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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."
does anyone know of a way to dual boot solaris with say linux? maybe it was just the version that I downloaded, but it wanted to wipe the drive and repartition in order to install.
In a lot of ways, Sun is the MS of the commercial UNIX world, but they have an impressive record of making contributions to the community. the most notable contribution was probably NFS, and Sun gave it away long before most of us had ever heard of the GPL. Solaris has lots of goodies in it, obviously including great NFS support, but also pleasant standardisation and maturity, which Linux still somewhat lacks. Solaris is also rock solid. Sure, Linux can have multi-year uptimes, but it doesn't really compare to Solaris. When you want to run a giant website with 100's of CPU's, you turn to Solaris, and you don't even care that you get raped on the price of the hardware.
I imagine that Sun is doing this because they know they won't make any money pushing beige box PC's. (SGI sure didn't.) By just selling the OS, they may not sell a ton of copies, but the profit margins on software are pretty sweet, if you can pay off the cost of development.
Well, it's 4:00 am here, and I am still at work, so I don't imagine this post was at all coherent. God Bless Orange Soda. cheese fish is moose.
Interesting, maybe. But nowadays, open sourcing seems to mean everything between giving a quick peek into the sourcecode and releasing it under a license which poses no restrictions at all. Anyway, is there some pieces in the codebase that are especially worth waiting for - if the license would allow utilizing them for other purposes?
This is good news - but one of my main uses for Solaris is an Oracle platform. Oracle no longer support Solaris on x86, which is a shame because Oracle 9i on Solaris 9 on x86 would be a very interesting proposition. Anyone know of any plans for Oracle to resupport x86 for Solaris? With Sun seeming commiting itself towards it, would it be a mistake not to?
'Internet! Is that thing still around?' - Homer Simpson
When you want to run a giant website on a machine with 100's of CPU's, you CAN'T turn x86; there is no such machine.
There's not many OS options when you are talking about machines like that; you have to use the OS that the manufacurer provies.
You turn to Solaris because that's what Sun machines use, and Sun machines can offer a ton of computing power while still being a lot less money then large scale mainframe offerings from IBM and Sgi.
Not to say that the *only* reason people choose Solaris is because they have to use it when using Sun machines; I'm sure a lot of times people choose Sun machines because of Solaris.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Sure, this will help... As a Sun stock holder, this pains me. Again...
They buried any chances of x86 support when they 'killed' Solaris 9 flat out and gave marginal driver support for Solaris 8(x86). When it might have mattered, they held back. When it no longer does, they release and ignore linux.
The entry level SunBlade was a huge disapointment on a personal level - not sure what I expected for a $999, but for about the same cash I got dual x86 CPU's and SCSI hard drives. After adding an Adaptec 29160n card, it is still a dog. Guess which one is a web server and which one is my primary development environment.
They release a 'free' Java Application Server after giving the JBoss people the finger. They release a 'free' app server, giving every other partner the other finger who use to say 'use Sun hardware' when it matters.
They gave the log4j and a few other groups the finger when they did a 'not develped here' move and folded in some junky classes into JDK 1.4
Not that I'm bitter.... but I have not seen anything that looks like a solid move in a long time. Perhaps merging with HP/Compaq next week?
(shaking head and walking away)
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
I've heard many claims that Solaris is very reliable - more reliable than Linux. How much stability comes from Solaris itself, and how much comes from Sun's end-to-end control of the hardware? Solaris has had the advantage of running on machines that were not only well-designed, but designed and built to the specifications of the OS group. Linux has rarely if ever had this luxury. When Solaris 9 is running on ferrel x86 hardware, will it display the same reliability as it's UltraSparc sibbling? More importantly, will it even prove to be as reliable as Linux?
While I think that Solaris x86 would have been a good idea if it had caught on somewhat better, it hasn't and the Linux/*BSD world has more or less taken over the x86 platform for UNIX-like OS's.
Based on this, it would be in Sun's best interest to do one of two things. Either bring Solaris (both SPARC & x86) upto speed with the standard offerings of Linux/*BSD with the GNU software included and supported, or pull out completely of the x86 arena and reallocate company funds on a strengthening of the SPARC platform.
If it were me, I'd do the latter since there is a double whammy with Solaris x86 which is that users aren't buying Sun hardware, and therefore do not need hardware support either which hits them both on the sale and on the ongoing support contracts. If they can get people to stay only on the SPARC platform, it benefits Sun's bottom-line better, while allowing them to better focus on their own products.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
it all depends on what you are spec'ing out.
Dell 1650 - $4,163.65
2 P1.4 ghz processors
2 GB RAM
1 36GB 10k drive
2 gige NICs
add 2 GB RAM for $1131
add 1 36 GB 10k drive for $217
optional: redundant power supply, hardware raid, 4 GB RAM max, 3 drives max
Sun LX50 - $5,295.00
2 P1.4 ghz processors
2 GB RAM
1 36 GB 10k drice
2 10/100 NICs
add 2 GB RAM for $2250
add 1 36 GB 10k drive for $480
optional: 6 GB RAM max, 3 drives max
you save over $1000 for the comparable Dell, which comes with more options than the Sun (excluding the 6 gb total RAM).
If you max both out, you get the Dell (with raid and redundant power supply) for $7000 and the Sun (with 6 gb RAM) for $11,600.
You can find greater savings in disk arrays from both vendors.
-f
www.blackant.net
Err, no, you just need to know enough perl, to know that you need to hunt down and adjust Config.pm to use gcc and corresponding flags instead of the default SunCC stuff.