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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.
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?
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.
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.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
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...)
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?
"95% of all Slashdot
"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.
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!).
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.
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.
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.
You mean like this one?
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown