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?"

Comments

Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

The current solaris systems will only have issue with this if they actually need to be rebooted one day and the new admins notice its not linux.

Re:Of course

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

You say Solaris, I say SunOS, let's call the whole thing old. ;-)

Seriously, if you can't figure one out, you don't know the other very well.

Re:Of course

[dnoyeb]

Thats a technical reason. In the US though, its about shareholder perception. If the CEO is trying to do big things and keeps talking in "old" terms, he will quickly be accused of being out of touch with reality.

Like the post said, Linux is generating the buzz. The money follows the buzz even if it does not make sense.

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

The money follows the buzz even if it does not make sense.

I'm intrigued by your philosophy on economics. I'll stuff a bee's nest up my butt and see if people start throwing coins into my guitar case.

Re:Of course

[Francis85]

I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Of course

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The money follows the buzz even if it does not make sense.

I'm intrigued by your philosophy on economics. I'll stuff a bee's nest up my butt and see if people start throwing coins into my guitar case.

If he is right, don't expect anyone to be throwing money into your guitar case - instead they will be stuff quarters up your ass to follow the buzz.

Re:Of course

[Samah]

The money does indeed follow buzzwords, like "Neural Network" for example...
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-No-Quack.aspx

Re:Of course

[Joebert]

Hold him down, I'll lube up the guitar case.

Re:Of course

[INT_QRK]

Just as a data point, I loaded Open Solaris on an IBM laptop purely for giggles. On the surface it looked and smelled like Linux with the default Gnome desktop and application preload (openoffice.org, Firefox, etc). Very fast. Had issues with wireless that took some research. As a linux user, my main difficulties were at the command line, understandably, since several Gnu tools (e.g., iwconfig!) were not there and it took some work finding the Solaris equivalents. Since that was the idea, no problem. Learning opportunity, but a comprehensive xref would have been nice. Otherwise, performance just excellent. After having frolicked for a couple of weeks, however, I retrograded to Ubuntu 8.04 mainly for comfort and lack of a few OS apps that I couldn't get to port properly.

Re:Of course

[jc42]

Yeah; that's a great WTF classic. My favorite part was at the end, when the neural net produced the gem:

The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack.

The blog then asks "Rather Zen, isn't it?" In fact, even with my meagre knowledge of Mandarin, I can see that if you were to do a word-for-word translation to Chinese characters (perhaps leaving out "the" most of the time, since Chinese languages don't much use such articles), the result is fairly good Mandarin, and sounds very Zen.

We might conjecture that this is where the Zen masters got their start. Back around 1200 AD, when those Korean guys were building the world's first small, efficient, transportable printing presses, some other nearby hacker monks were experimenting with early uses of electricity. They built the first programmable computers, and being scholarly types, started writing programs to do philosophical calculations. The hardware was lost to history, but the resulting philosophy wasn't.

Ya think?

Nahh.. its not going anywhere.

[k1e0x]

Solaris is a great big iron OS. I don't think it will be disappearing anytime soon.

Re:Nahh.. its not going anywhere.

[Anonymous Coward]

... 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.

Re:Nahh.. its not going anywhere.

[jonasj]

Sun is about to lose the enterprise completely and they don't even know it. [...] Lustre--which only works on Linux--is what is really needed to take on this decade's problems.

-- parent post

Lustre is a scalable, secure, robust, highly-available cluster file system. It is designed, developed and maintained by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

-- http://www.lustre.org/

Hmm...

Re:Nahh.. its not going anywhere.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Really? Do you have any sort of cite, because I have anecdotes out the ass that do not indicate that Solaris is "losing the enterprise". My wife is a contract sysadmin at multiple Fortune 100 companies, and they've been replacing Redhat and Windows Datacenter en masse.

Then again, people like you probably think that IBM mainframes are going away as well.

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.

Most Sun engineers I've dealt with actually have a CS/CE background, as opposed to the Linux folks which look like rejects from amateur hour.

Re:Nahh.. its not going anywhere.

[funwithBSD]

That is only half of it.

It also places it's buffers in kernel space and tries to pull off the old "Use all available memory" Windows trick.

Then, when something needs the memory it gives it back... only it does not. Plays hob with Oracle and even screwed up the ST driver.

set zfs:zfs_arc_max=0x100000000

is in all our systems using ZFS. It limits it to 4GB.

Don't get me wrong, ZFS is very useful for certain things. For example we use it to provide direct-to-disk backup space for Netbackup. Combined with synthetic full backups it saves time and tape in our environment.

We also needed to ship 60TB of data that was on Windows machines. One solution was a wire. The other solution was to ship it by Thumper (in a shockproof 19" rack road case) with all those disks set up by ZFS and shared by SAMBA.

Dump the data and ship it back... looks like 2 weeks turn around.

Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[compumike]

The purpose of the operating system is to act between the hardware, system abstractions, and the algorithms. But now that virtualization is taking over, the hardware responsibility of OSes is being minimized -- or centralized. Therefore, the advantages of one hardware platform can be more easily decoupled from those of an OS.

In my opinion, Sun was always known for rock-solid hardware, and this move toward hardware-agnostic computing means that Solaris gets just a bit less relevant today. Especially since cost is still a factor, and the hardware-specific advantages are disappearing...

--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[certain death]

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.

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[mysidia]

The purpose of the operating system is to act between the hardware, system abstractions, and the algorithms. But now that virtualization is taking over, the hardware responsibility of OSes is being minimized -- or centralized. Therefore, the advantages of one hardware platform can be more easily decoupled from those of an OS.

It's more important than ever, and Solaris delivers virtualization through Sun logical domains, hardware virtualization (zones), and the xVM hypervisor based on Xen (with Solaris dom0).

Now with Virtualization: if your physical machine fails, and your hypervisor cannot recover immediately from the error (without a reboot), you don't just have one server down -- you have many virtual machines disrupted.

Your Linux VMs that use ext3 may have some problems after that unclean death (filesystem corruption); whereas, your Solaris VMs backed by ZFS are less likely to have fatal problems, as filesystem backed by ZFS with redundancy 1 with no issues, as ZFS all but guarantees filesystem itself is consistent.

You can restart axed VMs on another server, perhaps: you have a shared storage environment, but this disruption costs something, and it is higher the more VMs you were running on that machine.

Also: there are application I/O-intensive workloads that do not virtualize well, such as high-load databases i.e. your 5 billion row Oracle DB.

Solaris is perfect for managing the hardware for these specialized applications that are not efficient to be run in a virtual environment.

ZFS may also be a major factor.

If you have shared filesystems -- you need SANs & NASes.

Do you use a $5 million NAS, or do you buy a couple high-end Sun servers, load them up with a direct-attach storage arrays, and share via NFS in order to provide a good bit of reasonably fast storage on the cheap? hmmm...

Think about it: Linux isn't really even a possibility for backing your servers' storage, you want 99.9999% uptime of your servers, right?

Systems based on Linux cannot generally guarantee uptimes like that (yet); although it is over time getting closer.

Your storage can't be efficiently shared by a VM (I/O in a virtual machine is notoriously slow, plus the CPU usage and available memory for caching is limited by other usage of the host).

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[ArsonSmith]

It's kinda funny watching things go in circles. First it was hardware built to run one specific app. Someone said lets build something so we can run multiple apps on general purpose hardware. So the Operating system was born. Now we want to run multiple operating systems on even more general purpose hardware.

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

just atended a seminar about solaris LDOMs at the office. with LDOMs (which only run on niagara T1 and T2 CPUS) you can assign a whole PCI bus to a single guest OS in such way that the guest has full control of that bus, which implies no performance penalty if that bus have a couple of HBAs to connect it to a storage/SAN.

the sun guy at the seminar (same instructor that ran the solaris 10 administration course I took last year) made it very clear that the kind of hardware backed virtualization provided by LDOMs is the second best for high I/O apps, losing only for hardware partitioning, and it's way ahead of the kind of full software virtualization provided by vmware, virtual pc or virtual box.

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[allenw]

No, you use a few thousand cheap x86 boxes to decentralize your storage and move your computations to where the data is located. :)

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[Lennie]

AMD is supposed to support virtualization of I/O on their processors, but I've not seen any implementation of it.

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[phantomfive]

That is the problem with Sun: they make the most amazing systems, for a market that doesn't exist. They have systems that can hot plug processors. If that is not I cool, I don't know what is. But then if you have a cluster of $200 machines, and you can just replace the whole machine, then the usefulness of such technology gets less and less, unfortunately.

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[TheRaven64]

with LDOMs (which only run on niagara T1 and T2 CPUS) you can assign a whole PCI bus to a single guest OS in such way that the guest has full control of that bus

You can do that on IBM systems and on modern Intel systems too. The definition of 'modern' here is really another way of saying 'expensive' though, and you're likely to be paying more for the kind of Intel system that has this capability than you are for a T2. Usually Intel catches up through economies of scale, but the segment of the market actually wanting this kind of feature is relatively small, so they might not.

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[An dochasac]

But does it run DOS?

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[Larryish]

Uhyup. And we went from thin clients and servers to standalone peers, and now are moving back to thin clients and servers. Is it practical, or just a fad? These thngs seem to come and go in cycles.

Speaking of fads, I hope miniskirts make a comeback. YAAAAAYYY MINISKIRTS!!!

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[Tweenk]

I recall that Linux has a compile-time option for enabling CPU hotplug too: link. However I'm not sure whether it's the same thing.

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[domatic]

It is but with what you pay for hardware that supports it you may well have other good reasons to consider Solaris instead.

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[street struttin']

That feature has to be supported by the hardware, too. How many servers do you know where you can take the cover off and pull out a CPU while it's on and nothing bad happens? I somehow doubt the sparc hardware that supports this option is supported in Linux, or at least not supported well.

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[mistahkurtz]

Also: there are application I/O-intensive workloads that do not virtualize well, such as high-load databases i.e. your 5 billion row Oracle DB.

at least with vmware VI3, Oracle, specifically, and other databases such as *SQL, Exchange, etc, actually perform better in a virtualized environment.

please note that this is not an out-of-box solution, or something attainable through a point and click wizard. a couple of years ago, this would be correct. today, at least on vmware (and i would assume virtualiron, xen, and all the others too, either now, or in the near future), high I/O VMs virtualize very well.

a lot of this has to do with cheap hardware. SAS drives are falling in price, though slowly. thank companies like pre-Dell Equallogic, LeftHand, Compellent, etc for bringing higher-end SAN equipment to the large market of the SMB. multi-core, multi-CPU, with memory scalable to hundreds of gigs now costs roughly the same as a crappy used car. even fibre equipment, while crazy expensive, has dropped in price. thank media and art departments demanding Apple Final Cut, an inexpensive Apple/Promise SAN, and separately, the demand for web-facing databases offering real-time functionality.

things are changing in storage, virtualization, and infrastructure.

