Solaris 9: Sticker Shock

sysadmn writes "With the release of Solaris 9 , Sun has bundled many goodies, including an LDAP directory server and a J2EE application server. At the same time, while a single CPU license is still free, they've begun charging for multiprocessor systems. As a kicker, purchasers of used systems may find that they have to pay Sun an OS licensing fee. (Curiously, the 2 CPU server version seems to be $249, while the 4 CPU desktop is $199. In some cases it's the same motherboard, power supply and memory!). At the upper end, that million dollar machine from Ebay may require a $400,000 fee :-) I like Solaris for many reasons, but I have to wonder: will this pay off? " Solaris is certainly a capable os, but sheeze that seems like an awful lot of money.

Comments

customers move to competitors?

[EricBoyd]

Sun has already been fighting back advances from RedHat and IBM... I wonder if they will trigger a mass migration away from Sun? Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

Re:customers move to competitors?

[calidoscope]

So when is Red Hat coming out with a kernel capable of supporting 128 processors? The licensing fee for Solaris 9 goes up rapidly with the number of processors, the 400 grand fee is probably aimed at the Fujitsu customers. Sun makes the money needed to update Solaris by selling hardware - if people by used Sun equipment, that means less money to sun for development.

Sun makes a big distinction between systems bought from Sun or an authorized reseller versus EBay, etc. This is probably done to keep the resellers happy.

There has been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth on comp.unix.solaris, primarily from people having old 4 processor servers lying around (which are worth less than the license). The license for Solaris 8 was really nice, free for machines that could hold 8 or fewer processors. BTW, that license is still in effect for people with media in hand (although it applies just for their organization).

Sun's hurting themselves more by not getting the Jalapeño systems out - keep up the pressure on the low end. Rumor was that the Jalapeño machines were to be cost competitive with the intel boxes.

Re:customers move to competitors?

[Arker]

I doubt it very much. People that buy multiprocessor Sun systems are used to paying, and most probably won't blink at those prices. They have to give away the single processor version to compete at all - Linux and BSD are very capable competitors on that hardware, and they're free after all. But Solaris still has the advantage on their multiproc boxen, so people that need that kind of performance will pay for it.

Re:customers move to competitors?

[Anonymous Coward]

The linux developers at SGI has ran Linux on a 128-processor Origin2000 setup way back during the 2.3.x development phase, so there already is a linux kernel that "supports" 128 processors.

I also remember, however, that the -j 128 parallel kernel make didn't scale terribly well (I think the SGI guys will now nominate me for the understatement of the year award). The patches to remove the Linux's 64 cpu limitation didn't make it into the mainline.

Although I see it claimed all the time, I have never seen any actual numbers presented to show that Solaris really does scale well up to 128 CPU's, tho. SUN's own biggest server right now only goes up to 106 CPU's, although Fujitsu-Siemens has a Sparc server that handles 128 CPUs. I'm not saying that it _doesn't_ scale, but it would be nice to see SOME real-life case presented to actually _support_ sun's claims.

In any case, there aren't all that many applications that actually _require_ a massive multiprocessor server like that. Many of the workloads of that magnitude can be handled just as well or better by a cluster, be it an expensive Sun Grid computing setup or AIX SP/6000, or a cheapo DIY whitebox beowulf cluster running Linux.

Re:customers move to competitors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Granted the larger SMP boxes will blow away the Linux/Intel group....but as for the lower end 2-4 proc boxes....unless your app is designed for 64bit processing....almost all tests of apps that would most likely run on a 2-4 proc box that I've run and seen blow away boxes like the 250/450 series sun boxes. (i.e. Tibco, Weblogic, Netscape, ....)

Re:customers move to competitors?

[Enry]

Sun makes the money needed to update Solaris by selling hardware - if people by used Sun equipment, that means less money to sun for development.

If peoply buy used CDs, there's less money for the RIAA
If people buy used DVDs, there's less money for the MPAA
If people buy used books, there's less money for the authors/publishers.

Re:customers move to competitors?

[treat]

Although I see it claimed all the time, I have never seen any actual numbers presented to show that Solaris really does scale well up to 128 CPU's, tho. SUN's own biggest server right now only goes up to 106 CPU's, although Fujitsu-Siemens has a Sparc server that handles 128 CPUs. I'm not saying that it _doesn't_ scale, but it would be nice to see SOME real-life case presented to actually _support_ sun's claims.

Sun sells you those large systems (E10/12/15K) expecting you to separate them into domains - entirely separate systems. Very few people are actually running one kernel on 64 or greater CPU systems.

Re:customers move to competitors?

[daniel_isaacs]

Exactly. Care to see our invoices for Windows 2000? I'd love to pay $250. $250 is a drop in the bucket for us customers.

Re:customers move to competitors?

[roybadami]

The license for Solaris 8 was really nice, free for machines that could hold 8 or fewer processors. BTW, that license is still in effect for people with media in hand (although it applies just for their organization).

Could you point me at any information on this?

My understand was that you had to register all your Solaris 8 machines on the Sun website for them to be licenced. Now when I try to register another machine, the page that comes up says that free licenses are only available for machines which only support 1 CPU.

Re:customers move to competitors?

[Anonymous Coward]

So when is Red Hat coming out with a kernel capable of supporting 128 processors?

Probably about the same time that 128-processor boxes become common.

Re:customers move to competitors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Note:
You pay the cost if you buy a NEW box no matter what.

If you bought the box on e-bay, THEN you are expected to pay the cost of an OS license.

If you got the box from Sun or an official reseller than the OS license is usually built in.

So, this change REALLY only effects the e-bay and auction aquired used equipment. I bet all the other vendors require used equipment to repurchase OS licenses when boxes are obtained on e-bay or by out-of-business auctions; the AIX and HPUX licenses I looked at in the past would require the same as Sun is requiring now: OS licenses aren't transferable, each new owner of hardware has to obtain their own license.

Re:customers move to competitors?

[Tony-A]

If people buy used cars, there's less money for Ford and GM, etc.

Short term, maybe. (assuming you don't plan to be around very long;)

Re:customers move to competitors?

[qeL3-i]

Don't forget that Sun also has binary compatibility. The application that runs on your SS5 will also run on your E15k. If you replace your developer's SS5 (HAW HAW) with a Linux box, then the application has to be recompiled to run on the E15k.

Re:customers move to competitors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I know, I have worked with an E10k. The fact that those systems are (almost) always partitioned was partly my point. On the E10k I worked with, no partition was assigned more than 8 CPU's, which is a number that current Linux SMP handles ok. My point was partly that the "Linux doesn't scale to 128 Processors" comment I see a lot is largely a red herring.
The real reasons you don't want to run Linux on that class of server hardware (yet) is that there is not because Linux lack of capabilities or performance, but simply because you can't find anyone with experience in administrating and supporting Linux on an E10k. That expertise will probably have to be grown in-house at SUN, if they want to do it. Unlike IBM, however, SUN seems to have no inclination to work on getting Linux supported on their big UNIX iron.

UNICOS, Anyone?

[lostchicken]

Sounds kinda like UNICOS to me...

UNICOS, the Cray OS, would cost Joe Slashdot around half a mil to run, and it's non-transferable. This new sun deal sounds kinda like that.

However, there is no Linux for Cray. There is Linux for SPARC. So, If Solaris is too expensive for you, don't use it. IRIX is too expensive for me to run on my SGI, but it's not a problem. I don't care, I use Linux.

Re:UNICOS, Anyone?

[green pizza]

IRIX is too expensive for me to run on my SGI

Every SGI machine out there is licensed for at least some version of IRIX... depends on when the machine was built. The Indigo2 started out with IRIX 4.05 and was sold well into the release of the IRIX 6.5 stream.

The O2 originally shipped in 1996 with the O2-only IRIX 6.3. The Octane originally shipped in 1997 with the Octane/Origin/Onyx2-only IRIX 6.4. Pretty much everything built after May 1998 shipped with the IRIX 6.5 stream. If your machine has at least an R10K/250 CPU, chances are it's licenced for IRIX 6.5.

Depends on where you live and what sort of SGI offices/dealers/VARs are in your area, but most folks have had good luck getting a free/cheap or borrowed CD set of 6.5 and then downloading the latest quarterly update off support.sgi.com.

There's nothing wrong with borrwing the CDs for a version of IRIX your machine can rightfully use. It's not like IRIX will run on non-SGI hardware... nor were MIPS-based SGIs ever sold without the intent of running IRIX.

Lots of $500 Octanes on eBay and $400 Octanes on USENET.

Re:UNICOS, Anyone?

[PapaZit]

There's nothing wrong with borrwing the CDs for a version of IRIX your machine can rightfully use.

This is like saying "There's nothing wrong with using Windows 2000 on a machine that came with 98 if it also came with a Microsoft keyboard and mouse." You can justify it however you like, but it's still theft if you don't have a license.

I have an Indigo 2 at home that was going to be thrown away. I have the hardware, the original OS CDs (5.3, I think), and a transfer of ownership statement from the original owner. SGI still wants $600 to bring the machine up to 6.5 legally.

I decided to use another OS (NetBSD) that could be installed legally instead of paying SGI or stealing their software.

Re:UNICOS, Anyone?

[rmitz]

Note that he's not saying you can use a newer version. Please, read more carefully.

Re:UNICOS, Anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

the poster didn't say anything about using a *newer* version... just the version the machine originally shipped with (or was last licensed for... whichever is greater).

os licensing fee?

[wo1verin3]

This means they may be charging people to transfer ownership of the software....

... even though the software has already been paid for?

Re:os licensing fee?

[Mr. Slippery]

This means they may be charging people to transfer ownership of the software....

... even though the software has already been paid for?

Yep. Welcome the bizarre world of software "licencing", based on the concept that reading parts of a program into memory as they are needed is making a copy, and thus subject to regulation by copyright. You can own the disk but, under this bogus theory, not have the right to "copy" it into memory.

Since we humans read text by copying it from the page to our short-term memory (via our eyes), I'm waiting for someone to apply this to books...until you no longer have the right to read. After all, how is copying from printed text to synapse structure and electrical potential any different than copying from magentic alignments to electrical potential?

Re:os licensing fee?

[ObviousGuy]

how is copying from printed text to synapse structure and electrical potential any different than copying from magentic alignments to electrical potential?

Ease of perfect reproduction.

Re:os licensing fee?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even when I read out loud?

Re:os licensing fee?

[ObviousGuy]

When *you* read, it's parody. That falls under fair use.

Re:os licensing fee?

[Forge]

After all, how is copying from printed text to synapse structure and electrical potential any different than copying from magentic alignments to electrical potential?
This aplies because it's a human. I.e. If I were to deliberatly and maliciusly drive my Truck over your motorbike I would be liable for the cost of the bike and in rare cases sichological trauma to you.
However. If I did the same to the $2 whore you rented last night (This is all figurative) I would not owe you any money at all but I would be sent to prison for a long time. In some contries I would even be executed.
You see. It's not the electrical nature of the reading proces that makes the diference. It's the human involvment.
PS: All that is just to disprove your argument. The reality is that under *curent* copyright law I can publish a book requiring that you pay me royalties on a per page read basis. It hasn't been done simply because enogh readers wouldn't stand for it to make it a viable business model (Compared to selling books outright).
If people would likewise refuse to use software under onerus licenses then the vendors would have to get less restrictive in order to sell anything.

Re:os licensing fee?

[Homburg]

PS: All that is just to disprove your argument. The reality is that under *curent* copyright law I can publish a book requiring that you pay me royalties on a per page read basis.

I very much doubt that (although there seem to be yet more copyright restrictions cropping up every day, so you may possibly be right). Copyright traditionaly only restricts you in distributing copies of a work. You can do anything you like with the work except give copies to other people - you can photocopy for your own use, incorporate parts of it into your own work (as long as you do not distribute that work), use it to wipe your arse, and the copyright holder has absolutely no say in it.

Which makes me think that this idea of paying a fee just to use the OS is unenforceable bullshit. If I have a legitimately owned CD with Solaris on it, I can run it on any machine I like, and Sun can go jump.

Re:os licensing fee?

[Mr. Slippery]

Ease of perfect reproduction.

If that's all there was to it, copyright law wouldn't restrict hand-written copies.

Re:os licensing fee?

[Mr. Slippery]

You see. It's not the electrical nature of the reading proces that makes the diference. It's the human involvment.

Ah, you're trying to apply common sense here. But remember that we're dealing with the area of human endeavor that gave us the DCMA.

In your murder example, the law explicitly makes a distinction between human and non-human. But there's nothing in the constitutional clause authorizing copyright law, nor so far as I know in copyright law itself, that mentions a distinction between living and non-living, human and non-human, media for copying.

Re:os licensing fee?

[homer_ca]

Welcome the bizarre world of software "licencing", based on the concept that reading parts of a program into memory as they are needed is making a copy,

This is one of the huge myths of copyright law and is often cited to justify mandatory software licensing vs. purchase. Section 117(1) of the Copyright Act amended in 1976 thoroughly debunks this:

Sect. 117. Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs

Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106 [17 USCS Sect. 106], it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:

(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or

(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.

If you need the power

[ObviousGuy]

You usually have to pay for the kind of power that you need.

If you want to serve some OSS projects, then all you need is a handful of Athlons and Linux. But if you want to serve a large enterprise system, you're going to need some big iron and big iron software.

These fees are not as expensive as having your network crash because some zealot thought he could set up an equivalent network in Linux instead of Solaris.

Re:If you need the power

[Anonymous Coward]

Like their names imply, Lunix is the Moon, and Solaris is the Sun. Lunix is merely reflected light while Solaris is the real furnace. Something to think about.

Re:If you need the power

[gewalker]

I don't know, but at this kind of pricing, pirating the software and paying the $100K fine when you get caught may be cheaper.

Then again, I don't really care too much. I can't afford a 128 CPU Sun server in the first place.

Re:If you need the power

[ObviousGuy]

Exactly. And the kind of companies that can afford it will pay because it's better to pay for the service than steal it and hope for the best.

Re:If you need the power

[rodgerd]

Linux may be the answer for every situation, but Sun has competitors other than the free *ix world. Who are probably high-fiving right now.

One of my customers has been flirting with ripping out Slowaris and replacing it with AIX. When they've finished shitting bricks over the US$160,000 it will cost them to upgrade their web farm, they'll be signing up with Big Blue.

Re:If you need the power

[shagan]

Does you customer not have a support contract for the hardware with Sun? That would be the only reason they would need to purchase a Solaris 9 upgrade. All of Sun's system support contracts include "support" for Solaris, which gives you access to all releases of Solaris.

