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."

Comments

Let me guess

[SpanishInquisition]

More SCO IP?

Re:Let me guess

[DAldredge]

Yes, that is why sun is one of the companies paying them money each quarter for there IP.

Re:Let me guess

[nexex]

No, more Valuable SCO IP

I do believe that the industry standard...

[AKAImBatman]

...is to refer to it as "Solaris X" or "Solaris OS X". That way it can join the ranks of:

Mac OS X
JBuilder X
MegaMan X

And others!

Re:I do believe that the industry standard...

[C. Mattix]

You forgot:

Final Fantasy X
Static-X
Active-X
Fragile X
Malcom X ...

Re:I do believe that the industry standard...

[Dunkelzahn]

SolariX?

Then they could start the numbering all over again, like with SunOS.

Re:I do believe that the industry standard...

[Delirium Tremens]

MandrakeLinux X!

Re:I do believe that the industry standard...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, besides the point that MegaMan X wasn't the 10th MegaMan... But now I'm getting off topic.

Re:I do believe that the industry standard...

[10bt]

...But none of those beat Final Fantasy X.

Nice list, but how much of it is useful?

[The One KEA]

Buzzwords like "DTrace" and "Fire Engine TCP/IP" don't sound very useful, they sound like bloat. And who needs a zetabyte filesystem? We haven't even reached petyabytes, for $DEITY's sake!

The only bright spot is that Sun is releasing it for x86-64 platforms as well as x86, so all of this "oh-so-wonderful" stuff can be used on Opteron boxen.

Re:Nice list, but how much of it is useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget "military grade security" in that list of buzzwords.

Snake.

Oil.

Re:Nice list, but how much of it is useful?

[bconway]

Buzzwords like "DTrace" and "Fire Engine TCP/IP" don't sound very useful, they sound like bloat. And who needs a zetabyte filesystem? We haven't even reached petyabytes, for $DEITY's sake!

Did you read the article? These things are specifically addressed.

Re:Nice list, but how much of it is useful?

[wo1verin3]

don't know Fire Engine TCP/IP, it's way better then the Honda Civic IPX/SPX we use at work.

Re:Nice list, but how much of it is useful?

[The One KEA]

I did read the article, and I still think that both sound a little over-engineered. I'm sure that in tiem they'll certainly be quite useful, but at the moment they sound like a lot of marketroid.

Re:Nice list, but how much of it is useful?

[DjReagan]

So what if we've not reached petabytes yet? Is there something wrong with not waiting till the last minute and trying to cram in a poorly tested feature without much time for testing? Get it in now and have it well bedded down for when its needed.

Re:Nice list, but how much of it is useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then the question is, did you follow the links that were provided in the article...like to the Register article? I think a compleate re-write of the Solaris TCP/IP stack to allow offloading of CPU intensive work to third party hardware is a big deal. And what's the problem with being proactive about features in a new FS? Would you prefer then to handle it like M$'s NTFS and wait until the last minute?

--AC

Re:Nice list, but how much of it is useful?

[moof1138]

You do not sound like you use Sun hardware. Rewriting an IP stack for greater scalability, and implementing a better trace are certainly useful to the market Sun is aiming at.

DTrace, provided it is well implemented, should be very useful for debugging the sorts of problems that one runs into in many enterprise settings, and I assume that folks who develop for Solaris, and the support folks at Sun are more pleased than anyone that it is in there.

How anyone could characterize an IP stack that handles multiple 10Gbit NICs bloat is beyond me. I realize that it would be absurd for home users or a small office setting, but that is not exactly the market Sun is in. The fact is that bandwidth can be high enough (100Gbit) that it was time to implement an IP stack that handled multiprocessor configs gracefully - that was where the bottleneck was. Sun was engineering a solution, not bloat.

"We haven't even reached petyabytes, for $DEITY's sake!" Which 'we' are we referring to here? While petabyte data stores are not common (yet), there are certainly a number of existing sites out there with petabyte SANs, especially in scientific research, and various gov't applications. Having a filesystem that scales past that is not bloat, it is foresight, and it is a selling point for that class of customers to know that Sun will be able to scale, and is doing the work of scaling in advance, rather than retrofitting some bolt-on solution.

Re:Nice list, but how much of it is useful?

[SillySlashdotName]

Is there something wrong with not waiting till the last minute and trying to cram in a poorly tested feature without much time for testing?

Not a thing wrong with it; in fact it has been "bery bery good" to Microsoft...

Re:Nice list, but how much of it is useful?

[john82]

We haven't even reached petyabytes, for $DEITY's sake!

Correction. Perhaps you haven't reached petabytes yet. There are however core Sun customers who do have that much data.

Your remark reminds me of certain visionaries who thought there would never be more than six or seven computers ... in the world. Or that 640K of RAM ought to be enough for anyone.

Re:Nice list, but how much of it is useful?

[spectre_240sx]

I heard something about a Police Cruiser NETBUI to be used as a safegaurd while children are on the internet too.

Security?

[coolmacdude]

I thought it already had military grade security. After all Solaris was the first OS to earn Common Criteria certification.

Re:Security?

[elmegil]

Trusted Solaris is currently a seperate release. It is to be integrated.

Re:Security?

[MoralHazard]

WinNT (or was it 2K?) earned a CC certification not all that long ago... Let's think carefully about what sort of security standard this could possibly be.

As I recall, CC is a measurement of the security of a particular configuration and patch combination of an OS, and has nothing whatsoever to say about the overall security model/software quality/break-in resistance of that OS generally.

So the patch level that was evaluated for NT to get the CC was the ONLY patch level for which the CC applies. If you add any additional patches, kiss the CC goodbye for that system. What? The additional patches were security updates to known, common, remote root vulnerabilities (like, say, an RPC exploit)? Oh, shit! Now, the "certified" system is provably INsecure!

Which just demonstrates why a multi-year testing process cannot possibly deal intelligently with the security issues surrounding OSes (including Linux and the Unices) that get patched on a weekly or monthly basis. CC is pretty useless, in the current age.

Re:Security?

[SillySlashdotName]

WinNT (or was it 2K?) earned a CC certification not all that long ago.

Wasn't that ONLY IF YOU DIDN'T CONNECT IT TO A NETWORK? If that is the case, then no security patches are needed - no one can break security if no one can GET TO the box...

Re:Security?

[IM6100]

Well, maybe you can't get to it, because it's not in your mom's basement with all the rest of your computers. The staff and end-users who are meant to have physical access to the machine can.

We live in a very strange world these days where people consider big powerful chunks of hardware totally inaccessable if they can't sit at their keyboard/monitor and reach it.

Re:Security?

[phoenix_rizzen]

No network and no floppy drive. On NT 4 Workstation, without Service Packs.

Re:Security?

[Mod Me God]

And no mouse or keyboard. It may only run clock, and that is on the condition there is not a buffer overflow an easter egg built into minesweeper could take advantage of.

Re:Security?

[drsmithy]

Wasn't that ONLY IF YOU DIDN'T CONNECT IT TO A NETWORK?

I think you'll find being disconnected from the network (and being without a floppy drive) is part of the requirements of that particular security certification (it was C2 IIRC).

Re:Security?

[calidoscope]

Presumably Trusted Solaris as opposed to run of the mill Solaris...

One question that I do have is when their IPSec implementation will interoperate with other versions of IPSec without having to bang on the config files for a fortnight?

Well, at least Solaris has a native IPSec - Linux users still need to get and install Free/SWAN (which is a pretty nice implementation).

No root access

[cynicalmoose]

When the chips are down (or fried), and the system's crashed, I want root level access. Sure, it is less secure, but somebody needs permissions to root level edit every file simply in case of emergencies.

Re:No root access

[i_r_sensitive]

I think you'd find is that all you would have to do is create a role with equivalent access, providing the default role schema doesn't satisfy this (which it likely will.)

The bigger issue to me is that a user put in the admin role may inadvertently do bad things. I'd want a su or sudo type of speedbump to make sure users (especially expert ones) don't inadvertently do something silly while they get used to the role based setup.

Re:No root access

[TheLink]

What you should do then is run stuff in virtual machines.

So stuff in a virtual machine has all that Trusted stuff. But if you have to you can snapshot the whole system, copy it, and then alter stuff as necessary and restart the altered snapshot. Change program counter, stack etc.

At an enterprise level the host system/cluster may need a "zetabyte" filesystem to store all the snapshots and VMs :).

Re:Pay through nose

[grub]

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".

What's coming?

[wideBlueSkies]

A hook into Phoenix's DRM BIOS on the x86 ports ?

Just kidding.

wbs.

Military grade security?

[TimboJones]

Isn't that where the case is internally wired to explosives so that all the hardware and data will be incinerated if an unauthorized user tries to crack it open?

Maybe the military has various grades of security. They shouldn't, though -- everything should explode. What good is the military if nothing explodes?!

Re:Military grade security?

[pete-classic]

The US military doesn't go in much for booby-traps.

In the event that a secure installation seems about to be overrun the sensitive equipment is stacked up and destroyed with WP grenades.

You'll be sad to learn that WP grenades don't explode.

Sorry to disappoint.

-Peter

Re:Military grade security?

[ckaminski]

How exactly do smoke grenades destroy sensitive equipment?? Just curious, mind you...

Re:Military grade security?

[sharkey]

the sensitive equipment is stacked up and destroyed with WP grenades.

Once again demonstrating that WordPerfect is a VERY powerful application.

Re:Military grade security?

[efalconer]

Well you could always wire your case like they did at TechTV with thermite, that should destory any, uh, "sensitive" material. TechTV

Re:Military grade security?

[pete-classic]

I looked it up and I think what we had were actually TH grenades.

The WPs are smoke/incendiary, not to be confused with the HC colored smoke grenades. The WP grenades will burn up some shit, but I don't think they will turn an engine block to slag like the THs will.

-Peter

Re:Military grade security?

[SillySlashdotName]

White Phosphorous is NOT a smoke grenade. Burns hot (not thermite hot, but hot enough...) and can't be extinguished with water. Nasty, nasty stuff.

Re:Military grade security?

[rifter]

How exactly do smoke grenades destroy sensitive equipment?? Just curious, mind you...

WP == White Phosphorous

It's pretty hot stuff, that.

Re:Military grade security?

[thogard]

Scattered around AF bases you will find safes with two cords that are to be pulled if the place was going to be over-run. The idea is that it would start off a thermmite burn that would destory the
safe and everything in it. These of course would have all sorts of warning signs all over it. I would love to get one (even minus the 2Al Fe2O3) for the computer room.

Re:Pay through nose

[Tackhead]

> "When your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail".

When your only tool is an axe, every problem starts to look like hours of fun.

It's spooky

[HarveyBirdman]

I ran a beta here at work, and an ex-girlfriend and a couple dead grandparents appeared. Then I saw George Clooney. It was wild, man.

It was beta, though, so I couldn't talk to them.

Re:It's spooky

[DrEasy]

What's spookier is that I got the movie ref, but was puzzled by the mention of Clooney, until of course I remembered that "they" made a remake of it...

Re:Pay through nose

[bongoras]

...and when your only tool is a screwdriver, someone ends up getting screwed...

What we'd all like to see:

[BigDumbAnimal]

Profitablity?

Alternate dumb comment

[HarveyBirdman]

Wow. Did Solaris 2 though 9 go direct to video?

I'm sorry. Man, I really need this 4 day weekend coming up.

Re:Pay through nose

[glwtta]

hmm... possibly because this article is entirely about features that you will not find on kernel.org?

So....

[objekt404]

I take it I'll have to upgrade again from my Ultra 5 just run this!?!

still on Sol 8

Dear Sun

[Letter]

Dear Sun,

Can I run the ZFS (Zebra file system) in a RAID-0 configuration?

Thanks,
Stripes

Re:Dear Sun

[k12linux]

Dear Sun,

Can I run the ZFS (Zebra file system) in a RAID-0 configuration?

Dear Solaris customer:

Yes, all RAID levels other than 1 (due to lack of striping) are supported. I am happy to inform you that RAID-1 will also be supported in our next release (code named albino.)

Thank you for your interest in our products, Sun.

sorry i'm a cynic

[happyfrogcow]

Not all of these features will be available with the initial release

Yes, I too am releasing an operating system. It will have the ability to run buggy code without compromising any other part of the system(*). It will improve performance of buggy code as well, rewritting it to accomodate your Bugless Needs(TM)(*).

* Not all of these features will be available with the initial release

Re:So...

[elmegil]

Some of the military IS using Trusted Solaris. Right now, however, it's a seperate Solaris release. In Solaris 10 or whatever the name is going to be, it is supposed to be integrated.

Price?

[WatertonMan]

I wonder what they will charge for the upgrade. Sun wisely made the Solaris 8 -> Solaris 9 move free for developers and home users. (They have home users?)

This was a big deal considering how overpriced their low end hardware is. I had to purchase a new workstation for a new project. We're talking almost $2000 for a 500 MHz machine. Yeah. You heard that right. And it only came with Solaris 8. (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!) I know that Apple has a huge Apple-tax. But damn, the Sun-tax makes Apple seem like they are selling Walmart prices.

Yeah, yeah. I know. They are competitive on the high end. However the expense at the low end certainly must have some effect upon what is developed for the high end. Sun is so far behind the times. Their prices are ridiculous. Their speeds embarrassing. Their software is embarrassing as well. No wonder they are losing billions.

Re:Price?

[__aafutm5472]

Yes, they have home users. I'm one of them.

I could have sold you a Ultra 10 with a 440MHz UltraSparc IIi for a mere $1800. That's a $200 savings!

Just ignore the fact that they sell for about $500 on eBay.

Re:Price?

[illumin8]

I wonder what they will charge for the upgrade. Sun wisely made the Solaris 8 -> Solaris 9 move free for developers and home users. (They have home users?)

Your comment shows a huge lack of knowledge about Sun and Solaris licensing. If you purchase a system from Sun you have a right-to-use license for any version of Solaris you want to put on it. If you bought your system from some other vendor (aka Intel), then you have a right-to-use license for only 1 CPU. Any more than that you must purchase licenses. Sun doesn't charge for upgrades, other than the media price itself. When Solaris 10 is released, go ahead and put it on your Ultra 5 or Sun Blade 150, or whatever you have. No worries there.

Also, unless you are just trolling, you should be aware that Sun has shipped the Gnome 2.0 desktop environment with Solaris 8 for the last year or so. KDE also comes on the Open Source software CD included with Solaris 8.

No wonder they are losing billions.

Last I checked, Sun was merely losing millions, not billions. While this is still a bad thing, they do have ~$5 billion in the bank and won't be going away any time soon.

Go back to your bridge and quit spreading FUD, troll.

Re:Price?

[geoff lane]

Those with a support contract get the new release for free.

The x86 release is available for $20 or so.

Re:Price?

[sir_cello]

You don't buy Solaris for the low end. Just like you don't buy a station wagon to make courier deliveries. Trying to criticise their low end abilities is a poor argument: that's not really a space they want to be in.

Re:Price?

[WatertonMan]

Last I checked, Sun was merely losing millions, not billions.

It was nearly $300,000,000 this last quarter. It's been losing more than $100,000,000 a quarter for some time. Add it up. Before long you start talking about real money.

Re:Price?

[Anonymous Coward]

At your login screen, click the little button that says "options" then go down to Gnome 2.0 desktop and select it. Then put in your password.

Guess what Window environment starts?

Re:Price?

[Enry]

Last I checked, Sun was merely losing millions, not billions. While this is still a bad thing, they do have ~$5 billion in the bank and won't be going away any time soon.

They seem to be losing that $5 billion pretty quickly.

Re:Price?

[illumin8]

Look. I just got a Sun Blade 150. I guarantee Gnome is not in there nor is there an option to use it. I searched the help files and there is nothing about Gnome. This is a brand new system.

Ok, I'm going to walk you through this since you're obviously new to Solaris. Open up your Solaris 8 media kit (you know, the big box you got with Solaris 8). Hopefully you purchased a media kit along with your system or you might be screwed. Find a plastic binder called "Bonus Software". In there there is a CD called "Exploring the Gnome Desktop". Pop that in your CD-ROM and install it. Gnome is now installed and you can choose it from the login screen. There's another CD in that same Bonus Software pack called "Software Companion" that has tons of Open Source software, including KDE. If you install that you'll have GCC and a bunch of other great GNU and open source stuff. I highly recommend you do that.

I hope Solaris 10 is free. The last time I bought a Sun it wasn't free.

Solaris 10 will be free in the same way that Solaris 8 and 9 are. If you bought a system from Sun, you already purchased a Right-to-Use license (it's bundled into the cost of the hardware). All you have to pay for is a media kit. When you said "last time I bought a Sun it wasn't free." I think you're talking about paying $70 for a media kit. This seems like a lot but look at how big those boxes of media are. It probably costs close to that amount to manufacture all of the CDs and manuals in there.

Re:Price?

[acaird]

It's not there. I just got a SunBlade150, too. It wasn't there under Solaris8 and it wasn't there under Solaris9. I don't know what they mean when they say shipping, perhaps they mean available. Because you can download it in nice pkgadd-able packages from Sun's Star/Gnome site (what a funny name). And that works nicely. But don't forget to set your display to 24 bit color - see fbconfig and Google.

Re:Price?

[x0]

"Gnome is not in there nor is there an option to use it"

Look harder. If it isn't on install 1, 2 or the Software Companion disk, then Gnome FCS 2.0 is available for download at sun.com. It isn't hard to find, nor is it hard to install. Once installed, Gnome Desktop will be available on the XDM login screen.

Re:Price?

[tarsus]

Revenue and cash flow aren't the same thing.

Re:Price?

[Xua]

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.

Re:Price?

[11223]

How about a 500MHz US-IIe with less cache, on a mainboard with a flakey IDE chipset commonly found in $400 HPs? This is not what I call Sun. It's not even high-throughput. It's high-suck. You sneeze near it and the firmware locks up for a week.

And tell me, given that AIX does not use the extra instructions that seperate a POWER from a 64-bit PowerPC, I suppose you're running OS/400?

Re:Price?

[ciryon]

...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

Re:Price?

[pmz]

(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%).

Re:Price?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Like it or not, the "professional" space seems to be dwindling and is in a losing market.

For example, Alpha is effectively out of the market, anyone buying one will be knowing that they are buying the last of the line. AFIAK, neither DEC, Compaq nor HP has really made a profit with Alpha. It also doesn't help that they are charging $40,000 for a single CPU box and $5000+ for each additional CPU. The systems are fantastic, but not enough for the money. Certainly not good enough for most people that hasve a professional degree.

If LANL & Cray is going for Opteron for their Red Storm, and IBM is using PPC for Blue Gene, then it shows that you can't put things into neat little compartments.

Besides, MIPS is more likely to be put into toys (game systems) than most of the other chips listed. :)

Re:Price?

[Transfan76]

Oh come on. Why do you need a CD when you can just download it also? http://wwws.sun.com/software/star/gnome/

Re:Price?

[MrChuck]

And yet, what we bought 690's for - at $75k loaded - was pretty easily done by Intel server class machines a year later.

Low end is last year's high end.

I'm looking at a 12CPU E4500 loaded with sub GHz Ultra2 chips. They paid a LOT of money for that 2 years ago. It's ok for databases, and has terrific IO (if you use non-Sun disk systems), but how long until a 4Way Opteron comes out and smokes it? For Looking at rows of V880s (a waste of money, IMHO - fiber channel disk? pure price inflation). About $1 million dollars worth. In two years people will roll their eyes when they have to use those.

Sun's got themselves in a bad situation.

Linux works on the desktop and that means that there are THOUSANDS of folks < 30 years old who know Linux (and BSD) pretty well. Moving up in seniority and skills in the decision trees of companies.

Moving to Solaris means giving up /usr/ports/ or pkgsrc (BSD), means giving up a userland with tools developed since 1992 ("df -h" is FAR more handy on a machine with 2 TB of disk attached from the SAN than Suns "df -k" and counting).

If someone strong in Open Source OSs can make a case that using a 4x3GHz Intel box for all but the MOST high end (and costly) services, then Sun loses MORE ground.

Shall we talk about SGI's far far superior hardware and OS features and how strong THEY are in the market place? Want an 8 CPU SGI? Take the 4CPU one you have, get another, join them. All the way up to 512 CPUs. Want to start with a 4CPU Sun and move up to a 64CPU Sun? Sorry, you buy a mostly empty chassis for several $100 thousand and hope that you can still get the CPUs later on.

(my 4800 with 800MHz CPUs won't work if I add the new 1200MHz CPUs - I either replace them all or scrounge for old ones. Nice. Almost a year old too).

Sun won, in large part, the Workstation wars - the high end desktops where PCs just couldn't compete. Built in Ethernet, graphics and SCSI, for around $15k. Hows the PC world going to compete with that?

"Sun will never sell a $2000 computer - that's not the space they want to be in. - they make servers and workstations."

They've lost the desktop.

They have to innovate to keep the server space.

Hardware partitioning is KEY - a 48 way machine is mainly useless to me, but being able to chunk it - dynamically - into (say) 30 or even 50 virtual machines in very attractive.

We have a big thing going on next month where we're building up a pair of boxes to handle a HUGE load that will be for just the month.
If I had a monster machine and could say: "Oh, give those servers 24 processors during the day, but only 8 at night so the other systems can run their stuff" then we'd save money. Now.

I'd free up 6-7 people's time for 2 weeks and that all factors into ROI.

- -

We're already throwing around terrabytes of disk on SANS from machine to machine as required. Why not with CPUs and memory?

Re:Price?

[k12linux]

They seem to be losing that $5 billion pretty quickly.

Yeah, you're right. Unless I'm reading the data your link points to wrong they'll burn through that $5b in just over 350 years! Yikes! lol

Re:Price?

[nr]

Well, theres lots of differencies between Power and PowerPC. Power4 is a dual-core design, PowerPC 970 (G5) has how many cores?

And yes we have 10-15 iSeries running OS/400.

Re:Price?

[nr]

Dont want to start a CPU war here or something. But what is a good design from a engineering point of view is not the same as what is succefull on the market. Good design is mostly expensive due to production costs and cheap designs is well, cheap.

Intel/AMD very is successfull in the market and Alpha/PA-RISC/MIPS/etc is not. But they are still better designs.

Re:Price?

[11223]

Excuse me. POWER3, and RS64II processors are also still sold by IBM last I checked, and are also in the POWER line. The dual core nature of the POWER4 doesn't apply to what makes it POWER.

You are obviously a silly troll, who pretends to know what he's talking about.

Re:Price?

[mangino]

All numbers in thousands, that is 3b dollars

Re:Price?

[AKAImBatman]

Actually the price is higher because of the higher quality parts they use. Every part is thoroughly tested and burned in to be sure that it won't fail. This is critical for Enterprise hardware that going to be taking some serious punishment. Home users could care less.

