Linux Making Inroads, But Not At Windows' Expense

zaphod123 writes "According to this article, the stories about Amazon (and others) switching to Linux have been misrepresented. The Linux install has replaced a proprietary Unix system, not a Microsoft Windows product. This is still "A Good Thing" for Linux, but not the downfall of Microsoft that some have foreseen."

Comments

Re:From the thank-you-capt-obvious department....

[Arethan]

Small applications are the only areas that Linux will ever beat Solaris on Sun hardware. I'd like to see a Linux cluster beat SunFire15k or even an older E10k in a performance vs. total cost of ownership chart.

Let's see, so we hire 10 people at 80k a piece to manage our 500 machine cluster, which will need to be replaced every 4 years at a minimum, just so that we can utilize a free OS?

Or, do we shell out some bucks up front, and get fault tolerant hardware, running an OS in a 5th generation VM environment, that will only require 2 people to manage, and will not need to be replaced for at least 10-15 years. (Upgrades not being considered replacements)

I'll stick with Sun, thanks. I'd much rather deal with a single machine, using extremely fault-tolerant tech than having to deal with 500 commodity pc's that are going to go through the usual 4 year replacement cycle.

Linux and Sun both have their place. Linux is a nice server, and a moderate desktop OS for the tech-savvy (at least I use it as a desktop). It's good for ftp servers, web servers, even small to mid database servers. Sun, on the other hand, is great for extremely high availability situations, where the 0.001% of down time in a 99.999% uptime plan could cost the company a few million in revenue.

Linux is saturating the low end market. Good! The low end market could use some low-cost & stable server software that runs on inexpensive hardware. But Sun caters more to the high end market where uptime is critical and data-sets are unbelievably large.

And no, Intel is no where near doing what Sun can already do. Go shoot your precious linux server with a .44, and see if it's still up. I'd guess the answer is no. Doing the same with a properly configured SunFire 15k would result in a high replacement cost, but an up and running system nonetheless. Processing power? Single cpu vs single cpu is getting closer. But for fault tolerance, full hotswap upgrades (as in lets pop a few more cpus into this machine...while it's running), high end SMP (way more than 8-way, try 72-way), and high end memory size (as in my server as 200GB of ram, what do you have under the hood?), Intel isn't even close. Sun, OTOH, has been doing it for a few years now.

So...how was linux going to kill Sun again?

Re:Try it on grandma.

[SCHecklerX]

I often think that this excuse really is more like "we can't get naive users to use it without being crippled". Linux distros need to test their software on non-Unix people more. Humans. Typical office people who, if you ask them if they have a Mac or a Windows box, say, "Yeah, I think so".

Funny how these people used to be quite proficient with things like word perfect for dos and quattro pro for dos. If they were forced to go back to that, they would use it. It is their job, after all. They are capable, but everyone gives them the pointy-clicky thing that they can use, but never really understand. It used to be that people actually understood the tools they used to get their work done, since they actually *HAD* to read manuals on using that tool. Nowadays they are just amusing toys that actually get in the way more than help.

The hassles you speak of are imaginary. If people knew their tools, no matter what those tools may be, there is no hassle. The problem these days is you have people using tools that they certainly do not understand, and there is no incentive for them to do so.

But what would the Windows growth curve have been

[EisPick]

... if Linux didn't exist? I think these analyses ignore the loss of momentum that Linux has caused Windows.

Five years ago, as NT was replacing Netware in most enterprises, many predicted that Unix systems would be the next to fall under the Windows steamroller. However, in cases where simplicity and the availability of commodity hardware are more important than raw performance and scalability, people are turning to Linux to replace Unix systems, not Windows.

So while Linux may not have made major inroads in replacing existing Windows servers, it has prevented Microsoft's hegemony on the desktop to spread to the server side, and has given Unix (generically) a new lease on life.

I think that's a pretty major story.

Very very wrong: here's why

[devphil]

Not only do I admin and program on Solaris boxes, I'm also a GCC library maintainer. There're my qualifications.

Solaris, their operating system, has few advantages over Linux, nowadays. Frankly, without adding the GNU tools, Solaris is virtually unusable!

"Frankly," you're utterly wrong. Not only is Solaris just fine and dandy, it has features for programmers which aren't anywhere near to showing up on Linux. For example:

• The proc tools, for manipulating a running process. Try using pldd(1) to find out exactly which libraries have been mapped in, or pstack(1) to print the call stack. Yes, that's right, print the function call stack of a running process from the command line, without a debugger, and it works flawlessly. There're about a dozen of these tools, man -s 1 proc for more.
• Kernel watchpoints on memory. Tell the kernel you want to know when a process tries to read or write from an arbitrary block of memory. That process when then be frozen (or killed, as per your instructions), allowing you to find out exactly what piece of code is trashing memory.
• A boatload of malloc(3) implementations. Want a version of malloc that uses brk? It's there. Want it to use mmap instead? It's there. Want a version of malloc that never reuses memory? Or a malloc which sets kernel watchpoints on its own bookkeeping structures, for when your code is hosing the malloc internal memory? It's all there.

Linux has none of these.

(And, who's gonna pay $10k for their compiler when GCC does the job?)

Severely uninformed statement, my friend. GCC doesn't generate SPARC code nearly as well as Sun's compiler. (Ask the GCC developers.) It's good but it's not there yet.

GCC cannot even generate a 64-bit binary yet. (Very close, but still some bugs.)

There are plenty of reasons to buy a SPARC, and to use Solaris, and to use Sun's software. It's all about the right tool for the right job, and Linux quite often isn't it. (I write this sitting on a Linux box.) Quit'cher karma whoring. :-)