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Sun Reconsidering Solaris 9 for x86
jeffphil writes "This article reports that Sun is meeting with a group of Solaris x86 users called the 'Secret Six.' The group was created to convince Sun to re-examine its previous decision to cancel Solaris on the x86 platform."
they are in fact the same: they dual boot.
there's no place like ~
You might be surprised. Pixar Studios, for example, uses Sun Enterprise 10000 machines for rendering their movies (so I was told this 6 months ago by one of their chief animators). Those max out at 106 processors per box, and Pixar has over 3000 CPU's. Do the math to figure out how many boxes that is. And maybe such a conversation did indeed take place:
Mr. Smithers, get the CTO in here right now. Our animators say that Monster, Inc. is going to take another 3 months to render. Get some more of those 106-processor Sun boxes right now!
Finally, to those who wonder why they don't use clusters instead of SMP machines? Pixar's rendering software algorithms are optimized for fine-grained communication patterns and simply would not work on a message-passing cluster.
I am pretty sure that a company I used to work for, NCR, is one of the six. They build and sell really big MPP database servers. They need an extremely reliable and _trusted_ OS to run on these servers (which run in a loosely coupled configuration -- remember MTBF is the product of the MTBF of all the parts) and they don't want to support their own flavor of *nix just for their own niche product. In their particular market, telling customers that they run these special, expensive, multi-terabyte databases on linux is not gonna cut it. Solaris for x86 is just the ticket for them. I believe that they have customers running solaris 8 for x86 so SUN's decision to back away from this OS really puts NCR (and potentially their customers) in a bind.
Have a NICE day.
The reason that Sun sells the blade for something near a competitive price is that it is composed of mostly (shoddy) standardized PC components. If you want a machine just to run Solaris, one would be better off with a used SPARCstation 5 or 20--superior quality, cheaper ~100, and better supported by Linux and *BSD for when Solaris runs out of usefulness for ya...
She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Solaris/X86 was overpriced for commercial use only. It has been free for nonprofit use for years now. Even before it was free, Sun sold individual academic licenses for $99, with overnight shipping and 30-days of engineering/technical support included. Early versions of Solaris/X86 even supported more advanced disks and graphics subsystems than Sun itself sold for SPARC.
That's what an open source operating system does.
I think Solaris x86 is most helpful for this type of situation where companies are deploying in-house created custom apps, not looking for commercial software to target the platform.
We have had some interesting bugs with solaris 8 that we never had with 7. In fact we probably will be staying away from solaris 8 on our next project. Any one else having troubles with qfe nics???? I mean if you snoop it off the network and it says one thing and then the interace says another............that can't be a good thing.
...at least according to all the tests I've seen.