Re:Price?

[WatertonMan]

Thanks. My apologies for overreacting a bit. Apparently what happened was that the purchasing didn't get the media kit with the system. I'd explicitly asked for Solaris 9 as I knew that came standard with Gnome and I've been frustrated at times under Solaris 7 trying to program in the past. (I truly hate CDE)

I do think that for a few CDs that $70 is overpriced. And the problem of low end systems being overpriced still stands. I think Sun would get a lot more support were they more competitive. The fact is that while servers are typically high end systems, development systems, test systems and so forth aren't. By effectively selling systems that are vastly underpowered and expensive, they do affect how businesses decide to deploy. The fact is that those other machines are budgeted in.

BTW - since you are knowledgable. Can you get the full Solaris C compiler for free or do you have to stick with gcc? On the Sun pages it appeared like you had to pay $1000 for the compiler.

Re:Price?

[nathanh]

I do think that for a few CDs that $70 is overpriced.

Gee, I don't. It's like a dozen CDs and manuals in a box that makes a concrete block look small. I think they lose money on the media kit: there's no way they can be making and distributing them for a mere $70.

And the problem of low end systems being overpriced still stands.

They're competitive with namebrands like IBM. You can get a white-box for half the price, but I'm firmly of the opinion that you get what you pay for with hardware.

Re:Price?

[WatertonMan]

A 3 billion dollar negative is nothing to sneeze at. Where did you get the 350 years? Admittedly some of those debts are "artificial." But by any measure they've lost a hell of a lot of money the past three years.

Re:Price?

[acoopersmith]

GNOME 2.0.2 is builtin to Solaris 9 8/03 and later releases. For earlier Solaris 9 and
Solaris 8 releases, you'll need the web download from http://www.sun.com/gnome to get GNOME 2.0.

Re:Price?

[acoopersmith]

"Sun will never sell a $2000 computer - that's not the space they want to be in. - they make servers and workstations."

You mean except for the $995 workstations and servers they've been selling the past three years?

• Sun Fire V100 server (starts at $995)
• Sun Blade 100 workstation (originally sold at $995, now replaced by Sun Blade 150)
• Sun Blade 150 workstation (starts at $1395)

Re:Price?

[rthille]

NetBSD's pkgsrc works on solaris.

Re:Price?

[k12linux]

Where did you get the 350 years?

This is where my disclaimer (Unless I'm reading the data... wrong) comes in. :)

The little label of "All numbers in thousands" on the chart and the fact it was annual and not quarterly data kind of changes the math a bit doesn't it? :)

Re:Price?

[illumin8]

BTW - since you are knowledgable. Can you get the full Solaris C compiler for free or do you have to stick with gcc? On the Sun pages it appeared like you had to pay $1000 for the compiler.

Unfortunately you do have to pay for the compiler. I admit it pretty much sucks because I am more old-school and have this mistaken impression that any real Unix should come with a compiler. But, I think you might be better off with GCC anyway. I hear it generates better code than the Sun compiler does now, but I could be mistaken.

Re:Price?

[MrChuck]

That would explain the 20 or more E4000's that my buddy effectively returned (had sun replace backplane and 400MHz processors) as they kept eating it.

No, their QA hit a bad wall. It may be fixed, but their THat $1000 "desktop"? That 500MHz UltraII is about as fast as an Intel box at 800MHz. Which I can pick up for $400.

And they must have a low end box - it's needed for folks that develop on a shoestring. And those disks are impressive. /me wonders if they still are shipping the 4500 RPM drives in those...

The Netra X1 (V120) is pretty well despised by their field engineers. The advertised "under $1000" is tainted by the fact that you blow that price putting reasonable memory in it.

I'm still looking for a cost effective 2CPU box that can be REMOTELY competitive to a DL360 (hardware RAID, 2x3GHZ RAM, dual gigabit network...). The V280 has fewer features for 5x the price.

In a time where I can put up a cage and install 12 blades to act as web front ends, sun's promise of "give us $80,000 and we'll give you a box you can eventually put 16CPUs into (the 4800)" isn't so tempting.

Yes, they are more reliable that a PC put together at Fry's. But I've had enough Sun hardware fail that I consider prime vendors of Intel/AMD hardware to be equal.

And IBM (I really dislike AIX) is kicking their ass with the POWER chips. IBM will still be around in 5 years, for certain (unless SCO takes them over :). Sun may be the next SGI - in a perpetual slide.

Re:So...

[musikit]

short answer they are trying. long answer... i worked on one military system that had to communicate to 13 other systems. now each one of those systems was built at a different time with a different OS/programming language. so it turns out no one wants to upgrade because they are all afraid it will break the system. like any other project after it's over the developers leave. so now the military either has to 1. train new programmers to change the old code or 2. create a new system. i believe they have choosen the 2nd by formally dropping the Force XXI Suite of tools in efforts to put people into the Future Combat Systems.

Microsoft Did This First...

[tonyr60]

The security enhancements sound a bit like Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Initiative. Didn't that start 2 years ago...

Re:Microsoft Did This First...

[grigori]

They want to stop having to carry 2 versions of the OS and retrofitting the security updates. One OS with features you turn on or dont when you install. Cheeper for them, and cheeper for us.

Re:Pay through nose

[happyfrogcow]

same reason people will pay for redhat enterprise solutions, i imagine. support if the sh*t hits the fan.

Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[illumin8]

Wait until you see what is coming down the pipe from Sun. The new Athlon 64 workstations and servers will breathe new life into Solaris. For the first time you will be able to run a fully 64-bit kernel with all of the stability and reliability of Solaris, along with all of the advanced features of Solaris. Features like this won't even make their way into Linux for another 5 years or so.

Solaris 10 will be the first release of Solaris that supports native 64-bit mode on the new AMD Opteron and Athlon 64 processors.

Not to mention the ability to address terabytes of memory without using PAE hacks.

The only question in my mind is: Will you be able to run the IA-64 port of Solaris 10 on a home-built Athlon 64 box, or will it require Sun hardware to run?

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[goodwink]

IA-64 != x86-64

IA-64 is Intel's Itanium line, whereas x86-64 includes the Opterons and Athlon64s.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[WatertonMan]

Actually I believe the advantage Suns brings to hardware is in a lot of thoroughput. That's partially why they can offer slow CPUs. Their main market is servers which aren't typically CPU bound as much as I/O bound. They have very nice multiprocessor systems. I was harping on them earlier, but they definitely do have their place. However they are being pressured on the low end by Linux and so forth. Their lowend offerings are primarily development workstations to get code ready for servers. But they've shot themselves in the leg to a degree there by making it somewhat unattractive to develop for them. (Yes people do it of course but it isn't always nice)

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.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[illumin8]

Ooops! Sorry, I meant X86-64.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[penguin7of9]

Features like this won't even make their way into Linux for another 5 years or so.

Let's hope so. If we are really lucky, most of them will never make it into Linux because they are useless bloat for almost all users.

Let Sun go for the really, really high end of million dollar hardware running specialized operating systems. I'm happy with Linux being the operating system for huge compute clusters made out of commodity hardware, and for that, Linux is more than enough already.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[mbbac]

Now, if you mean AMD x86-64...

Isn't that AMD64?

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[m_TheRedHead]

> Not to mention the ability to address terabytes of memory without using PAE hacks.

Its pretty easy to address lots of memory on 64 bit hardware. You dont need any of these "PAE hacks" on anthing other than x86 - which is 32 bit.

Do you think Solaris addresses more than 4 gigs on x86 without PAE? - ( Hint, the answer is no )

PAE is only needed on x86 hardware. You dont need it on ultra sparc, ia64, or any other 64 bit processor.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[timeOday]

Actually I believe the advantage Suns brings to hardware is in a lot of thoroughput. That's partially why they can offer slow CPUs. Their main market is servers which aren't typically CPU bound as much as I/O bound.

"We didn't want a fast CPU anyhow!" how's that for sour grapes? If CPU speed didn't matter in SUNs business, they wouldn't offer their servers with so many CPUs. Maybe a small handful for redundancy, but not 106 processors! The fact is SUN *can't* offer slow CPUs... not unless they're happy losing money. There just isn't room for more than 2 or 3 high-end processor manufacturers, and SUN isn't one of them.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[ELiTeUI]

no. it's x86-64. for some reason, lazy people call it AMD64 in their kernel trees. it's not.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[strobert]

okay, I think you are trolling, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt.

What stability/reliability? worst data disaster we ever had was due to Sun techs on Solaris 8 on E4500's running Veritas clustering.

And care to give some tangible examples of the "advanced features" that are actually present/work? (don't say things like hot plugging of CPUs -- read your E4500 manual if you think Sun Hardware + Solaris supports this).

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[anthonyrcalgary]

"There just isn't room for more than 2 or 3 high-end processor manufacturers, and SUN isn't one of them."

I agree, but I'm not sure about the number. If you have two, they tend to find markets where they don't compete and it's basically a monopoly situation until a third company springs up out of nowhere and very quickly gains a large market share.

I think there's probably room for more, but not many. I think the bigger issue is the number of competing architechtures... There's probably only room for 2-3 major architechtures. POWER/PowerPC and x86 are here to stay. IMO, one of Sparc, IA-64, and MIPS will survive on the high end, and I don't think it's going to be Itanium or MIPS.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[grigori]

Hot plug works on "this century" CPUs. Seen it.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[grigori]

Sun probably will post a hardware compat program on their site for you to test your funky homebrew with, just like they already do with Solaris for Intel or AMD. They want people to run Solaris, they wont discourage it.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[strobert]

try 2001/2. the E[3456]500 line was the main sun line in the "mid range" market (with the E10K's) in the high end up through that time. I know at least in mid 2001 (when we had the fun in question).

oh, and your analogy is flawed as well, try it would be like you saying "linux is still for technical OS hobbyists" that is where Linux started.

Oh, and you still aren't answering the main question I asked about "what features"?

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[strobert]

Ummm, Last I checked this century includes 2001. The E[3456]500 line was the main sun line in the "mid range" market (with the E10K's) in the high end up through that time. I don't recall exactly when these no longer were the headline candidate, but I know at least in mid 2001 (when we had the fun in question).

And so that still doesn't address the point. okay, say it has CPU hot plug NOW. the poster I responded to (like a lot of Solaris zealots I see on /.) talk in hand wavy terms about all of these "enterprise" featutes Solaris has had and continues to have 5-10 years before Linux does. And I haven't really seen any facts to back these claims. It so far has less basis than Microsoft's claims about Windows vs. Linux Security.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[mbbac]

I guess you can count AMD amoungst the lazy ones, because they call it AMD64 as well.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[anthonyrcalgary]

"Why don't you think IA64 is here to stay? Intel isn't just going to drop this one" Almost nothing needs it. Oh sure, it'll stagger on in a sort of living death, and Intel will be contractually obligated to keep it around, but it's just not what people need. "You do know it is the fastest CPU money can buy, don't you?" meh. As if that's a factor. If being the fastest CPU money could buy was a factor, Alpha would still be around.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[grigori]

Solaris doesn't have SMIT. Does that count as a plus? ;-)

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[illumin8]

I can't see them putting 'slugs' into the O/S to prevent it working on non-Sun-assembled boxes, that's more of an IBM style trick

Well, I could maybe see them changing this policy simply because a 4-way or 8-way Opteron clone system with 32GB of memory or so could take a serious chunk out of their midrange workgroup market. I could see them offering single processor usage for free, and possibly crippling the multi-proc kernel so it only runs on Sun hardware.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[illumin8]

I don't know about you, but I like having features like virtualization part of the base OS. That means it's supported and not tricky to install and use, and I can have multiple Solaris instances on a single box and never have to worry about one of those instances taking another one down. I know Linux has similar functionality, but it's a separate program and probably not supported by Redhat or any of the main Linux vendors.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[illumin8]

Let's hope so. If we are really lucky, most of them will never make it into Linux because they are useless bloat for almost all users.