Re:If you need the power

[4of12]

If you want to serve some OSS projects, then all you need is a handful of Athlons and Linux. But if you want to serve a large enterprise system, you're going to need some big iron and big iron software.

My shop has got Linux clusters, Sun E10ks as well as desktops Solaris and Linux.

Linux works great and is economical like nothing else, and it's lately becoming a favorite choice on the desktop.

Meanwhile, though, for ultra-reliable, high-throughput, convenient, easy-to-manage systems connected to SANs, the big 64-way Suns are absolutely the way to go.

Dunno if that will still be true in 5 years, but it certainly is the case now.

When you need that kind of service, the kinds of prices we're talking about here are not at all unusual. While everyone should constantly evaluate their options (i.e., will a MOSIX cluster do the job?), the right answer is still Sun in certain cases.

Re:If you need the power

[Forge]

Hmmm... There may be provision in copyright law for a "triple damages" penalty in special cases. This would be one such case.

PS: Even if I am wrong about those penalties it is worth noteing that after paying the fines you still have to pay the original license fee.

2 vs 4 CPU apparent quirk isn't one

[erlkonig]

The 2 CPU for $249 is for a server, while the 4 CPU at $199 is for just a desktop. Nice desktop, methinks.

Now the question is whether Sun still doing the old 2-user Right-To-Use license from the old days or not, although, unlike some vendors, I don't recall them ever having enforced it at the software level.

Re:2 vs 4 CPU apparent quirk isn't one

[Anonymous Coward]

I fucking hate the EuroNews channel.

It sucks! Sucks! Sucks!

Re:2 vs 4 CPU apparent quirk isn't one

[Anonymous Coward]

The 2 CPU for $249 is for a server, while the 4 CPU at $199 is for just a desktop. Nice desktop, methinks.

No kidding. That's what the original post said. The funny part is that if you take the SAME Ultra-80 motherboard, you pay more for the SAME software if it is rackmounted.

Re:2 vs 4 CPU apparent quirk isn't one

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't pay more if it's rackmounted, you pay more if you use it as a server. And Sun trusts you to say whether you're meeting their server or desktop usage criteria. Why is this funny?

2CPU vs 4CPU isn't that curious

[Pretzalzz]

The 4 CPU license that is $199 is a Desktop upgrade while the 2 CPU license that is $249 is a Server2 upgrade. Operating systems for servers are usually more expensive that operating systems for desktops so this isn't that surprising.

What is sun doing here?

[synx]

I am frankly rather confused at Sun's approach here. Generally people use big big iron for only a few things, one being database servers. Generally you spread the load across many smaller cheaper Intel boxes.

Considering that the database of choice is Oracle (Larry Ellison aside...) and I have heard from numerous people and DBA professionals which say that HPUX+Oracle is the way to go (don't take my word for it, both amazon and yahoo use HPUX for Oracle), where does this leave Solaris?

I guess in the lucrative education market Solaris still has a major presence (my University certainly had a good number of solaris boxen). But with the trend to massively duplicated web services across high end Intel hardware combined with HPUX's strength with Oracle, where does Solaris fit?

Re:What is sun doing here?

[BJH]

Finance.

All my company's clients (which include the top five stock trading houses in the US) run our software on Sun boxes and Solaris, with Sybase as the database.

Re:What is sun doing here?

[guacamole]

Sun sells more UNIX servers than HP, IBM, and SGI combined. I don't know about Yahoo, but the reason Amazon uses HP servers for the database backend is that HP was so depressed about their small market share that they sold a bunch of servers to amazon at much lower than usual price just to say "Amazon uses HP hardware"

As for Oracle, Solaris is THE platform to run it on as Oracle people have told many times, Solaris is the prefered Oracle platform because Oracle is developed on Solaris and then ported to other OSes.

Re:What is sun doing here?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Sun doesn't sell "big iron". You could fit one each of all of Sun's models in a single semi trailer.

Re:What is sun doing here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. In Q1 of 2002 IBM for the first time surpassed SUN as 1 Unix server vendor, sun regained the 1 spot but it's very far from
selling more then HP and IBM combined.

Times change.

Re:What is sun doing here?

[haggar]

What the heck are you talking about? Sun is the primary platform on which Oracle runs. Oracle themselves test it first on Sun and then all the rest.

Even the installation: on HP-UX is more convoluted because HP-UX doesn't support RockRidge extensions to iso9660, so the CD management requires additional care. The fact that Oracle didn't care facilitating this problem shows how (un)importan HP-UX is for them.

Re:What is sun doing here?

[guacamole]

This is true.. if you count Linux as Unix. If you correctly count only the AIX and Dynix sales as Unix, then IBM has less than 20% of market share.

Reference: http://news.com.com/2100-1001-912700.html

A quote: In the Unix market, No. 1 Sun gained 3.3 percent, rising from 50.7 percent last year to 54 percent this year. No. 3 IBM, meanwhile, lost 4.1 percent, sinking from 21.3 percent to 17.2 percent.

Re:What is sun doing here?

[Burdell]

As for Oracle, Solaris is THE platform to run it on as Oracle people have told many times, Solaris is the prefered Oracle platform because Oracle is developed on Solaris and then ported to other OSes.

That's funny. An Oracle rep said that their primary platform in many ways was Tru64 Unix running on Alpha. They started on VAX/VMS and migrated from there. He also said that Oracle licensed Tru64's TruCluster clustering software to port it to Solaris and Linux to get reliable Oracle clustering.

Re:What is sun doing here?

[Anonymous Coward]

And we all know that Oracle sales rep. are honest trustworthy people.

Re:What is sun doing here?

[qurob]

Whats all this jazz about Amazon running on Linux?

other commerical unices

[green pizza]

Thankfully many other companies have kept a single price for their OS regardless of system size. IBM AIX is still that way, as is SGI's IRIX. In fact, the only real IRIX cost when buying a new machine from SGI is the (oddly) required media fee of about $200. I've been pretty happy with IRIX, it gets a pretty decent update each quarter, as does the SGI freeware archive (http://freeware.sgi.com) -- I wish sunfreeware.com was.

But then again, if a person buys a brand new 512 CPU SGI Origin 3800 with 1 TB of RAM and and 25 TB of disk, SGI outta toss in a free car. Or house. In the swiss alps.

Re:other commerical unices

[josh crawley]

Fuck the car. For those prices, they oughtta toss in The Swiss Alps.

Re:other commerical unices

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember hearing rumours that it was Intergraph who used to specialise in these little bonuses (presents, jobs, etc) for people who bought their equipment.

People in New Zealand will know at least one of the cases I'm referring to.

Re:other commerical unices

[guacamole]

Though, I feel sorry for those SGI hobbysts most of whom can't get a recent version of IRIX to run on their precious O2s and Indys that were purchased on ebay and such. This has not been a problem in the Sun world for the past few years.

Re:other commerical unices

[Technomancer]

Debian-mips works fine on my Indy. Indigo 2 and O2(R5000) are supported too but only with serial console.

Re:other commerical unices

[GutBomb]

when I worked at Larry FLynt Publications we picked up an intergraph box for our 3D and video editing stuff. We didn't get cars or anything. All we got was lunch with a bald guy in a suit at El Torito, and I think the salesman even bummed a cigarette off of me.

Re:other commerical unices

[wowbagger]

Do you have a good pointer to a page on re-installing Irix? I have an Indy that came with 6.2 installed, and 6.5 CDs. After upgrading, the thing locks solid 50% of the time you access the video capture system - it now has the dubious distinction of being less stable than Windows. I've also tried putting Gnome on it (because I hate 4DWM), and Gnome will hard lock.

I'd like to do a from-scratch re-install of 6.5, but I've never installed a *nix other than Linux before.

And I suppose that is one of the problems with commercial *nixes - you get the hardware at a flea market, and the OS costs eat you alive. Not unlike Windows....

Re:other commerical unices

[Anonymous Coward]

about the IRIX re-install:
indy's freeze while capturing video
if they have 32M of ram installed
i learned that the hard way

feel free to email me at
cypher7_v@yahoo.com
i just installed 6.5.15 on my
purple monster (indigo2)
not all that complex provided you
have a working cd-rom

Re:other commerical unices

[rapidweather]

Linux distros are cheap because there are loads of alternatives (lowering 'need' for your one) and the users are mainly cheapskates ;-)
Yep, that's me!

Re:other commerical unices

[Anonymous Coward]

Systems bought from Sun or that are under free or paid support get Solaris "for free".

Unless you're buying a multiprocessor machine from someone other than Sun, or you're upgrading a machine you've dropped from free or paid support, why would you pay for Solaris again?

How to Milk Your Best Customers 101:

[Henry V .009]

Can someone explain to me why they even bother charging by the CPU? Why don't they just go out and charge customers by their annual revenue or stock market valuation or something. Or is there some important OS difference between 64 CPUs and 128?

Software should be protected by copyright, not by license. It distorts the system too much this way. A software product no longer acts a a normal commodity.

Re:How to Milk Your Best Customers 101:

[coryboehne]

I don't know that this is a valid qualification for charging more, but there is a difference between an OS made for 64 CPU's and an OS made for 128 CPU's, the reason for this is the fact that the OS has to be able to both control and manage all of the CPU's in a system, obviously there would be modifications and optimizations needed to make a system capible of accessing more CPU's. And by your theory of charging by annual revenue or stock market valuation Microsoft would have to pay millions for what would cost you about five dollars, now I don't really know that it would'nt be a good idea, but there would have to be minimums and caps.

Re:How to Milk Your Best Customers 101:

[squaretorus]

You have to have SOME manner by which you charge customers differing rates based on their 'need' and their 'ability to pay'. The greater their need, and the greater their ability to pay the more you can charge.

Linux distros are cheap because there are loads of alternatives (lowering 'need' for your one) and the users are mainly cheapskates ;-)

Solaris on a low-end system indicates a low need, and/or low ability to pay so a lower licence is charged so that you 'at least make something out of them'.

The higher end systems indicate a greater need, greater ability to pay, and so these people should be milked dry!

Seriously - if they could charge by market value they would! Banks do.

Re:How to Milk Your Best Customers 101:

[Henry V .009]

Good post. But you don't NEED some manner to charge customers differently. With most commodities it is impossible, because you can't control the used product market. Cars, food, what not, don't have this system. In fact, it is usually cheaper to buy things in bulk. Among other things, a healthy used product market helps balance price. And price balancing is the system which makes free markets so great at resource allocation. The rich paying the same price for bread as the poor is a feature of capitalism, not a bug :).

OTOH, if someone can break that chain, then the advantage of having a free market to allocate resources goes away. This is what happens with software licenses.

Re:How to Milk Your Best Customers 101:

[sydneyfong]

Imagine Sun charges for 5%
Then some other 3rd party software vendor charges for 10%
Then M$ comes in (for some reason ;-) and gets another 10%
Sun changes its mind and charges 10% more.

Now tell me what you have after paying taxes.

Re:How to Milk Your Best Customers 101:

[Iluvatar]

Or is there some important OS difference between 64 CPUs and 128?

Is there a difference between buying your airplane ticket 2 months versus 2 days in advance? Yes, demand (you are probably on an urgent need)---and a few $K more. Or buying 1 hour in advance? Yes, demand (no-one else wanted you seat so far)... Is there a difference between business class versus coach on the same plane to the same destination? Yes, service---and a few $K again... etc etc

Re:How to Milk Your Best Customers 101:

[inerte]

Because Intel marketing told you Mhz are a Good Thing.

Nevermind price, if you dual, you battle ;-)

Re:How to Milk Your Best Customers 101:

[guacamole]

Simple. They want to charge the big bucks only from people who bought uber-expensive big-iron systems (but then, the OS license fee is laughable compared to the cost of the whole server or even cost of the anual service/support contracts). At the same time, Sun wants to charge nothing or very little from users who use Sun workstations or low-end servers. Is this hard to understand?

This pricing scheme is quite different from say the Oracle pricising which is a real ripoff. ($50K for -each- CPU, anyone?)

Re:How to Milk Your Best Customers 101:

[odie_q]

"Cars, food, what not, don't have this system."

Of course they do. The rich pay much more for their Bentleys than do the poor for their Hyundais. They pay more for their quail eggs than do the poor for their spam, and they pay more for their two hundred cpu Solaris servers than do we for our Linux driven 486:es.

Re:How to Milk Your Best Customers 101:

[rtaylor]

Simple... Cost of writing the OS is X. Often more work goes into higher end features like keeping 128 CPUs from trampling eachother. 2 or 4 is easy.

So... Rather than charging the guy with the E250 $700 for their cut of the OS, they're transferring most of that fee to the guy whos actually buying the $2mil server.

See, the $2mil guy probably doesn't care much if they have a 200k OS fee where the guy buying a $2500 server would really notice the $700 -- but not so much a $250 fee.

People are used to taxes, etc. tacking on ~10% to a given purchasse -- so consider this an OS tax on the machine.

Re:How to Milk Your Best Customers 101:

[Henry V .009]

Whoa. The point passed you by like a freight train in the night. The 64-CPU OS is almost certainly exactly the same code-wise as the 128-CPU OS. In fact, it is probably exactly the same (minus certain protection features that stop you from using it) as the 1-CPU OS. They almost certainly ship the same code to everyone. Now it's the rich and poor paying different prices for Hyundais, simply because the rich guy uses it for richer things.

Re:How to Milk Your Best Customers 101:

[odie_q]

What I meant was that you should look at it as a total cost of the system. Server and OS together. I don't want to díscredit Bentley, but many spare parts ("upgrades"?) for expensive cars are of insignificantly better quality than their Hyundai counterparts (Hyundai's are actually of quite decent quality). Still, they cost many times more simply because they carry an expensive brand name. This way the customer's wallet size is taken into account (which I personally have no problem with).

Sun has customers in a very wide spectrum of the market. I actually think it's nice of them to deliver the same top quality product at a lower price to customers with less wallet power (Which is what they're attempting to determine by this licensing scheme)

Re:How to Milk Your Best Customers 101:

[bkocik]

With most commodities it is impossible, because you can't control the used product market. Cars, food, what not, don't have this system.

Who buys used food?

Re:How to Milk Your Best Customers 101:

[billcopc]

Yes there is an important OS difference. The OS needs to reserve an extra 12kb of stack to hold CPU state information. I remember reading in an assembly language book that "stack memory is expensive". So there you have it :)

Re:How to Milk Your Best Customers 101:

[goid]

The problem with Sun's licensing, and many others like it, is that it makes an invalid assumption: that people with, for example, >1 CPU can afford the licensing.

