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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.
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.
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..
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.
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.