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Sun Offering Optimized AMP Stack On Solaris

Posted by kdawson on from the LAMP=~s/L/S/ dept.

tbray writes "This is your friendly local Sun corporate drone reporting that we're going to be building and optimizing and DTrace-ing and shipping and supporting the AMP part of LAMP (details here). I think that basically the whole tech industry, excepting Microsoft, is now at least partly in the AMP camp."

31 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Well, I'm AMP'd by denmarkw00t · · Score: 2, Funny

    Will Sun also be rolling out energy drinks for server admins?

    1. Re:Well, I'm AMP'd by Ant+P. · · Score: 2, Funny

      An optimised SPAM stack! Just what we need!

  2. The job isn't finished yet, until all of...(NICE!) by linuxbaby · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Great quote from TFA:

    The job isn't finished yet, until all of Apache and MySQL and PostgreSQL and PHP and Python and and Ruby and Rails are in the package, all optimized for Solaris, all stuffed with DTrace probes, and all with developer and production support available. It won't be long.
  3. i love carpet... i love desk.. by President_Camacho · · Score: 2, Funny

    We're going to be building and optimizing and DTrace-ing and shipping and supporting the AMP part of LAMP (details here).

    I love lamp.

    --
    Wizard Needs Food, Badly
  4. Yeah but... by dasOp · · Score: 2, Funny

    How about an optimizied, Dtraced and -l"-froot" free telnetd?

  5. Meanwhile... by linguae · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...Microsoft is announcing an optimized ISA (IIS Server, SQL Server, ASP.NET) Linked List on Windows Vista(TM). More details to follow.

  6. You call that an AMP stack? by stratjakt · · Score: 2, Funny

    THIS is an amp stack. /dundee

    --
    I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
    1. Re:You call that an AMP stack? by hotdip · · Score: 2, Funny

      dude, that looks like a half-stack to me.

  7. Yawn.... by CodeShark · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Seriously....since I don't really want to use Sun hardware or Solaris, tell me again, why would I want to leave the "L" (Linux) out of the Apache/MySql/Php stack? Especially given the fact that most of the security and bug fixes --at least for Php and MySql -- which pop up are first dealt with in the Linux end of the stack.


    Seems to me that this is not so much News as it is "snooze..."

    --
    ...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
    1. Re:Yawn.... by gstoddart · · Score: 2, Informative

      Seriously....since I don't really want to use Sun hardware or Solaris, tell me again, why would I want to leave the "L" (Linux) out of the Apache/MySql/Php stack?

      The same reason anyone wants to run Sun hardware -- sheer size, (preceived) reliability, as well as a vendor you think you can trust who sells good support packages.

      As much as Linux has been really making inroads into the core UNIX market by using commodity hardware, at some point, that big honking Sun server which they promise to have someone on site within a few hours moves you into a whole different level of enterprise hardware.

      Sure, you could spend the money on a huge Sun box and then probably run Linux on it. But, if you need hardware that costs that much, the extra costs for the support contract dwindle into not important. Anything based on PC architecture isn't quite going to scale as big as what a Sun machine. And, they also get to piggy back on LAMP, and say "OK, here's a turnkey solution for anything you'd use LAMP for, but it's on bigger hardware and comes with a support contract".

      Cheers
      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    2. Re:Yawn.... by m0rph3us0 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      For us we doubled the performance on our db by switching from RHEL4 to Solaris 10. The support for Solaris 10 is less than for RHEL4

    3. Re:Yawn.... by Kadin2048 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I don't think there's any real reason to, if you're familiar with Linux ... Sun would like people to use Solaris, and they have some interesting administration tools, and of course they'll sell you a support contract and might be more "PHB compatible" than many Linux vendors, but I've yet to see any good comparisons.

      A while back there were some interesting comparisons of SQL performance on Darwin/Mac OS X versus Linux, under controlled conditions on similar hardware; it would be interesting to see a Sun-AMP versus LAMP comparison, done by some disinterested party, using the same versions of all the same software except for the OS, wherever possible. If Sun could outperform Linux, it would be intriguing ... but if they can't, except for people who already are familiar and more comfortable with it than they are with Linux, I don't see a major draw.

      --
      "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
    4. Re:Yawn.... by nuzak · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Hell, I more than doubled my performance on my filesystem-heavy loads going from RHEL4 to RHEL3. The syscall overhead went through the roof in EL4, even with SELinux off. I got tired of trying to compile a kernel (hey vendors, would it kill you to ship a config that doesn't panic when I compile using it without changing anything?) so I just retrograded. The next move will most likely be lateral, to another vendor.

      --
      Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
    5. Re:Yawn.... by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Interesting

      A while back there were some interesting comparisons of SQL performance on Darwin/Mac OS X versus Linux, under controlled conditions on similar hardware

      Ah, but remember -- Sun can sell you a machine which goes well beyond the whole 'similar hardware'.

      If they can sell someone an optimized, supported, and enterprise-class piece of hardware which is basically turnkey, and can fill the job of being your web-facing front-end, there will be companies for whom this is a very good idea.

      What Sun can sell you is the higher end for which there is no way you could build it with a commodity PC. Enterprise customers have enterprise hardware needs, and enterprise mindsets. Being "PHB Compatible" is a valuable thing in business, cause if things go to shit, you have someone who can come in and make things go again.

      Sun isn't trying to get the hobbyist shop; they're targeting higher end companies with bigger budgets who want reliability.

      If for nothing else than they're going to support the AMP stack, I have to commend Sun on this decision. This can only be good for those parts of the stack, and it won't really hurt Linux in any way -- this is complementary. This will have the effect of giving PHBs an option which uses Apache, MySQL, and PHP/PostgressSQL (whichever it is). I don't see this as being a 'lose' for the OSS people.

      Why is Slashdot so pathologically opposed to someone buying a computer and operating system, even if it makes sense for their business goals?

      Cheers
      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    6. Re:Yawn.... by nadamsieee · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Seriously....since I don't really want to use Sun hardware or Solaris, tell me again, why would I want to leave the "L" (Linux) out of the Apache/MySql/Php stack? Especially given the fact that most of the security and bug fixes --at least for Php and MySql -- which pop up are first dealt with in the Linux end of the stack.

      Solaris is a pretty darn good product. And if Sun starts providing full time support for the "AMP" part of the stack, you can probably bet that bug fixes for Solaris won't be far behind those for Linux. And if Sun follows through and GPLv3's Solaris, things really start to get interesting...

    7. Re:Yawn.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      why would I want to leave the "L" (Linux) out of the Apache/MySql/Php stack?


      DTrace, zones, ZFS. Then throw in the Sun StorageTek Availability Suite and Solaris Cluster for fun: both are available as free downloads (AVS is open source (or will be soon)) or with upto 24x7 support.

    8. Re:Yawn.... by squiggleslash · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Sun sells computers that use a GPL'd CPU, and run a SDDL'd operating system (which will probably move to GPLv3 when that's released.) What's proprietary about it again?

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  8. Re:The "AMP Camp"??? by CodeShark · · Score: 3, Informative
    Ummm, no.... A perfectly tuned, very very expensive MS stack blows the doors off the average LAMP stack.


    But spend the same amount of money on the LAMP stacks, and you get can high availability plus database replication, load balanced multiple application servers, plus the bandwidth, and probably most of the programming expense, pepsi and pizza a team could could consume -- per year.


    Seems to me that ASP and Java are the tired stacks. Not LAMP & Ruby.

    --
    ...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
  9. Postgres Migration by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wish there were a simple tool I could run that would analyze a LAMP install and migrate it to Postgres instead of MySQL.

    I don't want to get into a holy war about the relative merits: we already use Postgres, we will not support two database systems, we are not switching from Postgres to MySQL. MySQL might be good for others, but not for us.

    But we do get these LAMP apps that come bundled with MySQL. Usually they don't use any MySQL specific features that Postgres (and maybe moving some functions across the app/DB boundary) can't directly support. So I'd like to get a LAMP -> LAPP migrator that will automate the switch. Leaving optimizations for after the switch, to be performed by other (Postgres) tools or programmers/DBAs. The open source of these two DBs, and the open source of all these LAMP apps, should make migration between them accessible.

    I'm sure there are lots of people like me. Where's the tool that makes the open source as good for migrating among these programs as creating them from scratch?

    --

    --
    make install -not war

    1. Re:Postgres Migration by TheNinjaroach · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Better programing of these LAMP packages will end the need for a LAMP -> LAPP migration tool. When the database connections are abstracted properly it becomes fairly trivial to swap out DB backends without changing much, if anything of the application itself.

      --
      I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
    2. Re:Postgres Migration by larry+bagina · · Score: 2, Funny

      When the database connections are abstracted properly it becomes fairly trivial to swap out DB backends without changing much, if anything of the application itself.

      Nice in theory, but MySQL, being an "extended subset" of SQL, doesn't support a lot of standard SQL features, then makes up for it by doing it their own nonstandard way. Perl is nice about abstraction with the DBI, but PHP is a complete mess. Every PHP project I've seen either a) uses raw mysql_* functions or b) uses a roll-your-own db "abstraction" which is tied to mysql tighter than the ball gag in CmdrTaco's mouth when Cowboy Neal re-enacts the gimp scene from Pulp Fiction.

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    3. Re:Postgres Migration by Furry+Ice · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you've never actually maintained a large application that supported more than one database. It's not the most difficult problem to solve in the world, but it's pretty far from trivial at times. SQL may be standardized, but no one implements the standard.

      Sometimes, you end up having to have a different schema for the different databases because of optimizations that one supports and the other doesn't. For example, modeling trees in Oracle can be done with the CONNECT BY clause, which very few (any?) other databases have, so instead you choose whatever your database can deal with (there are many representations for trees; there's a whole book on the subject, actually: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/bookdescription.c ws_home/702605/description#description).

      Often you can choose something that works reasonably well on all the platforms you need to support, but if it ends up being a bottleneck (I've seen it happen more than once), you end up making different schemas and having to deal with all the headaches that come with it.

  10. Re:The "AMP Camp"??? by m0rph3us0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What makes the MS stack shine, is the developer tools. Try debugging through from the webserver to the webservices, debug the XSLT, down into the database and into the stored procedures in LAMP.

    If you could do it it would take at least 5 different applications running on different machines. There is nothing like being able to watch a particular users request flow right through the whole system. Yeah it takes a few minutes to setup all the watch conditions on production hardware, but in DEV it is just beautiful.

  11. Re:SAMP VS LAMP by joe_bruin · · Score: 4, Funny
    No doubt, SAMP > LAMP.

    strcmp confirms it, SAMP is greater than LAMP!

    $ cat amp.c
    main() { printf("%d\n", strcmp("SAMP", "LAMP")); }
    $ gcc amp.c
    $ ./a.out
    1
  12. telnetd fix now available by dananderson · · Score: 2, Informative
    A fix for telnetd is now available for free download from sunsolve.sun.com e SPARC patch is 120068-02 or later and X86 patch is 120069-02.

    In any case, it's probably best to disable telnetd with svcadm disable telnet Better yet, next time you install or upgrade use the "reduced networking profile" which has most services disabled (not ssh).

  13. Re:The "AMP Camp"??? by killjoe · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Yeah, because they have ASP.NET, which pretty much blows the doors off of most other things productivity-wise."

    As a ASP.NET programmer let me be the first one to say BULL FUCKING SHIT!!!.

    ASP.NET makes it easy to slap controls on a screen and bind them to a recordset. If that was the entirety of your programming efforts then it would be productive. In the real world that's like 10% of job or less. In the real world I have debugging, refactoring, building, deploying, testing, and a billion other tasks where visual studio gets in my way and windows itself throws up roadblocks the size of winnebegos.

    When you consider the the whole of the software development life cycle ASP.NET and visual studio are at the bottom of the stack.

    --
    evil is as evil does
  14. Dtrace by starseeker · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I have a feeling Dtrace probes might be a big, big win here - if they instrument it as they have the Solaris system itself that level of performance tuning integrated into the entire software stack may allow for some Really Impressive payoffs.

    On the high end, bottlenecks are something to really watch for and identify, and Dtrace is an excellent tool for that sort of activity. This will be very interesting to watch.

    Also, if Solaris DOES go GPLv3, the immediate availability of a superior SAMP stack that is GPL could turn a lot of heads, and may even displace some LAMP systems quickly and painlessly.

    --
    "I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
  15. Re:The "AMP Camp"??? by gbjbaanb · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Its not that you *have* to do that amount of debugging, but that you *can*. I suppose it does matter if you have several teams that write different tiers of a n-tier architecture (we've done that - web monkeys wrote the front end to a specified API, DBdevs write stored procedures. Poor application programmers get the blame when anything goes wrong, and poor system/middleware devs have to then find out who's right (or wrong as is the case). So being able to debug all the way through is rather handy.

    Really - don't knock something for being good.

  16. Get Some Clues - One, Perhaps Two by Smackintosh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The answer is in the form of a question: do you have any clue as to what you're talking about?

    I'm being completely serious here.

    Anyone who knows anything about the IT marketplace will know that of the UNIX-variant operating systems (yes, that includes Linux), Sun Solaris has quite a significant share. In fact, a good deal of the professional UNIX admins out there prefer Solaris over the other choices, and again, that includes Linux.

  17. Re:The "AMP Camp"??? by larry+bagina · · Score: 4, Funny

    LAMP still easily give you the best price/performance.

    Illegal division by zero

    --
    Do you even lift?

    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  18. Just because AMP is all you know about... by Marcus+Green · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "basically the whole tech industry, excepting Microsoft, is now at least partly in the AMP camp"

    Go to any job site of your choice.

    Do searches on
    apache
    mysql
    perl or PHP

    Then do searches on
    Oracle
    Java

    Allowing that most Java development is on the server side, try to draw a conclusion. Are these people spending good money advertising these jobs because they are using the technologies?. Is the whole tech industry, except Microsoft at least partly in the AMP camp or just the tiny bit that you are familiar with?