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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.
With HP-UX and Solaris based projects getting ready for launch in the next few years I imagine that Enterprise Unices will have a long life to live.
John C. Dvorak writes "Unix is Dead! Wanna Fight??".
Also, here is a funny comeback from http://www.superhero.org "Windows 95 is finally out, and I keep reading in all the consultants' columns that UNIX is dead. I believe them, of course--they're paid well to make such pronouncements--but UNIX seems pretty lively for a corpse. Whenever a hardware vendor brings out the latest hot box, it seems to be running UNIX; the telecom industry still likes UNIX pretty much; and there sure seem to be a lot of UNIX users out there on the Internet. If UNIX is so old, how can it be producing offspring like that little scamp, Linux?
"Maybe these consultants are confusing dying with age. UNIX is old, a lot older than the other operating systems that have long since passed on. In spite of its twenty-six years, however, UNIX continues to crunch numbers while younger systems can only gum them till they're mushy. What explains this mysterious longevity?
"I have a theory. UNIX survives because, unlike other operating systems, it lacks doubt and guilt. UNIX does just what you tell it to, as quickly and efficiently as it can, and then it waits for more work. It doesn't worry about whether what you asked it to do was fair, beneficial, or even sensible. It just does it.
"By contrast, Windows frets about you. It offers you hints and choices and dialog boxes. Help is everywhere (for what it's worth). And if you ask Windows to do anything of consequence, it asks you to confirm your request, and then it tells you what it did. Delete a large number of files, and Windows is exhausted. It's not the work, it's the *stress*. It's no wonder that Windows systems tend to freeze up where a UNIX system would crash.
"UNIX snorts at Windows-style solicitude. UNIX doesn't ask you to confirm--if you didn't want it to do what you asked, why did you ask it? Similarly, it won't annoy you by reporting the consequences of what you did. Why would you enter a command if you don't first know its consequences?"
Suhit
A few years ago, one of the ops at my place of work put a magazine in my (real-word) intray. It was a copy of Byte Magazine with a front-cover headline "Is NT the end of UNIX ?".
:)
At the time this was a common headline in the popular rags...and then I noticed the date - February 1992
This crap appears every five years along with "life on Mars" and "possible cure for cancer".
The words "snake" and "oil" come to mind.
No, I don't think so--OpenVMS still sits quietly in the back corner of financial institutions, chugging away at its COBOL based applications with real fault-tolerance quite nicely thank you! Why would a soul use Java on slowaris? http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/0 2/09/1347215&mode=thread&tid=108
Besides, OpenVMS also has java and netbeans. But then again, why would anyone spend the money to migrate from COBOL to java when everything works just fine and there are great migration products like BridgeWorks available?
http://www.openvms.compaq.com/commercial/bridgewor ks
You speak as if you had the power to make migration decisions, but low and behold you're probably just some troll developer with a strange opinion.
The other issue here is cost.
Some background on Randy Mott, Dell's CIO. Before joining Dell, he was the CIO at Wal*Mart. Both Dell and Wal*Mart are kings of supply chain and operations management, especially cost reduction. This guy is very good at squeezing cost out of corporate IT infrastructures while delivering first rate solutions to his internal corporate customers. Any hyperbole aside, if Randy Mott speaks, he knows what he's talking about, and he knows what he's doing. It may not be right for every organization, but I guarantee it'll be right for Dell.
Considering how Dell feels about other operating systems other than Windows, I'd say its in their culture.
Linux spends almost no money in R&D and Sun spends like 2 billion. Stop ripping their shit off and come up with your own stuff or Unix will die.
Sorry, but ... what the fuck? So free Unix-alikes are "ripping shit off" of Sun, now? I guess the fact that real talent contributes code to Linux doesn't excuse the fact that Linux is based around the "everything is a file" concept. So reading information in public Usenix papers is ripping off of Sun? Please. For example, the anticipatory i/o scheduler seems to be based on information that's been freely published. Not information hidden away under proprietary NDAs. Futexes and the O(1) scheduler are other examples of information that wasn't ripped-off shit. (I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure about this.)
If Sun is spending two billion dollars in R&D and the linux people aren't, why hasn't Solaris managed to totally blow Linux out of the water? Oh wait, it does. On big (as in many processors) systems. It doesn't do as well on commodity hardware, but everybody knows Linux just doesn't scale well to 64-node machines these days. (People are working on it, but we're not there yet.) Even in the days of secure, portable, light reimplementations with wide hardware support, propietary Unix still has its niches. Besides, part of the appeal of Sun is a "total-package" deal - kind of like Apple.
Look, I appreciate that you might actually care about this, but if you don't give examples of what you're talking about you're going to look like you're talking out of your ass. Even on Slashdot. :3
Just because Texans refer to all soft drinks as "Coke" doesn't mean Pepsi sold out. (Ask a Texan for a Coke and they will respond, "What kind? I've got Pepsi and 7-Up for y'all.")
UNIX is obviated to most users needing UNIX-type services thanks to Linux. *BSDs are interesting but don't have the mindshare Linux does.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
E.g. Stallman insists that man pages are obsolete and refuses to support them, which is incredibly wrongheaded.
Ironically, the last person I heard complain about that was a Debian developer. I seem to recall he also said that Debian policy is against this and in favor of having man pages for everything anyway. There's probably a happy medium ... but I definitely agree (and so does Debian?) that a goal of the extirpation of man pages is silly.
Personally, I don't care how "pure" my "Unix" is either. It works the same way, and I like that :3
He's saying the days of solaris/etc (propriatary unix) on "big iron" are gone, and the days of linux on commodity hardware are here.
Quad-xeon Dell PowerEdge 6600 8Gb RAM, with RedHat Advanced Server and 4 HDs: $31,168
SunFire V480, quad-UltraSPARC, 8Gb RAM with Solaris and 2 HDs: $43,995.00
In the grand scheme of things, that's not a big difference, especially given the high build quality of Sun hardware. It's too early to say that Dell have a distinct advantage.
Well, I wonder if he's *ever heard* of freebsd or openbsd or netbsd. They are real unix.
They aren't real UNIX(tm). As for being real Unix systems, how do they differ from Linux in that respect? Both are POSIX-compliant; with the exception of a few newcomers not known to K&R, all the commands in the C library are the same. The system commands all work the same, with the exception of a few knobs here and there there were again added since the time of the first Unix systems.
What was the last thing that Dell innovated? They get on board of every industry group and use the products of that group, but they NEVER contribute anything. All the other majors drop big coin on R&D, but not Dell. That's why they make so much money. Licensing is cheap compared to research.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Not necessarily. I guess they'll most likely build a whole cluster of these to make it more reliable and work around some of the instabilities by throwing more machines on it which are cheap with x86 hardware.
Redhat is not Unix.
.NET in mind". "This is all too confusing."
We all know Redhat is Linux. Or more correctly of course GNU/Linux.
GNU stands for GNU is Not Unix.
Therefore Redhat is not Unix... This is all really simple.
In a related story, Manager Buzzword journal reports this month that the fragmentation in the Windows market spells the end of Windows. "Developers need to write their apps with Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP and not
--- Liberty in our Lifetime
I am a senior developer at a major international bank (one of the worlds' biggest). We are building the vast majority of new enterprise systems on Java/Solaris. Most legacy systems are C++/Solaris, 2-tier scripting & database (a surprising number) or COBOL/mainframe (tiny minority). There's virtually no other Unix platforms (there may still be a little SunOS around, and there's a bit of Linux just coming in). Desktops are all Windows, server rooms are virtually all Solaris on Sun hardware. Email is Exchange (*cough*) but hey, nothing I can do about that ;)
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Sure, accurate from an ethnic standpoint, but considering how the US is supposed to be a 'melting pot' how meaningful is that? Sort of like my roomate, who is ethnically chinese, born & grew up in Hawaii, but not American - she says she's Hawaiian. She can only be talking of nationality here and not ethnicity.
Same thing with Dull's CIO: to him, 'unix' is apparently only proprietary implementations of unix - a meaningless & sensationalist definition these days.
Pigeons are extinct!! (great headline, and accurate if pigeon=carrier pigeon)
get their Sparc archetecture up to speed
You may find this article interesting:
Sun has two surprises in store for users
Basicaly, what they are trying to do is embed tens of processor cores inside one chip. If they can pull this off sufficiently early, they may completely overwhelm their SMP competition as both IBM and Intel are at the point of embeding only a couple of cores in one die. Plus, their software has excellent SMP characteristics which may prove quite usefull.
Actually Sun has a pretty good theory of Unix relative to NT. Basically that the Unix market tends to lead the PC market by about a decade.
So during the 1980's you had: PC's which were glorified typewriters while Unix boxes were used for real computation (the workstations)
During the 1990's you had: PCs which were power individual workstations while Unix boxes provide network services (the servers)
During the 2000s you will have: PCs providing workstations and small local servers while enterprise apps and enterprise consolodiated servers become key (essentially Unix as the corporate mainframe)
They want to sell packaged solutions with dell hardware of course. Notice the fast track to Linux is there. They have whole classes on Unix to Windows or Linux migration. They are doing quite a good job of marketing themselves as a supperior solution. Its all about profits and taking as much as they can from Sun.
http://saveie6.com/
You missed the point. There's nothing about a Sun Fire that makes it more stable or reliable than PC server hardware -- component failures result in crashes and happen just as often (read: rarely) in both camps. (And I speak from decades of experience.) That being said, there's nothing about the servers being assembled by Dell, Gateway, and others that you cannot build yourself for a fraction of the cost.
For year, I've been appauled by the money companies waste on name brands and support contracts. (And that's not including the hoops they jump through in executing their support options. For example, IBM won't send us a replacement for a failed hard drive; we are required to ship the entire server back which can not happen.)
Maybe Unix isn't dead. Maybe just Sun and HP. When they start making decent high end Intel servers that don't cost 3X as much as the equivalent Sun box, then yes, Sun will go away, and HP will not be able to sell those 9000 monsters either. Go out and price one of those 32 way Unisys Intel boxes. Last I checked they were like twice the price of an E10000. And of course, the *nix OSes that go with them, like Solaris and HP/UX will go away too. I'm not trolling, I love both of those dearly, but I think they will go away. Linux will take their place. And you notice, I did not say IBM will lose its high end market share, and what are they doing differently? Running Linux on everything they have that plugs into the wall. Yeah, AIX 5.2 has some new goodies in it, but Linux is really gaining ground there. And the new blade servers will kick ass. Remember, we all love our favorite operating systems, but it's all about the hardware. Unix will not go away, it kicks far too much ass, but M$ will gain market share as others build these bigger boxes.
Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.
Rebuttal:
1. Ok, well, yeah, but the drives cost more than 1U dual PIII servers.
2. Yeah, you can, but try upgrading the firmware on an A3500FC on the fly. Would you now trust hitting the disk array with your database at the same time? I wouldn't....
3. Solaris doesn't have 64 bit memory access. Its like 38 or 48 bit. Check their UltraSparc docs.
4. Sure, and for things that need "decent" clustering, its one of a few options. Most things, however, don't need "decent" clustering.
5. No current Sun product supports 128 processors, and if you need a loaded E15k you have very specific needs indeed.
6. Again, how many UltraSparc II/III processors have failed on you in the past month? If you deal with lots of them, they die depressingly frequently. Especially considering the cost.
7. Anybody can and does provide support like this. Sun premium support (gold/platinum) is really freaking expensive.
Sun will continue to have fabrication problems, since they are relying on TI to fab for them. Sun has so many supply vendors that they run into the same problems white box vendors do, but they can hide it better. When push comes to shove, they are selling enormously expensive servers that are justified for about 1% of server duties. And that will shrink as Linux gains the features to compete in those corner cases. At which point, Sun will die. Period.
andy
Bad jokes about our bad tempered hero aside, it's very odd that someone as high up as that person at Dell not knowing what unix is. I bet everyone with a degree in anything vaugely technical at Dell would cringe at his comments. At this point (and any point proir) I can't see how anything other than small pockets of the net could survive without all the various breeds of unix boxes holding it together.