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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.
Isn't this a little like those trolls that post obituaries on /. for people who aren't dead yet? Anyway, I sort of agree with him, moving to Linux makes the most sense for traditional UNIX vendors that want to keep up with the market.
Anyways, so what?
-Sean
Large financial organizations are typically *just* moving away from COBOL based apps running on VMS and SCO to Java and C apps running on Solaris on Sun Hardware.
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Considering that I've migrated from systems such as NeXT and AIX to Linux-based solutions with very few problems, I'd put forth the assertion that any Linux distribution would qualify as `UNIX' to most lay definitions of the term. I've even taken applications from Oracle/WinNT to Oracle/RedHat with minor issues. Computer operating systems are simply getting better; more commoditizied, which is why Microsoft is afraid of Linux right now. The "UNIX vendors" are still shipping machines, but with Linux installed instead of their "big iron" legacy UNIX systems. I think that he should have said "Operating Systems are Dead" instead -- which is how it should be; the computer should simply get out of our way and let us get jobs done in an efficient manner.
What used to be home-user shops, such as Dell, can now ship high-quality UNIX solutions thanks to Linux and BSD. Quibbling over the proper definition of UNIX seems silly. If it looks like UNIX, acts like UNIX and runs the source found on "legacy" UNIX systems, well, what is it?
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Hmm... Could it be that Dell has an interest in actively killing enterprise-class unix, given that Dell doesn"t manufacture any serious unix hardware. (I know you can installed various flavors of unix on Dell servers and workstations, but Dell has clearly and intentionally linked its own success to Microsoft's.)
This is about as surprising as Microsoft claiming that open source software is crap.
To me, This just smacks of wishful thinking and marketing.
In short, he did not say Unix is dead, I think he said Solaris is dead. Of course, Dell sells server, and Sun sells server.
"Unix is dead, but no one bothered to claim the body" (1986) (from this source.
Of all the pundits out there, Dvorak must have the largest database of being both for and against the same thing; perhaps multiple times. I can even recall him claiming that the Internet was dead. His credibility for me has been zero for several years. I'm amazed anyone reads anything he writes any more.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
I've been in the computer bidness since 1988 and I have heard "UNIX is dead" at least 15 times since then. Every time, it refuses to die.
Here's why Randy Mott, Dell CIO, is wrong:
1: DELL only deals with Intel-based hardware. Intel is cheap-assed commodity based bargain basement garage sale type of junk. Yeah, it works and the speed is increasing more quickly than other architectures, but it's cheap and reliability among different Intel-based systems is inconsistent. Read as: Not big-money mission critical trustworthy.
2: Extremely large database installations running Oracle still choose HP 9000 RISC based machines running HP-UX, Sun machines running Slowlaris, SGI machines running Irix, or IBM machines running AIX. BTW, it's not Linux that isn't trustworthy, it's the chintzy hardware that it runs on.
3: Corporations still want highly reliable iron to run their mission critical processes on. Intel based junk can do it in some cases, but the bigger iron has had better regression testing done on it, and has a better redundancy infrastructure to it, which these companies are willing to pay for. This big iron still runs UNIX, and UNIX still rules the big iron, and rightly so. UNIX -is- however, losing out in the "little iron" and is losing market share from mid-size down, but it's not "dead."
4: Corporations are still willing to pay for all this testing and corporate support for the big iron, if that'll mean big uptime.
5: The only UNIX that is REALLY threatened is the actual AT&T System V that is now owned by SCO-Caldera-SCO again. I used to work for a SCO dealer, and was told by SCO at the time that Unixware 7 was going to revolutionize UNIX on Intel. I told my salesman and managers not to hold their breath waiting for people to line up at the doors to get their copy of SCO Unixware 7. I was right. We sold about three copies of it in two years. We sold ten or twenty times as many of the old Open(Archaic)Server 5.0.x licenses in the same amount of time. Eventually, the new installs became mostly Linux or Winblows, but we only dealt with Intel based junk.
Had Mott qualifed his opinion to mean Intel only, he might be getting close. UNIX isn't dead. I still have clients who would rather run a Sun or HP 9000 any day of the week over an Intel-based machine.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
Two problems with this article:
1) By many popular definitions, Linux and BSD are unices. The announcement that "UNIX is dead" is too sweeping a term to be safely used.
2) We have no way to quantify what differences in performance are attributable to software rather than hardware in the given example, nor does one anecdotal application constitute a complete comparison between Solaris/SPARC and RHL/ia32.
This article seems to have more to do with squabbles between Dell and the traditional iron peddlers over market share in the enterprise sector than anything else.