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Unix Vendors Get Creative Against Windows & Linux
coondoggie writes "As x86 servers become increasingly capable, IT managers are taking a closer look at their Unix installations to determine whether a move to Linux or Windows might make sense, analysts say. "The defensible hill for Unix is the big, vertically scaling, mission-critical application, which is usually some type of database serving," says Andrew Butler, a vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "But increasingly, the appeal of Windows- and Linux-based systems running on cheaper, commodity hardware is becoming more and more compelling.""
Linux beats it in hardware support, but Sun has the whole overpriced reliability image which some might find attractive. If you're paying the big bucks you can get a good response from Sun, though I'd suspect people working on Linux could make those bucks go further.
I've worked on some huge Unix systems (mostly for databases) and never once did anyone mention Windows without laughing. No way are people with truely large-scale critical Unix servers considering switching to Windows. When you already own the hardware, paid for the software, and have huge support contracts, consider expansion with Linux. Windows is only intruding on the smaller scale Unix installations.
Gartner is known for sometimes putting out some fluff but this just sounds silly.
Developers: We can use your help.
Last time I checked, both BSD and Solaris (which are UNIX not Linux) run just fine on commodity x86/64 hardware. Sounds like somebody missed everything from 1999 on.
Cheers, -b.
When I think of Sun, I think of reliable, mission critical, just like the article says...Sun has this big business image that "if you want it to run, you should be using Sun", but it also comes with a steeper learning curve. Whereas Linux's image is building and linux has an attitude like "anything you can do, i can do better, and if i can't yet, i will soon" and also comes with less of a learning curve...however still a lot more of a curve than your run of the mill windows server guy would like, I've met so many bleeding heart MS guys that would use/try Linux if they didn't have a misconception that it is infinatley harder than windows...
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
::The defensible hill for Unix is the big, vertically scaling, ::mission-critical application, which is usually some type of ::database serving,
No, it is not. It is a way to temporarily survive. When I looked at my first Vvery large database it has like 12gb of data. It was very large by then's standard, and you had problems finding a vendor for multiple pentium processor servers. Intel had one that could handle up to 6 pentiums, and I think 512mb ram or so. That was considered hugh.
Today I can get eight opteron processors with 128gb ram from stock hardwre. Dual opteron (4 cores, soon 8) with 32gb ram is something that I get from a distributor. Database sizes have not necessarily increased like that.
I am not saying I need big iron hardware - but the island defended is getting smaller. In my experience databases are not growing in a similar speed like hardware is anymore, and standard x64 (forget x86) hardware is vextremely scalable today for the vast majority of cases.
I remember when SUN told me years ago that I needed a SUN Server to boot javastations I wanted to buy. We had like 30 customers. Their argument why I should use a SUN was: Windows / Intel does not scale (ignore the fact that no, I acutally do not need a scalable server to BOOT 30 thin clients, damnit). Today that WIndows / INTEL/AMD combo has eateen the majority of the market share - they STARTED to scale, AND theiy offer a better deal (thanks to the number of processors pushed).
Assuming you can defend on "we scale more" does not work - they better start finding a way to match the price, too - like SUN Did, offering opeteron based servers. Otherwise you hope that data processing needs rise at least as much as hardware speed, and for the majority of uses that simply is not the case. The market IS there, but it is getting smaller.
When it comes down to the real enterprise Unices, ISVs, support, and scalability all need to be balanced. As a large corporation, deploying Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris should really be a no-brainer. There has to be something to fall back upon whenever something cannot be figured out by your own staff. I don't particturally love Sun or Solaris, but know that if I get hit by a bus, the business will find people who can work with it in a couple phone calls. It also keeps things like certifications and knowing all the core competencies simple, by having one primary computing vendor for training, hardware, and software. Finally, guaranteed support for software AND hardware you need to run, especially stuff that scales vertically (like Sun's CoolThreads line) is awful convenient.
"Anal" - backside
"Yst" - ancient Greek word, meaning "to pull ideas from"
has anyone received their free solaris dvds http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/14/194 1259 yet?
A place I used to work planned to move everyone from sun workstations to windows boxes as a cost-cutting exercise.
It ended up costing way more overall because all of a sudden our IT department went from a single sysadmin who was hardly ever busy, because everything just worked, to a whole department of IT staff needed to second-guess MS exchange and a now very unreliable network (even though no network hardware or configuration had changed), and Windows PC's that were always slowing up or crashing, especially after that stupid automated windows update.
Sun has one of the most unmanageable patching system among all of unix. IBM's aix should be the #1 corporate choice. Their device support are top notch, they already have a hand in the linux cookie jar, their numbered patching system is superior. Redhat advanced server is priced at $2500 per system last I checked. So don't think it is quite free.
Linux and Solaris have a similar learning curve if you're coming from a non-UNIX(like) environment, one isn't any harder to learn then the other. On top of that when you are used to only Windows, Linux is harder. Everything you don't know is harder then what you do know.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I support telecom network applications and services running on unix and rh linux. I've been a pretty keen linux supporter for some time, although still think it's out of place in critical environments. I've not seen a month go by without kernel panics and reboots. RH's only solution is to upgrade - a process that is not so easy when hardware/driver development/qa etc... is involved. There are more releases and patches that are virtually impossible to support and maintain any type of version stability. Unix on the otherhand in my opinion is a powerhouse of stability. I know whenever I install these boxes that they will be up operating without problem until some power or hardware failure occurs. Telco operators of course are selecting linux mainly on pricing - poor bastards..... there goes your 5 9 bonus...
windows naturally enought doesn't even merit consideration in telco environments.. I don't actually think I've seen a single pc in the telco world..
If what they want to do is special windows-centric stuff, like talking to an exchange server or participating in a windows domain, then ofcourse they will have a hard time, because that stuff doesn't exist in Linux (note Samba however).
The big advantage that BSD and Linux have over Windows in this space (migration away from commercial Unix) is that most of what you have already learned is, as near as damn it is to swearing, directly portable. Even most of the applications you are already running, need no more than a swift recompile.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
X windows is 23 years old. UNIX, with trusty system calls like open() is around 38. Without radical innovation, its no wonder that customers are moving to low cost alternatives that coincidentally do open() or X-Windows just fine. If Sun wants its market back, they should have photorealistic 3D graphics, real time, robotics control, neural network security system, files presented as memory mapped data structures of type-specific format... There are opportunities, market and technologies that are still left for $1M price tag of high end Sun servers or Cray supercomputers. Its just that these companies have been overrun by management that has too much money and too little brains to care.
I think there's a stigma attached to Linux within Windows users aware of it. In all honest truth, I think it might be the MS FUD, but either way, when you are running Windows you get the impression from all angles that Linux is going to be infinitely hard to learn, is only for the most hardcore of hackers and that it doesn't support anything in the hardware department. All things obviously false.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
RELIABILITY!
Cheaper, commodity hardware does not work for all of us! There's a huge category they're missing out on.I know the Fortune 100 (or maybe 500?) companies don't care, as they can just run clusters of cheap ass machines. But what about the millions of small to middle sized businesses and research institutions?
I've been involved in a number of smaller sized research organizations, and uptime is the utmost importance, however, we definitely aren't running "server farms", so clustering is out the window. I've relied on Sun servers running tons of GNU tools to get the job done. I think you'll find (unless you already know) there's a very large number of people doing what I'm doing. We can't rely on Dell (or even Penguin, or Monarch, or....) to deliver consistent, well thought out, easily-repairable, robust servers. Sun (and other big box makers) can! So what do I do? Run Solaris 10 (GREAT, Solid OS) and install a ton of GNU open-source tools. The result? Great open-source software, and the reliability and well thought-out hardware from Sun. It takes a bit longer to do, but the results are great.
B E A utiful.
Can somebody explain how Unix is different than Linux? Most Linux distributions are mostly POSIX, SUS and ELF compliant. Is the underlying code better somehow?
Or ... they could move with the market, offer an x86 version of Solaris that is the same as the Sparc version, start selling AMD and Intel server and workstation solutions, and bring themselves back to profitability (something they haven't done in years).
... they did that. Much like TFA states ...
Oh wait
- Roach
linux [...] comes with less of a learning curve...however still a lot more of a curve than your run of the mill windows server guy would like, I've met so many bleeding heart MS guys that would use/try Linux if they didn't have a misconception that it is infinatley harder than windows...
Wait, what? Linux has a steeper learning curve than Windows, yet Windows admins have a "misconception" that Linux is harder for them to use?
Either it's easier to use (in which case the learning curve isn't as steep as you claim), or it's not (in which case there's no misconceptions, only reality).
the coolest club on
Anyone who conflates "Unix" and "large, expensive custom/proprietary hardware" in 2007 isn't worth reading. While there are indeed some Unix operating systems that only run on custom hardware produced by the same vendor, that's by no means universally true. Note especially Solaris, which runs just as well on the very same cheap and ubiquitous x86 (whether from a tier-1 vendor or homebrew) systems used by some to run Windows or GNU/Linux as it does on the big, expensive SPARC hardware that Sun and Fujitsu offer. Anyone who wants to have a meaningful conversation about the IT industry needs to start by separating the hardware options (driven mainly by economics) from the software discussion (driven mainly by technical and business factors). While there are business problems that can only be solved on high-end hardware that's often limited to a single choice of OS, those are the minority of deployments and form a distinct market from the volume space. Talking about competition between high-end and low-end solutions is pointless; either you need high-end performance, capacity, and features or you don't. If you do, you're simply not in the market for a low-end hardware platform and the OS you run will depend largely on the hardware vendor you choose. If you don't, it would be silly to spend money on high-end gear, and you'll be able to choose from among several operating systems - including those named here - based on your individual business needs and the features offered by each product. But it's a sure mark of ignorance to discuss the two as if it's all one market in which a choice of Windows/GNU/Linux/Solaris/BSD on a uniprocessor PC competes directly with HPUX on Himalaya and Solaris on Starcat. One can see why commentators are always talking about Unix's imminent demise; they fail to recognise two key aspects of the market: Unix's strong and capable presence on both low-end and high-end hardware, and the segmented nature of the server market. Not much to see here, I shouldn't think.
With x86 Solaris its more important which applications run with it. The propritary Sparc Solaris apps might not have been ported by the vendor to x86 Solaris because of lack of demand. Vendors are more likely to port to Linux because of the greater installed base.
I'm pretty sure the GP was talking about paying 1 k$ for the box + hardware warranty + software support. That's a pretty damn good price for an opteron workstation, especially one with a name like Sun on the front.
The sheer ease of starting a business with Linux and other open-source technologies (MySQL, PHP, ruby, etc) gives Linux the the advantage over Unix. If the company grows, we will just keep using what works.
I am currently working in a 10-man startup company that delivers employment training over the Web. Our system runs off a cluster of 3 boxes in a LAMP configuration, and we never paid a dime for server software.
Linux dedicated hosting is much cheaper than Windows dedicated hosting, and there are so many tutorials and packages out there that make it really easy to learn and deploy open-source systems.
Sun and company have started their battle way too late for anything but niche deployments -- the King of "Big Iron", IBM, long ago threw in the mainframe towel in favor of Linux.
My Dad used to run a university library, and he was always very forward - looking in terms of IT. He wanted to get a Sun server to run thin-client systems for the library patrons to use rather than having to clean the Windows systems every day, and he could not get a Sun salesperson to talk to him (this was about 12 years ago).
The main library software ran on Sun servers (that they bought through the software vendor), and he was highly impressed with the stability of the Sun boxes. He was so impressed that when the time came for PC's to be installed in the library, he wanted to put 20 thin-client terminals in that ran sessions on a second Sun server. That plan ended because he could not get Sun to talk to him -- he literally could not get the sales people there to call him back to sell him the system.
The end result was that he had to install the 20 PC's and deal with the viruses, downloaded software and other daily headaches of the Windows world and Sun lost an easy sale because they were too arrogant to care.
Sun should have been fighting way back then -- Linux is way too mature now, and way too cheap and easy to deploy. In these days of Ubuntu livecd's and Macs running on top of Linux, anyone who is not a Windows person who is interested in computing will learn Linux. Sun may have a few legacy apps, it looks like they will just be a niche player at best. Sun was legendary for their stability, but our Linux boxes have all the stability we need.
I am sure Unix will have it's niches here and there, but Linux is way too strong at this point.
But nothing is stopping you from running White Box Linux, which is the same thing but without the expenditure of cash - or the support, of course. What you are buying with Redhat is support. You're not really buying Linux.
I might agree about AIX, but it's been a long time since I used it. Last time I used it, it was almost unbearable. On the plus side, smit is sexy (mostly because it tells you what command it's executing) and having a unique error code for every error on the system is beautiful and wonderful. But I'd rather just run Linux, which eventually will rule them all and in the darkness emulate their every damned feature.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No conflict in gp: he says they have a misconception that it's _much_ ("infinitely") harder to use, but that in fact Linux has a lot more of a curve than a windows server guy would like. I'd agree--many do have an overblown sense of how hard Linux is to learn/work with, but in fact it is _somewhat_ harder to learn than Windows.
Computer companies have special deals every other week. I'm sure you could pick one up for the same price if you didn't mind waiting a month or so.
FYI, OS X Leopard *is* Unix, it's been offically certified as such and will be marketed as such, unlike the previous versions which were 'Unix Like'
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Claim 1: Linux has a slightly steeper learning curve than Windows
Claim 2: Windows zealots claim Linux is infitabely (*sick*) harder than Windows.
+4 Insightfull Poster*: Those statements are totally contradicting eachother. You're stupid and I'm smug!
* FULL DISCLOSURE: Quote may have been slightly paraphrased.
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
Wait, what? Linux has a steeper learning curve than Windows, yet Windows admins have a "misconception" that Linux is harder for them to use? Actually that is fine. Initially, linux can have a steep learning curve (first week or two) but after that it is easy. Windows admins have to misconception it starts difficult and stays difficult.
Driving has a high learning curve, but I doubt any of us would call the morning commute particularly taxing
i would imagine that is the case in many large datacenters. to paraphrase the great philosopher jules winnfield: mission critical enterprise applications are not in the same ballpark as windows and linux on x86. it's not even the same sport.
the one big shop i worked for in central ohio used mainframes, unix, and windows. mainframes for a lot of legacy data (like stuff from the 70's and 80's) unix for all things oracle, and oddly enough, windows for the front end web hosting. so all of the customer facing web front ends were windows based, but the data itself was hosted and served up from sun gear. inside the firewall, the company itself was seriously MS centric, being used for a number of MS case study/whitepapers on replacing X and Y with stuff from microsoft. i haven't worked there in several years, but i would imagine they are still all MS until you get to the data itself.
there was also a big project in the mid to late 90's to replace the aging development workstations. the sun workstations were replaced with windows NT4 running eXceed. again, windows on the front end, but the serious work is in unix. the support costs for having a sun on the desk for development and a wintel for office and email were offset significantly by replacing both with a powerful (for that time) PC and host emulation software. in all of the "unix substitutions" that i had seen, not once was the proprietary data hosted on anything but IBM mainframes or SUN unix.
IBM will occasionally hit the IT trade rags with ads and op-ed pieces about "server sprawl"... a kind of out of control proliferation of low-end (in IBM's opinion) servers or even clusters that handle one or two tasks instead of running everything from a handful of multi-million dollar godlike servers. i would imagine that sun will eventually take the same approach.
i think that larger and more well established datacenters will always feature commercial unix at their cores thanks in large part to the investment and contracts that you mention. but i think newer companies will focus on large numbers of commodity servers (ala google). i think that is where MS and commercial unix will fight a pitched battle with linux.
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
Ah, the young and naive. Its not that there are people "moving on" but that more people who don't know the old stuff are entering the work force. Our company used to be a unix shop, with HP Apollos, HP PA-RISCs, Suns, SGIs, and RS/6000s. Along came the late 1990s, and some new engineers were hired. They said, "hey, look at these super Dell machines we can get! They run Windows! Everyone loves Windows! We don't have to pay for OS maintenance, and they cost $10,000 less than our current workstations!" And so the Windows migration began. We have gone through three generations of Dells in that time. Sadly, most of the old unix stations were trashed before I got here. Remaining are an SGI Iris Indigo R3000, a Sun Sparcstation IPC, and a Sun Ultra 1 C3D. Although they do not see a lot of action these days, when I do need them, they work flawlessly.
In this day and age where linux is starting to become a real engineering and commercial OS, more people are saying, "we want software on linux." With Apple slowly gaining market share, people are saying "we want software on Mac OS X." Did the people in our company ever think that once we ported our software from unix to windows we would ever be faced with the possibility of going back? Probably not. However, all these years later it isn't that far fetched now.
Radical innovation is irrelevant when you need reliable systems. If you are an IT manager that believes consistent radical innovation is key to developing reliable products, you are wasting money and should be fired. It is irresponsible to assume that something new is reliable. Who cares that X is 23 years old? Apple is using X11 on BSD and they are laughing all the way to the bank.