I know, it's bad form to reply twice, but I wanted to point something else out. Several years ago, people probably said the same thing about new features Sun added like NFS and NIS. Now they are considered standard parts of Unix. Sun has a long heritage of making kick-ass software that works so well that it becomes a standard (well, maybe NIS isn't the best example, it kinda sucks, but you get what I mean).

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[illumin8]

okay, I think you are trolling, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt.

What stability/reliability? worst data disaster we ever had was due to Sun techs on Solaris 8 on E4500's running Veritas clustering.

Excuse me? Who's trolling? You wouldn't be basing your opinion of the reliability of a systems manufacturer on one isolated incident that resulted in data loss due to the use of a 3rd party software product now, would you? :-)

Ok, here are a few "advanced features" that actually work and are used in the real world:

* Multiple hardware domains on a single physical system (let's see Linux do that).
* ECC across all data paths (show me an Intel manufacturer that does this).
* Sun Fire plane interconnect that allows up to 106 CPUs to work without bottlenecks and gives you a total of about 40 GBytes a second system throughput.
* Real error reporting, actually calling out correctable memory errors in syslog and telling you exactly which DIMM on which system board you need to replace.
* Openfirmware allowing low-level hardware troubleshooting and diagnosis without the need for an OS.

These are just a few of the advanced reliability features that Sun offers on their hardware that you can't get on an Intel box. Note that I didn't list hot-swapping CPUs on an E4500. Sure, they support what's called DR, or dynamic reconfiguration, but in actual practice nobody uses it. And to my knowledge, even on the largest box a CPU failure while executing kernel code will cause a kernel panic. I don't know of any Unix system that has figured out a workaround for that problem.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[penguin7of9]

I suspect RedHat doesn't support it (assuming they don't) because there isn't much demand for it. If you want multiple Linux instances, you just buy multiple machines.

Sun virtualization is rather bizarre from an economic point of view: first you pay a premium to get all your hardware in one huge "Enterprise Server", and then you virtualize it out again.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[penguin7of9]

NFS/NIS was an incompetent implementation of a feature useful to lots of people. That's why lots of people ended up using it even though it had no security and would corrupt their data with regularity. (NFSv4 may, finally, address these issues.)

Solaris 10 sounds like a competent implementation of features useful to only a tiny fraction of the market, if they are useful to anybody at all. Sun can go head to head with IBM with that, wooing a market consisting of maybe a few thousand customers. For the rest of us, I just don't think it matters.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[illumin8]

Sun virtualization is rather bizarre from an economic point of view: first you pay a premium to get all your hardware in one huge "Enterprise Server", and then you virtualize it out again.

Yeah, you're right, it doesn't make sense at first, but a lot of companies want to do "server consolidation" projects where they can stick all of their smaller boxes on one big box where they share resources like power and can reallocate CPUs and memory to meet short term demand for different projects.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[penguin7of9]

Normal 1U rack mounts or rack-mounted blade servers will work for consolidation: they can share power and they can be dynamically reassigned to different tasks without any need for virtualization.

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[illumin8]

There's no point in consolidating if you're not reducing the number of boxes. Also, how do you add CPUs and memory beyond the capacity of a single box?

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[strobert]

hmmm... I think you are trolling, but I'll entertain :), how about:
- a real reliable automatable install (speaking of RedHat's kickstart here) -- jumpstart is a joke by comparison.
- CIDR compliance. the funniest comemnt I ever read in a Solaris config file was in Solaris8 (back in 2001ish) about how maybe we should support that CIDR thing soon. -- goes along with decent network conifguration scripts
- workable software raid out of the box. not to mention *gasp* shipping a C compiler.

Yes the first two features I mentioned are not as important if you only have one or two boxes (although I still feel they do matter as relying on tape backups to reproduct the config of a machine is asking for trouble). But what about networks on machines. I can't imagine having to spend the hours tweaking every single box I install manually. -- Yes you could home brew your own, but it is nice when you can use standard scripts that do a lot of the work for you. (And before you say it -- yes I can do the scripts myself if I needed to, and I have in the past on older systems, but I enjoy being able to improve other areas rather than having to re-invent the wheel on so much basic stuff)

And even if I COULDN'T name any (I only spent a minute thinking so far) the point I am making is the previous poster claimed Solaris has had and continues to have "enterprise" features 5-10 years before Linux.

Plus, you also can get down to the "what is meant by Enterprise features?" question.

And if you read soem of my previous posts on this thread, you will notice I mentioned a nasty experience with Solaris on Sparc. We had two dedicated admins on 2 solaris boxes. And they still couldn't keep up and stuff went boom. around the same time we had a 30:1 ratio of linux servers to admins and (knock on wood) have yet to have a similar "experience".

Re:Athlon 64 will breathe new life into Solaris

[strobert]

on the veritas thing. Sun did approve it, so I really don't consider it that 3rdparty. they used to have a joint effort site up at www.vosinitiative.com. And yes I will give you it may be unfair, but we do all tend to base viewpoints based on our experiences.

- hardware domains: IBM has been doing a lot of work in this area. And this is realyl only usefull if you have a big box doing mainframe style stuff. I guess I don't put a whole lot of value on it as you generally get more bang/buck on clusters of smaller servers.
- ECC: funny you mention that, Sun had to add parity checking on the Ex500 procs due to a nasty chip fault (they force some customers to sign an NDA, it stayed hidden from the press for about 18 months before some folks blew the whistle and it beamce public).
- error reporting. that is a factor more to do with the hardware than the OS. and you even seem to admit to it being a sparc hardware thing.
- firmware -- again hardware

on the DR (dynamic reconfigure) -- yes I ahev heard of it (it was actually those manuals/addendums I was referring two when they (sun) basically said don't use it.

I will grant you that the Sparc hardware has some interesting features, and with the latest generations for some applications the performance is great. But the point was about Solaris. I have far more issues with Solaris than I do Sparc hardware. And yes there is a difference between the two. I will say this, I wasn't that thrilled with the performance on the Sun boxes I was exposed to. Our intel boxes smoked them (running Oracle doing OLTP). Sounds like the newer generation is better.

And again back to Solaris vs. Sun Saprc boxen. My gripes are about the huge Solaris is so wonderfull and so superior to Linux without much (if any) concrete backing.

Solaris A

[MrChuck]

Guys, cmon. SunOS 5.A or marketing speak: Solaris A

(or "ayyyyy" like fonzie...)

How about some hardware support.

[Lussarn]

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.

Re:Pay through nose

[tonyr60]

Pay how much for Solaris? It is a free download for SPARC and $10 for x86

There really WILL be an "10"?

[mcrbids]

Apple couldn't do it. Instead they call it "OS/X". (See "Oh Sex" for a pronunciation guide)

RedHat couldn't do it. Instead they call it "Fedora Core 1". (Pronunciation? Don't bother)

but Sun can do it! Think of the possibilities, though...

They could have "Solaris X" as the Unix system, and "Solarux" as their Linux distro! What a way to leverage their brand name onto something that's unrelated, and works even better!

I mean.. talk about SEXY... you'd pronounce it "Solari-Sex"...

Well? Why couldn't they?

Wait.... Maybe, just maybe.... who could say "Solaris X" without saying "Solaris-Sucks"????

Re:There really WILL be an "10"?

[natd]

Apple couldn't do it. Instead they call it "OS/X". (See "Oh Sex" for a pronunciation guide)

Negative.
See "Oh Es Ten"

Re:There really WILL be an "10"?

[kalidasa]

and spell OS X , not OS/X.

Re:There really WILL be an "10"?

[natd]

Yes - I realised that as I hit 'submit'. We need an edit - I didn't want to make another post ;)

Re:There really WILL be an "10"?

[hackrobat]

Well, how about Oracle 10g?

Interesting business strategy

[mackman]

It looks like Sun is adding compelling new features that make Solaris 10 a more powerful alternative than Linux. I wonder if offering a better product is a valid business model. Seems like suing your competitors and their customers is cheaper (no pesky high-paid engineers) and ,uch better for the stock price. I'd suggest anyone investing SUNW should instead buy into a company with a proven business model like SCOX.

Solaris Express and NDA

[nemaispuke]

Sun by mistake made Solaris Express available for download in August, and I have been working with it since (including the monthly releases). However, to write something specific about Solaris Express you have to get your article cleared by Sun.

When you go to download it the first item in the click through user agreement is the NDA. The "What's new in Solaris Express" pdf files tell of new features, and they are released at the same time as the new release of Solaris Express. It would have been nice if they actually did a review as opposed to regurgitating the pdf files.

What a COUNTRY!

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, old jokes get tired of YOU !

Re:Pay through nose

[mph]

When your only tool is an axe, every problem starts to look like hours of fun.

Upgrade to a Sawzall and it's just minutes of fun!

FireEngine

[ENOENT]

That's what I want: a free fire engine with every mainframe I buy. A nice Tonka fire engine would sway my decision towards Sun products, especially if they threw in a fire man's hat.

Woo hoo! Off to play with my toy trains!

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely yours,
The CTO of your company

Re:Pay through nose

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't pay through the nose for the software. They pay through the nose for the hardware which is second to none IMHO. Where I work the AC went out in the datacenter over a weekend. Unfortunately, the first box to go down was the intel box that monitors everything else. On Monday the only boxes still running were the Sun boxes. It was over 120 degrees in the datacenter. It was approaching 200 degrees inside some of those Sun boxes.

Re:Pay through nose

[elmegil]

I like to feed trolls.

Why would you want to pay through nose for a proprietary,

I suppose conforming to open API's doesn't count?

no-support,

I daresay Sun's support is broader and better than Red Hat's any day.

closed source *nix

So your real problem is that Sun doesn't give away all of their IP for free then, right? Sorry, but not everyone believes that the communal ideal of share and share alike is a viable business model.

Still playing catch-up

[darkcompanion]

Lots of cool sounding projects names, but I still don't see a lot of exciting features. I'm under the impression that Sun is still playing catch up with other major Unix players. Dtrace, a new monitoring tool ? Sheesh, these things are already implemented by most sysadmins. Oh, and we can now dynamically create soft partitions? God, LVM had this for years. Just try increasing a partition size under Solaris8 (or 9) with Disksuite, without switching to single user mode. In HP/UX or Linux, that's just 3 or 4 commands.

Re:Still playing catch-up

[mihalis]

Dtrace, a new monitoring tool ? Sheesh, these things are already implemented by most sysadmins.

I think you should give dtrace a bit more credit that this. It looks very cool to me

Re:Still playing catch-up

[Anonymous Coward]

Soft partitioning is for grown ups who use big computers. It has nothing to do with disks. It is dynamically changing a "virtual" machine within a piece of hardware that is visible to an os. For example you could take a 6800, and have 3 different instances of solaris running on it. If you needed more cpu in one of the "partitions", you can shrink one of the other partitions, and add cpu's to the one in need. Its the same thing as a domain on a e10k, except its at a software level instead of hardware.

