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Sun to Sell Unbundled Solaris 9
An anonymous reader writes "Sun VP John Loiacono told eWEEK that the company is scrapping its plan to limit Solaris 9 support to Sun x86 hardware. Loiacono said the version for non-Sun hardware will retail for $99 for a single CPU and that the company is committed to supporting both Sun and non-Sun hardware in the future. Sun will also publicize the compatibility test suite it used internally, and said it may ultimately open the code for the product to the open source community."
I really doubt anyone is running a website on a 100 CPU server. Using a single large unix server as web webserver is just not very practical or economical. It is very easy to distribute the load between multiple cheap, comodity x86 servers. They scale greatly for this kind of application. Databases and such is a different story..
- No sound drivers for anything other than Sound Blasters; probably not a biggie, and you can download drivers for SB64/128
- Pick your network cards carefully; check the HCL.
- Poor/non-existent X support. You almost have to use XFree86 to get any useful X windows.
- Poor support for IDE; DMA is limited.
If you can work around that, you'll do OK, but linux will probably run smoother on commodity x86 hardware.True, but a couple of points:
> No sound drivers for anything other than Sound Blasters; probably not a biggie, and you can download drivers for SB64/128
The one thing I don't like about Solaris on x86. I've *never* been able to get the OSS soundcard drivers to work on my system. (Dual CPU - something goes very screwy and system usage goes up to ~95%!)
> Pick your network cards carefully; check the HCL
True, but many non-HCL cards can be persuaded to work without too much trouble. I've got a great system, works beautifully except for the sound card, which I don't miss, and none of it is on the HCL. (Oh, maybe the SCSI cards..?)
> Poor/non-existent X support. You almost have to use XFree86 to get any useful X windows
Not so bad as it used to be, especially with the porting kit. The XiG Accelerated-X server, or Summit as I think they call it now (www.xig.com) is very reasonably priced, works with anything, and generally *rocks*.
> Poor support for IDE; DMA is limited
Solaris IDE support really sucks, even on SPARC. Give it SCSI disks - it loves them.
Yes, this seems to be the case in this article. However, I found this maybe more interesting one (Making Solaris open source)
Clip (Sun chief engineer Rob Gingell, August 28, 2002 ):
The really valuable thing to us is this community. Not all predecessor communities have agreed to operate on the same IP principle that the Linux community operates on. Getting by that is a real impediment to throwing open the kimono and saying, "Here, Solaris is now open sourced." So, some of it has happened, and we are working on the rest of it. We may never be able to do it all because we may never be able to reach an agreement with the originators of the stuff. In short, the answer is that we're just sort of chipping away at it
This might be worth submitting to /. as a separate story if it has not already been here.
In 2000, I would have agreed with you that most sites would just throw a slew of linux boxes running apache to host the website. At my old job that's what me and a couple of others were proposing--we so wanted to get rid of the boss installed M$ IIS server--for many many reasons.
In 2001, I got a job with Sun. I went to a customer site to monitor an E10k, and I asked them what they were running on it, when they said their website, I was shocked. The usual answer is a ERP system with a database of some sorts. I have heard of clustered E10k's hosting websites, but I haven't heard of F15k's running websites.
So, since an E10k can only scale to 64 UltraSPARC II processors, you're right....as far as I personally know that no one is running a website on a 100 cpu system (which would imply a F15k).
"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
You must be a Solaris sysadmin. Let me give you a Solaris developer perspective :-)
I have complicated package install scripts that rely on many of the old Solaris SysV stuff to be there. If it isn't, things will almost certainly break.
The suggestion I would have is put the GNU stuff in /usr/local/bin for now - and this is exactly what Sun is doing. After some period of time, announce that you are deprecating the SysV coammands. Some period of time later (several releases) consider reversing the situation - make the GNU stuff the default, leave the old commands somewhere else.
We still have plenty of customers running Solaris 7. When you have high availablility high transaction systems, you make upgrade moves slowly and carefully. I know this isn't the way Linux works, but Sun plays in somewhat of a different market.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.