I can afford to get reasonably powerful 2-4 CPU systems but I can't afford the license for them.

Contrary to what someone else said, some of the old systems ARE worth a lot. A quad-CPU Sun SS20 for example, is still a decent machine, but now Sun wants way too much for the OS license.

Re:How to Milk Your Best Customers 101:

[odie_q]

This might not be the perfect solution to the problem, but I think Sun really are trying to be fair. Quoth their web site:

Note: User Licenses are based on system capacity, not on the number of CPUs installed

I guess that means my dual 55MHz SS10 shouldn't require to expensive a license, seeing as a 1050MHz Ultra III can run Solaris for free.

More money than cents.

[coryboehne]

If I had more money than I knew what to do with, or some type of use *cough*, I'd have to go for one of these. The cost is'nt even listed, but I'm sure it's WAY up there.

Re:More money than cents.

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you have not heard of the sun fire 15K. Yeah, sure the E10Ks are nice, but if you wanted to try to impress us with how big and bad of a product you could find that Sun sells, why not post with one of these.

Re:More money than cents.

[coryboehne]

Ohhhh, MAN!

4,329,501.00 List Price - loaded

Yep, that's up there.

Re:More money than cents.

[BJH]

Some guy's selling an E10000 on Yahoo Japan's auction site, starting at 1,000,000 yen (about $8000). Unfortunately, he doesn't ship internationally ;)

Re:More money than cents.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't that offer be almost worth flying to Japan and back?

Goddammit! I haven't cleaned my apartment for the last six weeks and now I have to clean it in two hours. I hate peope who want to visit me unannounced.

Re:More money than cents.

[BJH]

He's pulled the box's memory, so you'd have to find some yourself. Probably cost you as much as the machine itself...

Re:More money than cents.

[Anonymous Coward]

E10K's are old hat.

You really want one of the new E15Ks....

License is for CAPACITY, not number of CPUs

[M100]

The Sun licensing page says "User Licenses are based on system capacity, not on the number of CPUs installed" (emphasis mine). So it's not the number of CPUs that you actually have, but the number that you could install in the future!
Taking this literally you still need to buy a license for a system with two CPU slots, but no CPU installed!

Re:License is for CAPACITY, not number of CPUs

[zmalone]

You certain about that? Sun sells machines which have more CPUs installed then you pay for. The extra processors are just not turned on, if you later need more power, you buy the processors off of them, and they turn the additional chips on. I think that what they are saying, is that you wont be charged for the processors that are turned off.

Devil's advocate.

[cbr372]

Ordinarily I'd agree with you. It's a fact that Solaris has traditionally been the one of staunchest Unix systems available, and its stability has been proven in data centers the world over. However, in recent years, Linux on Sun hardware has improved to the point of actually been faster on Sun hardware than Solaris itself. Of course this doesn't hold true for 64-processor E-10000 systems, or other very high-end Sun systems, but for the average E-450 and E-250? What you don't seem to grasp is the fact that very few companies actually need the kind of power provided by ultra high-end hardware that Solaris performs best on. Yes, it does have its place and many companies will continue using that high-end Sun (and other corporations') hardware, but most companies just don't need it.

But if you want to serve a large enterprise system, you're going to need some big iron and big iron software. These fees are not as expensive as having your network crash because some zealot thought he could set up an equivalent network in Linux instead of Solaris.

Yeah. Zealots like IBM who have ported Linux to their 370 Mainframes. how much bigger Iron do you need? I agree with you to a certain extent, Solaris is still the top Unix system available, but in some respects, Linux is already far ahead of it, for example, in terms of portability and flexibility. Solaris won't go away in a hurry, but Linux also has its place, as does *BSD and other systems.

Re:Devil's advocate.

[guacamole]

Ordinarily I'd agree with you. It's a fact that Solaris has traditionally been the one of staunchest Unix systems available, and its stability has been proven in data centers the world over. However, in recent years, Linux on Sun hardware has improved to the point of actually been faster on Sun hardware than Solaris itself. Of course this doesn't hold true for 64-processor E-10000 systems, or other very high-end Sun systems, but for the average E-450 and E-250?

Linux on anything non-x86 is useless except for embedded applications. Do you wnat to loose all of application support? Do you want to loose the vendor support? Do you want to exchange a stable, robust datacenter quality OS that was designed for this type of hardware for Linux which probably is even less feature-rich and stable on sparc hardware than it is on x86? Do you think people would have paid 2x the price of comparable x86 hardware for those E250 and E450 to run Linux on it? Solaris and its applications is the main reason companies shell out their bucks for sun machines, not the hardware features. If you like Linux, for god's sake, get an x86 box, not a sparc. Viceversa is true for shops that prefer Solaris.

As for portability, although, it is offered only on two platforms, Solaris is still pretty portable, more so than many other unix variants. Solaris was designed and developed in a portable manner. It runs on x86 and SPARC today. Solaris 2.5.1 used to run on PPC but Sun canned that project early on. Rumors from quite respectable sources suggested that Sun engineers had Solaris running IA64 emulator before any other OS did.

Re:Devil's advocate.

[rodgerd]

The notion that an E250 (or 450) is better than a free *ix on good quality IA32 hardware is horseshit indulged in by zealots who can't let go of their proprietary hardware.

If you were talking E10k or 6800/15000 class hardware, you'd be right. But a 250 is a worthless proposition, which is why Sun's low end systems are all just PCs with UltraSPARC CPUs these days.

Re:Devil's advocate.

[guacamole]

When I can run an x86 box without having to upgrade
Linux on it every 18 months, and with NFS3 implementation that doesn't suck, and with a RAID/Volume manager that doesn't suck, -then- I'll might consider buying it. Until, then, I prefer putting Sun servers in the machine room.

Re:Devil's advocate.

[Lumpy]

But if you want to serve a large enterprise system, you're going to need some big iron and big iron software. These fees are not as expensive as having your network crash because some zealot thought he could set up an equivalent network in Linux instead of Solaris.

No you dont, several mega-corperations have already proven this. Yes The likes of AT&T and MCI have some Big iron left over but if you watch their stockholders reports that talk about the big purchases Nither have bought a mainframe in over 20 years. and from talks with people at both everyone is migrating away from them to either clusters or discreet servers. 9/11 changed more than the world, it changed the mindset of corperate america...

The scary part... I know of one of those companies above that will be sliding toward a microsoft solution... and there is nothing that microsoft sells that runs on big iron let alone medium iron.... So it will have to be clustered SQL... MS - SQL....

the thought of that makes me feel like I just drank some spoiled milk.

Re:Devil's advocate.

[Tet]

with a RAID/Volume manager that doesn't suck

You mean like this one?

Re:Devil's advocate.

[Anonymous Coward]

uhhh, maybe that is because you don't buy mainframes anymore, you lease them. So they won't show up on quarterly reports under purchases.

Re:Devil's advocate.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a fact that Solaris has traditionally been the one of staunchest Unix systems available, and its stability has been proven in data centers the world over. However, in recent years, Linux on Sun hardware has improved to the point of actually been faster on Sun hardware than Solaris itself. Does this mean when the less stable Linux on SPARC box crashes, you will at least be able to tell your boss that it is booting up faster?

Re:Devil's advocate.

[Anonymous Coward]

9/11 changed more than the world, it changed the mindset of corperate america...

Corporate America !> The World

Re:Devil's advocate.

[Anonymous Coward]

umm yes it does... corperate americ can easily destroy mof othe the rest of the world with nary a fart.

Bewae, our corps are too bug for their own good!

corp america == the world.

think about that next time you hear your countries govt passing a type of copyright protection law...

Re:Devil's advocate.

[billcopc]

Well geez, if it's so fast on Sun hardware, why is it so slow on native x86 ?

Re:Devil's advocate.

[pmz]

in some respects, Linux is already far ahead of it

I don't agree. Consider that with modern Solaris, one can take apart and reassemble most of a server while it is still serving. Also consider that Solaris is extremely well documented and supported. Also consider that Solaris configurations tend to be more consistent, predictable, and maintainable.

Sure, it is harder to argue for Solaris on a computer that is essentially disposable (i.e., a PC), but when that computer is indispensible, Solaris will make you very happy.

Re:Devil's advocate.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that it is still linux. One day you'll upgrade the kernel to fix some idiotic security flaw, and then all of the sudden Linux is crashing because it's new driver for your RAID controller is crap. And then you write the author, and he says that he needs your motherboard to fix the updated code. This kind of hard lesson you learn when running Linux on a server as compared to Solaris.

Re:Devil's advocate.

[Anonymous Coward]

IA32 has been broken since they started using the A20 line for memory management and it's been continually hacked farther and farther as time has gone on. What are x86 users going to do in a few years when Intel and AMD hit moore's law and their 20+ stage pipelines no longer provide them with the competitive MHz ratings?

Re:Devil's advocate.

[Cramer]

I don't care how much you pray to the god's of Sun; NFS will always suck.

As for upgrade cycles, every OS requires periodic upgrades. Some (read: M$) require the entire OS and all applications to be updated and reinstalled. I have linux boxes that are over 5 years old and none of them have ever been completely rebuilt -- if you keep up with things, there's little need to wipe your system and start over. [These machines pre-date glibc (libc4) and the whole ELF migration.]

Re:Devil's advocate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun Microsystems - Dead Man Walking

Re:Devil's advocate.

[Anonymous Coward]

> The notion that an E250 (or 450) is better than
> a free *ix on good quality IA32 hardware is
> horseshit indulged in by zealots who can't let
> go of their proprietary hardware.

I see in post 3607949 that you claim to have a customer considering "ripping out Slowaris" and moving to AIX, apparently for a web farm (oooh, that's a high end use for "cheap" RS/6000 hardware) and you manage to not bad mouth IBM. So, are you a pro-IBM zealot, anti-Sun zealot, or a "linux is so 3l33t, don't confuse me with the facts" zealot?

> But a 250 is a worthless proposition, which is
> why Sun's low end systems are all just PCs with
> UltraSPARC CPUs these days.

You really haven't looked at the specs / capabilities of the E250 have you? You could make a reasonable argument that a Blade 100, or Ultra 5 or 10 is a PC with an Ultrasparc CPU, but not a E250, or E450 for that matter.

http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/250/

Re:Devil's advocate.

[kriston]

I run Solaris x86 on several computers and Solaris SPARC on many times more, and I think the main reasons that Solaris x86 is much slower than the SPARC version is due to non-support for UDMA mode IDE, and the super-tiny processor caches on the x86 systems. The UDMA IDE support and the full-speed processor cache in the 400 MHz Ultra5/10 systems can show you this when stacked next to 1 GHz Pentium 3 systems.

Kris

Obligatory OS X and XServe post!

[2nd Post!]

No OS licensing fees!

Sure the hardware doesn't compete against the range, but for the narrow band in which XServe does compete (dual CPU, 2GB DDR, GigaE, 480GB storage, $7000), there are absolutely *no* OS licensing per CPU or per user fees.

Re:Obligatory OS X and XServe post!

[hendridm]

> Re:Obligatory OS X and XServe post!
> by 2nd Post! (louis-wang@hp.com) on Thursday May 30...

Err, don't you mean HP-UX? What would you boss say? ;)

*shrug* pretty cheap actually

[StandardDeviant]

compared to the licensing costs for some other commercial unixen... compare this to what SGI wants for the latest IRIX (their workstation IRIX is, iirc, something like $600). Given a) Sun's current financial position (could be better) and b) the fact that solaris is a project involving many, many highly paid engineers, them wanting some bucks makes perfect sense. They're still giving away (iso download soon, physical media now for $fairly_cheap) the 1-cpu version, which covers the majority of workstations and low-end servers...

yep, that's a hard one to answer

[Anonymous Coward]

duh...try using the 'price and buy' button at the top...too hard for you?

List Price: $927,210.00

Re:yep, that's a hard one to answer

[coryboehne]

Hmm, did'nt see that, however I assure my mouse is in my full control, thank you kind troll. :)

sun = oracle

[mexilent]

sun's totally taking this cue from oracle, which changes its pricing model every other year just to make money off the confusion (with dominance of the enterprise db market, they're basically the Micro$oft of RDBMS's anyway).

i love solaris, but it's not like they've ever made money off the OS--it's the hardware, stupid!

Re:sun = oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

with dominance of the enterprise db market, they're [oracle] basically the Micro$oft of RDBMS's anyway

Well, except for the fact that IBM now has a larger share of the database market than Oracle does. Granted, "the database market" != "the enterprise database market", but the point is that there is no one database vendor that's just obviously dominant.

Re:sun = oracle

[kubrick]

i love solaris, but it's not like they've ever made money off the OS--it's the hardware, stupid!

Sun want to be like Microsoft (more money from the sale of cardboard boxes and shiny discs), but Microsoft want to be like IBM (keep bleeding your customers for services). And given the current level of quality of much Microsoft software, maybe they've just been trying to ensure that they have a good future income stream. :/

Re:sun = oracle

[guacamole]

Oh, this remark is pure bullsh*t.

The Solaris 9 license fee is a tiny little fraction of the cost of the hardware or even the anual service/support contract. $240 to run Solaris 9 on a $10 server or, what? $400 is probably not bad at all for a +$20K quad CPU box. This fee is still symbolic compared to what other unix vendors charge. Even $6000 fee is not bad either if you're paying it to run Solaris 9 on a $200,000 Sun Fire 3800. Don't forget that you get to run it for free on single processor machines.

This is quite different from oracle which charges absoletely crazy fees per concurrent user or per CPU (the cost is in tens of thousands of dollars per CPU and people still buy it)

Re:sun = oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

sun's totally taking this cue from oracle...

Oh, did they get a huge contract with the state of CA too? :-)

Re:fist pro$t, of course

[Anonymous Coward]

call us when you swallow

NASA AMES knows what's up

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA AMES has about half a dozen 128 CPU SGI Origin 2000 machines and absolute beast Origin 3800 with 1024 CPUs running a special "XXL" version of IRIX 6.5 (which normally doesn't support more than 512 CPUs per machine).

SARA also has a 1024 CPU Origin 3800, though they have it partitioned in firmware to a few smaller domains. What's almost more impressive is their 100 TB of near-line tape storage.

http://home.sara.nl/~walter/sara/images/lg_sara. jp g

I wonder if NASA and SARA ever battle it out with big iron Counterstrike bots? :)

Can you imagine?

