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Dell CIO Says "Unix is Dead"
An anonymous reader writes "I thought this might spur some good discussion on this board, including jabs at Dell and MS, which I always enjoy reading. Dell's CIO believes that the end of Unix is here, in fact his opening slide in a recent presentation was "Unix is dead." Specifically, he talked about the savings he claims in moving Dell's Oracle databases from Solaris to Red Hat.
Since I worked on the earliest versions of Berkeley Unix, I can clarify this (the terse version is "BSD used to be UNIX, but that was a long time ago"):
The original Berkeley Unix was indeed a set of mods to the Bell Labs Unix code (which unfortunately were not accepted by Bell Labs/AT&T in a hissy fit of Not Invented Here Syndrome).
However licensing issues kept getting in the way of efforts of people like Bill Jolitz to make BSD Unix available on PCs (386 PCs, back then). This was another really nasty battle that reflected quite badly on AT&T, and caused untold trauma for Jolitz, other BSD developers, and of course the teeming masses that wanted affordable Unix on their PCs.
Therefore a huge effort was made to strip out all of the original Bell Labs source code.
Modern BSD distributions, like FreeBSD, therefore have none of the original Unix code, and properly should be called workalikes, just like Linux.
I've been using Linux for lo, these many years, so I'm out of touch with BSD issues, however there's every reason to think that BSD is a more exact workalike than Linux, since it started out as Unix and only gradually had each component rewritten as a close copy of the functionality of the original. Some purists care about this, I don't.
Except where functionality is actually removed. E.g. Stallman insists that man pages are obsolete and refuses to support them, which is incredibly wrongheaded. BSD is superior in that regard, and in a few other places. (Many places where BSD had a similar edge in the past are now obsolete issues; Linux has mostly caught up.)
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
2. Dell has some of the worst-managed IT projects in existance.
3. Randy Mott is an idiot.
That about sums it up.
No sig, sorry.
That's right, and a Mercedes costs more than a Fiat.
True enough, but anyone worth their salt knows the A3500 was a flaming piece of
Now, take an E10k. I can dynamically add/remove processors, memory, SBus cards, PCI cards, etc.
In fact, I just replaced 4 SBus I/O mezz's each on 2 of my E10k's with PCI ones. All while the system was up. And the database was running. And the data was processing. And not a single hiccup.
Now _that_ is what I call hot-swap hardware.
Errr.... check the Solaris docs.
OK, you tell me how to keep an Oracle database highly available without decent clustering.
Yes, a parallel DB is still technically a cluster.
True enough, max. CPU in an SF15k (They're _not_ part of the Enterprise line), is 108.
However, it's not a "very specific" need; I see lots of places where running several domains on SF15k's would be ideal. I also have some E10k's that run balls-to-the-wall, 64 CPU's, 64gb RAM in one domain. We're trying to determine exactly what our performance gains would be if we migrated off of the pair of E10k's mentioned above to a single SF15k. Honestly, I don't think a single 15k would handle the load. The application in question seems to like more processors at a (relatively) slower speed than fewer procs at faster speed....
The US-II chips were very unreliable until the Sombra modules became available. They got seriously reliable after that.
Sun never introduced a Sombra-like module for the desktop-class equipment (E450 and below), _BUT_ they did replace the CPU's with IBM e-cache modules with CPU's with Sony e-cache modules. I haven't seen an e-cache parity error in a long, long time (And I support about 300 Sun machines, from Ultra 1's through SF6800's, and soon 15k's....)
That depends on what it means to your business. If downtime costs you serious $$$, that contract is worth its weight in gold.