Where have you been the past 15 years? SGI _invented_ photorealistic 3D graphics, did you not see "Jurassic Park"? Sun systems have been able to do high-performance 3D CAD for almost as long. Heck, my two year old Dell Precision 670 runs the EXACT same CAD software as my Sun Ultra 10 C3D (UGS NX5) complete with photorendering. The Sun isn't much slower. Matter of fact, when I had Vista on the 670, NX5 actually ran FASTER on the Sun. Not bad for a computer I bought for $40. Half the software we need to run on that 670 won't run on that machine whether in XPx64 or Vista. Investing in radical innovation when we needed reliability got us NOTHING but a bill from Dell for $3,600.
For robotics control, perhaps you are not familiar with the Sun SPOT. Nifty little self contained computers, with sensors, ADCs, and communications. When they hit the market, I'm considering using them to drive a UAV.
Innovation and reliability are two completely different things. If you need reliability, why does innovation matter? When you need your data, you need it, nifty features be damned. Now, I have some FORTRAN programming to do. Time to fire up the SGI.
I know I am being redundant but, for all intents and purposes, Linux is a UNIX clone. I also know that my previous statement is an oversimplification but Linux and UNIX behave similarly with similar commands. In some cases, software is fairly portable between the two. Also what about the BSDs? I'd argue that they are actually closer to their UNIX ancestors. Look at Explaining FreeBSD for an excellent comparison and history.
Of course, it's not just control panels, but they seem to cause me the greatest frustration. I much prefer the Unix philosophy of "You asked for it, you got it" to the Windows "What you see is what you get" one.
Just junk food for thought...
There was that Dilbert where Alice was put in charge of the company's booth at an expo. Alice was told to get "booth babes." Her response was to hand Dilbert and Wally pieces of string.
"What are these for?"
"It's your uniform. Wear it and stand in front of our competitor's booth.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Very informative. Good job in bringing that to light. I guess that also will settle the litigation issue between apple and the open group over the UNIX trademark, about which I've been very curious but haven't seen any developments on.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
From the article: "especially now that Web-based applications are written in operating system-agnostic languages such as Java and .Net."
.net framework, and it sure looked 100% windows to me. Perhaps the author is considering "multiple flavors of windows" to be "multiple platforms." My bias leads me to a different conclusion.
I just went to Microsoft's page for the
Mod parent up.
I work in a large financial institution; our mission-critical systems are either AIX or Solaris, with heavy emphasis on AIX.
AIX seems difficult for many because it is (IMHO) so much more mature than anything else out there. Clustering, performance tuning, etc. are decent with some other vendors (i.e Veritas Cluster on Solaris). Smit makes things elegant and simple, but also lets you (Esc-6) see what commands it is running in case you want to script things.
You have to consider so many things that other OS's really neglect- hardware firmware/microcode versions, patching, etc. AIX really tackles all of them, and in a mature way.
I don't think there are that many options for a very good midrange operating system when you are talking about $500k/hour downtime. For me, in order- AIX, Solaris, and HPUX.
Perception != Reality
And that is in either direction.
When you see Gartner you know something is funny... First, from Gartner itself, with some extra hilighting from me,
Andrew Butler is a vice president and distinguished analyst in Gartner Research, covering most server technologies, including operating system evolution, architectures, platforms and vendor strategies. He is also one of four senior analysts -- named research area managers -- responsible for defining and steering Gartner's global research agenda for the server industry. Prior to joining Gartner in 1997, he worked for Hewlett-Packard Company for 14 years in the U.K. and Germany, most recently as European marketing manager for midrange Unix servers. His period of employment at HP also included channel marketing, European & worldwide product management roles for messaging and imaging software products, and a consulting role in the professional services organization. His previous industry experience includes software development on IBM midrange computers for Altergo, a leading U.K. software developer during the 1980s, plus programming and systems analysis roles on IBM mainframes and midrange computers for Boehringer Ingelheim, Schwarzkopf and Nielsen Research. I love being a barometer for the industry; seeing my ideas and insight empower clients to make better decisions and save money. Years of Experience 8 years with Gartner 33 years in IT industry Professional Background A C Nielsen, Programmer, 4 years Altergo, Software Engineer, 3 years Hewlett-Packard, EMEA Marketing Manager - Midrange Systems, 14 years
So, this guy was a developer in a past age for 7 years, a marketing manager for 14, and has been out of the game for 8 years.