[coryboehne]

That is impressive, however it begs for the asking: Can you imagine a beowulf of these? j/k :) but it seems so necessary!

Re:Can you imagine?

[green pizza]

I can imagine.

SGI big iron supports a fancy new flavor of HIPPI that can do 800 MB/sec (that's 6.4 gigabit for the myrinet folks) per link. Up to several links per machine.

So... if you needed such a beast, you could buy several dozen 512 CPU Origin 3800 machines, plus several dozen what-ever-this-new-flavor-of-hippi-is-called cards... boom, fifty gazillion CPUs.

Of course, you'd also a need a fifty acre warehouse and a nuclear power plant...

Re:Can you imagine?

[coryboehne]

I wonder if even Bill Gates could afford that.

Hardware: 1.7 billion
Software: 150 million
Nuclear Power Plant: 4 billion
Cracking RC5 in under 10 seconds: Priceless
:)

Cray software *and* parts

[Anonymous Coward]

A nearby business recently took their Cray J90 offline, after some discussion with their management I was told I could have the thing in exchange for helping haul it out of the machine room and help haul in some new Suns and IBMs. Problem was, at some point in the life of the machine, the "CRAY" badges were removed. I phoned Cray asking if such badges were available for sale and at what cost. The fellow on the other end wouldn't even talk to me unless I had a license to UNICOS as well as as support contract. He also informed me that the UNICOS license would no longer be vaild once the machine was give to me and that use of it would be illegal!

I eventually realized that the machine in question required three phase power, something I can't get in my neighborhood. :(

Guess it's time to shift my lust to big iron Alphas or Origins.

Re:Cray software *and* parts

[Anonymous Coward]

"Could you please give me your license number, sir?"

"Why?"

"I am sorry sir but I am not allowed to answer any questions unless you give me a valid license number."

"Uhh... you see I don't have a license..."

"You do not have the license, but you are in possession of one CrayJ90? Is this correct, sir?"

"Well, kind of but..."

"Thank you very much for your call, sir. I must inform you now, sir, that it is illegal to own or use a Cray without a valid license."

"What the fuck?!"

"This phonecall has been traced and recorded for further use. Our legal people will be contacting you shortly. Please pack the Cray J90 in its original shipping crate for retrieval. A failure to comply will result in further lawsuits. Thank you for calling Cray Support. Have a nice day."

Re:Cray software *and* parts

[psavo]

"Could you please give me your license number, sir?"

"Why?"

"I am sorry sir but I am not allowed to answer any questions unless you give me a valid license number."

"Uhh.. Where can I see what my license number is?"

"I am sorry sir but I am not allowed to answer any questions unless you give me a valid license number."

"Ok, quit joking, I have this iron, and some papers, where is this number printed on?!"

"I am sorry sir but I am not allowed to answer any questions unless you give me a valid license number."

Re:Cray software *and* parts

[lucifuge31337]

You can get a three-phase converter for well under $500 that runs on 220 volts....plug it into your dryer outlet.

Or better yet, just give it to me.

Re:Cray software *and* parts

[Tony-A]

As useless as a dead Cray.

It also reflects on the value of a still-alive Cray.

Groan...

[BJH]

This is very relevant new for me - I just bought a Fujitsu Primepower200 off an auction site, and I'm currently downloading the Solaris 8 installation CD.

The thing is, this machine has 2 CPUs. What I want to know, is it physically impossible for the Solaris 8 Free Binary version to run on multiple CPUs, or will it actually require a license? (I want to make sure the machine works before I fork out $249 for a license...)

Re:Groan...

[scrye]

AFAIK the solaris 8 sparc free binary is for 1-8 cpus.. maybe 16..

Re:Groan...

[dpoulson]

8 short and sweet answer, but the lameness filter won't allow it!

Re:Groan...

[sh00z]

Save work on the download, and money on the license: Sun will send it to you for free (assuming you can read a DVD).

Re:Groan...

[Vagary]

As far as I can tell, all copies of Solaris are the same. I got a quote on Sol9 for a 2CPU server yesterday, and in addition to the license it included a media bundle -- exactly the same product they'd sell me for a 1CPU server.

Re:Groan...

[kindbud]

There is no license enforcement code in Solaris 8 whatsoever. YOu can install and run it on both CPUs with no (technical) trouble.

Re:Groan...

[roybadami]

AFAIK the solaris 8 sparc free binary is for 1-8 cpus.. maybe 16..

It was for up to 8 CPUs. They seem to have changed the licensing now, though, so that it's the same as the new Solaris 9 licensing. (ie machines with a CPU capacity of 2 of more CPUs require a paid-for licence)

Sun explains the licensing discrepancy

[schnell]

On the Solaris 9 order page, Sun explains its seemingly incongruous licensing fees:

"Note: User Licenses are based on system capacity, not on the number of CPUs installed."

Sun's desktop and server/enterprise systems are built very differently. The number of CPUs (or even their MHz) on a system has little to do with their performance when considered alongside bus clocking, bandwidth, RAM, etc.

As such, it appears that they're making a good-faith effort to correlate a system's performance class (and hence what type of customer probably bought it) with what they're charging for the OS upgrade. Associated with the above idea is probably their built-in support costs (e.g., a large company using Solaris on a mission-critical system will probably have greater support demands than an individual user on a desktop machine).

If you're using Solaris rather than Linux or *BSD, chances are that you're doing so in a business environment where 24x7 commercial support and Solaris' other goodies are important. Unless you're a hacker who bought a $100 SPARC 2 box off eBay to tinker with Solaris, you probably purchased it because of its commercially-supported reliability and other kinky features like CPU and HD hot-swappability etc. on high-end systems.

FWIW, I think Sun's licensing terms here are a rather good attempt at equating commercial use and mission criticality with licensing fees. So, here's the question: (GPL/BSD aside), can anyone think of a better (specific!) scheme for equating the need [and presumably consequent ability to pay for it] of large corporations to pay big OS upgrade license fees and letting individual/small business users pay smaller OS license fees?

Re:Sun explains the licensing discrepancy

[Anonymous Coward]

who bought a $100 SPARC 2 box off eBay

Not to nitpick -- er ok -- to nitpick, I hope most folks aren't paying $100 for a SPARC 2. I recently bought an UltraSPARC box for $110 off eBay. Hell, $100 buys a pickup truck full of Sun IPXes or a small stack of SGI Indys.

Re:Sun explains the licensing discrepancy

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to pay $100 for a Sparc 2 these days.

It's a drop in the bucket

[Anonymous Coward]

Sticker shock? Come on. Any business that needs
the horsepower will fork over the cash without blinking. Software costs are negligible next
to maintenance costs.

no fees...

[green pizza]

Until Mac OS X 11.0 / Mac OS XI comes out. Then you'll have to shell out $100 or more for an upgrade. Unless you switch to Darwin... but then you'll lose most of the wizbang monitoring and clustering apps.

Not that bad. Their CPUs, on the other hand...

[IvyMike]

For the older and lower end machines, this might have an impact on the wallet, but for their modern high end workstations, $249 for an OS license is pretty cheap compared the the price of that second processor.

For example, click on one of the Blade 2000 systems on this page. Go down to the part where it says, " 900-MHz UltraSPARC III Cu Processor with 8-MB External Cache [add $4,500.00]". Now that's a spicy meatball. (It is a helluva processor, but 4.5k makes me gasp).

I do sort of feel bad for the old timers with older systems, but if they're trying to be cheap, they do have the option of sticking with the same OS, or switching to Linux. Solaris really is a solid OS, and for a lot of people, $249 will be definitely worth the cost.

Glad Sun doesn't sell Cray and SGI machines!

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on capacity?!?!?!?

The Origin we have can be expanded to about twice its current CPU count while still using the current chassis. I think it can go up to 256 CPUs if we add chassis and buy a thick mesh of "CrayLink" cables (sort of a cable replacement to an oldschool backplane or bus).

Does that mean if Sun bought SGI, IRIX would cost $1,000,000 no matter what size Origin was purchased?

Re:Glad Sun doesn't sell Cray and SGI machines!

[mridley]

Uh....no probably not. SGI has a pretty limited product line - I'm not up on all their servers but it used to be if you wanted a low end to moderate server you'd get an Origin 200. Otherwise you get an Origin 2000 in whatever configuration makes sense. Today the scenario is basically the same but change in Origin 3x00 instead of 2000. SUN has their product line more gradiated - so where on a SUN you would get perhaps a 3800 or a 4800 or a 6800 or an SF12k or an SF15k - probably for all of those apps you would get some kind of O2K or O3K system from SGI.. So..uh..it's kind of different.

Re:Glad Sun doesn't sell Cray and SGI machines!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun DOES sell a Cray machine. It's called the Enterprise 10000 (Cray 6400 I believe)

Always though Sun was all about hardware.....

[Iber]

Wow, this surprises me, I always though Sun's primary source of revenue was their hardware, the OS was a way to get people to buy their hardware. That's why I thought they dropped Solaris 9 for the Intel architecture: It wasn't worth developing since they weren't selling any hardware with it.

Re:Always though Sun was all about hardware.....

[guacamole]

*sigh*

The fee that you need to pay is still a fraction of even the yearly support contract that Sun would require you to pay to support it. Also don't forget, that Solaris 8 license used to be free only for up to eight processor servers. I don't really think this fee is going to make a big part of their business. Hardware sales and maintenance contracts is still Sun's bread and butter.

Re:Always though Sun was all about hardware.....

[rodgerd]

Yeah, that's right. When Sun are already ripping you a new arsehole in service fees, why, you should be grateful they add another charge!

Re:Always though Sun was all about hardware.....

[guacamole]

I am grateful because the value still greatly exceeds the cost. Solaris never was free until version 8 (except for students and developers who could get Solaris 7 for $30, Sun claims it was just a media cost). The pricing for Solaris 8 used to be similar to the pricing for Solaris 9. Big iron users had to pay more than people who used "workgroup" class servers and such. The only difference is that Sun has slightly lowered the bar for the free licenses. I think it does make sense because those who could afford say an eight CPU E3500 or E450 or even E280R could certainly be made to pay something for the OS upgrades.

Re:Always though Sun was all about hardware.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure Sun's support contracts are expensive, but no more so than IBM,HP,SGI or RedHat. RedHat contracts might be a little cheaper, but only because they won't replace your defective hardware.

The kinds of customers....

[crispi]

Somehow I think that the kind of customers who are going to be running 16 cpu systems are
definitely going to have Sun Spectrum support.

If Sun comes across a server that's licensed for fewer CPUs then it has, I guess it would be justified in refusing to support the machine anymore.

Sun are a bit careful about noting which system board serial numbers are in which machine.

solaris: worth the money

[Anonymous Coward]

Their fees are not as high as microsofts and the OS is much much more reliable for servers. If linux was this good I'm sure they could get away with charging for it aswell.

Hmmm

[Fredbo]

Are they trying to out Microsoft Microsoft or something?

Re:Hmmm

[guacamole]

No, its just the whoever posted the store has no clue. The OS license fee a tiny little fraction of the cost of the system you will run it on and probably smaller than even the yearly support/service contract fee that you're paying to Sun every year anyways.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why bother with it? My company has a mondo support contract so this wont affect us at all but if i wanted to pick up a used dual processor ultra2 off ebay (for personal use) for a couple of hundred bucks i would have to shell out the equivalent amount of money just to get solaris 9. In other words this will keep people who can't afford a support contract away from Solaris 9 and perhaps away from Solaris alltogether. At a time when there are a lot of OS's to choose from this is a pretty stupid move. I think making it free for 4 (or even 2) processors or less would have been the smart way to go.

Hee hee

[Junky191]

that 'million dollar machine' link to ebay sold for $5

Sun's transitioning

[nrosier]

"People say you buy a Sun server and get Solaris for free. No, you don't, The hardware is free as far as I'm concerned; we just charge $200,000 for Solaris." - Ed Zander

Sun's trying to move from a hardware company to a service provider. Just look at all the software products and services they have to offer right now. The only problem is that their customers haven't realised this yet and still consider it a hardware vendor. I've heared people saying they were amazed about the products/services (SunONE etc...) that Sun has after attending presentations... they just didn't know.

I guess Sun is trying hard to change that perception and is using Solaris 9 to wake people up.

Re:Sun's transitioning

[More Trouble]

Sun's trying to move from a hardware company to a service provider. Just look at all the software products and services they have to offer right now.

See, I thought the only problem was that their services were really terrible. I can't tell you how many time their tech has had to be taught by my tech how to fix Sun hardware. Of course 1 in 5 boxes we get new from Sun are DOA, so the hardware's not all that either.

Re:Sun's transitioning

[codingOgre]

Who the fuck is your VAR? I have never received a DOA Sun box or disk array (After something like 25 of them). They should test them and give you the sys printout. It seems your VAR is using the Ace Ventura(sp?) shipping company.

Re:Sun's transitioning

[Natacado]

Indeed, I attended a Solaris 9 technical breifing yesterday at Sun, and they said in the future they'd like to sell service by the resource - they pick the hardware to match. If they provide you with too much big iron, their costs go up. If they provide you with too little, they lose the contract.

This is where they're moving; Solaris is Sun's baby and the hardware is just the means to an end for them.

Sol9 licensing.

[mrbill]

I havent seen anyone mention yet that there is no actual license enforcement in Solaris 8/9; there's nothing to keep you from buying Solaris 9 and installing it on a machine with any number of CPUs. Sure, you're breaking license terms, but its not going to ask you for license keys or stop working.

I've worked in a number of large Solaris shops, and never ONCE has a Sun sales droid or FE/SE asked about licenses. We spend $$$ on systems and support contracts; they dont bicker about petty things like per-CPU licenses for the operating system.

I've got some reader reports about the Sol9 licensing issue on my web site, SunHELP.

Re:Sol9 licensing.

[Neil]

I've worked in a number of large Solaris shops, and never ONCE has a Sun sales droid or FE/SE asked about licenses. We spend $$$ on systems and support contracts; they dont bicker about petty things like per-CPU licenses for the operating system.

If you're paying for a support contract on a box then that includes Solaris upgrades.

Re:Sol9 licensing.

[mrbill]

Even on machines we *dont* have support contracts on (e.g., on a "time and materials" basis), our rep has always said "So, got all the media you need?" and so forth. I think the only people who *really* care about enforcing licenses at Sun are the people who are *selling* the licenses. Everyone else takes the attitude of "Even if its not officially license for that machine, at least its not a Windows-based server".

