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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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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 $fairly_cheap) the 1-cpu version, which covers the majority of workstations and low-end servers...
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Sun makes a big distinction between systems bought from Sun or an authorized reseller versus EBay, etc. This is probably done to keep the resellers happy.
There has been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth on comp.unix.solaris, primarily from people having old 4 processor servers lying around (which are worth less than the license). The license for Solaris 8 was really nice, free for machines that could hold 8 or fewer processors. BTW, that license is still in effect for people with media in hand (although it applies just for their organization).
Sun's hurting themselves more by not getting the Jalapeño systems out - keep up the pressure on the low end. Rumor was that the Jalapeño machines were to be cost competitive with the intel boxes.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
sun's totally taking this cue from oracle, which changes its pricing model every other year just to make money off the confusion (with dominance of the enterprise db market, they're basically the Micro$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!
-- Know Nukes!
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
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
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.
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...
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
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.
"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.
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.
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..
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.
"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."
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.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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
"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."
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
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.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.
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.
Of course, he's talking about IBM's RS/6000 (aka pSeries) products.
Most Sun customers cut the deals with the Sun
sales representatives directly, avoiding sunstore on the web.
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.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
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.
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!
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.
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*.
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.
Free Solaris on DVD while supplies last.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Lies. Damnd Lies & Statistics.
The Sun numbers include "Cobalt Cube" servers.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
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.
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.
- Dan I.
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?
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.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
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.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
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.
Edith Keeler Must Die
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?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Do you have a
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.")
Do you have a
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.
Do you have a
But I'm not that naive.
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.
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 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;)
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.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
As useless as a dead Cray.
It also reflects on the value of a still-alive Cray.
Huh? RedHat runs on Solaris? Does it run on Windows too?
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?
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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:
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.