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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?"
But my company is moving away from Solaris because the new Dell Boxes are at least three times as fast as the fastest Sun we have.
And cost one third as much!
Raydude
Not that the CentOS distro is bad, but it's really more for a server, not a user box. Since this is going in the computing labs, and presumably the students will be logging into the box(es), it would seem to me that using another distro more geared towards users would be appropriate, since the CentOS 3.3 is geared towards enterprise servers.
I'm sure it can be tweaked to be just fine, but it seems kind of an odd choice to me, for a computing lab.
Both Linux and Solaris seem to have their respective merits, and with the OpenSolaris project, it would seem that Sun might be leaning towards the open source world, but this is an interesting choice by Duke, as one might think that a large university such as Duke would perhaps go with something with more corporate backing like with Sun. But Dell also has been pimping Linux to the server market for awhile now...
The math department at University of Maryland, College Park recently decided to replace it's Sun workstations with linux computers, probably Dell's.
I for one welcome our Educational Linux using ahchchhc cough cough.
We have a lab full of UltraSparcs running Linux at ITESM (www.itesm.mx).
Is it just me or does centos remind you of breath mints or something?
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/
Yep, and it'll be really outdated by then and will need to be replaced anyway.
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!!!
The CS department lab at Yale runs SuSe. Most of our public computers are either Mac or Windows, though.
Sorry, wrong website.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
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.
Some companies have said that if Sun was doing three years ago what they are doing now (Solaris 10, OpenSolaris, free licensing), they would not have switched to Linux. Consider that Sun still guarantees binary and source compatibility when migrating to Solaris 10 from older versions, while Linux cannot. Linux is very useful, but there are still things that make long-term deployments awkward at times. Mod what you will, but it is true.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Hmm, 1/3 the cost, 1/2 the longevity.
Sounds like a good deal to me!
I don't know much about CentOs, but I would guess that proprietary apps built for RH run on it without major tweaks to the CentOS file system.
Most Solaris labs are used for engineering and similar technical work, often on proprietary apps distributed in binary for for only 1 or 2 major linux distros. This probably makes support a breeze compared to all sorts of tweaks and hacks to make these apps run under Unbuntu or others.
If something's mission critical then it'll be used until it irrevocably breaks down - witness brand new IBM mainframes running executables compiled in the sixties, just because the customer wants to do the same thing, only faster.
Even VAX machines are still being used, and MULTICS wasn't finally put out of use until the year 2000.
Yes, if you're doing short-range projects with relatively trivial applications a Dell machine running Linux is better value; if you'll still be doing the same thing in a decade you'll want something more upmarket. How many people lived in shitty apartments before they got a nice house?
Where I teach, the tech people are linux-phobic. They are adamant about "keeping linux off the network" yet aren't so pissy about OS X (which probably means they've been reading Gartner). Of course, the highlight was a few years ago when I was running linux my older laptop, surfing the net, and doing my grades (through wine no less), and the school's distrtict tech guy asks how I can do this since "novell doesn't support linux." I guess our network admin never heard of, what's that thingy called? oh yeah, TCP/IP.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Sounds like a good deal to me!
I think you're trying to be funny, but it is a good deal - if you buy two in a year instead of one, each at 1/3 price, you pay 2/3 the price - thus saving 1/3 the price. Since failure is unpredictable even in expensive equipment, you're going to buy two of your servers for redundancy anyways (right?) - so the longevity argument doesn't even factor in.
I work as a Unix admin at a major school of medicine in the midwestern US. We have a pretty large amount of Sun equipment on campus, and also a lot of Linux on Dells.
Sun's hardware, especially the old SparcStations, are nearly indestructible. We literally have old Sparc 5s plugging away still. Dells are, as others have pointed out, inexpensive to buy and run pretty well.