Re:Not that bad. Their CPUs, on the other hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a helluva processor, but 4.5k makes me gasp

Guess you haven't priced a Silicon Graphics Fuel workstation. Having a desktop machine based on the exact same chips as an Origin 3000 would be pretty cool, but for $15K I'd rather have a Mac, a PC, and a Sun!

IBM isn't any better. Their "entry level" $8K box quickly becomes a $22K box after adding a decent amount of RAM and including their 3D accelerator.

which ibm?

[Anonymous Coward]

i hope you're talking about ibm's powerpc64, power3, and power4 boxes... cuz their ain't no x86 ibm that costs more than $10k!!

Re:which ibm?

[guacamole]

Of course, he's talking about IBM's RS/6000 (aka pSeries) products.

and don't forget free patches and support 4 years

[guacamole]

One thing that many people don't know is that Sun supports the OS for much longer time than any Linux vendor -has existed-. This is a huge value. I am telling you as a system administrator who supports many many critical servers and hunders of desktops.. once you the OS machine is installed and running and it is doing what you need it to do, the -last- thing you want is to keep upgrading it every year. However, frequent upgrades are a norm in Linux world but it doesn't -have- to be that way. Do you think it is fun having to upgrade 200 or so boxes every 18 months or so? Fsck that. I am interested in doing fun stuff.

However, Solaris 2.6 is five or six years old and Sun said they will support it for two more years. Do any Linux vendors support an OS version for six years, or five, or four? They hardly support it for three years. Last year I had to upgrade a bunch of perfectly well working RedHat 6.0 servers. Why? Because redhat stopped releasing updates for 6.0.

Also, Sun backports the drivers to old Solaris versions. For example, they used to offer Solaris 2.6 and 2.5.1 until a year ago preinstalled on all
of it's UltraSPARC II machines. Now, can you buy brand new IBM or Compaq x86 server with RedHat Linux 5.0 preinstalled? No.

This is a huge value for real production environments. That's why Solaris is so popular..

Go get a maintenance contract...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, if your machine is on a maintenance contract (no matter what maintenance level) then the upgrade is free - including the media kit. Not to mention the fact that all Sun machines ship with a Solaris license, so it's not like you need to buy a copy for your new machine either.

And at the end of the day, if you're running a Sun box (with the exception of the low-end machines, which are covered by the free licenses) and you don't have a maintenance contract on it, you probably need to re-think why you're running Sun in the first place.

Yes, this is a negative over where Solaris 8 was (free for all machines with a capacity of =8 CPUs), but it's still a step in front of where Solaris 7 and earlier were (not free!) and where Windows is (not free!).

Re:fist pro$t, of course

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the way I like it... I like it!

Stop fucking complaining about free software

[Anonymous Coward]

So when is Red Hat coming out with a kernel capable of supporting 128 processors

Well, excuse me! Have you or anyone actually gone out and asked the kernel developers to develop support for 128+ processors?

No? I thought so. Have you considered writing it yourself? I think not.

It is so typical that people who whine about Linux (or other free software!) just sit on their fat asses and don't do anything to fix the problem.

Hire someone to write support you want or do it yourself! Just stop whining like a spoiled brat!

Re:Stop fucking complaining about free software

[Anonymous Coward]

exactly how much of the kernel have you written?

yeah, I thought so.

-AC

Re:Stop fucking complaining about free software

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not a kernel hacker!

I hack Icecreamtron.

Re:Stop fucking complaining about free software

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but I'll bet in a few months when another Linux vs. Windows or Linux vs. Solaris article is posted, there will be the same amount of morons who will post about how superior Linux is to everything else in the enterprise. The reality is that if Linux was that superior, it wouldn't even be a question if it supported it or not. All the time I see these posts about how OSS is so fucking superior all the time, and when a flaw is found all you people do is get defensive and ask why don't I code it myself. The reason is that unlike most OSS hippies I actually don't have an endless amount of time to fuck around with kernel compiles and howtos.

Re:Stop fucking complaining about free software

[Darby]

Project UNIX name: icecreamtron
Registered: 2001-07-19 08:39
Activity Percentile (last week): 0%
View project activity statistics

Well get to work then.

Re:Stop fucking complaining about free software

[Archfeld]

Who's whining but the anonymous coward troll ?
I think he pointed out a flaw/lack and was flamed on by a small minded idiot. It's no wonder my IT manager thinks linux people are subversive security risks. If you want to change things in business, you do with approved business methods. If you want to alienate people you you flame as a anonymous coward. We know that Linux is capable of doing the job, it is the image of OSS that the issue here. Making the Open Source world seem professional and upright/uptight is what needs to be done to snag the corporate customers.

This pricing scheme almost makes sense

[guacamole]

Essentially Sun is saying that if you have a single processor box (that is a cheap machine), the OS is free. If you have a multi-processor workstation, you have to pay a license fee, however, this fee is much lower than the server fees are. $200 is not bad at all for a license to run this OS on a box that costs $5,
$10, $20, or $30 thousand dollars (such as Sun Blade2000, aniversary edition). Finally, the price for server licenses is not bad at all either. A dual processor license is only $240 Now do you know how much a new dual processor Sun box costs? $10,000 -minimum- (with discounts). Maybe more. Quad and eight processor licenses, again, are not bad at all considering the overall price of the server. I also really doubt Sun would charge $400,000 even for a big-iron 100+ CPU Sun Fire 15000 server. Which I believe, can be bought for under 3 million dollars.

The only problem with this pricing scheme is that it does penalize people who use very old, slow, obsolete, but still very reliable and useful hardware such as sparcstation 10, sparcstation 20, and Ultra2 all of which can be bought very cheaply on ebay.

Re:Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

...be a hell of a lot funnier if it rhymed. or wait, is this haiku? hrm.

Re:Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

FUCK YUO FAGORt!

Stop psting chix in you're journal if your that gay!!!!!!

J2EE app servers

[Ted Maul]

Ignoring the license fee thing for a second, I think it's interesting that they're bundling iPlanet. Now that HP are giving away their app server and Sun are almost doing the same, how will IBM be able to get away with charging the earth for Websphere?

Currently, we run a lot of apps on Websphere on Solaris. Our maintenance contract means that we're going to get iPlanet for free. Why bother with Websphere?

Re:J2EE app servers

[spells]

Free does not equal better (especially in App Servers). Tearing out iPlanet and replacing it with Websphere (or WebLogic) mid-project is a painful experience, even when developing to the J2EE spec. Unless iPlanet (now Sun ONE AppServer) has become a lot better since Nov 2001, (read standards conformance, performance, stability) its not worth the price :)

More goodies

[guacamole]

In addition to the value-added software mentioned above, the Sun's DiskSuite has been renamed into Solaris Volume Manager and included as part of the OS. Although most Sun admins regard disksuite as something very basic and prefer to use Veritas LVM on the big iron, from my experience with Sun Disksuite and Linux RAID software, I can tell you that the Sun Disksuite -alone- could be a good enough reason to ditch Linux and use Solaris on your servers instead. Linux RAID (and LVM) still feels very amateurish (ever tried to put all parititions, including the boot disk on a mirrored volume after installing the OS?).

Also, a staroffice 6.0 CD has been tossed in into the Solaris media kit for free. Lots of GNU software is now included in the OS, wu-ftpd, a rebranded version of OpenSSH, apache. Good stuff.

Re:More goodies

[mridley]

Veritas has certain capabilities that are nice I suppose, but frankly I use DiskSuite exclusively (which by the way has been included with Solaris since at least 2.6 or 7 on one of the supplemental CDs). Anyway if you are building a big SUN file server then OK maybe VxFS can give you things like in a SAN or especially if you are using the Vertais NetBackup product to do your backups. Fine.

But for me - #1 I don't want to pay $$ for Veritas (not just initial aquisition but also maint.) and I don't want added complexity. In my servers there are no local data but I do want root and swap mirrored for reliability reasons (pretty neat to have 200 GB of swap...mirrored...) But anyway - for those purposes I like to stick to just SUN because then it's one finger to point, whatever. Plus I know in my Solaris upgrade instructions it will (hopefully??) take into account the SUN product and give me instructions whereas with Veritas then again you have the integration issues.

Not that Veritas is bad software or that it's not cross-supported by SUN. It's fine. But computers (esp big ones) have enough issues - I like to try to keep the complexity to a dull roar..

That's my two cents...

Not too overly surprising

[DNS-and-BIND]

Solaris has always charged for installations of more than 8 processors. They're simply lowering the limit to 2. The prices aren't unreasonable. You'll hardly notice the OS charges on the bill if you're purchasing a Sun server. Note: these are list prices, and nobody pays list prices.

Re:Not too overly surprising

[rob_from_ca]

Somebody please mod the parent up (or better yet, update the story). This comment is dead on; this only represents a tiny change in Solaris licensing. Check out this Sun link for the Solaris 7 pricing scheme (Solaris 8 is mostly the same).

Am I the only one who has actually PAID for Solari

[mridley]

OK, this is just stupid. Everyone ranting on and on. Am I the only person who actually has paid maint. costs for Solaris machines here?! I have no idea what that crazy pricing on the SUN web site is but no one is going to pay that. Where I work we have quite a few (several hundred) SUN machines and while our maint. contract is in the six figures per year (ie. NOT free) we are certainly not paying $200,000 per system or whatever odd numbers are quoted on their web site.

I know it may be something you don't know if you're 16 and you're only familiar with "Dude you're getting a Dell" but for some reason (I'm sure those with marketing backgrounds can elaborate more than anyone wants) companies feel the need to put list prices that are out of the ball park. I guess so their customers feel they're getting a great discount or who knows. Anyway if you go to the SUN online store and you think that's what people really pay for those systems no wonder you're having a conniption. Of course not.

For real people who use real SUN machines to accomplish real work are not paying any attention to that web page. The media and the license are covered by the annual support agreement and it will just show up in the mail (well obviously only if you have support but again if you're a real SUN customer you do). I have no idea what functionality is even available in Solaris 9 that I would want...I got a card in the mail the other day but nothing really jumped out at me...although if they can fix that screwed up LDAP server product they have and make it easy to configure and install that would be enough for me.

But really Solaris 9 pricing is a non-starter....unless I guess you buy a used E3000 on ebay and put it in your bedroom or something but I don't think any of SUN's marketing or saless are really too worked up about that.

And as for running LINUX on a 24 processor SPARC box? What the Hell are you talking about?! No one does that. Sorry to rain on your open source parade they don't.

I'm not saying LINUX doesn't matter but nobody doing real computing on SUN's is having wet dreams about LINUX because it's such a super 31337 operating system...now the fact that the Intel CPUs are substantially faster than the SPARC ones - that's what's driving LINUX adoption where I work. People just want their jobs to get done faster....that is all they care about. The tools they are using costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in license fees, the fact that the OS is free is a non-issue...it's all about the speed advantage of the Intel chips...

OK rant over

Re:Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't been on Slashdot for a long time and I don't understand this:

Why are you guys bashing Linux and The Community like this? How is homosexuality related to Linux in the first place? I am confused. Someone please explain.

What we neec

[Anonymous Coward]

What we need now is a nasty racial slur!

That attitude

[jaavaaguru]

If only more people had that attitude...
Windows is too expensive for me to run on my PC at home - the latest reliable (hehe) version is more than 200 bucks (XP Pro). I don't care, I use Linux.

Re:That attitude

[afidel]

acutally the latest reliable version is 2k pro, xp is by its very escense less stable as it is 2k pro plus a bunch of crappy eye candy and plug and pray junk like the UPNP extensions.

No one pays the list price.

[guacamole]

Most Sun customers cut the deals with the Sun
sales representatives directly, avoiding sunstore on the web.

corporate math...

[edrugtrader]

Solaris is certainly a capable os, but sheeze that seems like an awful lot of money.

a 40% fee to make your $1M investment work like it is supposed to is not that big of deal.

Solaris freeware

[guacamole]

I don't know how about how often the sunfreeware.com is updated. Note that sunfreeware.com is not run by Sun. However, starting with Solaris 8 Sun started bundling the free software companion CDs with the OS media kits. The ISO images and, possibly, individual
packages are also available for download. Lots of good stuff is there, from gcc to gnome and kde. Sun has been updating this CD once in a while now and, given the popularity of free software, they'll probably continue doing so.

Get XP Home

[Betcour]

XP Home is exactly the same minus the biprocessor support (often not needed) and a few graphical gizmos. And it is about half the price...

Get the FSCK'ng facts right here

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey lets not let the facts get the way of a good story here right. This is posted anonymously as I work for Sun. :-)
If you buy a NEW or 2ND HAND Sun machine from Sun, then you get a licence to use Solaris on that machine. That licence does NOT let you transfer the licence to a 3rd party if you sell the machine.
If you buy a cheap 2nd hand / stolen / ex Dot.Com Sun machine from Ebay, then Sun is saying you dont have a licence for Solaris, you need to buy a licence.
Whos got the problem ?

Re:Get the FSCK'ng facts right here

[mccalli]

Whos got the problem ?

Well, Europeans for one. That kind of stunt is illegal here under an EU-wide 'Sale of Goods' act.

This was recently upheld by a German court against Microsoft - the topic was covered on Slashdot I think, but the essence is that Microsoft tried to stop people selling on their old Windows licenses along with their machine. Exactly as Sun are now trying to do with Solaris.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Get the FSCK'ng facts right here

[Anonymous Coward]

i have a problem with that! Why would i buy a dual processor Ultra2 for a couple hundred bucks off ebay and then pay MORE than that for Solaris? I wouldn't and neither would anybody else. I would use Solaris 8 or not go with Sun/Solaris at all. This means i would be using one of your competitors products and if i buy new hardware to replace my used hardware in the future it would not be sun. This is why this is a stupid move by Sun, especially in the ultra-competitve OS market. Make it free for 4 processors or less. This lets the little guy in the door to play with Solaris but sun can still get money from people who can afford to get used higher end boxes.

Solaris somewhat capable, linux better

[justanetgod]

In two side by side production environments I have worked in, one with high end Sun hardware and Solaris and the other with RedHat on intel, Sun was far more unstable and required constant babying. The Linux boxes aren't nearly as exciting and don't ever seem to have that sense of spectacle that Solaris has managed when it fails. Must have been the cosmic rays were more intense on the CPUs in that other location half a mile away...

Re:Solaris somewhat capable, linux better

[Anonymous Coward]

Must be some bad Solaris admins...

Re:Solaris somewhat capable, linux better

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you're incompetent.

Re:Solaris somewhat capable, linux better

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a Solaris 8, FreeBSD 4.6-RC, and SuSe 7.3 at home. They are listed in the order of how easy they are to maintain. If you've got an unstable Sun box then you're doing something grossly wrong.

At work we have large farms of servers that are under constantly heavy loads (high memory, network, disk and thread usage). The Sun boxes run like champs and are rock solid, onnly going down due to hardware failures or bugs in our own software. We have test beds of FreeBSD and Linux boxes that to use for the raw horse power at low costs, but driver, hardware and performance issues always make them unstable. The FreeBSD boxes are almost there, but the Linux ones aren't close.

So this means...

[maroberts]

...that the resale value of your machine has now sunk by the cost of the license to operate it.

No difference between big patch and upgrade

[maroberts]

The question does arise as to whether there is any difference between a huge patch and an upgrade, or whether in applying a whole raft of patches you are in effect performing an upgrade.

If your RH 6.0 servers are perfectly happy without the patches, then you did have the option of running them as is.

In the free OS world, you could argue that since there is no/minimal cost (apart from sysadmin time) to upgrade you may as well do so.

Providing you have a fairly standard install, I don't see that upgrading those or so boxes would take an inordinate amount of time.

Re:No difference between big patch and upgrade

[bullgod]

Yes there is: Backward Compatiblity and Support.

For example I've just been on the phone to Sun's support site because of a problem with a legacy application written in Xview. It's now somebody else's problem. By the end of the week I'll have a solution. I can get on to what I should have been doing today: porting our code to gcc 3, and the need to recompile all the libraries.

Compare that to trying to run linux apps which require different versions of glibc. RPMs that require Red Hat 7+. While the I can't run anything older that 6.2 on my laptop because it hangs went I close the screen.

Sun go out of there way to make the transition as painless as possible, because the alternative costs much more.

Re:No difference between big patch and upgrade

[kelleher]

In the free OS world, you could argue that since there is no/minimal cost (apart from sysadmin time) to upgrade you may as well do so.

At my current company, sysadmin time is charged back to cost centers at $100/hr. The business greatly prefers to spend that money on revenue generating projects instead of baby-sitting. If it's not broken (and won't break anytime soon), don't fix it.

Re:No difference between big patch and upgrade

[gr]

The question does arise as to whether there is any difference between a huge patch and an upgrade, or whether in applying a whole raft of patches you are in effect performing an upgrade.

If your RH 6.0 servers are perfectly happy without the patches, then you did have the option of running them as is.

No, you've missed the original poster's point.

He doesn't mind applying vendor-supplied patches, regardless of what OS is there. His point is that RedHat stopped providing patches for a system after a couple years. Sun's still providing patches eight years later. Therefore, Sun's more stable and less hassle for sysadmins.

Further, there is a Huge difference between running patchadd or rpm -F and rebooting the machine off of some install media, using the vendor's install software to upgrade the OS (presuming that actually works with your vendor's software), booting back up, then fixing all the software that doesn't work in the new version of the OS, since no dependencies were checked in the upgrade process.

(For most commercial installations, that difference might as well start and stop with "Rebooting..."--"nope, can't do that. This system needs to have 24/7 availability. Find another way.")

Re:No difference between big patch and upgrade

[strobert]

Have you maintained RedHat installs?

I'm not sure why you are rebooting. I haven't rebooted production servers to do a security patch in a long time. We still have lots of RH6.2 boxes running simple because of the same reason the poster said -- if they are running fine, don't bother. Which I still get patches for RH6.2 and that has been out for a while now. And since RPM is easy to do and well documented (I have yet to find a good source of doc's from sun on their package system -- found an okay one from a guy on the net) even when RedHat does stop releasing critical fixes to RH6.2 I can make the patched rpm's myself.

We had some solaris boxes for a while, and from Sun support were instructed to do reboots on the production systems after some patches were applied . And I can't forget the fun of the ecache firmware flaw in the mid range servers Sparc processors that caused them to die randomly.

Why is everyone getting so stressed now?

[khaine]

Lets face it, if your online business means anything to you then you probably won't run Solaris 9 in production for at least a year until its debugged a bit more and by then, if people hate the licensing so much, Sun will have changed it.

Whats the problem?

You're confused...

[isa-kuruption]

Look...

If you can afford a $3.4mill machine like a Sun Fire 15k, you can afford another $400,000 for the O/S to run on it's 106 processors...

But the price isn't that bad for their lower end things. Compare the price of the 2 processor server license compared to that for Windows 2000 Advanced Server. Or compare the price of the 4 processor desktop version to a copy of Windows XP Professional (retail, not upgrade). The prices are relatively comparable.

Sun spent a lot of time on development of the Solaris 9 platform, and they want to make money off of the development. That is why they are in business, to make money. They are not one of those dot-coms that was selling stock at $100/share and was still in the *coughred(hat)cough*.

sticker shock, wtf?!

[deltavivis]

$250 is expensive now? God, these kind of article posts really show the juvenile nature of this site. Think of what $250 really means, if you have employees making ~$80k a year (which is a fairly good estimate, at least where i live) then this costs less than paying 1 person 1 day. If 1 employee manages to save over 6 hours in wasted time over the lifetime of the product, hey it just paid for itself! You're not just buying a kernel here, you're getting a whole "enterprise solution". People don't buy into solaris because its the fastest or the most reliable unix, but because you can solve problems with it in less time (which equals less $) using reliable bundled software.

Will Sun's pricing strategy payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

chrisd wondered if Sun's charge for additional CPUs will pay off. Of course it will. There are a few nerds (myself include) who own a Sparc station, buy most are owned by corporations. I've found it's easier to get corporations to plunk down 100,000.00 than it is for them to use free software. Sun is charging those who want to pay.

Did Sun forget that Redhat runs on Solaris?

[linuxislandsucks]

I like it when Sun shoots themselves in the foot!

Re:Did Sun forget that Redhat runs on Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

eh?
i love it when clueless people post

Re:Did Sun forget that Redhat runs on Solaris?

[Anonymous Coward]

RedHat runs on Solaris? I thought they were completely different operating systems? Did Sun develop some RedHat Linux emulator? If they did that would be shooting themselves in the foot because in my opinion RH is crap.

Re:Did Sun forget that Redhat runs on Solaris?

[guacamole]

Huh? RedHat runs on Solaris? Does it run on Windows too?

Re:Did Sun forget that Redhat runs on Solaris?

[ecorrado]

Actually, new versions of RedHat don't even run on Sparc, let alone on the Solaris. You can still run and download older versions, but RedHat stopped releasing new versions for Sparc.

If you want new versions of Linux for Sparc you need to go to someone besides RedHat.

Time to short sun stock

[thogard]

This will rapidly devalue used sun hardware. This means that banks that considered them an asset last month will now consider them as worthless as PC's because they can't liquidate them. The short term effect of this is no one will loan money for small sun boxes and in time--the larger ones.

Re:Time to short sun stock

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when do large banks just get rid of their high end unix systems? Remember a lot of financial companies are still running solaris 7, let alone solaris 9. When you consider how much financial data still goes through old mainframes running cobalt, do you really think they're going to dump it all for PC's over night?

Don't buy into the hype. Financial institution have a thing about keeping criticals systems on hardware that works, and the IT department understands and manages well. This whole thing about PC's taking over sounds good in theory, but it's going to take atleast 10 years or more for this to happen. On the east coast, some banks are now considering switching non-critical systems to Java fulltime.

From first hand experience and conversation with friends (who have 5+ years of experience) in that field, financial institutions are usually early adopters for new projects, but not when it comes to their bread and butter.

If microsoft thinks the .NET push will get PC's into enterprise world they are right and wrong. There will be some small projects using .NET and discover it's not mature. But then again all languages take time to mature including C, Java, Perl, python and every other language. Once .Net and C# matures, microsoft may see a healthy share of the enterprise services market, but it's far their vision of "all microsoft world."

Banks don't like to rely on one vendor for everything because it makes them vulnerable. There's a reason banks keep old systems around and have a mixed environment. Plus it just makes sense from a Corporation perspective. For a small business it makes sense to go "pure" microsoft, but not a multi-national corporation that absolutely can't have systems going down for more than 1 hour a year.

PC hardware needs to be more reliable and stable before serious critical systems are moved from mainframes to a cluster of high end PC's. No one in their right mind is going to switch a critical system handling thousands of transactions per second from one that works well to cheap untested hardware. Especially if every minute down means millions lost. Unless you're rich enough to through away a couple million and still have billions.

Re:Time to short sun stock

[thogard]

Its not the computers that the banks use that I was talking about. Its the ones they might own because the company they lent the money went belly up.

Not quite

[Pinehill.net]

At least a few important features were left out as well. XP Home does not support logging in to an NT4 domain or ActiveDirectory.

Re:Not quite

[Richard_at_work]

And you have those at home? Right?
(if you do, thats serious geekness :))

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

What if you happen to use Windows at work (like 90% of the world) and need to login from home?

things are not looking bright for Sun

[orcldba]

It just tells you how desperate they are and how bad the situation for Sun is. Of course it is just an attempt to force people to buy new equipment. What they do not understand that those buyers will still have the same budget and will spend it on the "Lintel" systems. You will have less people knowing Solaris and hardware architecture and, in turn, it will affect sales negatively even more.
Sun is going down.

Re:things are not looking bright for Sun

[guacamole]

Of course it is just an attempt to force people to buy new equipment.

Which part of your body do you use when thinking. I doubt it's your brains. So, how many people do think will be forced to replace a $15,000 server in order to avoid paying a $240 Solaris 9 license fee?

hardware requirements?

[Anonymous Coward]

solaris8 dropped support for sun4c. what sparc architectures does solaris9 support?

Re:Am I the only one who has actually PAID for Sol

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah.. i really hate that. Why the fuck can't
companies just list prices instead? I don't care
how complicated the `options' might be it's such
a pain in the ass having to always get a quote -
especually if you're not interested in the quote
and they keep phoneing you back.

Free solaris on DVD

[jpmkm]

Free Solaris on DVD while supplies last.

Screwed Up LDAP Server?

[alistair]

The LDAP server in question is the iPlanet (now Sun ONE) directory server and is generally regared as being one fo the best in the industry. The install is fairly painless (14 questions as I recall), certainly no harder than say a typical Oracle install. To configure it you have the choice of some nice configuration files, which are very similar to Open LDAP, or a rather nasty heavy weight Java console.

Before they gave a 200,000 licence version free in Solaris 8 and above, this used to cost a significant fee per user, I think the list price was around $10 per entry, even if you asume people payed 10% of that it is still an expensive product, and getting it free with Solaris 8 is a bargain.

The server itself is very stable (version 4.x and 5.1 at least). I have been running it for three years to manage almost 200,000 entries, we replicate the data to seven servers worldwide and service well in excess of 4 million searches every business day. The servers are fast (much faster than Oracle's LDAP interface, OpenLAP or Active Directory), not resource intensive and are very stable, on a par with Apache for stability rather than say Solaris itself but still good. I would highly recommend looking at this product again, if you are interested in building a corporate directory it may be worth getting an E220 or two just to get hold of this product.

Re:Screwed Up LDAP Server?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the previous post was talking about configuring Solaris to use LDAP as a naming service. Solaris 8 supported LDAP as a naming service, but how to set it up was horrible undocumented and generally a pain in the ass.

Of course setting up LDAP under Solaris 8 wasn't any harder than setting it up under Linux, but Solaris users have gotten used to everything "just working"(TM).

Easy answer

[Anonymous Coward]

> will this pay off? " Solaris is certainly a capable os, but sheeze that seems like an awful lot of money.

Sun just wants to squeeze as much money as they can from Solaris before its inevitable death. Linux is more portable, more supported, and is becoming more stable too; Sun itself would (will?) make bigger profits by upgrading all their products to Linux based systems.

Ecache Parity Error Anyone?

[mrwiggly]

These fees are not as expensive as having your network crash because some zealot thought he could set up an equivalent network in Linux instead of Solaris

This used to be true, however, Sun dropped the ball big time with their UltraSparcIII. There was a bug in the CPU that caused "ecache parity errors". We had half a dozen E6500's loaded with as much memory and CPU's as we could. Each one of these boxes crashed at least once every week and a half! At first Sun blamed us! Our computing center had too little humidity, we installed the grounding strap improperly... Blah Blah Blah, none of it true. Finally they acknowledged the problem. It took them more than 6 months to work around the problem. Their workaround was a series of hacks and kludges (strange monitoring daemons and such).

We've migrated half of production to linux now. It's not perfect by any means, but we've lowered our harware costs by 66%, and increased job performance by 75%.

We're not looking seriously at Solaris in the future.

Re:Ecache Parity Error Anyone?

[Octorian]

I think you mean the UltraSparc-II. If you wanted a US3, then you'd have a 6800, and be ranting about a problem with the prefetch pipeline (which Sun caught early-on).

Re:Ecache Parity Error Anyone?

[zmalone]

The issue was with UltraSPARC IIs, and was only present in the 8mb cache modules. If I remember correctly, they traced the issues to problems in the IBM memory they had been buying, which ended up being faulty, but Sun caught the full blame for it. Supposedly all the UltraSPARC III chips cannot have that problem, although I cannot remember if it is because the cache is mirrored, or if it is ECC, or both.

Re:Ecache Parity Error Anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the same problem - it took me a year but
Sun is out from our data center.

Re:Ecache Parity Error Anyone?

[pmz]

The USII bug definitely caused bad experiences, but it is not representitive of Sun hardware and Solaris as a whole.

I have an US IIi-based workstation with Solaris, and I love it. Except for one hard drive glitch, it has never had unplanned down time (24x7 for over six months at a time). It just doesn't stop taking my abuse. This experience is much more typical for hardware and software of this caliber.

On the good side, once the USII was fixed, it was fixed. We move on.

Re:Ecache Parity Error Anyone?

[kelleher]

Actually, the problem was with the Ultra-II CPUs with 8MB cache. It affected primarily the 400Mhz CPUs but there were "isolated issues" with the 333Mhz chips. The problems were caused by bad cache memory supplied by IBM. There was no "strange monitoring daemon", but instead cache scrubbying was put in place via a kernel patch. Sun was very reasonable with us, to the point of upgrading all 64 of the 333Mhz CPUs in our E10000 to the 400Mhz mirrored ecache chips. (Nice, free performance boost.)

Next time, try to get your facts straight.

Re:Ecache Parity Error Anyone?