Re:Still playing catch-up

[southpolesammy]

You're confusing Solaris Resource Manager (what you're talking about) with Solaris Volume Manager (what the grandparent poster is referring to). Both are nice, but neither is new to Sol10.

Re:Still playing catch-up

[pmz]

Sheesh, these things are already implemented by most sysadmins.

My impression of dtrace is that is allows sysadmins to implement even better and finer grained tools. One example provided by a Sun engineer was about tracking down very short-lived processes that were causing a system slowdown (very hard to detect with regular ps-like tools and top).

The other features are both catch-up and leap-frog. Also, how many new deployments of HP-UX are there? Further, Linux really doesn't have all the features of Solaris or aren't as well tested or supported in the deployed configurations (how many Linux kernel developers really do have racks and racks of fibre channel arrays sitting in their living rooms? I know IBM is changing this somewhat, but it'll take time).

Re:Still playing catch-up

[mike_scheck]

I'm not confusing anything. Solaris resource manager allows you to create l-nodes that attach to the kernel. This allows you to limit cpu/memory/terminal time per users.

The soft partition allows you to run multiple copies of an os on a single piece of hardware. HP has done this for a couple years. This IS new to solaris 10.

p.s. I was the original anonymous coward post that mentioned soft partitioning is for grown ups.

Re:Still playing catch-up

[bitmason]

No he isn't. The containers technology in Solaris 10 is related to Solaris Resource Manager not the Volume Manager. Although I haven't seen a lot of the details about how this is going to work yet, what Sun says they're doing is to "harden" the resource groupings that you have with Solaris 9 so that they're more like virtual machines or partitions.

They're not VMs in the usual meaning of the word because they're all still running under a single copy of the OS, but the idea is that in Solaris 10, there will be be sufficient software isolation of the resource groups that most software failures within a group won't affect other groups. (Which is part of the reason that people use VMs anyway.)

Re:Still playing catch-up

[southpolesammy]

You're referring to Solaris 10's "Zone" concept, which is new. The original poster was referring to soft partitioning as a function of SVM/Disksuite (see man page for "metainit softpart -p") and has been around since the middle of Solaris 8.

Re:Still playing catch-up

[grigori]

I hear it gives you dynamic kernel tracepoints you can enable and disable on the fly. I don't think any SAs have been doing this. Very nice new stuff, I think!

Re:Still playing catch-up

[philci52]

How does this get modded as Informative???? It has 0 information and a bunch of FUD. Why don't you try reading a bit before you open your mouth. Here's a link to what Dtrace can do.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5160

maybe I'll actually get Modded as informative.

Re:Still playing catch-up

[Darren.Moffat]

It is impossible for "most admins" to implement Dtrace like functionality. Dtrace is very tightly integrated with the Solaris Kernel.

Re:Still playing catch-up

[nathanh]

Oh, and we can now dynamically create soft partitions? God, LVM had this for years. Just try increasing a partition size under Solaris8 (or 9) with Disksuite, without switching to single user mode.

Partitions are typically called slices under Solaris, so I think they're referring to resource partitioning (similar concept to domains in E10k terminology but in software, not hardware).

Re:Still playing catch-up

[sysadmn]

Don't think partitions - think FreeBSD jails - with the added ability to limit the resources (CPU & Memory) that each jail can comsume. Create it dynamically, reboot it, destroy it, all with affecting the other jails.

SUN Hardware Co.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:SUN Hardware Co.

[RevRa]

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

Because if customers want to use Sun systems for their shop, but there isn't an office product that runs on it they still have to have PC's lying around. If Sun supplies them with the hardware, OS, and decent office tools, it's yet another reason the customer can use Sun.

suddenly SUN was a wee bit worried. They tried Solaris 9 for x86, then pulled it back later on

Uhm. I've got a copy of Solaris 2.6 x86 downstairs in my software library. If you think that Solaris 9 was the first x86 release of Solaris, you're not very educated on Sun products/offerings. The reason Sun "pulled back" from x86 is because they were ready to relinquish the x86 market to Linux. Customers SCREAMED at Sun NOT to do this. They WANTED Solaris reliability and functionality on x86 CPU's and didn't trust Linux completely. Sun happily obliged.

Does anyone else think that they're competing with themselves?

Huh?

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).

Yes. Your one-stop-shopping place for all of your workplace needs. You need the hardware? Got that. You need an OS that offers seamless integration with the hardware? Here 'ya go. Want a built-in filesystem with the features of VXFS without having to pay a license fee to Veritas? ZFS comes in 10. Want to write your code in one language and run it on all of your other systems? Use Java. OS Desktop? That's just icing designed to take more $ from Bill G's pocket.

When Linux pulls through

Linux is a good OS and I am no stranger to it whatsoever, but it has a long way to go to catch up to Solaris. This announcement about Solaris 10 is demonstrating just that.

Oh, and by the way. Some of us in my office are playing with the internal-only betas of Solaris 10. Very sexy IMNSHO. For the heck of it, I started calling it SunOS X as a parody of MacOS X. The rest of the engineers on my team have followed suit, though as of yet none of us know what the "official" release name will be. :-)

***
Disclaimer
***
I DO work for Sun but this is my PERSONAL opinion. It is NOT intended in any way, shape, or form to be construed as an official Sun position.

Re:SUN Hardware Co.

[xtermin8]

One reason for the anonymous poster's confusion may be Sun's business goals and marketing. You have provided good answers, And yet its still unclear if Sun will stop trying to be a one-size-fits all company, which it probably should. Many of us wish Sun would have given up on Sparc more decisively. I don't question the original intent on backing Sparc architechture, but it probably left too big a target for FUD. The original poster didn't even mention Sparc, but the message is familiar- its ghost seems to still be haunting Solaris

Re:SUN Hardware Co.

[Cyno]

Not necessarily. Linux could run just as well on their hardware as it does on x86, if Sun wanted to do some of the work to get it there.

They would have access to all the software that runs on x86 Linux, like the stuff to use audio cards, firewire, usb cams, etc. And make their Sparc stations more useful.

Anyone know if you can use a firewire harddrive with a Sun Blade system? Does Solaris support this hardware? What filesystems are limited to?

With Linux they could have no limits and plenty of extra time to work on hardware and sales.

But it seems like they're doing fine with their China deal and all. How that happened is beyond me, tho. Some crazy voodoo happenin here.

Re:SUN Hardware Co.

[IM6100]

When Linux pulls through, *nix systems that rely on non-x86 hardware are going to wither and die.

WTF??

Linux is an open source codebase, and it's fairly portable. Are you pretending that IBM runs linux primarily on x86 hardware??

Re:SUN Hardware Co.

[fbsderr0r]

woohoo, i have 2.5.1 for x86,
i like to keep it for old times sake along with my
spf-100, sparc server 10, and ssa.

Re:SUN Hardware Co.

[penguin7of9]

Linux is a good OS and I am no stranger to it whatsoever, but it has a long way to go to catch up to Solaris.

Some races are not worth running in. This is one of them. Let Sun pursue pipe dreams of "Zettabyte disk drives", useless sequences-of-nines uptimes, and gigantic, overpriced shared memory machines, while humble little Linux forms the backbone of the real supercomputers and mainframes of the future: compute clusters built from unreliable, commodity machines.

Re:SUN Hardware Co.

[grigori]

"useless sequences-of-nines uptimes"????? FTW? You dont understand computing in Real World if you think thats useless. Not everythings a render farm with stateless compute.

Re:SUN Hardware Co.

[RevRa]

Yes, and didn't someone once say "Nobody will ever need more than 640K of memory." ? Or as I recall an IBM ad that I saw in the early/mid 1980's that read something to the effect of, "The new FIVE MEGABYTE hard drive, all the storage space you'll ever need!"

Just one of my customer accounts has a single Enterprise 10,000 cluster with ~20 TB of disk attached. Don't tell me that nobody will ever need a ZB of storage. Maybe not tomorrow, but in 20 years? Yea.

Your problem [1] is that you're too short sighted; You don't see the big picture. Companies with billion-dollar applications, Government agencies that need a reliable computer to launch rockets, companies who do molecular 3d modeling and research, those who build dams, nuclear power systems, design skyscrapers, build bridges, chemical engineering, and companies who handle emergency medical response systems, etc.

These are a few applications where companies want five 9's, and where they pay $500,000 a month to know that when they make a phone call, 30 minutes later the nerdy girl with the tool kit and the laptop are going to show up at the door with an entire company behind her. They want to know that if I can't fix it, Sun will fly someone in right-goddamned-NOW to find out why if they have to.

CIO's, stock holders, and someone with their life on the line doesn't want to hear about Linux and how it's open source and how you coded this in your spare time and blah, blah blah. All they wanna' hear is [3], "You ain't got no problem [customer], I'm on the mother**cker, go back in there, chill them [people] out, and wait for the calvary who'll be comin' directly."

Backbone of real supercomputers my ass. IBM still does most of the high-power processing in the world on their mainframes anyway.

[1] And the problem of most Linux fanatics[2]

[2] Not every Linux user or advocate is a fanatic. I use the term to refer to the more rabid zealots.

[3] To borrow a line from Pulp Fiction

Again. My own personal opinions. Not those of Sun.

-

Re:SUN Hardware Co.

[TheLink]

Depends on your target market.

If your target market wants uptimes of say 10 years, then you'd want to pick a design that can scale for the next couple of decades.

If your target market wants uptimes of about a month then they can pick MS.

In between is Linux.

Re:SUN Hardware Co.

[penguin7of9]

Don't tell me that nobody will ever need a ZB of storage. Maybe not tomorrow, but in 20 years? Yea.

You are absolutely right that reliability, performance, storage capacity, and service matter. But monolithic systems like Solaris running on monolithic hardware like Sun Enterprise servers won't be able to scale to those sizes.

Your problem [1] is that you're too short sighted; You don't see the big picture.

No, your problem (and Sun's problem) is that you are firmly stuck in a 1960's mindset.

[2] Not every Linux user or advocate is a fanatic. I use the term to refer to the more rabid zealots.

And I'm not a Linux fanatic either. The Linux kernel is pretty mediocre as far as kernels go. I think BSD or Mach or any of a number of other mediocre kernels would unseat Sun as well.

You see, it's not about whether Linux is "better" than Solaris, it's about the fact that Sun is just barking up the wrong tree: it just doesn't matter much what operating system you use to run your individual nodes, as long as it's cheap and simple. What matters is the application and storage software that runs on top of it and that can deal with both the distributed nature of the system and inevitable node failures.

Re:SUN Hardware Co.

[calidoscope]

while humble little Linux forms the backbone of the real supercomputers and mainframes of the future: compute clusters built from unreliable, commodity machines.

The jury is still out on that one, you may want to check out the article in the Nov 17 issue of EE Times.

There are certain problems that do no run well on Linux clusters and that will always be the case... Specifically clusters fall down in applications with unpredictable global memory address patterns...

IOW, using a cluster inherently assumes that the problem can be neatly partitioned leading to infrequent memory accesses outside of the local partition. Even then, the interconnect becomes quite a piece of engineering, half of the cost of VA Tech's Big Mac was the Infiniband interconnect. We haven't even begun to talk about cache coherency.

Even with problems that can be partitioned nicely, an expensive shared memory box can be cheaper than the cluster, especially if you have a large and unique application that would have to be re-written to work on a cluster.

