from at this price if you're looking to customize your software mix. The point of a Cobalt is that it's ready-to-run and can be patched and upgraded automatically to be identical with all other Cobalts.
This move is obviously part of the Sun overall strategy. For 3 main reasons:
1. They make Solaris. It makes sense for them to try and run everything of theirs from this platform. Their programmers know the OS inside out. This move is about as surprising as hearing that Microsoft is trying to move Hotmail over to Windows 2000 from BSD. So we'll see if Sun has any better luck than Microsoft.
2. Announcing this OS move is also obviously a publicity stunt designed to try and put forth their own Solaris as a superior OS to Linux. Remember, like Oracle and Microsoft, Sun has a major superiority complex.
3. In porting Solaris to another platform they are improving the overall portability of the OS, making it a more attractive OS.
"I would like to welcome everyone to the board meet and let everyone look at this hat, nice hat, a? What if I told all board memebers this hat could make millions. don't beilive me. Ok watch.
Here is 2 piles of small papers, if you look closly at the papers they have ideas written on them at random by the monkey is the type writter lab. roughly there is about 1000 peice in each pile.
We take these papers, put them in the hat, you watching this, did you see this Bob, I put the papers in the hat Sir. Ok, now if I could get some help from say uhh here Lisa, put your hand in here and randomly draw a peice of paper.
Ah good, let me see the paper, the paper says "Solaris", fine product we produce here at Sun. Ok on to step 2, here uhh mm Tim, please draw a paper from the hat. Ok, it says Coblat, another fine product that we just bought.
Now comes the making money part, what happens we you put these 2 peice of paper to gehter, 'Solaris on Coblat' that is right. Everyone ready to make some cash"
"Excuse me Sir, do you REALLY work here"
..blink....
"Yea, sorta, yea I work here, umm my name is Jim, I live in my car"
..blink.....
"So as head chairmen, I recommened everyone cast there vote, I think Jim knows what he is talking about, good face you can trust it."
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG