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What's Coming in Solaris 10
raptor21 writes "Ace's hardware has an article with feature list of technologies in Solaris 10 or whatever it is called today. Interesting stuff like DTrace, FireEngine, military grade security and a new filesystem called ZFS, Zetabyte File System."
Gee.. maybe the end users have a large Sun machine with dozens of CPUs and they need the scalability? There's nothing wrong with Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD/MacOSX, etc etc but you should pick the best tool for the job.
"When your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail".
Trolling is a art,
hmm... possibly because this article is entirely about features that you will not find on kernel.org?
sic transit gloria mundi
Why not include a driver for say some 3Com cards on the pci models. I have installed Linux on sun boxes just because Linux can use the hardware I give it. Solaris Can't.
I remember going to a comdex eons ago and asking someone from the SUN booth about how they could afford giving away StarOffice (5.1, I think). I was told that SUN was primarily a hardware company, and that the more exposure they got, even from software, would create more hardware sales.
Then there was Linux (and BSD)...who pretty much popularized the *nix on x86 architecture and suddenly SUN was a wee bit worried. They tried Solaris 9 for x86, then pulled it back later on. They cozied up to Linux, then backpedaled by saying they're only offering it because customers asked for it. Then they ink a deal with China for oodles of their Java Desktop with Linux inside.
Now they have a feature list for Solaris 10 out. Does anyone else think that they're competing with themselves? If they're truly a hardware company, wouldn't they focus on Solaris 10, market their hardware for reliability, stability, yadda yadda, and just keep up the cobalt raqs for "low-end" servers?
They're not a software-as-a-service business model. They're not really even an OS Software "manufacturer" business. They're a hardware company who has tried their hand at everything from a programming language (Java), an office suite (staroffice), and OS/desktop (Solaris, Java Desktop).
When Linux pulls through, *nix systems that rely on non-x86 hardware are going to wither and die. So which is it, SUN? Are you with linux or against it? You can't keep talking out of both sides of your mouth for much longer.
I suspect that Sun can't afford the development costs of remaining competitive with IBM, Intel and perhaps even AMD. We'll see them shifting servers to AMD more and more. (Although I'd be surprised if the SPARC disappears anytime soon) This kind of strategic alliance with AMD makes a lot of sense.
As to non Sun made AMD systems, that's an interesting question. I'd think it would be in their interests to sell or perhaps even give away Solaris 10 for AMD. That'd get people using them instead of Linux but allow them to sell their high end servers. The problem is whether other companies start selling nice workstations and servers that would cut into Sun's hardware. It seems like they are still between a rock and a hard place in certain ways.
I think you're wrong. Solaris isn't the fastest OS around, Linux and BSD beat it most of the time. However, it's much more stable, more robust, and scales far better, as you said.
What I am saying is Linux is a nice car for daily commute, but Solaris is a better investment.
Sun and Solaris have more on Linux and BSD then just an OS. Sun provides great support, hardware, compatibilty with past versions of it's software, Java, and more.
It's apples to oranges.
Fortress of Insaniy
Blogzine
How many times does someone have to clarify the point that the linux kernel's TCP/IP stack has been rewritten AT LEAST once since it had BSD roots?
And we are to ignore VxWorks as well? It's stack is specially designed for embedded workloads.
Then there's Cisco's OS. Oh, and Windows NT 5.x stack is completely different than the BSD one. It's just the sockets interface that's grafted on top of it that carried some Berkerley copyrights.
Now that I think about it, it seems that only operating systems using the BSD TCP/IP stack are the BSDs themselves! (MacOSX included)
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Who marked this as a troll? What's trollish about it? Solaris is the industry standard for high performance unix. I've worked on solaris, AIX,HP-UX, and Redhat, and I'd say that solaris gives me the least headaches. Any why did grandparent even mention support? No support in linux, aside from mailing lists. One can pay for support, a la Redhat, but that debunks that argument now doesn't it.
Sun makes money off of selling sun systems and support. I've found that they are as responsive as asking questions on a open source mailing list, without the RTFM comments. They make programming on their platform a really good experience. The documentation on their website is light years from microsoft and (though it is very dear to me) the linux documentation project.
As somebody else said, use the right tool for the job. I like linux alot. I run it at home. But it is not the catch-all solve-all operating system. I has its uses and weaknesses, but the reasons why to use solaris over linux are very numberous.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
Of course they want to be on the low end and desktop market. The thing is they've lost this battle with Wintel already, there is no way someone would use a SPARC Solaris workstation over Wintel box except for some proprietary software perhaps.
The price is high because of usual business rules. You don't produce enough of products (SPARC chips, SPARC chipsets), they get expencive (Sun doesn't even own hardware fabrics, their chips are manufactured on Texas Instruments fabrics). You produce a lot of chips (Pentiums, Pentium chipsets), they get cheapter just because of mass production.
On the other hand Solaris is very stable on its native hardware. True that Sun is slow on releasing security patches but other than security the system only fails becsuse of hardware (disk, memory) problems, never because of software (I don't want to give uptimes, but servers run for years). That's why Sun still has customers, customers that have _stability_ as their biggest priority.
...and meanwhile the university I'm studying at is migrating 200+ Sun workstations to Linux at the end of the year.
Loads of commercial and open source software easily available, good security, stability and no price tag. Oh, did I mention that the hardware is so much cheaper... AND faster?
Ciryon
(Which, for those of you who don't know, has CDE for its GUI which is basically the motif interface from more than 12 years ago largely unchanged!)
When you buy Solaris, you do it for the kernel, the hardware support, and some of the tools, but not the GUI. GNOME will change this somewhat, but fundamentally, the nice things about Solaris are really invisible to the end-user (i.e., the user will probably take for granted the lack of crashes and the generally graceful degradation of performance as utilization approaches 100%).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin