The Return Of Solaris 9 For x86

The Pi-Guy writes: "Hoping that I won't screw up again about Solaris 9 on x86 again, this time I'm sure I got it right... eWeek is covering that indeed, Sun will be shipping Solaris 9 for x86 after all!!! Also in that article, they note that Sun is shipping a x86 based server, which will ship the 26th. It will be running a Sun Linux distro... Many surprises from Sun today!!"

Comments

Re:Sun LX50 Servers

[pmz]

What are the real differences between Linux and Solaris as server OSes?

Solaris has:

- extreme CPU, disk, and peripheral scalability
- mature 64-bit support
- multiple scheduling and VM algorithms
- fine-grained patch management
- Dynamic Reconfiguration (allows partially-broken servers to continue running)
- easy hot-swapping
- Dynamic System Domains (multiple OS images)
- multipathing for networks and disks
- bundled management software (SMC, Disksuite, etc.)
- fairly easy installation (similar to Red Hat's install but much more robust)
- JumpStart automatic installation
- sccs (minor detail, but I like it)
- really good bundled documentation (enough to get a sysadmin cert. using it)

And I'm sure there are many more. One thing that is frustrating sometimes is that the Solaris vs. Linux vs. Windows arguments lose many of these details. Most people mindlessly regurgitate benchmarks or marketing-speak trying to justify their basically-religious feelings when an objective analysis would pose a much different argument.