Gartner is a think tank for hire - and they sell analysis on trends, technology, etc. usually paid for by some ubermanager trying to justify a decision, and written to and for other ubermanagers (so read CIO,CTO, and other flickkopf that also has a twisted and stale view of the IT industry.) Hardly objective. Hardly realistic.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Windows is easier to learn to use. As a user - but not necessarily as a sysadmin. Most people start in tech support with more experience using PCs with Windows. They learn how to browse the 'net, install apps and make changes to the OS config via the control panel.
It's easier for a PC support person to support Windows on a server because they know the interface but:
Servers are not PCs (referring to the purpose of the system, not the hardware config) and a different approach is needed . There is almost never a good reason to use a server to browse the 'net and installing apps or making changes to the config should only be done with rigid protocols in place. Directory management is a required facet for both and is best learned through training - and surprise - it's more complex on Windows than UNIX if you compare AD to LDAP. Disk management is generally similar - managed through a window if desired. I would argue that both types of server should only be managed by someone with several weeks of training from a partner of the OS vendor and a lot of procedural dogma in place.
Also - in a shop with both system types and dedicated support teams for both, I would bet that the trend is that the UNIX systems have better stability - even discounting the more frequent patch cycles on Windows.
This sig contains a manual self-destruct. Kindly please put your foot through your monitor in 8 seconds.
Unix is long dead. Let it rest. It is time for its successors.
So X has spent millions of dollars developing U and fixing bugs and tweaking system performance until it's fast and rock solid. Now Y comes along and rewrites a new version (clone) of U from scratch and calls it L.
... as (to a greater or leser extent) have a lot of the other people theoretically selling X's U.
... which "U" are you talking about anyway?
And "for all intents and purposes", those two things are identical?
X has spent millions of dollars developing U, but most of the work on making it rock solid was done by B (which we'll call BU), and D and S and SM and MS and I have all done their own variants of it. Meanwhile, W and M and Q and others have produced their own commercial versions of U from scratch. W's out of business, but Q and M are still going strong. Meanwhile, some of the folks from B remixed the stuff they'd done with U and released B', and Y has gone and done his thing to produce L (using a lot of the same code as B'). Oh, and MS sold their U to S... who did a bunch of remixes with X's U... and created MW instead. After MW and BU got popular, X sold U to N, who then licensed it to S and switched to a version of L instead. Meanwhile, S changed their name and sold their old name and rights to U to a company called C (who was selling a version of L). Oh, and somewhere in there guy who founded A made a company called N that sold a version of BU remixed with MA while his old company did a version of X's U, and he ended up taking over A again and switching from BU to B' in his variant,
For "all intents and purposes"
For all intents and purposes UNIX is a family of operating systems based on a common core API defined by Bell Labs in the '70s. Any OS where the native API is based on pipes and filters, directory trees and file descriptors, that's basically indistinguishable from the API descriped in Kernighan and Pike... that's UNIX. No matter where it comes from.
linux virtual private servers kicks unix arz. have a secure environment to run (pickYourPoison) in. i imagine in the not so distant future there will be usb embedded devices running virtual private servers on it; picked up in your cocco puffs cereal box.
It's not that 20 year old technologies always stop to be useful, its just that you can not expect to charge premiums for it. Your $40 Sun box was probably around $15K when first released and now you have a somewhat faster Dell for 1/4th of the price. To survive as a big iron vendor other than just another PC maker, Sun needs to come up with something that a Dell can not do. I don't see any robots around, with Sun SPOT or otherwise, so I assume its an area that can use improvement.
As for X, it totally sucks for remote access to modern applications which do quite a bit more drawing than xeyes. I have a hard time using emacs from our datacenter in Texas and most people run VNC, which is better but still sucks. Maybe its time for a technology with is less than 23 years old.
With windows learning starts easy enough and becomes harder and harder only to end up at impossible.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
In 1999, I ran a mission critical web server, apps, database, on not just a desktop, but one that was too slow (at the time) to use as a desktop. No one wanted it. It was an original 100 Mhz Pentium. We scrounged 128 MB RAM for it.
One day, the fan died, and the machine was fried. But, another old desktop box was available, and in a couple hours, the 'new' box was restored from backups and was on the air.
We had battery backup for the entire server room. And, if power wasn't restored pretty quickly, a diesel generator kicked in. All this stuff got tested twice a year. None of it helped much. Our main problem was people tripping on power cords. My own desktop had higher up time.