[Feren]

[This used to be true, however, Sun dropped the ball big time with their UltraSparcIII. There was a bug in the CPU that caused "ecache parity errors". We had half a dozen E6500's ]

Um, what you said there is just not possible. There's no way you've had problems with UltraSPARC-III chips in your E6500s... no 6500 has shipped with an UltraSPARC-III, ever. They can't even accept the chip. The US-III is only available in the SunFire product line, namely the SunBlade 1k/2k, the 280R (which is just a SunBlade 1k in rackmount clothing), the 3800/4800/4810/6800 models, the 12k and the 15k.

Sun did indeed have a problem with parity errors within the last 18 months: they were due to faulty cache chips that made their way into a few runs of the UltraSPARC-II chip. There's plenty of articles that have been written about it and the lousy way Sun handled the issue.

The UltraSPARC-III chip is an entirely different architecture (it's copper-based, for one) than the US-II and we've been running them in our datacenter since pretty much day one. They've run flawlessly.

not serious geekness

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not at all unusual for the slobs that have to support windows to run a windows domain and/or AD on their home network. There is nothing "geek" about microsoft software.

Re:Am I the only one who has actually PAID for Sol

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly! Just because google uses a huge cluster of linux boxes to spider the web doesn't mean everyone else is jumping to do the same.

But then again a lot of people treat linux like a religion, rather than a tool.

and meanwhile, MS is charging a mere $2-3K per CPU

[Anonymous Coward]

for SQL server.

you guys are such whining hypocrites.

Sun's reasoning

[zaphod]

I believe that Sun is trying to get additional revenue from companies who bought (cheap) used Sun hardware from the failed dot com companies. This is especially true for the high end servers. Personally I don't mind paying $249 for each of our SunFire 280Rs (when we decide to upgrade). If you don't want to pay the extra cost, you can stay on Solaris 8 for a long time.

Free UNIX on SGI is NOT a solution

[Octorian]

I'm sorry, but running Linux/etc on that SGI defeats the whole purpose of getting the SGI. You loose all support for the cooler hardware.

People don't just buy the SGI to say "hey, I've got an SGI, now let's see what it'll run". They buy them because SGIs have unique hardware features (yes, even the old ones) that IRIX supports.

For example, I've used my Indigo2 for some OpenGL coding. With IRIX, OpenGL in-a-window works in X "out of the box". No fussing, it just works! (there's also the Indy/O2 with video features, etc.)

Oh, and of course, IRIX has cool demos :)

A free 'nix would just turn the SGI into "yet another computer". SGI's are special, have features you won't find on that old Sun box, and damnit I want them to work!

Re:Free UNIX on SGI is NOT a solution

[lweinmunson]

check out Ian Mapleson's site. It has some verry good SGI information about installing 6.5 from CD.

Solaris is $$, their hardware is free

[javajames27]

"People say you buy a Sun server and get Solaris for free. No, you don't," Zander said. "The hardware is free as far as I'm concerned; we just charge $200,000 for Solaris." -- Ed Zander, transitioning COO for Sun talking about their N1 strategy.

So, how about giving me one of those E10000's and I'll put Linux on it.. Total cost: $0.

Full article: http://news.com.com/2100-1001-920593.html

End of the Line for Sun...

[constantnormal]

Seems to me that Sun has run out of rope in these economic harsh times, and is backing away from competing by raising (effectively) prices in order to keep some cash flowing through its corporate veins. With the ability to buy an 80-processor Xserve (clustered, since OS X won't support 80 cpus in a single image) for a mere $160,000 (and that includes over 2TB of disk) and NO per-user licensing charges, Sun has seen that they cannot compete and survive.

I Look for Sun to increasingly merge Linux with Solaris, just as IBM is doing with MVS, and Apple is doing with BSD unix. The costs of developing a proprietary OS are simply too much to bear in these times of declining profits.

Re:End of the Line for Sun...

[ekeko]

I agree with you on the business reasons why SUN is raising prices. SUN is struggling to find a compelling business model for themselves. This might be desperately measure to keep the company financially healthy.

man I HATE solaris

[Anonymous Coward]

Solaris is what I started to learn Unix on... however I got so fed up with its BS, quirks, stupid requirements for redundant changes just to set the system like I needed it, etc, that I almost gave up had it not been for Linux. Now with 8 (and 9 I guess) Solaris seems to have come out of its pit to a degree and looks like they finally TRIED to organize the system in a coherant and consistent manner. Unfortunately for me however, since I am now used to the way Linux is organized, Solaris seems so different in many ways. The other thing is that with the prices of Sun boxes the way we are, it is just not economical at all to use them. So why use Solaris on a PC when I can use BSD or Linux?

solaris to other....

[hatrisc]

i wonder how many previously solaris administrators and just solaris people out there have seen this and thought of a switch to linux or a bsd... oh wait! my boss!

Why do you think this is new?

[eschasi]

This has been Suns semi-official line for a long, long time. See this netnews posting from 1989 for an example.

And as for licences staying with (or not with) the hardware, well, you can't have it both ways. When I buy a copy of W2K, I put it on whatever machine I want to -- provided I only have it installed on one machine at a time. When I buy a copy of Solaris, I'm currently stuck to a given piece of hardware since Sun won't sell me new hardware to go with my old licence.

Explanation

[RedRider]

This is called "Milking" the cash cow before she dies.

My Question is...

[AdmrlNxn]

Will Solaris 9 run on an Athlon Platform.

cadillac vs honda civic of UNIX

[peter303]

Solaris 9 runs on 109 CPUs transparently compared to beawolf and other UNIXes. It supports nearly a terrabyte of core memory- several times more than the nearest competitor. It has been 64-bit tested for over eight years. Anyone knows that when you first use so-called 64-bit OSes, there is always some 32-bit bottleneck the engineers overlooked. We saw these in early Solaris and IRIX and see them now in Intel platform OSes.

On the other hand you can get Linux at low cost. When something breaks, you can go in and fix it right away, given you understand it. Linux doesn't have the multi-CPU performance of Solaris. Its is not 64-bit battle tested. hwoever, SGI and IBM Linux are making a lot a progress in high ed Linux.

Re:cadillac vs honda civic of UNIX

[Anonymous Coward]

*cough* Tru64 *cough*

DUNIX/Tru64 has been 64-bit tested from the beginning. And it's been running on a 64 bit processor from the beginning. You _will not find_ a 32 bit Alpha CPU. Same can't be said for SPARC

Lies. Damnd Lies & Statistics. [Re:What is su

[Forge]

Lies. Damnd Lies & Statistics.

The Sun numbers include "Cobalt Cube" servers.

shocker....

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, its known within Sun that solaris is used by AOL. In fact, AOL is sun's biggest server subscripter. Until recently AOL has put the mandate that all servers must be converted to linux. So naturally as revenue goes down for sun they must try and raise revenue in other areas. Standard thinking would be to raise prices as much as possible...

Kinda sad, but they're battling Microsoft

[darylb]

This announcement is a bit sad, in that I can no longer just download the latest Solaris without knowing relevant support contract numbers.

However, this isn't all bad. Every Solaris 9 system can be both a directory server and a J2EE application server. This isn't bad. It's very possible to argue that Windows NT/2000 has made its inroads on the back of the fact that it can do directory services (even as crummy as the old NT domain stuff was, and now, of course, there's Active Directory) and serve Active Server Pages out of the box. Once you bought NT, you had everything but a database.

Now these Solaris 9 machines can do directory services (better than NIS can) AND serve J2EE applications. This may hurt BEA more than anyone, since I'd expect that people at least LOOK at the Sun server before forking over their $10,000+ for WebLogic.

Per processor?!

[restive]

OK, the "old" (former Solaris 8) licensing scheme didn't seem to make sense to me either. They allowed free download for use on systems up to 8 (!!!) processors. I figure a company that purchases a system with 8 CPU capacity can afford a maintenance contract or at least to purchase the OS.

I, on the other hand, that just have an Ultra 5 and old SS10 at home...there is NO WAY I'm going to pay for a "two processor" license for my SS10. Time to goto Linux again on that system.
Decreasing their free license from 8 CPUs to 2 or 4 would have made sense, but SINGLE CPU?

Sun, you guys are like women...we love you to death, but you DRIVE US CRAZY!!!!

Re:Per processor?!

[roybadami]

there is NO WAY I'm going to pay for a "two processor" license for my SS10

IIRC, the SS10/SS20 has a CPU capacity of 4 (using two dual-processor M-bus cards) so you'd need a 4-CPU license.

Read it again

[The AtomicPunk]

If your machine is under a maintenance/support agreement, you don't pay anything to upgrade to Solaris 9.

Partitioning is the answer

[StormCrow]

Nobody actually trys to run a single instance of Solaris on machines with that many processors. At that level, you partition the machine into multiple instances that all operate seperatly (different RAM, different disks, different CPUs). You get most of the benefit of having seperate machines, with the added benifit of the higher speed interconnections between the partitions.

Solaris has its value

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at the Linpeak preformance for Solaris, you will see that is scales in an almos linear manor upto and beyond 64 CPU's. Not may OS's can claim this. It is still cheaper than M$ os'es and is a quality product.

J2EE Server bundled?

[Capt_Troy]

Ok, now this is worse than anything that MS bundles with their OS. Why does Sun think it can start bundling all this other software into the OS? This is the very thing that MS is getting in (or out of) trouble for. Does Sun think it's not ok only if MS does it?

Re:J2EE Server bundled?

[psychosis]

I'm not 100% familiar with the J2EE bundle, but I think that the difference is that MS's "extras" are (supposedly) integrated to the OS and cannot be removed. (OK, there's that new XP patch, but I don't use 'doze anyway, so I don't care :P) I don't believe that the J2EE server is integrated to the OS - you should be free to delete or not install it and use an alternative.
Similarly, there's a whole butt-load of apps that are bundled with nearly every linux distribution - you just don't have to install them.

Re:J2EE Server bundled?

[ratboy666]

Its NOT ok for Microsoft, because MS has a monopoly. SUN doesn't have a monopoly. They may sell the most, but certainly IBM, HP, SGI, etc. make the playing field a whole lot more interesting.

Ratboy.

Re:J2EE Server bundled?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it's okay for sun to bundle J2EE with the OS. For one thing, solaris is mainly used for network apps & secondly, they created the Java language!

It doesn't appear to be a forced bundle, you can remove it if you like.

Re:Am I the only one who has actually PAID for Sol

[Anonymous Coward]

"I guess you buy a used E3000 on ebay and put it in your bedroom or something but I don't think any of SUN's marketing or saless are really too worked up about that."

---

They *are* getting worked up about that. Sun sales got hammered in the dotcom death throes. All the .coms tried to sell their Sun boxes on eBay, and so many people got some kick-arse hardware for super-cheap.

This sounds like a response to that, a direct response to that experience, to be honest. Unfortunately, it will probably backfire in the long run. Solaris is a great OS, but Linux is getting better and better and Sun has no answer.

St

Re:*shrug* pretty cheap actually

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you here. When you compare it to other comercial O/S license fees (outside of the "free" ones) - the cost is pretty cheap. I have three sun machines at home and I'll be able to pay $0 to get Solaris 9 on them since the have 1 processor each. If I had 3 machines that I wanted to run a Micro$oft "server" O/S, Novell Netware, etc. on it would cost me a hell of a lot more. If you want free Linux or one of the free BSD's fine. I run them as well, but I don't think Sun's new fees are all that bad. Sure, I'd rather get something for nothing, but if Sun gave everything away for free they'd be out of business.

OK, I bite

[CaptainZapp]

Considering that the database of choice is Oracle

Background: I work since ten years on a fairly low level with various RDBMSs. I know Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise extremely well and Microsofts SQL Server quite well (the architecture's pretty much comparable). I know Postgresql and Oracle both fairly well.

Of course I acknowledge, that Oracle has the biggest market share, but in every other term I think it's the pits. It's a badly scattered assortment of various operating system files on (preferreably) multiple disks. Pricing is absolutely horrendous and you pay through the nose for additional options.

It's a heinous monster to manage as compared to Sybase or Postgresql (which is also very much file based, but far less messy, alas offers less features).

Oracle might be a great marketing organisation, but it's my last choice when it comes to a RDBMS.

OK, I slip into my asbestos suit now and await the incoming flames...

Solaris too expensive?

[99ways2die]

I work in a largescale environment with virtually every unix under the sun. The majority is Sun on largescale hardware, E4500's and up, and we generally have little to no problems with them, other than the usual custom software the client write crashing the server from bs overflows, etc. We also house mainframes (And run Suse in development there in). The sun hardware performs wonderfully, and most of the large scale applications like Oracle run quite smoothly on these machines, as well as HPUX.
Sun may be increasing costs but to the end user I don't think it's going to make a huge difference, companies may be taking a hit, but quite often they still won't run Linux on Sun hardware, because of the whole responsibility matrix and companies wanting to point the finger.
Truth be told when people swallow those costs of buying an E450 and above, they generally won't care that they are paying $400+ for the OS that is housed on it, especially when they will only have to call one place when something goes wrong... sun.

Re: List Prices, Real Prices

[mveloso]

As someone who works in the space, let me tell you why List Prices exist. They exist so the contracts/purchasing person at a customer can abuse the sales guy down to a 65% discount, and feel like they accomplished something.

Corporate purchasing is about getting discounts, and that's the game. The win for the customer is they get something that provides value, and a price/discount level that makes the bean counters happy. You have to make those guys happy, because they're the ones who actually distribute the money. If MSRP is $2m and they get it for $1.2, well, everyone's got a boner and goes away happy.

The reason is costs so much is because when it comes to corporate/enterprise level stuff, it's a low-volume business, relatively speaking. Trying to find a support person who understands the issues that occur in a 50,000 endpoint customer base is hard, as is writing software and creating hardware that can deal with that kind of environment. Belive me, it's different than writing software for joe wanker's desktop.

Re:*shrug* pretty cheap actually

[Anonymous Coward]

//Given a) Sun's current financial position (could be better)//

"Could be better"!???!?

Really? SUNW traded at $110 a scant two years ago, and now it's at $7 ?

How about "Sun's current financial position had BETTER IMPROVE IN A DAMN QUICK HURRY, or else the company is toast."

Could there be a reason why SUN is laying off hundreds, and forcing folks to take vacation.

Writing's on the wall. Sun is setting. Permanently.

You always had to pay.

[MKalus]

The Software License NEVER came with a used Server, we bought a couple of them a while ago and had to buy a new Software license as well.

Additionally, if you want to get a support contract from Sun for a used system they first come in and turn it upside down (which is a couple of thousand bucks).

So in the end: Nothing has changed.

Oracle best platform is AIX.

