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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.""
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.
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.
Have you actually looked at what Sun is doing these days?
Not only are they offering AMD Opteron (And soon Intel) server and workstation solutions running Solaris 10 x86 (which is damn near feature-for-feature as Solaris 10 on Sparc), their prices have come down.
I'm typing this on an Ultra20 Opteron workstation that I bought last year under one of their offers. 3 year service and support (Hardware and software including the dev tools) for $1k, and they bill my credit card for 3 payments over that time, no interest, no BS.
- Roach
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.
Have you actually looked at what Sun is doing these days?
:) And Sun is refinding themselves (if that makes any sense).
Yes
Sun used to only have a few products that were relatively expensive, but very good.
Look at there offerings today. They have _many_ products in all shapes and sizes, and there prices have really come down in price. I've been critical of Sun for years, and they really seem to be adapting to the market by offering everything from an E15k to inexpensive x86 boxes at about commodity prices with better engineering than your COTS junk.
Things like the x4500 are really turning heads (even here on slashdot).
Today's market requires more disposable and inexpensive computers. Why pay $10k for a server today that will last for years, when in 2-3 years it is way outperformed by a $1-2k server? Answering this question took Sun a few years, but now they seem to have answered that question.
folks dont change schedulers as part of minor patch releases
As an aside, you can actually run different schedulers concurrently in Solaris... each process or process group can be assinged a specific scheduler other than the default one (which is Time Share, or the "TS" scheduler).
For example, you can run your Oracle db processes with the FX (fixed priority) scheduler, and/or another set of processes with the RT (real time) scheduler. See the priocntl command man page on how to manipulate this and details on which schedulers are available.