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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.
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.
-twb
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.
I have been pwned because my
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.
Cedric Balthazar Rotherwood
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform +
System Admin. for Solaris
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...
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
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.
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?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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.
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
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.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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*.
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.
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.