The Pentium ran Solaris x86.
-- Stephen.
Reliability is nothing without features. Features come from innovation.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
True - still have some legacy stuff of which there is no half decent replacement running on SunOS 5.5.1 on a SparcStation10. While it is cheap to keep old hardware around as spares or run on newer sparc hardware (which is too busy doing other stuff for it to be desirable) eventually problems will crop up. Has anyone had success virtualising SunOS 5.5.1 for sparc on an x86 platform?
Only when you have poor bandwidth and/or high latency. If you are close to the host it is far superior to VNC. There really is nothing better yet - the MS terminal thing really is not even as good as exporting a virtual X windows display over VNC and although Citrix is better than the MS solution it still can't beat putting single application windows on your screen from a couple of dozen different hosts like I can easily do now. You can of course also use X on MS Windows machines.
If you re-read the Grand-Parent it actually says Linux has a steeper learning curve than "your run-of-the-mill Windows admin would like". That doesn't mean it has a steeper learning curve than Windows, it means that it's harder to learn than someone who already knows Windows would like. It could, in fact, have a much more shallow learning curve than Windows and yet someone who knows Windows and doesn't know Linux could still not think the curve is worth it. So I think what the Grand-Parent, I think he/she is saying that in general Linux is viewed as being "too hard to be worth it", and that it's a misconception.
I created a site which became a top 100 site during the .COM boom. We started out on Linux. Due to some investor pressure and visibility aspects, we moved to sun hardware. (Being a portable Java app, it wasn't a big port.) The hardware was nice; overpriced, but pretty nice. We paid the big bucks for it, and the support. We had several memory leak and crash issues that Sun attempted to fix, and escalated quite nicely and got us some personal attention. But when you're paying a million bucks for a fancy server, even having to help hunt down such bugs is unacceptable. After the .COM crash, we reverted to Linux/x86 machines, and were just as happy and reliable as ever. (Sept 11th finally took us out for good.)
Sun hardware is good, the company and its products are nice. But personally, with a properly designed application that doesn't depend upon certain hardware, it really is unnecessary in this day and age.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Just be sure to watch out for the boot archive corruption problem. The new bootloader (legacy Grub) can potentially make your Solaris 10, release 2 system much less reliable than a release 1 system.
For some reason, Grub stores a memory image of the kernel in the root filesystem. This image is loaded during the bootstrap process so that the bootloader does not have to perform I/O on the root filesystem before the kernel's available. The image gets updated via a "bootadm update-archive" when the system goes down _gracefully_.
What can burn you is if you modify something on the root filesystem (we have yet to narrow this down) but don't bring the server down or update the boot archive. If the system goes down unexpectedly while in this state, _it_will_not_boot_! The system will complain about a corrupted boot archive and require you to go into single-user mode to fix the problem. This usually requires one to clear the system/boot (IIRC) service, update the boot-archive and reboot. There's no fix for this, the only workaround is to run a cron job to update the boot archive.
We discovered this issue when one of our server rooms lost power. We spent _days_ fixing the corrupted boot archives. As far as I know, this problem is not documented in any system manuals.
Windows do not scale.
I know. Been there, seen others try to do it, got the bloody T shirt.
If you have a bussiness that is likely to grow fast, do yourself a favour and keep Windows out of your datacentre.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Now data is consolidated from many disparate places and we are beginning to see virutalization, for which Sun has a very good and simple offering (zones) at absolutely no extra cost.
Try virtualizing Windows. Soon you'll go mad figuring the licensing and legal issues, not to speak about performance.
With Sun you just type a few commands, have to ask permission to nobody, and are in bussiness. And using an OS that scales properly from prototype to full production and then to serving more clients than originally expected.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It sounds like you are a manager yourself...
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
Can someone tell me what the technical differences are between commercial UNIXes and Linux? I read Solaris was based on BSD, so that one's obvious...but what about the others?
I'm assuming obviously that of course there are driver differences and so on as well...but are there any major architectural differences?
"No, they AREN'T using X11"
So what was this package marked "X11" I just installed of my 10.4 Tiger DVD?
You can install X11 on OS X, of course, just as you can install any other app.
"Apple" however, is certainly not "using" it. Their GUI is not based on X11 at all (hence the need to install it separately if you want to run X11 programs).
You can install X11 on every other operating system on the planet as well... That doesn't mean Microsoft is using X11.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant