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Sun Solaris 9 for x86 for Evaluation
Rune Tønnesen writes "Sun has listent to their costomers, they have a released Sun Solaris 9 x86 for test and evaluation purposes, it can be downloaded ($20) as part of their OE Customer Early Access software.""
If I understand correctly, Staroffice isn't free anymore, because when it was free, people believed it was inferior to the expensive Microsoft Office suite. This isn't an issue for Solaris, however. And Solaris 8 was available for free download. So when it's out of testing, could Solaris 9 for x86 be available for free?
Does Sun make most of their money with their really nice hardware? If that's the case, what are the chances they could be considering opening the source for Solaris? I admit I'm fairly ignorant about Solaris, but it seems like this is a good example of a company that could benefit from opening the source of their software by, perhaps, generating a bigger demand for their hardware.
I found Solaris/X86 (2.6->8.0) pretty stable.
In fact, it has been rock solid.
More so than Linux (Mandrake 8.2) on the very same hardware (serverworks mobos).
So, it makes sense to run Solaris on cheap x68 hardware to get some trainning if you are going to apply for one of these jobs. It is much more fun than sysadmin'ing Win* boxes, and whenever the company switches to Linux/BSD you are already working there and you get to do real cool work ;-)
They paid for the massive bandwidth used by those that downloaded it.
It ran on hardware that they did not sell, so they made no money there.
Sun probably cannibalized sales of lower-end (e.g. Sun Blade 100) systems. Those who wanted to run Solaris could do so without having to buy anything from Sun.
All of the risks and no profits. Sun had no quality control over the hardware, so if Joe Blow had a system with flaky RAM that crashed all of the time, he'd probably blame Solaris.
It took a tremendous investment on Sun's part to make a version of Solaris that worked on such a large subsection of x86 boxes. This probably took money and time away from profit-making ventures.
Solaris clearly will not be a serious competitor to Windows or Linux in the x86 market. Sun should never have released it in the first place and charging for it is the only rational compromise between doing the smart thing -- discontinuing it -- and appeasing the masses by giving it away for free.'
I don't know if Sun can be said to make money on the software, or the hardware, or whatever. It seems to be more about the whole package. They make everything work together.
I used to have a business that used Sun, and the level of support we got (mostly from our vendor, admittedly) was incredible, and we never got that "pass the buck" sort of thing where the software people blame the hardware, and the hardware people blame the software.
I have a friend who works for sun doing support. He had a solid academic background and a number of years of experience doing system administration at fermilab before he joined the company. He spent most of his time supporting clustered systems. The point is that if you have problems and a high level support contract, you talk to smart people.
I know that they used to have (and probably still do have) Oracle gurus on staff, because if you're a big customer you don't want to hear Sun say, "Call Oracle" and the Oracle people say, "Call Sun." You want it to work.
And I remember once I had a system die on me, and I didn't have a spare. My vendor, who usually dealt with much larger customers, kept an inventory of stuff preboxed at an overnight shipping facility. He could call them up and tell them to ship something out as late as 8p or so, and get it there the next morning. I called him in the evening, and he got it there in the morning. He said, "We'll talk about billing later, let's get this shipped before the deadline passes."
It's a whole different world when you have problems. That's what Sun sells. But obviously, it's a lot more expensive than taking a commodity pc that you built for $500 and putting linux on it.
The problem Sun would have with an Open Source Solaris is that people would change it, and that would make support a lot more difficult.
Sun's problem isn't that Solaris is missing features that open source developers could contribute, or reliability issues that volunteers could help them work out. Their problem is that they're caught in a pretty small niche, and other people with a lot of money are coming at them all the time.
And the fact that linux is solid, and that it can be made to work creates a new problem, because it creates the possibility that another company (like RedHat) might be in a position soon to offer the same kind of "we make it work" service that Sun offers.
I don't think there are any easy answers to these problems. Sun seems like a viable company, but they definitely have some challenges ahead.
If you don't have a support contract, if you're a guy with a couple of sparc servers and no lifeline, Sun doesn't make so much sense. You're better off with the commodity hardware and linux. I think that tends to color the way linux guys look at Sun.
Sun says Sol9 is Linux compatible. They also include many of our favorite Open Source apps, and many of those are Sun supported.
If we didn't need SPARC binary compatibility for some of the libraries we don't have source code for I could probably convince the Powers That Be to take a look at this at work, especially since I could build a dual CPU Athlon 2400+ development box for cheap. (I have one at home. Real MP 2400+ chips should be available later this month, saving you the nuisance of hacking XP series chips.) Being able to use the same GTK+/GNOME GUI source for both Linux and Solaris development is very, very interesting. Windows has probably already won where I work, but who knows?
Sun only allow payment via VISA, MasterCard or AMEX. Most people who would make use of the Solaris 9 OS would be students or hobbyists such as myself. I don't have a credit card so I have no way of downloading this software as a result - cheque and postal money orders are available if I spend over US$195.
I wouldn't expect many students to download this one as a result, so we'll have less people with experience with Solaris 9 once they graduate. Guess what? They'll all use Linux.
Also, downloading this OS with an Australian broadband download cap is prohibitive, too, which would add extra costs as well.
Good work, Sun!
I sorta disagree.
Sun probably cannibalized sales of lower-end (e.g. Sun Blade 100) systems. Those who wanted to run Solaris could do so without having to buy anything from Sun.
Not really. People don't buy Sun stuff just for Solaris, they want the package. They wanted (allegedly) stable Sun hardware on (allegedly) stable Sun software. I doubt if Sun lost any money to speak of because people were buying Solaris and running it on their Dell's (I personally know of 0 companies running x86 Solaris in a production environment, I do know some that use to as a cheap developers box).
Solaris clearly will not be a serious competitor to Windows or Linux in the x86 market.
I agree, but you're missing the point that it was never meant to be. Sun already had a x86 port when they came out with their i386 boxes years ago. They were just leveraging that work by keeping the code base portable. It's always been a red headed step child and always will be. But generally I don't think it's that massive a drain on their resources.
Sun should never have released it in the first place and charging for it is the only rational compromise between doing the smart thing -- discontinuing it -- and appeasing the masses by giving it away for free.'
Well, yes and no. They gave it away on the same basis that they give deep discounts to educational buyers - they more people who know and like Sun equipment, the more people who will recommend buying it when they start work. Sun never intended people to do production work on Solaris x86, it was just a way to get students hooked early.
Now, the cheap hardware is good enough that you can do useful work on it, and you are right, at the low end, SPARC kit is competing (and in many cases losing) against high-end PC kit.
If Sun do want to give Solaris x86 away, it should be under a strict license that precludes it from being used for commercial work.
Apple is already starting off well in the Server market. What if they bough (or merged with) Sun and incorporated Sun compatibly into Mac OS X Server?
Wouldn't that really give Apple a nice jump into the Server market? Additionally, wouldn't that give Sun some kind of a future?
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
with all that software, they will have to call it Gnu/Solaris.
Or you can just download it if you don't want support. [shrug].
May we never see th
- open source
- java
- hardware
- proprietary software
- fight Microsoft
That would be ok if they were making money in each of those "fields". But I don't think they are. It seems like they are being pushed back from every direction.I think x86 Solaris is a symptom of their problems; it is not a cure.
Sex - Find It
While getting training on Solaris is invaluable for any *nix sysadmin worth his/her salt, it's my belief that when it comes to experience helping secure a job getting that experience on x86 hardware lies somewhere between "next to useless" and "better than nothing" on the usefulness scale. Anyone that wants Solaris software experience will also want Sparc hardware experience (disk arrays, remote mgmt cards, sbus legacy stuff, etc -- things you don't normally see on commodity PCs). They'll probably want someone who knows enough "Sun" to know what the difference beween an E420 and a SunBlade is and won't get surprised to discover that one of them doesn't have anything more than a console attached to it.
If you want Solaris experience for a job, then you'd be better off buying an old Ultra 5 for 80 bucks than paying for beta x86 software. You'll at least be able to say during your interview that although you don't have any "real world" Sun experience, you have been playing with an old Ultra in your spare time in order to get up to speed or round out your professional experience. I've seen a few people get jobs this way in fact.
You have a much better chance if you get an old Sparc, stick it in the corner, hook up a serial cable to it and run BIND on it for internal DNS or something than playing with x86 Solaris on a PC.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
IRIX has a number of assets that Linux does not have, even in the kernel space -- including scalability (support for up to 512 CPUs, 512 GiB RAM), advanced file systems (XFS journaled file system, XVM volume management), advanced networking (Clustered XFS, SAN), standards compliance (POSIX, DII-COE, Trusted IRIX), and a Unix (BSD+SysV) heritage -- that place IRIX in a different league from Linux and *BSD. It's not that these features could not be added to Linux, but at this time Linux and IRIX have different target markets.
AIX and Solaris also have features not found in Linux, I'm just not sure why you singled IRIX out. Don't forget that SGI has also developed a reputation, particularly for high-performance systems and cutting-edge hardware.
That said, many Unix companies do seem to be adopting Linux to some extent. Who knows what SGI will do?
If your Sun hardware has an endemic problem, and all your software is build around Solaris, where do you go?
Fujitsu?
I wouldn't, but you do have a choice. Every systems vendor has product issues from time to time. They all try to hush things up initially, because they are not necessarily aware that the problem is widespread and there's no point in causing panic - especially when initial findings pointed to environmental factors such as heat/EM noise. A single hardware issue is unlikely to affect all models and Sun was more than happy to generously discount on future purchases in order to keep the business. SunService did a stirling job during the E-cache (and the GBIC) issues. My systems were clustered and the problem was taken very seriously by Sun, I suffered little downtime and as such I have few complaints.
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...