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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
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.
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.
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
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.
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..
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
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)
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*.
Free Solaris on DVD while supplies last.
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.