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Linux to Replace Solaris at Duke

Posted by timothy on from the post-pepsi-generation dept.

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?"

13 of 462 comments (clear)

  1. Dunno about universities by RayDude · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. Centos 3.3? Why? by NitroWolf · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. UMD by ltbarcly · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. BYU by Stibidor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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/
  5. Linux - blah, blah, blan... by rovingeyes · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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

    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.

    1. Re:Linux - blah, blah, blan... by rovingeyes · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Ok I don't think you have looked at products offered by Sun lately. Just to help you recently the Computer Science department in our University decided to build a cluster of 35 nodes with dual opteron processors and 6GB ram on each node with raid. Initially Sun quoted 440K, Dell quoted 450k and a local beige box vendor about 350k. When we told Sun about it they dropped their price to 220K and guaranteed us 90% of published spec performance for hardware for a year otherwise they'd replace whole node for free including shipping. Apart from that they also offered to investigate in to Solaris OS if we can prove that apps would run better on a Linux box with similar hardware.

      Bang! is an understatement here

  6. Switching stories by SunFan · · Score: 5, Insightful


    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.
  7. my school district restricts linux by b17bmbr · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  8. Now hear this by turgid · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    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
    1. Re:Now hear this by DogDude · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Why go with Sun when there are 100 other companies that will give me practical experience in programming?

      Ouch. That was a real career blunder on your part. I'm sure that you, like many CS grads, assume that you *deserve* a job programming fresh out of school. The reality is that most of us who became professional developers do have to pay our dues in support. And the experience, even in support, at Sun, would have really set you up on a fast track into some good stuff. I hope your current job is somewhere as prestigious and well-respected as Sun and not some tiny Internet-based startup.

      --
      I don't respond to AC's.
  9. Solaris is replacing Linux here at UMBC by E-Lad · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 ;)

  10. university of texas at austin CS dept stays split by fool · · Score: 5, Informative
    i'm a sysadmin for UT's computer science unix machines and our longterm plan is to stay with linux and solaris. we've already junked IRIX, HPUX, and AIX a long time ago. there are a couple of reasons for this continuing two-forked path:

    • monoculture is bad. people say this all the time on slashdot; nobody likes a windows-only world. linux monoculture is maybe not just as bad, but it's not a win. anyone who tries to build some of the stuff from sourceforge on non-linux platforms and discovers it to be completely linux-centric and non-portable will probably agree with me here--we want code that runs on unix, not code that runs on linux, and students will matriculate hopefully with a broader sense of what that can mean with more opportunities available to them. furthermore, solaris has been 64bit for far longer than (mainstream) linux so even though linux is catching up now, there was a time when the platform gap was even larger and more "useful" in a research-and-education sense. finally stuff like timing cache hits and instructions-per-clock-cycle become more interesting when you have some true platform contrast.

    • sun's pricing is still competitive for us (they do a lot of matching donations and cheating on already-low edu prices to make it so) and in certain niche markets (thin clients, >=16-way servers), they are just easier to cope with than trying to homebrew a sufficiently sturdy solution (we use their thin clients in labs that are unlocked 24/7, for instance.)


    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.
  11. Re:Sun=good hardware Dell =cheap hardware by wclacy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.