As for "Zettabyte disk drives", I think Sun is thinking more of Zettabyte file systems to give them a couple of more decades of headroom. Solaris currently is limited to about 1 Terabyte for a file system (there are some work-arounds). Recall that 86-DOS -er- M$-DOS had a files size limit of 2 GB, which pretty much appeared to be a pipe dream when 86-DOS was written in 1980.

compute clusters built from unreliable, commodity machines sounds like the PR announcements for the IMSAI Hypercube - granted that a Xeon is better suited for numerical analysis than a Z-80...

but what about my capslock key

[Anonymous Coward]

it's still where my control key should be. i haven't typed a capital letter for ages now and am getting tired of it now.

Re:but what about my capslock key

[Yiliar]

When you order SUN hardware, be sure to pull down the selection box on the keyboard and select PC Style Keyboard. You will be happy you did. There are ALOT of lazy aquisition folks who screw their customers by not learning what options would best meet their needs.

Re:So...

[cibus]

military grade security probably refers to a Bell/laPadulla confidentiallity scheme.

Fire Engine TCP/IP stack

[Alomex]

According to the related article, it includes a complete rewrite of the TCP/IP stack. Conventional wisdom has it that all TCP/IP stacks out there borrowed heavily from the BSD code.

Will Fire Engine then be the first non-BSD TCP/IP stack?

Re:Fire Engine TCP/IP stack

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows also has a non-BSD TCP/IP stack. Originally Windows 3.1 used a third party stack based on BSD code, but Microsoft completely rewrote the core stack for Windows 95.

The Linux stack has also been modified and tuned to the point that it no longer resembles a BSD stack.

So, no, it won't be the first non-BSD TCP/IP stack.

Re:Fire Engine TCP/IP stack

[pmz]

Microsoft completely rewrote the core stack for Windows 95.

Why is it that I can't tell whether this was meant to imply progress?

Re:Fire Engine TCP/IP stack

[pjkundert]

And in all those rewrites, still no simple way to control the various timeouts that TCP/IP imposes on the user, making TCP/IP virtually unusable for mission critical, deterministic applications, such as SCADA.

Don't get me wrong; TCP/IP is great -- for browsing the web. Don't get your web page in a reasonable time, or the connection dies? Fine. Try that approach when you are trying to control a remote piece of equipment that, say, prevents a guyser of oil from appearing in someones back yard...

Hopefully, Sun will provide support for strong determinism in their TCP/IP stack. Until then, we're forced to implement custom protocols using UDP/IP, and provide our own determinism, error detection/correction, encryption, etc...

Re:Fire Engine TCP/IP stack

[thogard]

The new TCP stat should be much faster for what most servers do and not what people thought they would be doing 2 decades ago.

One place where I expect this to reduce the load is combined with "doors" which are sort of a light weight RPC call that doesn't do a full context switch. The result is you can hand of data streams to other programs and have them deal with them without the mess of full context switches. This could come in very handy for some types of spam filtering. Add in sendmail's new TCP based maps and you can do some very low overhead filtering.

Re:Fire Engine TCP/IP stack

[Detritus]

What you want isn't TCP. You might as well complain that a Porsche 911 can't ford rivers and cross ditches. There are very good reasons for the way timeouts are set and adjusted in TCP. See any of the numerous papers on the subject in ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communications Review. Fairness and efficiency are primary goals, determinism isn't.

How about...

[Orien]

Or "wauka wauka" like Fozzie.

beating a dead horse

[penguin7of9]

Solaris's problems are not in robustness or scalability--it already handles those very well. Trouble is, so do Linux and BSD and a lot of other systems. Arguably, not as well as Solaris, but well enough.

By analogy, sure, a Ferrari is a nice car, but for a daily commute, a Honda Civic is both cheaper and more practical, and it really doesn't matter that it doesn't go as fast as the Ferrari in theory. With software like Solaris 10, Sun is creating ever more expensive Ferraris.

Re:beating a dead horse

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:beating a dead horse

[evilviper]

By analogy, sure, a Ferrari is a nice car, but for a daily commute, a Honda Civic is both cheaper and more practical, and it really doesn't matter that it doesn't go as fast as the Ferrari in theory.

I think Linux is more of a Pinto... Sure, it has it's quirks, which most people just live with, and it'll do it's job just fine for a good deal of time until **BOOM**!

Don't take this the wrong way, I use Linux myself, but it isn't remotely close to being stable and reliable enough to play on the enterprise level. There's just too many features going in, unaudited, unverified. Debian's process of waiting until software is very old, and incorporating fixes for all the bugs found, before considering it stable, is the only way to get a stable Linux system, and with that, Linux then has very little juice, as you are stuck with all the old features like only one (very slow, unreliable) filesystem. And that's only on x86 where there is tons of money going into Linux development. On other architectures, the situation is much more dire.

Re:beating a dead horse

[penguin7of9]

You misunderstood the analogy. For Solaris vs. Linux, it's (unnecessary) scalability and robustness that is the key property, for the cars it's speed.

What I am saying is Linux is a nice car for daily commute, but Solaris is a better investment.

Well, let's try another analogy: do you keep your wallet in a bankvault or even a safe at home? Probably not, because it's too much hassle and not worth it.

Sun provides great support, hardware, compatibilty with past versions of it's software,

The SunOS/Solaris transition has been anything but smooth, and Sun sites have traditionally dreaded upgrading because it has been so disruptive. You do get decent support, but at a huge cost. And hardware compatibiliity? Well, it's a single-vendor solution--buy from a Linux hardware vendor and you'll get the same or a better experience with Linux than that.

Java, and more.

Yes, Solaris does have better support for Java than Linux. That tells you more about the fact that Java is a Sun-proprietary that Sun deploys according to their business interests than anything about Linux.

Re:beating a dead horse

[penguin7of9]

but it isn't remotely close to being stable and reliable enough to play on the enterprise level. There's just too many features going in, unaudited, unverified.

And you think that Solaris is better audited and verified? I don't think so. Sun doesn't have the resources.

And what do you want anyway? If your enterprise setup is so flaky that an errant kernel or kernel security flaw compromises your operation, you have a problem, and it's not fixable by spending millions on gold-plated hardware and software.

Re:beating a dead horse

[evilviper]

And you think that Solaris is better audited and verified? I don't think so.

At least an order of magnitude more, I'd say. Or maybe they have some other method of making sure their code is stable, such as special compilers or automated code verification... Whatever it is that they do, there is no denying that Solaris is far more stable than Linux.

If your enterprise setup is so flaky that an errant kernel or kernel security flaw compromises your operation, you have a problem, and it's not fixable by spending millions on gold-plated hardware and software.

That is a complete a total cop-out. If that's the case, then why not run Windows NT on everything? Sure, a small percentage of systems being down at any one time shouldn't pose a problem, but hardware redundancy can't make up for software problems and deffeciencies.

Re:beating a dead horse

[penguin7of9]

If that's the case, then why not run Windows NT on everything?

Because Windows NT is very expensive, because its APIs keep changing, and because it requires way too much manual effort to install and maintain.

At least an order of magnitude more, I'd say. Or maybe they have some other method of making sure their code is stable, such as special compilers or automated code verification... Whatever it is that they do, there is no denying that Solaris is far more stable than Linux.

Sun's systems have had really serious bugs in the past (memory leaks, data corruption, buggy code generation in the compilers, etc.), it's just that after years of bug reports from the fields, many of them have been fixed.

Whatever stability Solaris has, it's simply due to age, not any kind of special magical powers Sun has.

Cost...

[Namaseit]

Yah and it's going to cost your left nutsack, or ovary if your a woman.

Re:Cost...

[sharkey]

cost your left nutsack

You have more than one nutsack?

Re:Cost...

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

This is a Solaris discussion, Every competent Solaris admin has a spare nutsack as a hotswap.

Re:Cost...

[/dev/trash]

Bah, who needs two anyway?

Re:Cost...

[pmz]

Every competent Solaris admin has a spare nutsack as a hotswap.

The best part is that my wife believed me when I told her this! She thinks I'm the smartest bestest Solaris admin, ever!

Re:Cost...

[sharkey]

The best part is that my wife believed me when I told her this!

So, she thinks taking one to carry in her purse doesn't bother you?

ok see...

[JoeLinux]

This is a case of people actually providing a product that gives the customers something new and exciting.

Bravo SUN. And they recognize Linux as having a place.

To be honest, I'd rather have a SUN monopoly than a MS monopoly. At least the software would be a bit more stable.

Re:ok see...

[T-Ranger]

Even if there was a MS monopoly, they sell compilers, so you could personaly write your own OS, line by line, from scratch. For free. And get your hardware from anyone

On the other hand, if Sun was a monopoly you would only be able to purchase Sun Authorized 36.6 Gb SCSI drives for a mear $1495/USD. Each. Oh, that dosent inculde the $495 drive tray.

Holy crap

[Saint Aardvark]

Take a look at the link to the Usenet posting on Dtrace. Jesus Christ almighty, it's like they saw inside my head and gave me The One True Tool.

[puts on tin foil cap]

Re:Holy crap

[axle_512]

So many people on here are mocking "Dtrace"... read parent's link on the usenet posting. The tool is way cool.

Supposedly the article just scratches the surface on what Dtrace is capable of...

Re:Holy crap

[ajm]

That's an amazing tool. People will have to know what they're doing to use it correctly though, which is probably a good thing.

Re:Holy crap

[Saint Aardvark]

I agree, it looks absolutely amazing. IF they a) release Solaris 10 free for home use and b) include Dtrace in it, I'm definitely setting up a box w/that. Jesus, I'd give my right arm to have someone port that to Linux/FreeBSD and GPL it...

Re:Holy crap

[ChrisRijk]

Get the November edition of Solaris Express.

It has DTrace. Free download. For SPARC and x86.

Re:Holy crap

[lurvy]

I don't exactly follow. Sure, I have no idea what Dtrace is (and I don't intend to find out), but that's beside the point.

You wrote that it's like they saw inside your head to give you what you wanted, and that your first reaction was to put on a tin foil cap, but what I think you forgot to write was the part were you told us why eaxctly it is that you don't want them to do it ever again.

Care to explain?

Re:Holy crap

[Saint Aardvark]

Very nice. Thanks for the link!

Holy Crow

[jhallum]

They skipped Yottabyte, and went right to Zetabyte!

Fantastic! I want one!

Re:Pay through nose

[sonicattack]

Solaris 9 is freely downloadable to use on single CPU boxes.

This is exactly the same Solaris 9 that you would run on an SMP box, but the license to run it for free doesn't apply on those machines.

Oh, and it doesn't matter if you use only 1 CPU on a system that supports, lets say, 4. You still have to pay for the license on those machines, even if you never install more than 1 CPU.

Try the old version..

[k98sven]

I ran a beta here at work, and an ex-girlfriend and a couple dead grandparents appeared. Then I saw George Clooney. It was wild, man.

Yeah.. George Clooney is only in the latest version, though.
All in all, I wouldn't say it's worth the upgrade, even if the old one only had russian-language support.

Aha!

[Fefe]

So Solaris gets capabilies. Only, what, five years after Linux? And they finally abandon that obsolete slow-as-molasses file system of theirs? The level of technology leadership they are displaying is nothing short if breathtaking!1!!

On a lighter node, the article says their current partitioning scheme is software based. Good to know. Fits well in the general impression I got from them, with their shell script based "high availability" solution, and their industry leading "backup" solutions. There really is no need to know more than this about Sun and their software.
Long live admintool!

Zetta != Zeta

[slavemowgli]

That's "Zettabyte", guys, not "Zetabyte", as the referenced article correctly states, too. Now go and write down the SI prefixes 100 times.

Re:Zetta != Zeta

[sharkey]

That's "Zettabyte", guys, not "Zetabyte",

Are you sure? Maybe it's "Zebbibyte" or "Zebibyte".

Re:Zetta != Zeta

[slavemowgli]

That's another issue. It may well be that the Sun people actually meant to denote a 2^70 factor instead of a 10^21 one, but the correct spelling of "Zettabyte" is still "Zettabyte". For the record, BTW, while the correct spelling would probably be "Zebibyte", there is no such prefix yet, or at least not officially - the IEC binary prefixes end at "exbi".

Re:Zetta != Zeta

[pmz]

That's "Zettabyte", guys, not "Zetabyte"...

Exactly, because if we used Zetabyte, we would most certainly get sued by Mrs. Jones (or slapped with a restraining order if we took "byte" literally. Yum.)

Re:Zetta != Zeta

[gmhowell]

Now go and write down the SI prefixes 100 times.

I use the English system. Can't I just write three paragraphs of four sentences of eight words each? It works out about the same.

Re:Zetta != Zeta

[slavemowgli]

No - I meant write down *all* the prefixes 100 times *each*. :)

My abandon ship station

[A nonymous Coward]

I was a computer operator on a carrier long long ago. The computer room was two decks under the flight deck, right under the arresting gear ... pretty high up. My abandon ship station was to take a fire ax and whack the computer. I guess that old supply computer had too much vital technology. It wasn't the data in the computer, because it had no permanent storage, it was a tape operating system, and my job did not include whacking the tapes. So they were more concerned with the enemy capturing our carrier and recovering the computer technology than recovering the records of how much toilet paper we used. Must have been the water tight seals around the tape drive doors -- they claimed it could operate under water, tho how deep I never heard. And being so high up, 40 or so feet above the waterline ... if that had ever gotten under water, I wasn't planning on being the duty operator.

Re:Pay through nose

[MesiahTaz]

Exactly where can you download Solaris 9 x86 from?
I'd love to play with it but I can't seem to find a FREE download link on their site. They want either $20 or $95 for a media kit by mail.

http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/ge t. html

Re:Pay through nose

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you live in reality or in a fantasy world? Because it sure looks like reality to me what you just said. I think you forgot to take your Linux pills last night.

zetabyte != zettabyte

[macshune]

You're right, zetabyte is clearly a buzzword, while zettabyte is totally different. A zettabyte is 2^70 bytes or (in the notation of hard drive manufacturers) 10^21 bytes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000).

And for the record (biggest to smallest):

yottabyte (2^80 bytes)
zettabyte (2^70 bytes)
exabyte (2^60 bytes)
petabyte (2^50 bytes )
terabyte (2^40 bytes )
gigabyte (2^30 bytes)

Re:zetabyte != zettabyte

[Brandybuck]

yowzabyte (2^90 bytes)

Re:zetabyte != zettabyte

[splaytree]

yodabyte = (2^100)?

Re:zetabyte != zettabyte

[sketerpot]

I think we should save yodabyte for 2^900. Or, better yet, yibibyte. :-)

Re:zetabyte != zettabyte

[pmz]

exabyte...zettabyte...yottabyte

Interesting, they went from greek to Southern.

Re:zetabyte != zettabyte

[macshune]

>exabyte...zettabyte...yottabyte

>Interesting, they went from greek to Southern.

Wouldn't that be yokelbyte?

alpha (not 'ayyy')

[pr0ntab]

That'll get some marketing heads turning.

I'm really disappointed...

[Mysticalfruit]

I was hoping for a yotta byte capable filesystem.

Wow! it's Linux-2.6!

[Anonymous Coward]

DTrace == Kernel Profiling!
"Fire Engine" TCP/IP stack == Linux's TCP/IP stack + hardware crypography drivers
Solaris Zones ("Project Kevlar") == User Mode Linux
"Military grade" security as standard == pluggable security policies.
ZFS (Zettabyte File System) =? This one might be new...
Infiniband, NFS v4, "Atomic Operations", NUMA optimisations yup yup yup yup

"Clustrex" single-node fail-over as standard, "FMA/Greenline" self-healing and fault management,
BART, and more security/authentication features.
too vague.

And all these features are available in Linux on more platforms than Solaris.

sort of

[gearheadsmp]

It does sound like it, except Microsoft's "Trustworthy Computing" is like any PR campaign - it's more about convincing the public to think you're organization is doing something about x problem, as opposed to fixing the problem and being happy the press isn't on you're back.

A positive example of Microsoft security would be Xbox Live. Microsoft is full aware of modders running cracked games off their Xbox's upgraded hard drives. But all you have to do to play a modded Xbox on Live is to turn off the modchip while on Live, and use an official game disc. But you dont' see the Xbox division bragging about how they keep cheaters using modded Xbox's off Live, do you?

Sun, Linux, and Solaris... Round whatever

[Featureless]

All the talk lately has been about how Sun is on the fast-track to irrelevance, getting creamed from below by Windows and Linux, and from above by IBM. They splashed onto the scene years ago by being "faster, cheaper, and better" than DEC etc., and now that they are no longer any of those three, it's unclear what they offer - other than Java, which, while interesting, isn't part of their core "mid-to-high-range" server business. A lot of idiotic hot air about thin clients and network computing hasn't helped matters.

So are they going to go the way of DEC? Perhaps soon Gateway or Dell will be interested in an acquisition? Who knows. There are some things that look like signs of life, though.

One is dealing with AMD. This is very smart for both companies. Sun will package their excellent new chip in well-reputed new lavender-and-white boxes, and customers will run "Linux or Solaris." If they can do this cheaply enough, this could finally be a competitive angle for new business, on the low end...

But the "Linux or Solaris" is the interesting point. Right now Sun seems to make its money selling hardware and software (read: Solaris). Traditionally Linux - which is surely eating their breakfast, lunch, and dinner - has been Sun Enemy #2 (right behind Mr. Bill). And yet Linux may be exactly what they need - an open platform upon which to build a Sun-branded infrastructure that is "better, faster, and cheaper" than the competition.

And you get the feeling that some inside Sun, at least, know this. But clearly others do not. And the fight goes on, and on... and you get things like this:

The net result seems likely to be that Sun will promote Solaris ahead of Linux ("cheaper and better") except to customers who already have a large Linux installed base or they specifically want Linux solutions. For Sun customers with SPARC servers, using the same operating system across all servers would make life simpler as well - less complexity means lower TCO. By the end of the year, Sun also plans to publish benchmarks showing Solaris x86 matching, and in some cases beating, Linux on identical hardware.

This is an article detailing a strong feature-offensive against Linux - trying to make Solaris into a superiour solution that people will pay a premium for.

But I am wondering if this is such a good idea. Why not adopt Linux, and contribute this work to it, rather than try to compete with it?

The scenario with the sparc chip and the Opteron is perhaps an object lesson. It takes billions to keep your hand in the chip game. Sun is perhaps not in a very good position to continue to spend that money. The AMD move looks like the first step in a viable exit strategy. Partner with a chipmaker - a "cheaper, better, and faster" one like AMD - since the economics of trying to beat them all don't look as good.

Take Sun's software shop. While well-honed for its common uses, any given little piece of Sun's proprietary Unix fork is generally sub-par - from their SSH implementation (just found a bug in that the other day) to their shell. Clearly it is not Sun's highest priority to deal with all these little Unix details. So most people pile on open-source solutions to make it livable. But then where is the support? Yes, the world still tolerates this state of affairs while tending to their Apache and Oracle servers... but for how much longer?

Could Sun become a "services company" in the mold of IBM and Redhat, "building solutions" with AMD and Linux for the server market that are cheaper and better than competitors? Isn't there money to be made "just making these things work" for all segments of the server market - building and supporting? Wouldn't they be well positioned to do it?

In a sense this seems like a hedge. They will try to do both - package Linux and support their Solaris business. They may be waiting to see which one will thrive; they may think it's better to be in both games. But does that make sense, even now? They are hemorrhaging ca

competing with fast, cheap and good enough

[doodleboy]

Accepting for the sake of argument that a SolariX/Opteron system will be more secure, featureful, stable, and pretty than a DIY Linux/Opteron box, will it really be so much better that people will actually pay significant extra money for it?

Compared to, say, a 2.6 based linux box with an SMP Opteron board.

The entry level server market is a low margin minefield, and I'm not sure folks are going to want to pay for stuff (extra securty, huge filesystem support, a Sun badge on the case, etc.) they don't think they're going to need.

ARRRRGGHHHH!!!!

[pr0ntab]

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)

Re:Pay through nose

[supabeast!]

"...no-support..."

Are you on crack? Most of the businesses I know that use Solaris do so entirely BECAUSE Sun has better support than anyone else out there, with those exceptions when they make you sign an NDA to find out about a problem that they cannot fix.

Re:Pay through nose

[dubious9]

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.

Re:Pay through nose

[sonicattack]

Oops, I meant that "Solaris 9 SPARC" is downloadable for free.

I don't know for certain about the x86 version, but as far as I've heard it is correct that you cannot download it except for a fee.

(Quick check) -- yes, it is available on the Edonkey p2p network. Of course I think one has to have a proper license in order to download and use it. :)

Look at it this way:

[pr0ntab]

After reading the article, I was mildly enthused about the coming of a new version of Solaris. The promised feature set seemed quite exciting, for the user, programmer, and administrator in me.

And I don't support Sun unless there's no other option.

Meanwhile I only have feelings of dread about Longhorn, even if it will be much easier to come by.

Perhaps that's why I dread it.

I hope a free-for-home-use license for it becomes available...

Re:Military Grade cliche

[methanemonster]

The "Military Grade" security is an easy way to understand what Trusted Solaris is. TS has been developed in parallel with "Vanilla" Solaris since 2.5.1, with the goal of folding features into one code base. With Solaris 8 the Role Based Administration features was introduced, but so far not a lot of shops have figured out how to use it. The final phase that they are set to "unleash" into mainstream Solaris is the "Multi-Level" tagging, where filesystems, process, console X windows, and network packets all receive a Security Label. In the Military world, this would be Unclass, Secret, Top Secret, etc. For the Commercial world this would be Public, For Internal Use Only, Confidential, Confidential HR, Conf. Legal, Conf. Eng, etc. Actually a pretty good way to protect internal resources, but the administration overhead sucks!

UFS isn't that flawed...

[pr0ntab]

you should really turn on logging... it increases the speed threefold. It's retarded that they don't shout it across the hills (you have to stumble across it in the manpages or newsgroups). just add "logging" to the mount options in vfstab.

Re:UFS isn't that flawed...

[kdm]

logging in solaris 8 and 9 has known issues with ufsdump and restore. I've had it crap out on more than a few machines

Re:Pay through nose

[Suicyco]

Yeah, its not like IBM wants a viable business model.

Besides, SCO owns the IP at sun, not sun.

Re:Pay through nose

[pmz]

SPARC and UNIX are not proprietary, yet there are proprietary implementations of those families of standards. The vendors of those implementations most definitely provide as much support as your wallet can handle, even for Linux. As for source, Sun made Solaris 8 source available to those who wanted it, only you needed their compiler to build it.

Sun isn't Microsoft, by any measure. Sun's architectures and interfaces are more open than anything from Intel and Microsoft combined.

Re:Pay through nose

[Tin Foil Hat]

> > "When your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail".

> When your only tool is an axe, every problem starts to look like hours of fun.

When your only tool is a shotgun, every problem starts to look for the closest exit.

