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Linux to Replace Solaris at Duke
wwhsgrad2002 writes "At the end of the 2004-2005 academic year, the Sun Solaris computers available in public computing labs at Duke University will be replaced. The replacement computers in these spaces will be Dells, running a version of Centos 3.3 as supported by Linux@DUKE. Pragmatic and technical considerations have driven this change, as Linux continues to gain a greater userbase and more third-party commercial software is made available on the platform. Are other universities eliminating Solaris in favor of a Linux distribution?"
BYU switched several years ago. By the time I took CS 240 back in 2000 what had once been the UNIX lab was full of Dell linux boxes.
http://nerdfortress.com/
My father works at the Holy Cross math department, where they have their own internal network setup separate from the rest of the school. All of the math professors use Solaris, and they have been for years.
:)
Over time this has slowly changed though -- Sun upgrades their hardware and takes back the old machines on a cyclical basis, and recently all of the desktops were replaced with thin clients (about as big as a cabel modem!). And I'm pretty sure the main server was migrated to Linux.
Since all the professors have been using Solaris for probably around a decade, it's doubtful they'll change the clients anytime soon... but from what I can tell, they're slowly testing out Linux as a replacement.
I'm not gonna speculate why, I'm just answering the question
If you say "here goes my karma" I will bite you!!!
Really, so that means vendors have stopped supplying new softwares for Solaris! Or does it mean that practically Solaris is not technically a viable solution?
I really don't see the need to replace an X system with Y system when the X system does the job for you more than adequately. I don't understand why people are always eager to change systems. Of course someone is going to reply to me and say - "hey universities are research institutions and they need new stuff" - too overrated. I am not trying to root for Solaris here, just don't get why you need to replace a system that can do the job that Linux can.
The undergraduate computer science lab used to be populated primarily by Sun workstations, but the latest upgrade replaced most of them with PCs running Linux. The reasoning for this was that PC hardware had become sufficiently reliable that the more expensive Sun hardware was no longer cost-effective.
Most of the publically-visible servers, both for CPSC and campus IT, are also now running Linux, as opposed to Solaris and AIX. I assume that cost and compatibility reasons motivated these changes.
Of course, there are also substantial numbers of WinXP PCs around.
In three days time I will no longer work for Sun since I have been made redundant.
During my time at Sun I was part of the Companion CD team. We built on x86 and SPARC. For x86 builds we had a Dell 6400, Dell 6600 and finally a Sun V40z (4-way Opteron 246). For SPARC we built on E450, E4500, and V880 (8x900MHz UltraSPARC III) and V880 (8x1200MHz UltraSPARC III).
Now, I will not go into a long spiel about the realtive merits of the various hardware platforms, and I have no axe to grind now since I get my lasy pay cheque in a fortnight but:
Why the heck are you buying (32-bit intel) Dells when you can buy (cheaper and faster 64-bit) Opteron boxes from Sun? If you are a Linux fanboy, Sun will sell you one with DeadRat or SuSE. They are Windoze certified in case you have had a lobotomy, and you can run the free (as in beer) 64-bit Solaris 10 on them.
pBut hey, it's cool to hate Sun on slashdot.
Stick Men
Curious. That's pretty much what they did at Edinburgh University, Scotland, 5 years ago...
MiT is currently ditching all of it's high end Dell-based linux lab workstations in favor of ...brand new sparc IPXs. Apparently they can fit an entire server cluster into the sysadmin's backpack.
-- http://www.criticalassets.com
I'm one of the two people here at UMBC who run the core servers for the campus.
;)
We use AFS here for everyone's home directory, mail spool, web space, and other things. To maintain this, we currently have about 6 servers with direct-attached storage serving everyone's AFS home directory volumes. These servers are a mix of Dell and Sun gear running Linux and Solaris. Both platforms have run well over the years, but each server's direct-attached SCSI storage is limitting and, well, aging.
So we can better use our storage and improve things for everyone in general, I'm in the process of rolling out a fiber channel SAN with new servers and RAID arrays to replace what's currently running. The new server gear we chose? Sun's V20z Opteron server running Solaris 10 . Linux is right out.
