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NYT Ponders the Future of Solaris In a Linux/Windows World
JerkBoB links to a story at the New York Times about the
future prospects of Sun's Solaris, excerpting: "Linux is enjoying growth, with a contingent of devotees too large to be called a cult following at this point. Solaris, meanwhile, has thrived as a longstanding, primary Unix platform geared to enterprises. But with Linux the object of all the buzz in the industry, can Sun's rival Solaris Unix OS hang on, or is it destined to be displaced by Linux altogether?"
it'll just be a niche product.
personally i think it's sad sun blew their chances with solaris, it's superior to linux in security and performace.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
If your only experience with Solaris is v8 or v9, you really need to check out Solaris 10. It is a complete night and day difference in ease of use and features. Add to that the volume of useful enterprise management software from Sun (the N1 stack, and now the new xVM stack) and you have an enterprise that is a dream to maintain.
I've been doing straight Solaris 10 admin for the last 2 years (linux for 4 years before that), and shortly will once again be taking a position that will be 99% linux. I will miss Solaris 10. I still love both OS's, but Solaris wins in my book at the moment.
"Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live." - Mark Twain, "Taming the Bicycle"
Please elaborate with what aeras and tasks that Linux is so good at that Solaris
can't touch?
I use both Solaris and Linux in my environments and Solaris 10 is by far the superior
OS in my opinion. We have Solaris servers on both SPARC and AMD64 and Linux on AMD and Intel 64 bit hardware.
We had migrated a number of Sybase instances to Linux, but we kept having reliability and performance problems, so we migrated them back to Solaris but Solaris 10 on AMD64 boxes
and we've been extremely happy with the results.
Our company is current migrating all of our market data servers to Solaris AMD64 servers in Zones and will reduce the number of Linux servers which stand at 25 to 4 X4600s running Solaris 10. In our testing of Solaris on x4600 as opposed to DL585s (same CPU and memory configurations) we have seen a large performance gain and cheaper operating costs, since we don't have to pony up a RedHat license for each server.
How is cost an issue, when you can get Solaris for the same price as Linux? FREE! Both offer paid support, both cost approx. the same.
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
I use the Solaris 10 JDS everyday at work and also run Ubuntu and Solaris 10 x86 at home, with zones on it. Basically the "apt-get" you're looking for is called "pkg-get" and is available from blastwave.org.
The future of Solaris on the desktop is not as exciting as that of Ubuntu, or any other wildly popular Linux distro. The enterprise future of Solaris is way more exciting IMO. The reason is this; Solaris 10 Zones are ready for primetime enterprise whereas Linux is still being pondered and in most cases not being taken seriously due to the open source nature of the beast and the sheer number of different distros, many of which lack and enterprise level support. We had a Red Hat box in our DC and we retired it. Meanwhile we're approaching 400+ Solaris 10 zones and we're coming in at *HALF* the price of the VMware solution that the Windows side of the house provides. Guess who's growing faster? Even with more expensive boxen our solution is a better value and provides a very solid framework for many, many environments.
As an OSS advocate and 20+ year SunOS/Solaris admin I will welcome both operating systems in my home and data center. Like the man said above, you know one, you practically know the other. It's all *nix in the end.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
... except Sun appears to be too busy turning it into a desktop OS. Many of the underlying subsystems that have been added in the past few major releases need some work to make them enterprise ready. [My favorite is the lack of group and netgroup support in RBAC. How can they possibly push it as a sudo replacement without that?] Instead, they are too busy screwing around with things like WiFi support and replacing Jumpstart with a system that doesn't even support begin/pre and finish/post scripts... and asking the community to justify it. WTH?
Sun is about to lose the enterprise completely and they don't even know it. ZFS is interesting in a 'last decade' sort of way, for those machines where you care about the local storage. Lustre--which only works on Linux--is what is really needed to take on this decade's problems. While they are porting it to Solaris, why should I as a large enterprise use it on Solaris when I can use it on Linux today?
There are lots of things Sun got right with Solaris. But it is clear that they simply couldn't (or, more likely, wouldn't, given the arrogance of your typical Sun engineer) execute and keep up with what was happening around them. Too much time trying to build 'perfect' solutions instead of giving us, the customer, what we wanted even if it meant the interface wasn't Stable.