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[jedidiah]

> at least with vmware VI3, Oracle, specifically, and other databases such as *SQL, Exchange, etc, actually perform better in a virtualized environment.

Databases like Oracle SUCK in virtualized environments. Nevermind
vmware, they don't even tolerate "zones" very well. They can be
VERY demanding applications and hit more of the system than just
the disk controllers. They are far more likely to "melt" your
hypervisor.

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[jdanton1]

Stratus redundant hardware can allow for 99.999% uptime on Linux.

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[paulsnx2]

The purpose of the operating system is to act between the hardware, system abstractions, and the algorithms. But now that virtualization is taking over, the hardware responsibility of OSes is being minimized -- or centralized. Therefore, the advantages of one hardware platform can be more easily decoupled from those of an OS.

The primary and universal purpose of an OS isn't to provide interfaces to hardware, abstractions, UI, or functionality. If that were so, how is it that the fundamental issue with Solaris brought up in this thread revolve around configuration issues?

The primary purpose of an OS is to support, maintain, and protect the configuration of a set of applications onto your hardware. Nobody cares *how* that happens (i.e. whether the functionality involved comes from the applications or from the OS).

Virtualization merely wraps up the functionality of an OS so that the OS and a set of applications can be deployed as something that looks like just another an application.

In that sense, virtualization makes the configuration problem easier. The applications only have to be configured into some standard OS image, and the OS that deploys the virtualization only has to manage the configuration of the "virtualized OS".

Solaris will succeed or fail in a domain such as the enterprise or desktop domains based on how well they solve the configuration issues in those domains.

No different than any other OS.

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[sinkemlow]

Yes, clustering a bunch of small systems is great ... except when your application is not supported on a cluster. The the awesome power of Solaris on Sun systems shines brightly in these cases.

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[boccaccio's hamster]

That is the problem with Sun: they make the most amazing systems, for a market that doesn't exist. They have systems that can hot plug processors. If that is not I cool, I don't know what is. But then if you have a cluster of $200 machines, and you can just replace the whole machine, then the usefulness of such technology gets less and less, unfortunately.

But what about energy and cooling costs on that cluster? I recently attended a session by Sun at Oracle World that was describing Sun's Coolthreads Technology. If Sun can show significant energy savings using their hardware and virtualization, then all can be justified.

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[mistahkurtz]

sorry, but either you're doing it wrong, or you didn't notice the part where i said it's not an out-of-box solution. it requires actual thought, planning, direction, testing, etc. i'll assume you were trying Oracle in a virtual environment in order to run multiple OS instances on one machine? in most of the successful implementations that i've heard of, this is not how it's done. you use the virtual environment for its scalability, it's HA features (think vmotion, etc), and so on. it's not so you can squeeze that 10% load fileserver in as a VM.....

take the following with a grain of salt: http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2007/11/ten-reasons-why.html

i seriously have to wonder if your response is just a case of poor implementation, or if you're a default-answer-is-no person, or if you're on the "DBs suxor in VMs, d00d" bandwagon, like many are on the "i hate M$" bandwagon....(or maybe you work on Oracle VM?)

anyway, the success stories that i'm aware of all included DB architects, SAN architects, VMware gurus, linux and windows gurus, and a formal plan, with the correct hardware implementation (including fiber, new multi-cpu multicore servers, many hundreds of gigs of RAM, and so on... i guess better luck next time?

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[mysidia]

DB servers aren't the only example. How about site NTP servers? These need to keep very accurate system clocks. Sun logical domains will keep an accurate system time.

VMware VMs on the other hand have major problems with accurate timekeeping. Clocks running too slow; clocks running too fast; clocks fluctuating wildly. I've seen it all. Which plays havoc with authentication services (users can't login when the clock drift exceeds 5 minutes to the KDC).

sorry, but either you're doing it wrong, or you didn't notice the part where i said it's not an out-of-box solution. it requires actual thought, planning, direction, testing, etc.

Major downside. Solaris on certain hardware is an out-of-the-box solution that works and is vendor certified platform for many major applications such as DB systems.

Dedicating an army of DB architects, SAN architects, VMware, Linux and Windows Gurus to shoehorn Oracle into an environment it doesn't fit naturally is expensive and poses problems as the environment evolves (possibly the non-vendor-certified solution stops working unexpectedly at some point).

Use of the army of experts should be focused on to the items where they provide the most benefit per $$$ spent, and on the tasks which equipment and software is known to be reliable for and officially supported; which is design of the general framework and virtualization of what may be safely virtualized.

HA can be provided by having two servers, and you don't waste millions having an army of experts waste time on those two or three servers that benefit from being raw over thousands that can readily be virtualized without penalty.

Experts are much more expensive to tie up than a little hardware you leave to spare by not oversubscribing your DB servers' equipment with other VMs.

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[alcourt]

It is my sincere hope that NFS based NAS will die. It is easily the worst possible solution for current networks when it comes to any situation where data is put on the share that is not acceptable to share to anyone with access to your entire network. The security is so awful that I'm amazed that auditors only have moderate language against it thus far. NFS V3 (which is all that most of the NAS vendors seem to support) security seems to roughly be the same as the r-services, meaning roughly that of a three foot chain link fence around a playground. It says please keep out, but that's all.

Oh, and as someone who has done real work on moderately high end Sun servers, anyone expecting five nines had better be prepared to spend a lot more than $5M for the solution. You listed six nines, which is even worse.

My experience with Linux has us on track to get an amazing 2.5 nines. We have had well over 12 hours of application downtime in the past eight months caused by still unexplained kernel panics that the vendor cannot identify if it is even hardware or software. It doesn't help that RHEL's IPSEC is so unstable by default as to fail several times a day. Took a lot of digging around to find a configuration change to stabilize that.

Re:Virtualization makes Solaris less relevant

[rubycodez]

for non-clustered some things shine even more brightly than Sun, I see the top ten tcp-c non-clustered benchmarks aren't held by sun boxes but by ibm, fujitsu, hp, nec, bull.....

solaris is the new AIX

[timmarhy]

it'll still be around because it's a good OS, worthy of being used.

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.

Re:solaris is the new AIX

[Shaman]

Easy to say. Not so easy to prove.

Re:solaris is the new AIX

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

it's superior to linux in security and performace.

You reckon Solaris is superior to linux in performace? I reckon these guys really know performace.

Re:solaris is the new AIX

[dosius]

Indeed, the nickname "Slowlaris" is well deserved.

-uso.

Re:solaris is the new AIX

[Ash-Fox]

SunOS was an enterprise grade UNIX before Linux hit 1.0. Linux and Windoze are the OSes that needs to prove something.

Windows and Linux is currently used extensively more than SunOS and Solaris in the Enterprise. I think you need to reevaluate things.

Re:solaris is the new AIX

[mysidia]

Indeed, the nickname "Slowlaris" is well deserved.

It used to be well-deserved; in Solaris v8. But in those days, the other OSes were slow also.

Those days are also long past. Modern versions of Solaris, like the current release, on current hardware, are not slow in the slightest.

Re:solaris is the new AIX

[lysergic.acid]

what do card tricks have to do with server performance?

and google's hardware strategy has always been to buy lots of cheap commodity hardware and to use lots of redundancy. in a one to one comparison, there'd be no match between one of google's cheap linux servers verus one of the Sun's SPARC+Solaris servers.

the key is in the volume of cheap servers they deploy. google simply builds massive server farms using off-the-shelf components. their software is written based on the premise that hardware will fail (they admit to having high disk failure rates), they just code their applications to anticipate that failure and write reliable software to overcome unreliable hardware.

their "cheap and fast" mantra refers to using simple hardware that is cheap and quick/easy to deploy, and likewise to replace. but without the redundancy of massive clusters, the performance would be very poor.

Re:solaris is the new AIX

[spearway]

Cheap and fast also mean lots of boxes using lots of power and creating lost of pollution. I though Google mantra was: do no evil.

Re:solaris is the new AIX

[Culture20]

[Solaris] is superior to linux in security and performace.

In the way that Solaris leaves telnetd unfirewalled, turned on, and with a remote vuln on their latest OS, or in the way that Solaris can't run in super dinky hardware?

Re:solaris is the new AIX

[Nyeerrmm]

I'd imagine, though its not something I have experience with (I'm in Aerospace), that while that argument would be very valid for a case where you only have a couple of servers, where triple redundancy would double or triple your power requirements, pollution, etc, if you scale it up to a lot of servers, as long as you can replace a broken component within the mean-time-to-failure divided by the number of servers, you could maintain triple redundancy with only two extra machines. At this point, its conceivable that the use of cheaper hardware might reduce the pollution per box, and with only 2 extra machines, you could come in lower.

Of course, I'm sure the actual situation is much more complex, but this is the first thing that occurred to me, and I'd guess its a fairly accurate example of smaller version of the problem. It also illustrates why cheap hardware might be good for google, but wouldn't be good for a smaller setup.

Re:solaris is the new AIX

[tonyr60]

Try a recent version. Telnetd is off, and it install and runs nicely on my new Acer 5620 laptop, with NO extra drivers. It just works, including wireless and web cam (that surprised me, actually). Not even vista or xp work properly without extra drivers.

Re:solaris is the new AIX

[andr00oo]

it's a good OS, worthy of being used.

it'll just be a niche product.

Yeah, just like OS/2.

it'll still be around

Yeah, just like OS/2.

Re:solaris is the new AIX

[An dochasac]

One point with google is that the company started when oil was $10/barrel. With oil 1000% more expensive, their massive "throw PCs at it" approach is as anachronistic as the 1964 Pontiac GTOs 100Hp 7 liter V8 engine is now.

Re:solaris is the new AIX

[jedidiah]

Yeah... but between then and now Sun mostly rested on it's
laurels and tried to ignore the x86 side of things as much
as they possibly could.

Despite the fact that they had a lukewarm offering of
their own, someone else came in and filled all of that
pent up demand for low cost Unix servers.

Re:solaris is the new AIX

[alcourt]

Performance is too aimed at what application you are evaluating, but security is my primary area so I'll speak up.

Linux security alerts too often require kernel patches. Due to major vendors not supporting even minor kernel patches, this requires these alerts go unremediated for months, or lose vendor support from common vendors of middleware, neither of which is an attractive option to a large business.

When writing audit compliance tools for four flavors of Unix: RHEL, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, we often find RHEL to be the most limiting in providing a reasonable way to check an audit control. Each OS has its time being the odd OS out, but Linux far more often just doesn't have a standard tool available (logins(1m) command comes to mind, a great, if seldom used tool for auditing user configurations and password settings). Yes, we are able to find workarounds, but it does require more effort than it should.

I've also noticed that Linux has required more care and feeding in other security related areas. In fact, the main areas Linux used to be ahead are areas where the other OS's either have caught up, or the workaround was surprisingly simple and global to all the other OS's to the point that Linux became the special case, albeit in a good way.

There is one area where I still consider Linux a better solution from a security perspective. I am not aware of a vendor supported tool on Solaris, AIX, or HP-UX to provide for file system encryption that creates a mountable encrypted filesystem. RHEL provides such a tool with cryptsetup, though documentation is very sparse, it is at least quite usable. While there has been talk of ZFS and encrypted filesystems, I haven't seen one yet, and the Veritas/Symantec does not appear to provide such yet.

Re:solaris is the new AIX

[dosius]

...about the only OS sluggish on modern hardware is Vistrash.

-uso.

Re:solaris is the new AIX

[mysidia]

...about the only OS sluggish on modern hardware is Vistrash.

What's your point?

Solaris doesn't have speed issues.

If you use older hardware, Linux has speed issues too.

Try doing a full install of Fedora Core 9 & CentOS5 on an old Celeron 600Mhz system with 512mb of RAM, do that same install on Solaris; no, you don't get to turn any services off or make any speed tunings on either install.

You will find surprise, both systems are painfully slow.

Solaris seems to be faster.

Others have also measured Solaris to be faster.

Granted, you could benchmark Damn Small Linux against Solaris fully decked out, and running ZFS, but that wouldn't be fair.

Nowadays, there is hardly any general difference between Linux and Solaris, when they are properly tuned, it's all about how much software is running on the system, and which system services are running.

I.E. ZFS. Naturally, I am most interested in differences in the default (full) installs, because most *IX users are performing default full installs of popular distros, i.e. Redhat, Mandriva, SuSE.

And not optimized niche distros like dsl.

Solaris 10

[Tsunayoshi]

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.

Re:Solaris 10

[segfaultcoredump]

I agree.

If we were talking Solaris 8 or 9 vs linux, it would be no contest. Solaris 10 is another story.

In the current shop where I work, Solaris is the OS of first choice. We only run linux if we absolutely have to due to application compatibility issues. From a cost standpoint, they both run on the same server hardware (intel or amd), so there is no cost advantage there. The major one is that a RedHat support contract cost more than the equivalent one from Sun for Solaris (they are both free if you dont want support... sorta.... You can download solaris from sun for free and install it. You cant do the same with RedHat. That said, if you use kickstart you can get around the mandatory rhn registration that stops you dead if you dont have a valid support contract.)

  It just that with solaris we have the ability to load the box up with dozens of zones that are easy to manage compared to the alternatives on linux (yes, there are alternatives to solaris zones, and all of them involve unsupported kernel patches. ) We tend to run 20+ zones per dual proc box. Each zone gets its own env. We dont need them to differ too much from the main zone, so things like Xen are overkill. Chroot would be nice if we could also get better control over things like IP's, admin access, hostname resolution, etc. For what we want, Zones are absolutely perfect. zfs and Dtrace just add icing to the cake.

That said, this article read like a BMW sales rep's opinion of the newest Audi. If I want opinions of if solaris is dying, I'm not going to go and ask the head of the linux consortium which has a vested interestin seeing their prophecy come true.

  For a good time, go to the IDC site and read the comments. Most of them are ripping the author for the piss poor job he did since it reads like a linux marketing piece more than an actual news article.

Re:Solaris 10

[seifried]

I love how you didn't even mention Sparc: "From a cost standpoint, they both run on the same server hardware (intel or amd), so there is no cost advantage there. " Lovely platform but yeah....

Re:Solaris 10

[tyrione]

I suppose he could have added the UltraSparc or SPARC64 and noted the superior threads per processor the latest Sparc has over the Xeon and AMD but then it wouldn't be a comparison of Operating Systems. On the same hardware, he's stating the benefits of Solaris 10 and it's stack of Enterprise tools which makes his job a dream.

Re:Solaris 10

[FictionPimp]

My only problem with solaris is having to install all those gnu utilities so that I can work with tools I'm used to.

I just hate it when tools don't work like I expect them to (such as my normal bash profile cant' be moved as is to solaris because ls does not work the same.)

Re:Solaris 10

[Lennie]

You cant do the same with RedHat.

It's the reason CentOS exists.

Re:Solaris 10

[tonyr60]

1 - Install recent release of Solaris
2 - Look in /usr/sfw/bin

export PATH=/usr/sfw/bin:$PATH does it for me.

Re:Solaris 10

[Lennie]

Zones are like Linux-vserver which in Debian is just an apt-get away

Re:Solaris 10

[FictionPimp]

I see a lot of tools in there, but no ls ;)

Sun updates like a glacier travels anyways. At least in my experience.

Re:Solaris 10

[alexborges]

You got it all wrong: redhat does not limit at all what you CAN do with their thingie, its the legal agreement what makes the difference: you can bypass registration and installation key with one click

Re:Solaris 10

[segfaultcoredump]

vservers? are you kidding? They are a joke compared to solaris zones. Network configuration is one issue. The lack of mainline linux support is the next, thus its not very well tested. Its a hack that is bolted onto the side.

Debian? thats nice, but none of the commercial apps I use support that distro. In my case, Oracle is the big one. They support RHEL, SLES, Asianux and of course, Oracle Linux. Debian is not on the list. They do support solaris zones, but not linux vserver containers.

I can more or less pick any OS I want if I have the source code to the app. But in that case I'll just compile it for solaris and be done with it.

And this brings me to the next major annoyance about 'linux'. It is not one product, it is a catch all for a dozen different, often incompatible, variants based on a common base that then go off in a dozen different directions. I have vendors supplying me with drivers that are specific to not only the distro but the patch level because things change.

Re:Solaris 10

[Lennie]

In mean in the way it works, I didn't mention anything else.

I don't buy from vendors where the drivers are not in mainline or are atleast actively working towards that goal. Otherwise, yes you will get those problems, so don't.

Re:Solaris 10

[Tsunayoshi]

RedHat updates the same IMHO. Any enterprise supported software is not going to do much feature enhancement within the current version.

If you are referring to the other dozens of linux distros out there, then yes they get the features faster. But if you want that from Solaris, try OpenSolaris or get on the Solaris Nevada (ie Solaris 11) list.

Re:Solaris 10

[Tsunayoshi]

But you get the Service Management Framework (SMF), on Sun hardware you get awesome hardware diagnostic utilities, you get zones (which can also run linux, Sol8 and Sol9), you get dtrace, you get a real nice auditing features (BSM), just to name a few. I don't consider 'ls' to be a deal breaker for using an OS.

I used to always install a crap load of GNU utilities on Solaris systems pre-10, but with Solaris 10 I have hardly found a need, and even then only to support some 3rd party app that depends on certain GNU libs.

Probably the wrong question.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm not sure that asking "will solaris survive?" is the right question. Any server OS with decent legacy traction can hang on for ages even without exciting benefits, or even parity, compared to its competitors. Any OS can also be opened up, given away, and allowed to limp along for as long as anybody cares to play with it. Solaris is essentially certain not to die.

The real question is "how much of a premium will Solaris be able to command?" This is probably connected to the question of how much of a premium SPARC hardware can command. If Sun gives Solaris away, and doesn't charge more than any of the major linux vendors for support, then Solaris will do fine; but that isn't necessarily helpful to Sun. If Solaris can justify a premium(either upfront or for support) or can drive or be driven by purchase of fancy SPARC boxes, then the resulting market share may be about the same; but far more valuable. That seems like the more relevant question.

How about some technical analysis

[synthespian]

Tech shouldn't be about "gee, everybody's using it."
How about some hard, technical facts?
So many things in Solaris are more advanced than Linux...Sounds like a Linux PR piece...
For instance, you can count on general ABI breakage on Linux. They even take pride in it. That's not a system you can trust for the long haul. You can't trust your applications will remain compatible.
Linux is a mess, IMHO.

Re:How about some technical analysis

[Shaman]

Yet, I have been using it nearly exclusively for 10 years and watched it progress as a result of some of these policies. Very seldom have I had an issue caused by the OS.

Re:How about some technical analysis

[Darkness404]

Tech shouldn't be about "gee, everybody's using it."

Ok, lets switch our servers to Plan 9, surely any CS grad will understand how to perfectly use it, right? While yes, you are correct in saying you should look at the benefits of Solaris Vs Linux, and because it is still UNIX it is more or less a void point, but if most of the new graduates don't work with an OS, it is bound to die out and get replaced with a more familiar OS. Either that or you have an incompetent admin running your servers.

That's not a system you can trust for the long haul. You can't trust your applications will remain compatible.

No, but you can usually count on a more up-to-date system and generally a stable one at that. Solaris only has a few releases, Linux has many, many more (mostly because it is OSS). Also, most UNIX apps are developed for Linux and later ported to Solaris, not the other way around, meaning that some things may be untested on the Solaris platform.

Re:How about some technical analysis

[synthespian]

Let me add some more: I can't, for the life of me, imagine Linux running on Computed Tomography scanners.
That would be horrible, that would be criminal...You often see Sun - and I suspect Solaris - on medical hardware. There must be a reason for that...

For instance,

http://www.sun.com/solutions/documents/success-stories/HC_Philips_BB.xml

Re:How about some technical analysis

[synthespian]

With all the GCC bugs Linux has? With the poor track record on security?

Linux might be fine and dandy for web monkeys, or huge data crunching. It's cheap. It's fast. But that's not all there is to it, at least for some stuff.

For apps, on Unix, thanks, but no thanks. Not with that sloppy "release early, release often" process. Even the LHC project had security problems due to Linux. Wake up!

Re:How about some technical analysis

[Shaman]

What kind of crap are you talking about here. GCC bugs? They're common to ALL operating systems using GCC - including OpenSolaris.

Security issues have been either few and far between - or in applications running on TOP of linux, which is a whole other subject.