[Anonymous Coward]

As for Oracle, Solaris is THE platform to run it on as Oracle people have told many times, Solaris is the prefered Oracle platform because Oracle is developed on Solaris and then ported to other OSes

Regardless of what platform Oracle was developed upon, I run it on HPUX, Solaris and AIX. Of those three operating systems and with similar powered hardware, I get the best and most trouble-free performance with AIX. To get acceptable I/O thruput, on HPUX I have to use raw LV's for the data, on Solaris I have to use raw partitions, on AIX I can get away with simple cooked files in the JFS filesystem. In 5+ years of running these machines, I've never once had an Oracle engine crash or OS crash with Oracle on AIX platforms. I've had a handful of OS-related Oracle crashes and engine problems on HPUX and Solaris.

Informix

[Anonymous Coward]

Of all the complex RDBMS's I've worked with over the past 15 years, Informix has always seemed to be the most technologically advanced and featureful datbase engine. Too bad the company has had such a terrible history of shitty senior management and moronic marketing. I really hope that IBM can save what's left of them.

Re:Informix

[CaptainZapp]

I never used it myself, but that's what I heard from a lot of Informix people coming from the technical side.

Great product, horrid management...

Free Solaris 8 now limited to 1 CPU also

[roybadami]

Looking at the web site, it appears that the 1 CPU limit now applies to new Solaris 8 installs, too.

And since CPUs are counted by the number of CPUs supported by the platform, rather than the number of CPUs installed in the machine, all those old SPARCstation 10 and SPARCstation 20 machines will now count as 4 processor machines and cost you $199 for a desktop licence or $999 for a server licence.

Please someone tell me I'm mistaken...

What a wimpy girly machine....

[Anonymous Coward]

... I'd much rather have one of these quaint little computers. You can even buy one over the web! :-)

No one pays license fees

[kindbud]

People who need it pay for support contracts. No one with a Sun support contract is going to be hassled over OS licenses. This only affects people who eschew support contracts, and then only if someone at Sun cares enough to proceed with a lawsuit. I have never known Sun to bring in the BSA or anything like that to enforce licence compliance. If Sun uses the license as legal leverage at all, it is to encourage you to buy a support contract, which is where they make a lot of their money.

Sun vs MS?

[Earl The Squirrel]

Lessee:

Solaris 9, 1 CPU -- free.
Windows XP HOME, 1 CPU $159-203
Windows XP Professional 1 CPU $179-$306
Windows NT Server 1 CPU (5 clients)$429.00-$814.95

Heck for 4 CPU Solaris, I'm within $40 of XP home for 1 CPU!!

Seems reasonable to me.
(all prices from shopper.com)

Re:Not that bad. Their CPUs, on the other hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and keep in mind that old hardware isn't going to be supported forever -- so if you've got a $5 IPC from ebay, there's no way Solaris 9 is going to run on it anyway

Spreading the load across many boxes....

[ralico]

Look at the first 2 tiers of the 3 tier enterprise architecture: web server tier, business logic tier, and database tier.

As I understand it this is how it works:

The web server tier should be stateless and perform operations quickly. For this reason it scales horizontally, that is, you scale it up in performance by adding more equivalent machines.

The business logic tier is stateful and/or it takes a significant amount of time to crunch data for output to the web server tier. For this reason it scales vertically, that is, you want to add more processors/and or memory to each machine in this tier. This is where the "big iron" can come into play, to scale the business tier vertically. Because, it is programmatically easier to add more raw power to one machine to statefully crunch the data, than try to distribute the state machine across multiple systems.

What is all the fuss about?

[jo42]

GNUrds and Geeks,

I don't grok all the foo foo about this announcement. When is the last time you tried to price Windows 2000 Server licenses? By comparison, Sun is still giving it away...!

Re: List Prices, Real Prices

[bryan1945]

Even better is since my company buys a fair number of Sun machines per year, we got put in some category that gives us automatic discounts. I called to get some quotes once, gave 'em our contract number, and they started rattling off the discounts. %15 for a SCSI cable, %20-25 for a disc pack, %40 for an Ultra 2. I should have asked for a server discount %, just for kicks.

Also, I haven't looked at the page yet, but has anyone noticed if they offer volume licensing?

irix updates free?! - I don't think so.

[Kunta Kinte]

um....

where can I download these free/cheap updates. Please do tell. Cause right now I have a lab of SGI that won't be upgraded with the lastest overlays because management will no longer pay for sgi support.

I doubt sharing overlays ( sgi os updates ) is legal. sgi charges a lot of money for those.

but I could be wrong, so *please* correct me if I am.

Re:irix updates free?! - I don't think so.

[modecx]

You gotta look for the release overlay (and if you still have a valid support contract, you can download the maintainance overlay, rather than get it by mail) at support.sgi.com. Beware, these overlays are massive.

If you run Solaris without a support contract

[morven2]

you're on crack. The support is the REASON to have Sun. If you don't have it ... run Linux.

There is a reasion for the difference in pricing..

[Boap]

The 4 CPU is a Desktop RTU for $199.00 while the 2 CPU RTU $249.00 is for the Server License.

Re:*shrug* pretty cheap actually

[Anonymous Coward]

> the 1-cpu version, which covers the majority of workstations and low-end servers...

Bzzt! If you have an SS10 or SS20, which is theoretically capable of holding 4 CPUs, you CANNOT use the free Solaris 8 OE even if you only have a SINGLE cpu installed. According to the Sun sales engineer I talked to, my "right-to-use" license for Solaris 8 for an SS20 (any SS20) is $999! Solaris 9 is $199.

Solaris Download

[EdMcMan]

Does sun actually have a free download in their site? Or is the "free solaris" the media kit? I'm sure Sun doesn't make any money charging $50 for a few cds. I couldn't find any download on their site.. but is there one? If so where?

Re:Insanity First!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but why? Are these guys addicted to losing monay or something???

I sure don't understand. One horrible idea after another. People will be fired again, etc, etc.

What's wrong with them?
What do they expect to achieve with "Insanity First!"? Innovation?

Umm, no, that's fucking stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

without other countries corporations in America wouldn't make any money. So they don't control the world, they depend on it.

reason for server/workstation price difference

[gr]

In some cases it's the same motherboard, power supply and memory!

... which are the least relevant part of the price difference. The higher rate is for the faster system and I/O buses in Sun's Workgroup and Enterprise servers. You don't use Sun servers for processing, you use them for massive I/O. (You use Intel machines for processing these days, much as I wish it weren't so.)

SPARCCenter 2000s

[zmalone]

Shit. This means that my SC2000 (http://www.sunstuff.org/hardware/systems/sun4/)is now useless for running Solaris 9. Right now it only has 4 processors, but I have boards for 6 chips, and I was thinking about upgrading to a full 20 soon. This kind of pisses me off, as it now means that I am limited (cost wise) to only running a few chips. I bet the licensing moving to this new system really screws owners of those 64 processor CS6400 machines. And to top it off, the xdbus machines are not supported by Net or OpenBSD (last I looked). So I now have 800lbs of machine sitting in my house, and I can't afford to put the most recent version of Solaris on it. Anyone want it?

You heard wrong.

[gr]

and I have heard from numerous people and DBA professionals which say that HPUX+Oracle is the way to go

Stop trusting anything whoever told you that tells you.

Oracle is developed under Solaris. Though Veritas products do exist for HP-UX, Veritas's happier dealing with Sun. There is a group of support engineers from all three companies working in the same place, answering calls together, precisely because the most common use of any of their products is with the other two. The ties between Oracle and Sun (and Veritas) run quite deep, and result in better performance.

Re:*shrug* pretty cheap actually

[capnjack41]

I tried to download the Intel ISO (for sol 8) just yesterday, and after the annoying registration process (hey, least I could do, since it's a free download anyway), they said that "at this time" free .iso's for Intel are no longer available for download (casually mentioning a price reduction for the actual media, to $45 or so, iirc?). But for Sparc it's still free and available.

J2EE - Sun ONE - iPlanet

[krulgar]

Bundling makes sense from the software side of the shop:

Sun's been seeing their market share diminish to almost nothing in the application server space. iPlanet isn't getting used by anyone, but with this new move I think we can expect to see the market share for Sun ONE skyrocket. It won't necessarily mean that everyone's using it now, but their numbers will look good.

It appears they are learning from MS.

Drop hardware costs?

[DaveBarr]

It will be interesting to see of Sun reduces the cost of the hardware. Seeing as how the RTU previously was "built in" to the cost to the hardware, logic would dicatate that they would reduce the cost of the hardware with this new pricing scheme.

But I'm not that naive.

Stop fucking complaining about for-pay software

[dr_db]

You missed the entire point - go drink some coffee and come back. OSS and free OS people look at the license fee and *whiiiiine*. HEY - they wrote it, they can charge whatever the fuck they want. *You* don't have to buy it though.

So, in plain english - his point was (as a reply to another article) that it won't cause a mass migration to Linux because where they are charging the serious money ... there isn't a linux product. Besides, if you are comfortable enough to spend a million dollars on a computer, you likely wouldn't blink at 400,000 for software.

Can anyone say...

[Anonymous Coward]

...$un $olari$ ?

Seriously, most of you guys are idiots. Previously, Solaris is free. Sun is good. Now, they are charging for it. So, logically, Sun is bad. Get a life. You don't make money by giving products away. Against popular belief, Sun's number one objective is to make money. Everything else is secondary.

Re:Not that bad. Their CPUs, on the other hand...

[Citizen of Earth]

"900-MHz UltraSPARC III Cu Processor with 8-MB External Cache [add $4,500.00]". Now that's a spicy meatball. (It is a helluva processor, but 4.5k makes me gasp).

So how does this "helluva" processor compare to the latest Athlon/latest DDR RAM? I would guess not very well.

Re:Lies. Damnd Lies & Statistics. [Re:What is

[Anonymous Coward]

Cobalt boxes usually ship with Linux I think...

What are the Jalape�o systems?

[jmcclure888]

What are the Jalapeño systems you mentioned? I've never heard of them.

Re:Am I the only one who has actually PAID for Sol

[Christov]

I know it may be something you don't know if you're 16 and you're only familiar with "Dude you're getting a Dell" but for some reason (I'm sure those with marketing backgrounds can elaborate more than anyone wants) companies feel the need to put list prices that are out of the ball park. I guess so their customers feel they're getting a great discount or who knows. Anyway if you go to the SUN online store and you think that's what people really pay for those systems no wonder you're having a conniption. Of course not.

Government contracts require a published list price. You can not charge more than that. It's kinda like the room rates on the back of your hotel room door. The hotel is not allowed to charge more than the published "rack rate" for the room.

Of course, you're right. Serious customers never pay those published prices. They do like to see the "discount" on their proposal though...

Re:*shrug* pretty cheap actually

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, wait... You believed what a SALES engineer told you? ROTFLMAO... Have fun, sheep...

Idiot Sun Marketing Droids May Have a Problem

[wallsg]

"So, If Solaris is too expensive for you, don't use it."

I had an on-line argument a couple of years ago with an idiot Sun Marketing Droid about something like this. At the same time this moron was claiming that Microsoft should be *forced* to *give away* Windows because the PC was a "public domain standard" (as she put it) she was claiming that it was OK for Sun to refuse to sell their boxes to you unless you licensed their OS because their box was proprietary and they "sell solutions, not hardware and software". She thought I was stupid to argue that maybe Sun should be forced to ship the box with a discount for not licensing Solaris so that people could run Linux on it. She just couldn't comprehend that I didn't see the obvious difference.

I wonder what she'd think of you not wanting to run Solaris on their precious proprietary box.

The best thing about open source

[evilviper]

The best thing about Open Source, is that if you spent that money _once_ on hiring a couple developers (that already work on the project) to develop the features you need, and release it back to the project under an open license, you'd then have that feature in a Free OS for all the future releases. So instead of paying that price every few years, you can pay for it just once.

Re:The best thing about open source

[ecorrado]

What you're saying is not so cut and dry. You only pay once if you never want it updated (unless someone else wanted it updated for some reason and did it and they did the same updates you wanted). If you want updates, you'll need to get (and pay) someone to do it for you. That's the same with Open source or if you contract someone to write a program for you under a different license.

Re:The best thing about open source

[evilviper]

You only pay once if you never want it updated

I was refering to a feature that doesn't constantly change. Something like drivers for a TIS card reader. Also, at the very least, an open source project will make sure what you had written will at least work properly in future versions...

That's the same with Open source or if you contract someone to write a program for you under a different license.

While you may need to pay to get updated to the newest version of whatever it is, the fact that it is open source implies that others may add-on features they need, before you need those same features. And even if you ALWAYS end up footing the bill, and it always costs you as much as a commercial operating system to add that feature you need (not damn likely) you still come out ahead because you are tied to an Open Source solution, not a propritary one, and have the advantages of free, and freely modifiable software.

Re:Not that bad. Their CPUs, on the other hand...

[IvyMike]

Not that it's definitive, but Ace's Hardware has a "SPECmine" page that lets you search known SPEC ratings for various processors. On SPECfp2000, the results are:

• 1050 MHZ UltraSPARC-III Cu: 827 Peak, 701 Base
• 1733 Athlon XP: 660 Peak, 613 Base
• 900 UltraSPARC-III 482 Peak, 427 Base

So the high-end UltraSPARC outperforms the Athlon by a healthy margin. (I mentioned in my earlier post the 900 UltraSPARC-III Cu, but the SPECmine doesn't have results for that exact processor. I'd expect it to perform at about 90% of the 1050Mhz version).

You can use the SPECmine to find the SPECInt results, and the Athlon does in fact beat the UltraSPARC (749 v. 610). So you're paying for floating point performance on the Sun part, but you actually pay an integer performance penalty.

In real life, the Blade feels like a REALLY fast system, in spite of the SPECInt numbers. Perhaps that massive 8MB cache doesn't help the SPECInt numbers, but pays off in day-to-day tasks? I can't explain it, and maybe it's just "This machine cost $20K+, it must be fast", but I'd definitely prefer the Blade to my current Athlon home system... If cost were no object.

On the other hand, cost is an object, which is why my current home system IS an Athlon. But don't knock the Blade system; it's outrageously priced, but it's one boss machine.

It's disgusting!

[chegosaurus]

Who the hell do Sun think they are? What gives them the right to charge money for a product they've developed? Especially when Linux does everything Solaris does but for free and at least ten million times better.

I hereby demand that to atone for this insulting slap in the face to RMS and 1337 bedroom haX0rs everywhere, Sun place all code they've ever written under the GPL