Why no more Linux, or rather, why Solaris? A few reasons. Solaris's storage management is TONS easier to deal with and do interesting things with than what is available in Linux. Namely, we've found and have been fustrated by Linux's software RAID. Yeah, it works... but that's about it. Weee look, I can make a mirror! Solaris's SVM (aka DiskSuite) is no VxVM, but it does allow us to do things such as disk sets to share between hosts and monitor our metadevices in detail. Linux's raidutils on the other hand are poorly documented and toublesome (usage options don't match reality, etc)
Another aspect on Linux vs. Solaris in mass storage is (as far as I know) a lack of multi-pathing in Linux. Multi-pathing is a no-brainer especially in the context of Fiber Channel networks and Solaris's MPxIO is in-built and works quite well.
But I'm just poo-pooing Linux here on this specific point. We offer Linux workstations in every one of our computing labs. Linux replaced SGI/IRIX workstations there many moons ago and work well for that purpose. Linux servers also are used for our general shell login servers. But on the backend, where we need reliable features, consistency, and heavy-lifting... we're enthralled with Sun x86 servers and Solaris 10. The V20z Opteron hardware actually is cheaper (for us) than a Dell 2650 and offers a ton more features all-alround.
There is an irony, though. The service processor on the Sun V20zs run Linux. Ah well
Gah!
We had a 5 to 1 ration of Dell to Sun gear at my last job. And Sun still managed to have 3x as much hear spectacularly fail. We had no less then eight Sun 6500 machines blackbirded in 6 months. That means three Sun dudes come and live in your data center while they make sure everything is *exactly* as it should be. Net result: no change in the rate chip were blown.
Same thing at my new job. One of the two Sun V880s blows something once every other month. The fifty odd Dell servers just sit there doing their job. Other than two blown motherboards over the past two years. And those weren't even major outages since I just dropped the harddrives into the spare chassis... hell of lot cheaper than Sun maintenance.
Sun can go suck it.
kashani
- Why is the ninja... so deadly?
Why do you think Sun is doing Opteron servers these days ?
My university, too, is mid-way switching from Sun to Linux. With Sun hardware you pay a premium for a slow product (at least CPU-wise, which, for the kind of stuff university people do, is the most important). Simply not worth it.
The Raven
middle school. taught there 7 years. lots of fun. anyways, here's a funny story.
to get digital school money, we need to have some x:y ratio of computers to students, so the district goes out and buys alot of pentium 120's w/32MB ram. there actually sitting around collecting dust at my school, but we have "computers". so, I snag several and bring them into my classroom, scrounge a switch, and turn them into X clients running off my P3 933 mandrake box. 6 computers running moz, OO.org, etc., great. kids use them without a problem. so, i pitch the idea to the principal, because we have a "lab" full of pentium 120's and 166's that take 10 minutes to start and are practically worthless once running, as they have to load up the novell client, anti-virus, lock down, security, etc., etc. software not to mention windoze. the lab was fully funcitoning, just never used. it was like a root canal with no anasthesia. and all we'd need is an application server, a dual pentium rig, big hard drives, lots of memory. $3000 tops. and we'd have a screaming lab. she's interested. I pitch it to the district and it gets shot down like a duck on opening day.
here's the {funniest|saddest} part: this was in late spring, when the next years funding proposals, etc. take place. the next year, our resident technidiot spends his time breaking down the literally 100+ old pentiums, stacking up the 1GB hard drives, organizing the 8MB SIMMs, etc. the only thing I could think to relate was he was doing graves registration duty. better to eliminate any possibiltiy than actually have a lab that the kids could use. part of the reason the computer were never used was because it costs about $300-$350 to put a workstation in front of a kid even if you give us the hardware. and 100 X $300...
he argued that they want to "standardize" on windows, as if he didn't realize how stupid and uninformed that comment was. he was concerned they wouldn'tbe able to use word. hell, we were still using word97 in 2002. As if Abi or OO aren't capable of typing papers, etc.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Damn, sounds like you and I worked in the same district.