Basically, the way it works around here is, if you can afford it, you buy a Sun. If you don't, you buy a Dell and throw Linux on it. With NIH funding slowing down in general, buying cheaper hardware for use now makes sense to me. But basically anything serious (that I have seen) is done on either Solaris or Linux. We'd also be interested in Xserves, but we do a lot of statistics, and that means SAS, which isn't available on OS X.
They choose CentOS because it is the stable version of the Redhat ES/AS server software. So, in effect, they are getting the same stable version as Redhat is selling minus the logo and copyright material.
Redhat still distributes the entire source code via the GPL. The volunteers at CentOS remove the copyrighted material and then release CentOS.
The reason why they use CentOS over the other distributions is that in a production environment you do not want to use anything potentially unstable (i.e., fedora) or anything constantly updated (i.e., the others). Rather than spending their time tinkering with the OS (i.e., upgrading or bug fixing) they concentrate on what the OS is supposed to be doing which is producing results for the department.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
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
Of course they aren't exactly using best management practices IMO but OIT never really took care of the Sun boxes either.
I never said I was smart, I just said I was smarter than you
My university uses mostly solaris for the central servers, and they still have a lab of solaris 8 workstations. Nobody uses those, however, because most departments have their own labs, mostly using Dell/Linux. The CS department was using Redhat and FreeBSD for years, but they just switched to Mandrake when Redhat changed its license.
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?
do students massively prefer the PC's to the sunblades and sunrays? sure. many professors care less. but do we want to limit any of them to a single platform? definitely not.
The Johns Hopkins University is also replacing its old (old!) Slowaris boxes in the undergraduate computing lab with new Dell workstations running Fedora Core 3.
:-). GNU/Linux enables commodity PCs to be useful computer science workstations. In fact, CS hired another administrator with Linux experience to set these up since the primary admin has enough work.
The old Suns run SunOS 5.6, also called Solaris 2.6. That's before Sun started really running with the Solaris trademark. They had 128 megabytes of RAM, slow-as-molasses X, and could hardly run mozilla. They had SSH version 1 installed.
The new machines have two Pentium 4 chips at 2.80GHz. They have 1024KB of cache. They have 1.5 gigabytes of RAM. I would like to emphasize, they are fast. And they have modern software, which makes life much easier.
Hooray
|/usr/games/fortune
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
I suppose I should refrain from commenting since I have no dog in the fight, but I am glad to see some migration away from Sun to linux since Sun helped fund SCO by buying licenses.
A Nelson HA HA to you, Sun.
Yes Sun boxes will last forever, but who keeps them that long? I would rather have a box that will work reliably for the expected lifespan before it is reasonable to upgrade.
You'd be surprised, a lot of universities and colleges have a lot of old hardware, especially Suns.
Presumably your purchasing people are smarter than you and compared these new Dell machines with current Sun machines. Now, Sun's SPARC-based systems are still basically more powerful than Dell's Pentium-based systems. But Pentium-based systems cost a lot less to make, so your company finds its more cost effective to buy more Dell machines to make up the difference in raw processing power.
Sun hasn't forgotten how to make powerful machines. They just don't have the economies of scale to make them cheaply.
SPARC hardware may not be fast relative to an x86 box,
Speed is relative anyway. My Ultra 5 didn't run individual programs as fast as its PC contemporary, but it's multi-processing ability was worth it's weight in gold. Windows absolutely choked on my workload, whereas my Sun kept chugging no matter what I threw at it. Program loading? No problem! Just minimize, keep working, and come back to it when it's loaded. Windows would thrash on that sort of thing.
Got three compiles, two remote X sessions, four netscape windows (in each session), and a StarOffice document open? Pff! As if that will slow an UltraSparc down!
It scares me that I need a modern Windows machine with 50 times the power to produce anywhere near the same experience...
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
How many people lived in shitty apartments before they got a nice house?
While I agree with your point in general, I take contention at your use of the above analogy, at least in respect to American architecture post 1940.
Apartments, by their nature, are most commonly found in urban (regardless of size, village-->town-->city) settings. As such, they exist in densely populated spots and were usually built pre 1940 at a point when the general public cared about quality (both sturdiness and look) of buildings. The apartment's interiors may be lacking, but the building itself has very likely stood for the better part of a century, possibly through several retrofits and extensions that enable it to be a viable living space for people for years to come. Additionally, it is probably located within walking distance of other urban amenities such as food, shopping, and employment.
Contrast this with the average American house. This house was most likely built post 1940 in the desolate sprawl known as suburbia. Like the territories conquered at the end of the expansionist Roman empire, suburbia was not planned and built with a future in mind. Instead, it is the product of supplying product for an immediate desire, in this case for "spacious country living". As a result most suburban houses are constructed of generally low quality -- with some infamous "green lumber" fiascoes -- by developers who have no interest in what the place will be like in 100 years. Even the nicest of these are simple scaled up versions of the same cheap construction with shiny fittings added; the McMansions.
Not only are the physical quality of these buildings significantly lower than those of say, most European cities, but their positioning far from all commercial and social centers forces residents of them to get in a car EVERY time they leave their home. Not only does this increase traffic and pollution, but it also creates noticeable emotional tension in residents, especially those such as teenagers who can't drive and can't therefore get out of the house.
I'm not saying that any given apartment is better than any given house, but the American dream of a "rural house with urban lifestyle"=>suburbia is more like a nightmare.
P.S. - Check out anything on urban planning by James Kunstler. He is a great lover of hyperbole, but manages to squeeze some insight into his works none the less.
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
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.
there is (was?) a unix cluster in carr too, but nobody liked to use it because of solaris.
No biggie really. I love my 105 year old house on 2 acres in northern New Jersey. I can't see my neighbors and the silence is exquisite.
Note 1: I said post 1940.
Note 2: I can't see my neighbors and the silence is exquisite. That doesn't sound like suburbia
The suburban life that I have witnessed (growing up in south-central Pennsylvania) was a soul-sucking existence that had many features that didn't make sense. For example, there is the characature of a "porch" and "front door" that all of the suburban houses have, but are functionally useless since the porch is only 18 inches wide and the "porch/front door" complex is centered on a large lawn with no walkway to it. The real entrance is through the kitchen/garage side-door. So why does the "porch/front door" even exist? I suggest that its function is to make a not so nice house LOOK like a nice house, since they aren't even usable.
I currently choose to live in a modest apartment in an old building right at the center of a small town. Yeah, I hear trucks on the street all night, but I also can walk across the street to the grocery store, the hardware store, and the bank. 10 restaurants and bars are with 3 blocks (8min) walk, and I can walk 15min to work. The other benefit is that I see the same people every day on my walks to and from work and the various stores. In the 8 months I've been in my current location I've met (and chatted with) more people in my community than in my previous 25 years combined.
Having a truly rural life would be great too. Some gardening, raise some chickens, do some consulting over the net from home, etc. Its the bastardization of human life that suburbia entails that I have a problem with. I'm not saying that anyone is wrong to want the things that suburbia purports to offer (large house, good schools, relative quiet, two-car garage, etc). Those things are honest, basic desires.
I do however feel sorry for those who have to live in suburbia because of the additional consequences involved with fulfilling those honest desires; reliance on a car to get anywhere, having to cumulatively waste years of one's life sitting in traffic while commuting, having to play "soccer mom/dad" and drive the kids everywhere since they can't walk home from school/practice/etc, having to drive drunk or find a DD instead of just walking/taxi home from the bar, etc, etc, etc.
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
or
?
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
I just love this shit. It's hilarious. And it always happens, without fail. When everybody brings out their anecdotes about hardware reliability, someone trashes on pretty much everybody's gear, somebody's worked at a place where any given manufacturer's stuff was junk, and someone out there has had any given vendor's stuff work perfectly.
At least everyone can agree that everyone's stuff used to be reliable. They sure don't meake 'em like they used to...
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.