Can you FEEL the love?

[HarveyBirdman]

But you can't. Ha! You are utterly impotent and powerless! :-P

Re:Still playing catch-up**did you read it?**

[mike_scheck]

>>The original poster was referring to soft partitioning as a function of SVM/Disksuite

Yes, he was. Thats why in my response to him I said (soft partitions are for grown ups, and have nothing to do with disks). The article only had one reference to soft partitions, and it was in now way shape or form connected to either disksuite or solaris volume manager.

In the article that is linked from slashdot, the word partition is only used once, and here is where:
"Solaris Zones ("Project Kevlar") A next generation of the software based partitions in Solaris"

You should know as well as I do that the zones have nothing to do with disks. This is a virtual os copy that runs on hardware. I'm trying to point out that the original poster doesn't know what he's talking about.

Who is more like a 4 year old?

[HarveyBirdman]

The guy who made the dumb quip, and admitted in the subject line it was dumb and a repetition, or the anonymous cowards who are so emotionally unstable they can't just ignore the quip but have to post a bile filled, invective laden diatribe which is even moire pointless than the original quip?

Now, a time out for you, young man, and no dessert tonight. If you behave, Mistress might give you a spanking.

In keeping with other Solaris Upgrade tradition

[FreeUser]

FOR IMMEDIATE RE-RELEASE

SUN MICROSYSTEMS INC, SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA

(Press Release: 11/25/2003)

In keeping with other solaris upgrade traditions, such as the replacement of vi with the venerable ed as the default editor, Sun Microsystems has announced several additional improvements to their core Solaris unix tools.

ed will be downb-graded to version 1.0.1. New features in the current are viewed to be too advanced for most users, and this move will simplify the interface. In particular, the confusing ">" prompt will be replaced with the vastly simplified "" (empty) prompt.

tar is being down-graded to version 0.55.1, removing numerous confusing command line arguments.

gzip is being removed in favor of compress.

ssh will be replaced by the much-streamlined 'crypt' command.

Package mangement is being further upgraded, with even more byzantine options for installing those binary packages in /opt. As with solaris 9, the tools necessary to remove packages once they have been installed will not be installed by default. Their use is depricated, and not-documented accordingly.

To compensate for the added complexity of the next revision of Sun's package management tools, the overall Solaris 10 environment will be further simplified by the immediate removal of ls, more, nad grep. These archaic commands are deemed extraneous and detractiving from the core performance improvements and ease-of-use enhancements of the Solaris 10 operating system.

Administrators who feel the need for these redundant tools can download their GNU equivelents from the usual locations, provided they have first paid Sun the $10,500 developers fee (per seat)...compiler not included.

Re:Still playing catch-up**did you read it?**

[southpolesammy]

Ah....I see. It's a terminology issue. The author used the "software based partitions" phrase to describe zones/containers, but the original poster confused it with soft partitioning, which is a SVM/ODS term. Better to have called it logical partitioning, like the rest of the UNIX world calls them.

We're on the same page...if not everyone else.

Sun is giving me a little SGI deja-vu

[TempusMagus]

Is it just me or does a lot of what Sun is doing remind you of what SGI went through in the high-end visualization market a few years back?

Obviously things are not DIRECTLY equatable but I can't stop thinking about the comparison.

Couldnt you say that in both cases that their niche erroded due to low or no cost competitors?

Both had some great software. Could Sun having Solaris and Java be somewhat equateble to SGI's OpenGL and Irix?

Both companies had hardware at the heart of their business models at one point.

Sun seems to be doing what SGI did in trying to do a bunch of different things to pull itself out while in the process losing focus and STILL having hardware at the heart of the business model.

SGI is obviously still around. If you look at their website now, you can see they are targetting a much smaller niche than they used to (supercomputers). The day of thinking that an o2 will be on the desk of every college student has long passed. I'm sure SGI never thought they would be promoting Linux-based supercomputers on their homepage 5 years ago - lord only knows what Sun will have on theirs homepage 5 years hence.

My apologies

[A nonymous Coward]

Fucking baby killer

Considering your maturity is that of a baby, I guess I somehow missed you, eh?

Military grade security??

[bl8n8r]

Dont make me laugh..
I guess that means they are finally disabling
by default the discard, echo, chargen, and
daytime services?

Military Grade?

[TempusMagus]

Is there any official definition of what "Military Grade" means? Does the fact that it is used by the Military automatically mean it is "Military Grade".

I'm starting to think that "Military Grade" is about to join the ranks of such descriptors as "Low-Fat", "Broadcast Quality", "New and Improved" and "Internet Ready".

Re:Military Grade?

[Chester K]

Is there any official definition of what "Military Grade" means?

Yes, the Orange Book.

Re:Military Grade?

[TempusMagus]

Thats a great link. All kidding aside, that is speicifically (that link) what people refer to when they discuss the standards software needs to meet to be used by the military? It was written in 1985 as well!

Still, what does "military grade" mean in general? Is there a standards body for military that determines what the base standards are for software, weapons and paper-clips. "We can't use those staples - they aint military grade!". Just curious, since I've seen the word use so much during our current 'security-bubble'.

Re:Military Grade?

[Blackknight]

Yes, there is. Everything the military buys has a committee somewhere that has to approve it first.

DISC4 and other agencies determine the standards for hardware, software, etc.

Re:Military Grade?

[Reziac]

[skims document] Might not be a bad set of rules for corporate environment either, if they don't have a policy of their own.

And now I'm wondering just what your sig refers to... did someone swipe one of our aircraft carriers? ;)

Re:Military Grade?

[Chester K]

Thats a great link. All kidding aside, that is speicifically (that link) what people refer to when they discuss the standards software needs to meet to be used by the military? It was written in 1985 as well!

That's the main book of the series, the orange book, and it's usually the one people refer to when they're talking about milspec compliance in their computing systems. Remember how Microsoft claimed NT4 was C2 compliant? You can see exactly what C2 means in that book. All in all, the book still stands up well, even being almost 20 years old, because it was written to outline concepts, not specific technologies.

The higher levels of compliance require that your software actually be thoroughly examined and tested by the NCSC -- since that's really the only way to know about any covert channels that might exist. I understand that testing is extremely expensive; but I don't have any further information about it.

There are a bunch of other books in the same series, pretty much all available here. Several years back you used to be able to request a hard copy of the entire rainbow series for free from Uncle Sam, but according to this link they don't publish the hard copies anymore, just CD-ROMs, which is a pity because they were a damn good way to fill up a bookshelf with intimidating-looking manuals. :(

Shit

[roman_mir]

when did I miss episodes 2 through 9?

nice

[chegosaurus]

dtrace looks fantastic. Solaris already has the best system monitoring tools around (at least that I've seen) but this looks so sweet.

ZFS seems nice too. What I'd really like to see is VxFS by default, but that's not likely to happen. (I'd also *really* like to see a version VxVM bundled to replace DiskSuite.... yeh, right)

The only other change I'd make is to kick GNOME out and have KDE be the new GUI, but once again, not a chance.

Good to see Sun coming out with some nice new stuff. It's been kind of disappointing how little the core OS has really gained over the last few versions.

DTrace for Solaris == PCP for Linux

[dsouth]

Sounds a lot like PCP, which SGI ported from IRIX to Linux a couple of years ago. I haven't used the Linux version, but the IRIX version of PCP gives point-and-click access to 1000's of kernel metrics.

In any case, it will be a nice addition to Solaris.

2 options:

[pr0ntab]

1) create a file system snapshot using fssnap and back that up.

2)
mount -o remount,ro,nologging /your/volume
backup
then remount,rw,logging

The remount will cause the log to be finalized, buffers flushed. You are advised to remount ro if you want ufsdump to have the highest chance of success (it can still fail if logging is disable, but it still is mounted rw)

dtrace

[nous]

more information on dtrace may be found (not on google but) on bigadmin
[i realize this is not nearly as much fun as playing guessing games and pissing on sun]

hope this helps...(but hope springs eternal)

nous

Re:Pay through nose

[elmegil]

IBM's business model is in a very large part selling services. They could pay customers to run Linux, and they'd make up the difference in services. Unfortunately (or not), Sun is not the 800 lb gorilla, and currently has shown no interest in becoming "everything to all people" in the same way that IBM does through IGS etc.

IBM's business model isn't "share and share alike" it's "the first hit is free (as in beer)".

The real cost of solaris.

[Anonymous Coward]

went to see about the free solaris 9 download a few days ago. Actualy read through the license agreement until I got up to this gem:

(j) Notice of Automatic Downloads. You acknowledge that, by your use of Software and/or requesting services that require use of Software, Software may automatically download, install, and execute software applications from sources other than Sun ("Other Software"). Sun makes no representations of a relationship of any kind to licensors of Other Software. TO THE EXTENT NOT PROHIBITED BY LAW, IN NO EVENT WILL SUN OR ITS LICENSORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOST REVENUE, PROFIT OR DATA, OR FOR SPECIAL, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, INCIDENTAL OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, HOWEVER CAUSED REGARDLESS OF THE THEORY OF LIABILITY, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO THE USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE OTHER SOFTWARE, EVEN IF SUN HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
Fuck that.
-Justin

yeesh, really cranking the version numbers out

[iggymanz]

I just downloaded 9 for evaluation, and they're talking 10 already?? It's getting to feel like the hoopla for Linux kernel minor point releases... Anyway, every place I've ever worked at that has Sparc gear is running mostly 2.6 and some 8. Never saw 7 in production; I've got an unopned box of it on my shelf. Maybe if Oracle 10g takes off we'll see Solaris 9 & 10 out there more.........

Re:Pay through nose

[peterpi]

no-support

*bite*

That's right kids, being told to RTF Source Code by an elitist stranger on a mailing list two weeks after you gave up and did something else is far better support that having a rational professional tech support group on a direct line.

I don't know why I fed you really. I troll enough myself to spot when somebody else is fishing :)

Congratulations, IHBT, IHL HAND

The SCO issue

[metamatic]

OK, how come nobody has mentioned SCO?

First, let me say that I like Solaris a lot. In general, I prefer the SYSV approach to the BSD approach.

But there's no way I would deploy Solaris anywhere right now, because it seems as though Sun's right to support it is dependent on the crackheads at SCO. Sun gave in to SCO, which suggests to me that Sun themselves believe they must license SCO's IP to be legal. SCO have already shown that they'll gladly try to yank the license from anyone they don't like, so it seems to me you'd have to be crazy to bet the farm on Solaris right now.

Imagine--SCO need more cash. They say to Sun "Well, sorry, but you need to stop supporting Solaris by shipping code that's our property, unless you pay us... ooh, One BILLION Dollars! Mwahahaha..." Suddenly Sun is fighting a huge lawsuit. Maybe an injunction is granted to stop them shipping SCO code, and suddenly you're looking at migrating your entire Solaris infrastructure to something else, or running it without support.

Sure, once SCO are out of business, things will be peachy again. But right now?

Re:Pay through nose

[Tackhead]

> When your only tool is a shotgun, every problem starts to look for the closest exit.

/me concedes to superior humorpower. But you still owe me a new keyboard.

How to take advantage of all of this...

[jo42]

1) Become an Linux consultant.
2) Preach Linux.
3) Profit !!!

And when that fad goes Ack! Phfft!!

1) Become in Solaris consultant.
2) Preach Solaris.
3) Profit !!!

Re:I'm confused...

[Kethinov]

Maybe Solaris 10 is actually Solaris 2 because you're supposed to read 10 as binary...