The schools in my area did the same thing: threw out perfectly good older computers because they were too slow to run Win95/Win98, much less anything newer. I (surreptitiously) made deals with the poor bastards this duty devolved too (usually a teacher with too little time) to come pick up the equipment and do the job myself. I managed to 'recover' several hundred computers this way, along with enough replacement parts to last for years. Enough, at least, to keep two labs running in two different middle schools so long as they were using Linux and not Windows.
Had to do it on the sly, though. If the tech folks for the districts ever caught a whiff that two entire labs were running off of Linux and not their beloved Windows both places would've been swarmed, shut down, and torn apart within a day. The kids knew of course, but fortunately (or sadly, depending on your point of view) nobody ever listened to anything they had to say.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Dell=cheap crappy hardware. We have 1600 dell workstations (Optiplex GX1-GX280.) Each month we replace 30 - 35 Motherboards that have failed. We never had this problem with the older Dells(GX1-GX110). We also got a bad batch of maxtor hard drives that have had about a 70 percent failure rate in our Dells. Most problems have been with the GX270 line. Out of our first 25 GX280's we have already had 1 MotherBoard failure and 1 Hard Drive. Dell has admited that they have had some problems and sent us 10 motherboard to keep on hand.(Some days we replace 5-6 motherboards) Most of our PC's are used 24/7. I am actually a Network guy buy since our Netware servers never go down I help out with the Dell hardware replacements.(we do NOT use Dells for servers) We were going to switch to IBM Desktops which in my opinion are much better than the Dell's but after IBM sold their desktops to Lenovo we sent all of our IBM's back.
So I'm going to burn through twice as much power to move zeros around that will never be used?
Somehow I doubt that a doubling of pointer widths is going to result in a doubling of your power requirements.
General purpose computing doesn't need to deal with over 4 billion unique things.
Yes it does, all the time. Not all of us write webapps all day. I work in bioinformatics and hit my head on the 4 GB memory limit constantly. There are 300 billion bases in the human genome, and tens of millions of polymorphisms with information required about their names, aliases, positions, and allele frequencies. I can't store things as first class objects- I have to use RLE encoded primitives everywhere and there is no type safety because everything has to be an int. Many algorithms require repeated visits to arbitrary points on a chromosome so paging through a database is not really an option. If you have to page contigs in and out of memory, many genetic linkage algorithms will take the lifetime of the universe to complete.
The 32->64 bit problem isn't the same as the 8->16 or 16->32 problem. If it was, why not just jump to 128 bit?
The Earth weighs 6E24 kg. 0.375% of it is continental crust, roughly 15% of which is silicon. If you consider that the atomic weight of silicon is 28 g/mol and figure roughly 10000 atoms of silicon per bit, that means that if we were to mine all of the silicon out of the continents, make RAM out of all of it, and put all that RAM in one big giant computer, that computer would need to be designed with an address space 132 bits wide. So you see, even 128 bits is not enough.
Yep.. A few years ago now, I helped setup a computer lab system for a small charter school.. We got the server, a decent cheap box with a couple of 36gig scsi disks. I setup NFS/NIS/autofs. We took an old P100 to setup as a firewall, and a resurected what we could out of a stack of P166s. We installed RH6.2 (latest and greatest release at the time) with abiword, and a few other apps. This was the first time the school had more than 5 computers running at one time.. previous to that, the P166 win98 just crashed and caused problems. We now had a network authenticated login system for every student, who each had their own home directory to store files.. no more floppies needed to save stuff.
A couple of the teachers whined noisily about the fact that they couldn't run FOO application.. but really, all they really needed was word processing and web access. The "tech" head, who was just one of the teachers was a friend of mine, and stuck to his guns and prevented any hostile takeovers of our network.. it worked well.. everything ran as smoothly as a bunch of crappy old PCs could run with no budget.
Eventualy we got around to building some Duron 500s, and installed RH7.x and things were feeling better..
A couple years ago, my friend quit, and moved to another city.. about 6 months after that, their firewall stop responding to ssh, and they never called me back. I just wrote the whole thing off as not worth my time.. oh well.. I bet they had to spend tens thousands of dollars buying new machines and windows licenses, instead of paying me $300 or so to come down and upkeep their network once a year.