If you had a clue, you'd eat it.

Re:How about some technical analysis

[synthespian]

Plan 9 is experimental and you know it. Inferno might be a viable alternative for a grid OS, commercially uppported with Plan 9 design, even though you intended it as joke.

http://www.vitanuova.com/solutions/grid/

Anyway, you sort of prove my point. Too many people make uniformed choice. There might be better solutions out there, if you are willing to think a liittle outside the box. But managers can't really do that, can they? They just look at the $number$ on their spreadsheet, and are mentally unable to factor in other things - like quality.

I guess the bottom line is: can I hire a cheap sysadmin, and a group of cheap web monkeys?

So, if people want to make a career underspecializing, be my guest. But just keep in mind that all this Linux PR you read is not set by the "community", but by big boys who are commoditizing enterprise software.

Re:How about some technical analysis

[certain death]

You obviously have not kept up with all the Kernel vulns...Do lots of reading before inserting foot in mouth.

Re:How about some technical analysis

[Darkness404]

With all the GCC bugs Linux has? With the poor track record on security?

The bugs usually don't affect the ability to compile code effectively. And I'm sure Solaris has just as many security flaws, it just is less audited as it is proprietary software (with the exception of OpenSolaris which has downloadable source code but I'm not sure if it is OSS) and not used as much as Linux, not to mention that every proprietary software company in existence spends money on "studies" to find security flaws in Linux so they can proclaim that *insert OS here* is much more secure and stable than Linux, Solaris has a lower marketshare so it is less targeted by these "studies".

For apps, on Unix, thanks, but no thanks. Not with that sloppy "release early, release often" process. Even the LHC project had security problems due to Linux. Wake up!

Release early, release often usually makes applications more secure and stable in the long run though.

And I'm sure that if the exact same software was running on a Solaris box it would have magically been immune to the attack?

This incident occured at 10:13 on 10th September. Due to an incorrect configuration in a private account on one of the CMS Web servers, it became possible to overwrite a Web page. The issue was detected within a few hours and full CMS operations were always guaranteed. The problem is understood, has been corrected, and as part of the review process started by CMS, the affected service has been terminated. Security issues in Web applications are a common threat, and the CERN Security Team recommends all service managers to review the security of their web applications. More information is available at: http://cern.ch/security/webapps/ The CERN Security Team

According to http://it-support-servicestatus.web.cern.ch/it-support-servicestatus/IncidentArchive/080915-CMSMON.htm it was an idiot admin who misconfigured an account. You mean to tell me that admins don't make mistakes when running Solaris? Wow! I should totally switch over, perhaps I wouldn't ever make a typo or grammatical error either!

Re:How about some technical analysis

[NormalVisual]

if most of the new graduates don't work with an OS, it is bound to die out and get replaced with a more familiar OS. Either that or you have an incompetent admin running your servers.

I imagine a lot of MVS admins and users would be surprised to hear this, as I don't believe there are a lot of MVS-centric courses in most IT curriculums.

Re:How about some technical analysis

[Pantero Blanco]

http://lwn.net/Articles/272048/

I'm pretty sure he's referring to this. It was a Linux kernel vulnerability that GCC exposed, not a bug in GCC.

Of course, that alone is hardly enough to warrant his first two statements: "With all the GCC bugs Linux has? With the poor track record on security?"

If he has something else in mind, he'll have to bring it up himself.

Re:How about some technical analysis

[truthful cynic]

No, but you can usually count on a more up-to-date system and generally a stable one at that. Solaris only has a few releases, Linux has many, many more (mostly because it is OSS).

Solaris (SXCE) has a release every other week (approximately). For you linux people with your head in the sand (or somewhere else), there are 3 flavors of solaris. Opensolaris (gened ~6 months), Solaris Express community edition (gened every 2 weeks or so), and Solaris 10. Opensolaris has it's packages updated roughly a few weeks after an SXCE build comes out (though they haven't reved the based installed image yet). As for your linux tested statement, using that logic, you should run windows.....

Re:How about some technical analysis

[Alpha830RulZ]

There must be a reason for that...

And that reason couldn't be that Sun is someone to sue if something goes wrong? Makes business sense, but not technical sense.

Re:How about some technical analysis

[fahrbot-bot]

Also, most UNIX apps are developed for Linux and later ported to Solaris, not the other way around...

There was a time, actually not all that long ago, that Sun (SunOS and Solaris) was the development platform of choice (coming from its BSD roots). In fact, GCC was first developed for the VAX and Sun circa 1988.

From: A Brief History of GCC

Date: Sun, 22 Mar 87 10:56:56 EST
From: rms (Richard M. Stallman)

The GNU C compiler is now available for ftp from the file
/u2/emacs/gcc.tar on prep.ai.mit.edu. This includes machine
descriptions for vax and sun, 60 pages of documentation on writing
machine descriptions (internals.texinfo, internals.dvi and Info
file internals).

In addition, the definition of "most UNIX apps" depends on the target audience; most mission-critical apps are NOT developed first on Linux, but rather enterprise Solaris, HP-UX / MPE or similar class systems.

Re:How about some technical analysis

[ion.simon.c]

Let me add some more: I can't, for the life of me, imagine Linux running on Computed Tomography scanners.

Why?

Re:How about some technical analysis

[ion.simon.c]

Tech shouldn't be about "gee, everybody's using it."
How about some hard, technical facts?

Agreed.

For instance, you can count on general ABI breakage on Linux.

*Whose* ABI?

That's not a system you can trust for the long haul. You can't trust your applications will remain compatible.

I can build (and run) *ancient* programs on my Gentoo Linux machine. If I can do it, your application vendor can too.
If your application vendor has gone tits up, and you *still* don't have the source code for $MISSION_CRITICAL_APP... well, boy, you done screwed up.

Re:How about some technical analysis

[Lennie]

Also I think the share of Linux-boxes in public places (webservers) is probably larger. Solaris boxes are mostly behind the firewall. Heck the firewall could even be running Linux.

Re:How about some technical analysis

[TheRaven64]

There are also a few distributions built on top of OpenSolaris - as far as I can tell they have the same relation to OpenSolaris that PC-BSD and DesktopBSD have to FreeBSD. If you're coming from a GNU platform then you might find Nexenta very familiar - it's like GNU/Linux, only with a nice kernel. In particular, take a look at how easy it is to set up zones for isolation (and even ones that support Linux system calls, allowing you to run Linux binaries), and how apt is able to use ZFS snapshots to allow you to revert updates.

Re:How about some technical analysis

[TheRaven64]

For instance, you can count on general ABI breakage on Linux.

*Whose* ABI?

That's the question. Most of us don't do stuff in kernel space, so in-kernel ABI breakage just means you need to update your kernel and modules all at the same time (which is only a problem if you get some of your modules from a third party). The C++ ABI breakage on most open source platforms was painful for a lot of people, but that's a GNU not a Linux issue (it was caused by the GNU compiler and the GNU C++ standard library - remember how little of your GNU/Linux system is actually Linux).

Linux, for the most part, has a stable ABI. It defines a few hundred system calls, and once defined these tend to be set in stone. In the main kernel, that is. There was a recent issue where Red Hat Enterprise Linux added a flag to one system call (something common, like open(), as I recall), but it didn't get merged upstream, then Linus used the same flag to mean something different, which broke ABI compatibility between RHEL and every other Linux. Technically, this isn't a bug in Linux though, it's a bug in the development process.

Re:How about some technical analysis

[Tweenk]

For instance, you can count on general ABI breakage on Linux. (...) You can't trust your applications will remain compatible.

Applications do not use the kernel ABI, they use the kernel API (system calls), and even then usually through libraries like libc. Stable kernel ABI is only of interest to closed source driver developers, and removes some of the incentive to ship open source drivers. What matters for applications is library ABI compatibility, which is completely unrelated to what Linux developers do, and depends on what your library developers do.

Re:How about some technical analysis

[domatic]

OpenSolaris which has downloadable source code but I'm not sure if it is OSS

Most people agree the license on it meets the OSI definition. It isn't GPL compatible but that doesn't suffice to make something not FOSS. The real issue is that Sun runs OpenSolaris the way they run OpenOffice. That makes it difficult to build a community that has significant contributions from non-Sun employees.

Re:How about some technical analysis

[alcourt]

One to four security alerts per week requiring us to issue an internal alert and mandate to patch our RHEL boxes does not qualify as "few and far between". And these are only the ones that require the OS to be patched. The ones that are against applications don't get reviewed by me prior to release, just the OS ones. If I do get sent an application issue, I kick it back for application review.

Performance

[Enderandrew]

I keep hearing that Solaris is the king of performance. Aside from ZFS, is the kernel really that much better?

With OpenSolaris, I'd really like to see some standard benchmarks of a few common server distros (SLED, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, NetBSD, whatever) compared to OpenSolaris on the same hardware.

Re:Performance

[Shaman]

ZFS is really not that impressive. Only if you are building systems with giant disk subsystems - which is exactly where you will be buying SAN at this point instead. We just bought a HP 5000 series SAN with 138 disk drives in it... does self-healing and provides up to 1.4TB/s throughput, doesn't use ZFS. ZOMG!

Re:Performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Got the balls to drop an strace on your production Oracle database? I tried strace on an Oracle database on RHEL 5 and the damn process deadlocked and the box needed a reboot to clear it up. Good thing it was a development DB.

I've put a truss (and now dtrace) on PRODUCTION Oracle databases running on Solaris many times.

I don't dare do that on Linux.

Solaris is as far beyond Linux in stability as Linux is beyond Win2K.

Re:Performance

[Enderandrew]

BTW, I'm an idiot and I meant to type SLES and not SLED.

Re:Performance

[bonkeydcow]

zfs in incredibly impressive. No fsck. That's huge. snapshots... allowing zone users to manage their own storage...Unlimited filesystem size. (Your storage array can be huge but if your filesystem can't handle it....

Re:Performance

[chekk4]

Actually, ZFS really IS that impressive. Almost platter speed using the equivalent of raid-6 without a hardware raid controller. It's not perfect, but in my testing, it has performed extremely well.
How do you get 1.4TB/s with only 138 drives? Even if you have hundreds of gigabit switches, the drives collectively are nowhere near that aggregate throughput.

Cheers.

Re:Performance

[countSudoku()]

Those two guys above this are spot on, and I'll add that ZFS administration is beyond easy and effective. Growing file systems on the fly is also a piece of cake. We've been using ZFS in our DC for about two years now and it is almost *criminal* how easy it is to take care of! Did I mention that our Solaris 10 zones cost around $2500 each on SPARC h/w, while our Windows pals are offering individual VMware virtual instances for about $4000/ea? I love it!!!1!
        Personally, I think my Unix group is about to enter the x86 business... if I were a Windows admin at my shop, I'd be worried. Fear my virtual instances that are about half the cost, kids!

Re:Performance

[amorsen]

$2500 for a virtual instance? You can get quite decent complete servers for that.

Re:Performance

[thogard]

About the only thing that it doesn't do is the whole "This volume needs a primitive file system at this location on its idea of the disk" which nearly every system needs to boot.

Re:Performance

[theCoder]

Where I work, we have a number of Solaris(*) and Linux machines. Almost as a rule, you can count on the Linux machines being at least twice as fast as the Solaris machines. At some jobs, Linux is 10 times as fast as Solaris. A lot of this probably comes from the fact that the processors run at twice the speed (x86 vs. sparc), but it seems like the I/O goes faster as well on Linux.

But remember, anecdote != evidence, so YMMV.

(*) Mostly these are Solaris 9 machines. We have a few Solaris 10 machines, but they aren't that much faster in general.

Re:Performance

[Phishcast]

1.4TB/s, wowza that's fast. Back of the napkin math says your 138 disk HP 5000 series SAN must have well over 3000 outward facing 4Gbps FC ports. Don't think so. Not sure where your number came from there.

Re:Performance

[Enderandrew]

We have SPARC boxes as well running Solaris 8. I was curious how a recent build of OpenSolars compared to a recent Linux kernel on the same hardware.

Re:Performance

[Zemplar]

ZFS is really not that impressive.

Either you've never used ZFS or have only used it in very limited use-cases. ZFS really is IMPRESSIVE.

Is ZFS best for every workload or task? No. But ZFS really does provide outstanding features and performance in a wide array of uses.

For example, the near-zero cost of snapshots alone is damn near worth the change, let alone the check summing. MANY more features exists but I'll keep this comment short.

Re:Performance

[brucehoult]

Hey dtrace is great. But you know where the largest number of computers running dtrace are?

#1 is on Macs
#2 is the iPhone and iPod Touch (will be #1 soon)

Solaris is orders of magnitude down on either of those.

"Literally" I Do Not Think That Word Means...

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

...what you think it does.

"That's literally like noticing the view from a third-story building as it burns to the ground."

Re:"Literally" I Do Not Think That Word Means...

[gringer]

That's literally like noticing the view from a third-story building as it burns to the ground.

They chucked a fudge word in, that makes it okay. It's literally like that, not literally that. Kinda like the US economy being both strong and at risk, literally like a muscleman who wouldn't wear a condom.

Re:"Literally" I Do Not Think That Word Means...

[aynoknman]

What does "literally" mean in the context of a fudge word? The difference between "like" and "literally like" escapes me.

Not all the best features are technical

[mcrbids]

When evaluating the success of a product in the marketplace, it's important to note that there are many features of even highly technical products that are not technical in nature, at all.

Linux compares very closely to BSD from a technical standpoint, BSD has a much longer history than Linux, and is arguably better than Linux in many areas. It's definitely had more time to mature. So what feature does Linux have that has everybody talking about Linux?

Its license.

I'm not knocking the excellence that Linus Torvalds has displayed over and over again over the years. He's done a great job and I depend on his efforts every day in running my own business. But as great as Linus has done managing the technology of Linux, it would be hard to say that Theo De Raadt has done any worse. It would be easy to claim that Theo's work is more secure, but both have produced excellent products that are truly world class in nature.

But what has everybody talking about Linux is the license - the share and share alike requirement laid down by the GPL, which turns the Tragedy of the Commons around on its ear so that everybody is pushing the project along together, rather than taking what's convenient and giving nothing back.

The sad truth? "More free" isn't always better. Just like "less government regulation" isn't always a good idea, you can often get a better mix for everybody by limiting people's freedom to screw each other.

Now, Solaris is behind the 8-ball. Even with the same license as Linux, they'd have to show a clear, compelling advantage to cause people to switch their efforts away from Linux. Given just how good Linux is in so many different areas that Solaris can't even touch today, that would be very, very hard to do.

Show me a Solaris supercomputer and I'll show you hundreds of Linux-based supercomputers. Show me a $40 Solaris-based router, or a Solaris phone, or a Solaris-based pocket calculator. Ironically, while Solaris is touted for "big iron", it's a non-starter in the list of the top 500 supercomputers, while Linux is dominant.

Go Tux!

Re:Not all the best features are technical

[the eric conspiracy]

Solaris doesn't play in the supercomputer market because the Sparc architecture is not cost effective for that application. The big iron that Solaris runs on are enterprise scale database servers, which are optimized for an entirely different set of performance parameters.

Re:Not all the best features are technical

[BlueQuark]

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.

Re:Not all the best features are technical

[JanneM]

"Please elaborate with what aeras and tasks that Linux is so good at that Solaris
can't touch?"

I've tried to play with Solaris at home twice, just to see what it's about. What it's about, for me, is an OS that doesn't support the hardware I have available for playing. And with no personal experience on it, and no way for me to form an opinion over time in an informal, non-critical setting like my own home, I have no inclination to suggest we look at Solaris rather than continue using linux on our cluster machines at work.

Yes, it's made for server hardware - like the clusters we have - not the laptop I have at home running as a small server (hey, it's silent, draws little power, keyboard and screen folds away when not in use, and comes with UPS built right in). But nobody's going to want to allocate a server and spend work time just to test a different OS when the current OS is doing a decent job already.

Re:Not all the best features are technical

[Waffle Iron]

It's not the license. It's the huge PR machine behind it. IBM and all big boys supporting Linux are really selling hardware and are using Linux to commoditize enteprise software.

And do you know why these companies chose Linux as the focus of their PR machines? As the GP post argued, it's because the advantages the GPL provides to these big companies over BSD-style licenses.

These big companies know that if their competitors use the code they contribute, it will have to be on the same terms as the contributor. It can't be closed up, embraced, extended and then used as a weapon against the original contributor. It's a simple exercise in game theory.

Re:Not all the best features are technical

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Bu-bu-bu-bu-BUT BSD is MORE free!!!

Re:Not all the best features are technical

[evilviper]

So what feature does Linux have that has everybody talking about Linux?

The same feature that Gov. Palin has...

The same feature that Wikipedia has...

The same feature that Paris Hilton has...

Linux is famous because it makes for a story dynamic that the press likes... A story about a bunch of young geeky kids writing code and trying to take over the world from their basement just makes for a more interesting read than a bunch of boring, pragmatic, 40 year-old professional tech veterans (with a life) quietly working hard, donating their work to make a reliable system that the world has been quietly making use of for 30 years.

Then, it becomes a self-sustaining cycle... Companies want some of that press, so they get in on "Linux" (not BSD, not open source, not Free Software, but LINUX) development. In the process they generate more interest in Linux, and so on.

Its license.

The license is only incidentally involved in any of this. A great many companies can and do contribute to BSD projects, without going out of business. "Competitive advantage" is a red herring... Binaries can be reverse engineered fairly easily, and having code available to the public under ANY license other than NDA gives away all of your secrets, which can then be used (clean-room) by anyone that wants to, they just have to find them valuable enough to put a bit of effort into in ANY case.

the share and share alike requirement laid down by the GPL, which turns the Tragedy of the Commons around on its ear so that everybody is pushing the project along together,

The tragedy of the commons requires YOU to take something away from the rest of us. Copying my code without contributing back doesn't stop me or anyone else from using it.

In fact there is a software analogy to the tragedy of the commons, however... It's the that when you require everyone else to play by your rules, or else you'll take your ball and go home, people decide to ignore you all together... BSD-licensed code becomes a world-wide standard: BSD TCP/IP stack, BIND, Sendmail, NFS, OpenSSH, etc. GPL-licensed code does not, ever. GPL code ends up always being a reimplementation of established protocols, while BSD code often ends up becoming the established protocol that everyone else uses and reimplements.

That's the relevant "tragedy" that applies to the software world. Good luck getting your audio format, with only a GPL-licensed decoder, included in hardware MP3 players and DVD players.

Show me a $40 Solaris-based router, or a Solaris phone, or a Solaris-based pocket calculator.

That's a bit like saying Nokia (or ARM) is going to take over the supercomputer market, because they're so dominant in the low-end.

Re:Not all the best features are technical

[mcrbids]

The big iron that Solaris runs on are enterprise scale database servers, which are optimized for an entirely different set of performance parameters....

which is a relatively small market that is rapidly being marginalized as commodity hardware increasingly becomes capable of matching the performance requirements of such large-scale databases.

I remember an "enterprise solution" based around a Digital Vax 11/750 that filled a good-sized room, with 3 300 MB hard drives, each the size of a large dresser drawer, linked with ungodly amounts of copper wiring. Now, the $20 2 GB USB 2.0 thumbdrive I bought at Costco provides more storage, faster, for cheaper. (See a trend, here?)

I'm not arguing that Solaris-based solutions aren't better for this task, I'm just saying that this fact becomes less and less important as cheap, commodity hardware with a free Operating System and DBMS becomes more and more "up to" the task. There is an awful lot that you can do with a few of these guys, even if they don't qualify as "big iron".

There still is a place for mainframes, there's still a place for "big iron". But both places are shrinking while the overall marketplace for data management solutions continues to grow exponentially.

Re:Not all the best features are technical

[ufoolme]

I wouldn't leave Sun Sparc arch out to die just yet.
The new Rock processor due out next year sounds pretty dam cool! Seems (to me) they are just having demand volume/price ratio problems.
Also when Solaris/open solaris is better tuned to run on x64/power archs you never know what might happen.

An operating system that is a always evolving at the rate SunOs is won't die anytime soon, not at least when every other OS is gutting its open source features.

Re:Not all the best features are technical

[Alpha830RulZ]

since we don't have to pony up a RedHat license for each server.

Um, is this an 'am I stupid' test? If you have any sort of test environment, you run redhat on the test server and CentOS on production. Personally, I've done fine for four years now with Fedora in production. No support dollars. The precise reason you run linux is so you can multiply your servers without marginal SW cost. If you need to run Oracle or something that you can't multiply, then Solaris on big Sparc makes sense.

Re:Not all the best features are technical

[Anonymous Coward]

M9000 with 64 quad code SPARC64 VII cpus

1 Teraflop. 1 or 2 Tb or RAM
http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/m9000/benchmarks.jsp#1

No single linux box that big
For threaded, shared memory HPC apps - unbeatable
(most HPCs apps are now written for the grid)

Re:Not all the best features are technical

[rainhill]

Well said. I would mod you +10 if I could.

Re:Not all the best features are technical

[thanasakis]

We made the mistake of buying HP DL385 G2's (AMD64 opterons) to install Solaris, and now we are stuck with I/O performance that is stupidly low. Solaris literally screams with the DL360G5 (xeon) but with the DL385 (opteron) something is very wrong. Go figure. I suspect HP's drivers but there's really no good way to tell and I might very well be wrong. Support has been not so successful (yet) in finding anything of use.

Moral of the story? When going to install Solaris, do yourself a favor and buy Sun iron (not necessarily Sparc). The O/S is guaranteed to work perfectly and you'll be home in time for cornflakes instead of trying to figure out what's wrong.

Re:Not all the best features are technical

[Tweenk]

Binaries can be reverse engineered fairly easily

Just listen to your bullshit. Why then is Wine not 100% reliable, and many applications don't work at all? Why is ReactOS nowhere near everyday usability? Why there is no feature-complete open source Flash player?

Copying my code without contributing back doesn't stop me or anyone else from using it.

Another fallacy. If MS takes your BSD-licensed code and makes their version deliberately incompatible with yours, your code suddenly becomes worthless because you can't use it together with any of the MS implementations, and you're effectively prevented from using it.

Re:Not all the best features are technical

[the eric conspiracy]

I'm just saying that this fact becomes less and less important as cheap, commodity hardware with a free Operating System and DBMS becomes more and more "up to" the task. There is an awful lot that you can do with a few of these guys, even if they don't qualify as "big iron".

Data is a gas that fills the container no matter how big it is. Yes commodity hardware can take over the application you were running on big iron two years ago. But the new higher intensity applications are popping out all the time, as newer hardware enables them.

There will always be a need for big iron.

Re:Not all the best features are technical

[Reservoir Penguin]

The answer is in your message, you just don't see it. Back when VAX/VMS ruled the world enterprise level applications required gigabytes of storage, now, as you correctly pointed out we have flash drives bigger and faster than that. But today we have terrabyte databases, and terrabytes of data to match, where are the flash drives to handle that? Just like VMS of yesterday, Solaris of today is the best option to handle the data load of today, and yes the market is growing and there is no shortage of data.

PC-BSD anyone?

[not already in use]

I think it would be more appropriate to contemplate FreeBSD entering the desktop market with PC-BSD. PC-BSD certainly isn't a good name from a marketing standpoint, but you'd be hard pressed to find significant features found in Linux that aren't found in FreeBSD 7. Then, consider the fact that FreeBSD includes ZFS support out of the box, and won't suffer from distro-itis, in which too many linux distributions exist that use too many different stacks/packaging systems, etc. FreeBSD is open while having a unified direction, the latter missing from the multitude of desktop linux distros.

Re:PC-BSD anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here! Here!

Also, Mac are on a come back and they are Unix as well.

Re:PC-BSD anyone?

[Klaus_1250]

Like write access to NTFS

pkg_add -r fusefs-ntfs . Lo and behold, write access to NTFS

Re:PC-BSD anyone?

[smoker2]

1)http://www.ntfs-3g.org/
2)The inotify API is Linux specific. Some other systems provide similar mechanisms, e.g., FreeBSD has kqueue, and Solaris has /dev/poll
You don't need to format to upgrade either. I could go on but you're trolling so just read.

Re:PC-BSD anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually there are quite a few features found in Linux not found in FreeBSD or PC-BSD. Like write access to NTFS,

Write access to NTFS is not likely to be an issue on a server.

inotify

FreeBSD has kqueue, which is arguably far better designed and generically useful an event notification mechanism

many journalled file systems,

Why do you need more than one journaled file system?

user-space FS

FreeBSD supports FUSE. I'm not sure why you want this on a server, though

multiple kernel virtualization methods and client optimizations

You got one right! OMG! Linux supports KVM, FreeBSD doesn't include any built-in virtualization support. But then, FreeBSD has jails, and Linux doesn't, so we'll call it a draw?

stable LVM, et al

FreeBSD has GEOM, a "modular disk I/O request transformation framework", which is arguably more generic and better designed than LVM. Notice a trend here ...

And how about those forklift upgrades that FreeBSD seems to love... no "apt-get dist-upgrade" foolishness for BSD. Oh no... it's time to format!

FreeBSD has freebsd-update, which supports binary updates between major and minor releases. Prior to the introduction of freebsd-update, the process was a bit more painful, but a format was certainly not required

However, note that FreeBSD doesn't tie their third party software (eg, packages/ports) to the base system. So you can keep a FreeBSD 4.x system around for 5 years and still have a modern up-to-date installation of your applications.

On Debian, however, you'll just have Stale-OS, unless you're willing to risk destabalizing your production systems by upgrading the *entire* base operating system

You're clearly unfamiliar with FreeBSD

Re:PC-BSD anyone?

[TheRaven64]

And how about the other way. For me, the big reason for switching from Linux to FreeBSD was something very simple (although there ended up being a load of reasons for staying): Sound just worked.

This was back in the FreeBSD 4.x days. I had a cheap on-board sound card with no hardware mixing. On Linux, I got one /dev/dsp, and so only one program could play sound. If I ran KDE programs, they would all talk to the KDE sound daemon, and so they could all play sound. Same situation in GNOME. Only, I wanted my (KDE) Jabber client to be able to notify me of messages, my (GNOME) email client to be able to notify me, and XMMS to be able to play music in the background. XMMS didn't support either sound daemon at the time, so Linux failed.

FreeBSD, on the other hand, had a sysctl to set the number of virtual devices. I then had /dev/dsp.0 to /dev/dsp.4 - one for GNOME, one for KDE, one for XMMS and one for BZFlag. Configuring each of these to use the correct device was mildly painful, but it did work. Then came FreeBSD 5, and suddenly all of this configuration was obsolete - each program that tried to open /dev/dsp would get a new channel. I set the maximum to 16 on boot, don't bother configuring sound daemons, and laugh at all of the issues that Linux users are having with PulseAudio.

A kernel is supposed to do two things well:

1. Hide details of the hardware from applications.
2. Hide details of other applications from applications.

This is an example of Linux failing massively at the second of these - if it's possible to multiplex a device, it should be multiplexed by the operating system. If you want to do it in userspace, fine, but support standard APIs for doing it. OSS is the standard sound API for all *NIX systems with the exception of OS X, and it makes playing sound very easy (four lines of code - one to open the device, two to set the sample format and rate, one to start writing the audio). A userspace sound daemon could implement this with something like portalfs, but none do, they all introduce their own APIs (and most have terrible latency).

Linux also tends to fail at the first of these too. Each supported architecture populates /proc slightly differently, so you need to code around these differences or, more commonly, use an existing library where someone else has already done it. Rather than writing three lines of code issuing a sysctl call, you will link against several hundred KBs of someone else's library. Which do you think is more maintainable (and auditable)?

Re:PC-BSD anyone?

[stasike]

FreeBSD has GEOM, a "modular disk I/O request transformation framework", which is arguably more generic and better designed than LVM. Notice a trend here ...

Plus, there is wonderfull atacontrol command that allows you to create and maintain RAID1 and RAID0 using a few simple commands. You install Vanilla bare FreeBSD, use
atacontrol create RAID1 ad4 ad6
Reboot, run installer again and this time install FreeBSD to the /dev/ar0

Re:PC-BSD anyone?

[Just Some Guy]

<aol>me too</aol> I'm typing this on a FreeBSD 7 / KDE 4.1.1 desktop, and I've been extremely happy with it. It runs more smoothly than when I had Linux on the same machine, and sound worked perfectly from the first boot. I've loved FreeBSD on the server for years, but it makes a great workstation too.

Re:PC-BSD anyone?

[TheRaven64]

I'm not sure why you need to run the installer twice, but then I've not used atacontrol. If you just want RAID-1 then you can use GEOM's gmirror. I added a second disk to a system I'd been using for a few years, told it that the main disk and the new disk were part of the same RAID array, and now I have a mirrored pair. The gmirror command is very simple to use and, unlike atacontrol, works with any kind of disk on any kind of controller. GEOM also supports concatenation, RAID-0 (gstripe) and RAID-3 (graid3) as well as encryption.

Or else...

[mangu]

... if they actually need to be rebooted one day and the new admins notice its not linux

...or if a new application is required and the admins can't find the apt repository...

Re:Or else...

[Ethanol-fueled]

That was the main reason why I canned OpenSolaris after trying it out.

It runs Gnome but that was the only similarity to more user-friendly *Nixes such as ubuntu. No apt-get or many other Joe User tools that make running desktop linux a breeze.

And what's up with "jack" as the default username?

Re:Or else...

[countSudoku()]

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.

Re:Or else...

[NuclearError]

...wildly popular Linux distro...

Good one!

Re:Or else...

[FictionPimp]

The same blastwave going though a huge identity crisis AND was down for a good deal of time while the 'founders' did a bunch of closed door arguing and backstabbing?

How can I trust my enterprise level environment to something like that? This is not a kick on solaris, we actually use solaris 10 (a few products we use only support solaris on sparc). But I just can't see a business case for blastwave. At least if we went ubuntu we get a guarantee of life cycle and the ability to get paid support. If I call sun support and tell them I'm having trouble with apache/php/mysql from blastwave or that the blastwave gcc is not working right, do you think they will give a shit?

Re:Or else...

[SL Baur]

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 too bad in a way that you did not have a good experience with RHEL. My workplace approved RHEL on the desktop that I use has never been rebooted for anything other than power failure. My older Solaris workstation has, but that was only because I was unfamiliar with the system and did not know how to get it to use a decent bit depth for the X display.

It's all *nix in the end.

Yup. Absolutely works for me, the 20+ year Unix and descendents user at home.

-sb (Penguin advocate, but as long as it's something Unixy, I can live with that.)

Re:Or else...

[Alpha830RulZ]

Even with more expensive boxen

Which is where the discussion ends with me. I use Linux because it cuts my costs for fielding compute power. Sure, I could use Open Solaris, but why would I use code away from the center of the action? That's where the bug fixing is happening. The key thing for me is cheap hardware and cheap software. I use a heavily replicated environment, so one box going down isn't a big issue. Cost of the farm is. So Linux on cheap x64_86 is where it's at for me.

Re:Or else...

[TRS-80]

pkg-get is hack only needed for Solaris 10 - in OpenSolaris IPS is used which is supported by Sun. If you want supported apache/php/mysql Sun have their SAMP product (formerly known as CoolStack) and Solaris ships with gcc these days.

Re:Or else...

[udippel]

That was the main reason why I canned OpenSolaris after trying it out.

Uhh. Yes. No.
I guess you talk about the miserable 2008.5 or so.
I for one hopped on the SXDE/SXCE/Nevada; just for a try, and have been there ever since. It contains (almost) all that I need, out of the box, from Macromedia Flash to StarOffice. The most complete one I ever tried. Compiz included, and the (alas) proprietary blobs (NVIDIA). Show me a Linux that you can install, and brings up 173.14.09 NVIDIA on reboot, at the correct resolution?

Actually, it only missed on Mplayer, Dia and Gnumeric for me. Over.
Now I run a few multi-boot systems, with Debian/Ubuntu and OpenSolaris as choices, and I tend to use OpenSolaris. The problem of OpenSolaris is not so much OpenSolaris as it is the SUN management's low visionary angle.

True, hardware support is better on Linux(Ubuntu), resource requirements are easily 2 GB (it consumes close to 1 GB after boot and starting GNOME), networking, and especially wireless, is far behind Ubuntu. Mounting of ext3 needs external programs to be installed the old SUN-way, and is not possible as R/W; it is limited to readonly. For the rest OpenSolaris is at par, if not superior.

That default username "Jack" does not exist in the world of Nevada. As I said above, the one that you had your hands on was 2008.5; codenamed Indiana, enforced on the project by a bunch of managers at SUN who have since long passed their expiration dates.

It is not only the DTrace and Zones that make it great(er), ZFS is truly the file-system contender for the next millennium. A file system needs to be seen as a self-contained, holistic, entity. fdisk and format are so last millennium.

The Caiman installer was the greatest piece of installation software I ever used. But it was broken half a year ago and now rumbles on as a low-priority project. Don't talk to me about bullshit: The installer is the first thing a potential user hits. And currently it is either the venerable CDE-SUN installer or console. This is how to screw up a visionary project like OpenSolaris at its best.
And then, community. Make me puke. The bug reports that I file (and still file) disappear in the intestines of SUN, and I can't even see them. Not to mention modify them.

Yes, OpenSolaris might fail, in the end. But not on technical reasons, and this is where the article is erroneous. It is a badly managed hybrid of proprietary-free software.

Re:Or else...

[Skuld-Chan]

My brother in law who works at Intel says they no longer use Solaris for CAD/Simulation - its all been moved to Linux.

Also have a friend at Cisco who says the only Solaris machines they have in their department run FrameMaker and that if Adobe ever made a Linux version they'd abandon Solaris entirely.

Re:Or else...

[jhol13]

The future of Solaris on the desktop is not as exciting as that of Ubuntu

I think it is as exciting. But then, I am excited by new (free) operating systems ...

The latest OpenSolaris has "pgk" which performs about same as apt-get http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/pkg/.

My next home machine will be OpenSolaris (NFS/Samba server with raidz2).

Re:Or else...

[Joebert]

I have to ask, are you an email spammer ?

Re:Or else...

[FictionPimp]

But what if I want a different version of gcc, or what if their version of php is not compiled with a feature I need (actually, that was the case with SAMP and why we compile our own php...)

I just put those apps out there as examples. If you would like, I can find a package only on pkg-get. We don't use opensolaris because it is not supported by the software we use. The only reason we use solaris is because we have to for a product that we require to do business. Their supported options are windows on cygwin or solaris 9/10. Even though the product runs fine on linux they do not support it there. And you do not run software that expensive and mission critical without support.

Opensolaris is a great initiative, but is not ready for production use.

Re:Or else...

[hitmark]

My workplace approved RHEL on the desktop that I use has never been rebooted for anything other than power failure.

hmm, given the energy issues going forward, isnt that a very big waste?

or does it go to sleep when not used for a while?

Re:Or else...

[Saint Aardvark]

Blastwave...heh. Which Blastwave are you talking about?

Sorry, this is a bit of a sore point for me. At work, we have a Solaris 10 machine that powers about 30 SunRays for mathematicians. JDS is fine, but adding other programs is a pain. (Disclaimer coming up, so bear with me.)

• Blastwave: They just had the split. But before that there were problems. Upgrading CUPS broke printing; they'd moved around some Ghostscript filters. Upgrading Postfix broke Postfix, because they'd moved the config files to play nicer with zones, and their script that should've dropped everything in the right place didn't. These were stable versions, not the unstable.
• pkg-src: Great until you trip over something that won't compile and spend days trying to track down what it is -- say, 1 package in 20. Sounds like good odds? Try compiling Firefox or Kile, with dependencies stretching back to libc and the Dead Sea scrolls. I'm guessing they just aren't able to do as much testing on Solaris...and fair enough; the job of making umpty thousand packages compile on mumble different OS' is hard enough.
• compile from source: fine, unless it's obscure (say, some mathematical package) that assumes GNU tools all the way, or a Linux OS, and weird, obscure things break.
• download binaries: yes, if they've got 'em.

And now for the disclaimers: No, this isn't enterprise (which was your point; I was looking for a place to jump into this discussion, and the mention of Blastwave got me). Yes, a real sysadmin could compile all this from scratch without problem. Yes, this is an edge case on top of an edge case (desktops for mathematicians? How obscure!). Yes, ZFS and dtrace are seriously, jaw-droppingly awesome.

But this is my experience; so far, I simply have not done anything remotely enterprise. It's all been server + desktop in small shops. And for that environment, requirements are changing all the time. The mail server now needs to do spam filtering and DNS. Yes, they should be split up, but there isn't the budget. The new guy wants KDE on his machine instead of Gnome, or needs to try out a new library to see if it works.

And for these, it's not "set it and forget it"; we need new packages, or updates to the old ones, all the time. If all the heartache I described was a one-time thing, I'd do it and be done...but in this environment, it'll need to be done again in three months. That means a good package manager (hello, Debian!), or a good ports tree (*BSD), or an environment that everyone is familiar with (Linux, because it has just that much mindshare).

Bit of a rant, and less coherent than I'd like. But it's 6am, I haven't had my coffee yet, and my kid's about to wake up...so I'll have to leave it there.

Re:Or else...

[street struttin']

Our DNS runs on an old Solaris 2.5 server and basically never breaks. We actually had a hacker break in once, look at what OS we were running with a quick uname, and left to bother our RedHat servers where he knew what he was looking at. Kind of funny, really. For Spam filtering, spamassassin works fine on Solaris, and those Barracuda Spam Firewall appliances are fantastic.

Re:Or else...

[assantisz]

What happened to compiling your own packages? What is happening with our systems administrators? Is this the new generation who needs things like apt-get and GUI to do work?

Re:Or else...

[Dog-Cow]

All new Unix servers at Ford are Linux unless there is a good reason (software compability) to choose another. Linux is by far the most popular server OS after Windows (roughly 40%).

I do have to admit that in a couple years it might be a stretch to call Ford an "enterprise" :p

Re:Or else...

[jedidiah]

Been done already. Life is passing you by.

OTOH, all of the hype surrounding "big iron" is
compelling up until the point where you have to
juggle conflicting SLAs, deal with zones that
are underpowered or you manage to find that one
point of failure in one of those "big iron"
machines.

Then you get to see 10 production systems go
down rather than just one.

Re:Or else...

[spydum]

That is exactly the case. People are so used to "apt-get" or "yum install" that they are unable to resolve library dependencies on their own for software that falls outside of the distribution. Whether this is good or bad is to be determined -- software should not be so difficult to install, but admins should be competent enough to adapt. Providing tools like apt-get and yum do aid in speed of service delivery, but don't give much hope to future admins who have never heard of "./configure" or "make all"

Re:Or else...

[FictionPimp]

Exactly. I don't care about the rest of the world. Being production ready for the rest of the world does me absolutely no good.

Re:Or else...

[palegray.net]

Don't get me wrong, I understood your meaning... it just could have been worded a bit better :).

Re:Or else...

[SL Baur]

My workplace approved RHEL on the desktop that I use has never been rebooted for anything other than power failure.

hmm, given the energy issues going forward, isnt that a very big waste?

Given the cost of my time and the amount of time I save by having my virtual desktops exactly the way I left them the day before, nope. The monitor goes to sleep, the machine does not. That's good enough.

I put my machines at "home" to sleep when not in use, but that's only to save on the equipment itself. I don't have an electric bill at the place I sleep when I'm working and at home, most of the electricity is generated from geothermal sources, but I can't leave stuff on and running because of the heat and humidity.

Re:Or else...

[alcourt]

My experience is quite the opposite of yours. I'd gladly give up my 54 Linux boxes for this one application, and replace the 20 central nodes with 4-5 truly large boxes.

Underpowered zones I find to usually be the result of bad planning (way too much stacking). We use moderate sized boxes, not the baby Crays (E10k types), but things like what used to be the E6900.

These days, my hardware is Linux and I'm cursing the lack of hardware diagnostic tools, the low quality of the kernel, the inability of our standard middleware teams (Veritas/Symantec, Oracle, etc.) to support even minor kernel patches, etc.

No one solution works for every application. I have a few apps that work really well in a zone. Other applications require a standalone box, and Linux works great. Some of my most parallel apps, Linux was chosen by our vendor, and we're trying hard to find a reason not to throw the vendor and the boxes out the window. Application failures, kernel panics that the hardware and OS vendor can't tell us if they are even hardware or software caused, you name it.

Solaris 9, I agree was underpowered, relatively tame. Solaris 10 is a surprisingly major shift in operating approach. Some of the changes I think are good, some not. I'm still unconvinced that svcs is done correctly. Databases as the underlying structure for OS configuration I consider very dangerous because of the higher risk of corruption and increased difficulty in using unexpected or arbitrary tools to maintain consistency (AIX folks know what I'm talking about here.) But some of the ideas I find very appealing. That might be even more obvious when for home, I rejected Linux and bought a Sun workstation with Solaris 10. I was tired of supporting hardware on my own with no help. Sun's workstation at the time was bid lower than any equivalent hardware from anyone else that would submit a quote.

Re:Or else...

[Alpha830RulZ]

Is uR PeNi$ werking today?

No, we do predictive modeling and scoring.

Re:Or else...

[Nutria]

hmm, given the energy issues going forward, isnt that a very big waste?

On-demand CPU throttling, and Display Power Management mitigate most of those issues. A trailing-edge video card will help, too.

Re:Or else...

[Grimwiz]

I believe Ubuntu will meet your requirements.

You will have to enable the tickbox for binary blobs before the Nvidia drivers are installed but that is a philosophical point rather than a technical issue.

Having used SunOS/Solaris since 1986 I no longer do so. I found their short-sightedness and arrogance impacting the ability of our department to meet our service level agreements. Now, it is very possible that we could also find our current OS vendor lacking but that was no reason to stay in a dysfunctional relationship.

Re:Unification

[Shaman]

The LSB solves most of this issue.

Why most people don't standardize on APT, though... it's beyond me. IMHO they should all talk to the Debian people and build a hardened core OS that they can build their management systems etc. on top of in order to differentiate themselves.

But what do I know...

Ask any former VAX user!

[mangu]

Any server OS with decent legacy traction can hang on for ages even without exciting benefits, or even parity, compared to its competitors. Any OS can also be opened up, given away, and allowed to limp along for as long as anybody cares to play with it. VAX/VMS is essentially certain not to die.

I can't say I totally agree with your post.

Re:Ask any former VAX user!

[atraintocry]

Don't forget about OpenVMS.

Re:Ask any former VAX user!

[Pantero Blanco]

Any server OS with decent legacy traction can hang on for ages even without exciting benefits, or even parity, compared to its competitors. Any OS can also be opened up, given away, and allowed to limp along for as long as anybody cares to play with it. VAX/VMS is essentially certain not to die.

I can't say I totally agree with your post.

VMS still has a sizable hobbyist community, and you can find the occasional Alpha running it in a server room. I think that's what he meant by "given away, and allowed to limp along for as long as anybody cares to play with it".

Of course, the NYT and (I assume) you are talking about commercial death.

Solaris isn't going to disappear from the business world any time soon, though its marketshare may slowly shrink.

It's the hardware

[espergreen]

Solaris is dying, but it's because of the hardware. The "big iron" sparc hardware is simply obsolete. Paying tens of thousands of dollars for a 2ghz sparc system is looking less and less attractive. Solaris x86, of course, cannot compete with Linux. AIX is still relevant due to the great LPAR virtualization and great POWER hardware. Nothing from HP or Sun comes close.

Re:It's the hardware

[fahrbot-bot]

Solaris is dying, but it's because of the hardware. The "big iron" sparc hardware is simply obsolete.

In addition to what "ducomputergeek" said above, I would suggest that you're not looking at the appropriate hardware. Check out the enterprise-class systems (Sun and other vendors, like HP) and you'll see a difference. You can reallocate (or sometimes replace) hardware on the fly. Ever tried hot-swapping an I/O board on Linux? As for other vendors, HP makes systems with redundant, hot-swap everything (or damn-near everything).

Linix is appropriate for certain audiences / environments, but not others.

Rival what huh?

[Aphoxema]

I wasn't aware of the 'rivalry' between Sun and, uhh, those bunch of other people who openly contribute to GNU/Linux.

Maybe it's similar to that 'rivalry' between Gnome and KDE, or Slackware and Red Hat, or all those other things that it's generally the onlookers that assume there's a conflict because heaven forbid there's such a thing as two different things sharing the same space when there's a choice to be had between them.

So, one day Solaris might win and then everything else will be gone?

These competitions only exist when there's money or ratings at stake, or when people are bored.

Re:Rival what huh?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I wasn't aware of the 'rivalry' between Sun and, uhh, those bunch of other people who openly contribute to GNU/Linux.

It is probably more of a one-way rivarly. I know a few engineers at sun and they all have stories to tell about certain fellow employees who have a very microsoft-vs-linux type of attitude about solaris-vs-linux.

Re:Rival what huh?

[CSMatt]

At least it's not like Microsoft and Apple, where both companies benefit from appearing to be in competition with each other when in reality they are not.

Of course it isn't going anywhere

[debatem1]

Solaris runs on mission critical systems, the kind that will (absent horrible, business-destroying failure) be running until their tape drives rust solid. It isn't going anywhere, and even if Sun's interest in it evaporates, there will probably still be thousands of systems out there chugging along merrily for years to come.

Re:Of course it isn't going anywhere

[Shaman]

This is probably the first sane statement in this article yet. :) Thanks for that.

Re:Of course it isn't going anywhere

[Grimwiz]

Rootkitted to the hilt and hosting pr0n.

Security moves. Keep up or sink.

Re:Unification

[Darkness404]

One or at most 2 will become defacto standards and the others will fade away.

We already have that. We have Red Hat (RPM) based distros and Debian (APT) based distros. Just about any major distro can fall into that category, CentOS, RHEL, Fedora, Yellow Dog, and even openSUSE can be considered to be with Red Hat based (RPM) distros. On the other hand, Ubuntu, Debian, KNOPPIX, Xandros, DSL, etc.

There has also been a lot of talk about LSB that could help unification (which, honestly IMO is not needed and will just be a waste of work on distros for a failed standard)

MacOS could become dominant

I can't see Apple wanting OS X to become dominant. They make $$$ of of hardware sales to fanboys. The die-hard Mac fans. Apple honestly wouldn't be able to keep up with the demand if Macs had 25% or more of the marketshare. Apple is happy to sell iPods to everyone and keep the Macs for the fanboys. Now, they want OS X to have access to all major software and to have drivers, so they don't want too low of a marketshare, but I can't see Apple wanting OS X to have more than 10% of the marketshare. Much as how Ferrari doesn't want us all to be driving Ferraris, it loses the prestige of driving one.

In the worst case scenario the desktop and server segments become so fragmented that you'll have dozens of versions of each app - 1 per OS.

Ummm... How is that bad? There are dozens of versions of Apache, one for each OS, yet it still manages to be a unified server. And dozens of separate distro specific Linux kernels but just about all are compatible with all programs (when the proper libraries are installed).

Sun has already tried Linux

[ratboot]

"Sun, he declared [Jim Zemlin], should just move over to Linux."

In fact, Sun has already embraced Linux without very much succes, see :

http://www.sun.com/software/linux

The Times?

[fm6]

I was a little confused to see this on the NYT web site, since most readers there would never have never heard of Solaris before. But this seems to be some kind of syndicated story that's appearing on a lot of other web sites. This one has an interesting post from somebody at Gracenote. Of course, his comments will be read in light of the fact that Gracenote is Evil.

A decent article, though I wish they had quoted somebody besides a Linux Foundation flack for the Solaris-Is-Dying side of the argument.

Old OSes don't die, they just fade away...

[TheMidnight]

Solaris is the smallest percentage of UNIX platforms my company's clients run on. AIX is first, followed by HP-UX. However, though Linux is a popular operating system with universities, web sites, startups and small server solutions, Linux on x86 scales horribly (and I do mean horribly) on our application and other high-performance database solutions with thousands of users compared with the big UNIX operating systems. ext3 can't support the filesystem throughput required even with RAID 10.

We still configure Solaris systems on Solaris 10 UltraSparc, and I believe Sun just came out with a new, rather mean processor. Solaris, and certainly HP-UX and AIX, are not going anywhere soon. There are too many enterprise database systems (new, not just legacy) that require the far more powerful and scalable hardware and software that Sun, IBM and HP offer.

Have you ever benchmarked the 4.7 GHz POWER6 chips on AIX 6.1? It's the fastest processor and operating system combination I've ever seen.

Re:Old OSes don't die, they just fade away...

[Just Some Guy]

However, though Linux is a popular operating system with universities, web sites, startups and small server solutions, Linux on x86 scales horribly (and I do mean horribly) on our application and other high-performance database solutions with thousands of users compared with the big UNIX operating systems.

That's the dumbest thing I've read today. Google, Yahoo!, and most of the Top 500 would dispute your contention that Linux is slow and unsuitable for high-performance work. I'm a FreeBSD guy, personally, but that's still just goofy.

Re:Old OSes don't die, they just fade away...

[TheMidnight]

All of those companies you listed are web sites. I was talking about high-end database servers used for corporate backends, not web sites, computer cluster projects, etc.

Re:Old OSes don't die, they just fade away...

[codepunk]

Oh you mean like Oracle RAC on Linux running ERP....yea it really sucks I have never seen a Linux Oracle RAC cluster go down in production ever.

Yes I admin a Oracle RAC cluster, enterprise ERP database...solid as a rock

Oh we have solaris machines also but I can state for a fact that the boss would never buy another one when we could just
use linux on a x86-64 off the shelf box.

Re:Old OSes don't die, they just fade away...

[willyhill]

Mod parent up. Way up. This is typical "advocacy": Write pithy articles wondering what in the world are your competitors going to do now that you've allegedly cleaned their clock. Sun isn't going anywhere. Solaris is in many, many ways much more advanced, stable and mature than Linux. The closest thing to Solaris in the OSS world is probably OpenBSD.

More importantly, in the world of PHBs, Solaris is a brand name, while Linux is not. RedHat has been working hard to change that, but they have a ways to go still. Trust me, out there in the real world Linux is not the true heir to the UNIX legacy. That may change in time, but Sun would have to continue making dumb mistakes for quite a while.

Re:Old OSes don't die, they just fade away...

[sgtrock]

Not to mention the Chicago Exchange, the NYSE, NASDAQ, virtually all large trading companies, etc...

Re:Old OSes don't die, they just fade away...

[Just Some Guy]

Eh. Big Iron advocates usually define "real workloads" as whatever they happen to be doing that you're not. If they were running NYSE, it would be a "real workload". Since they're not, it isn't.

Re:Unification

[at_slashdot]

The thing is... Linux took off, but people are too busy debating about irrelevant issue to notice, there are millions of Linux users already.

Sun servers

[nixbox]

Don't forget that most of the enterprises use BOTH Sun servers and Solaris which makes for a great combination as far as support is concerned.

Unlike Linux

[mysidia]

Solaris is a hard core OS for hard core hardware that just works, Linux is not; I.E. one rarely ever sees a Solaris system crash due to an OS bug, never seen a Solaris system need to be rebooted due to a kernel quirk.

Solaris is also open source and adaptable to suit whatever needs Linux serves. For example, there is Nexenta, a GNU userland on top of OpenSolaris. Eventually, Solaris can in fact be a more robust Enterprise-quality drop-in replacement for Linux.

It can also do things Linux cannot do; for example, capabilities and administrative convenience that the ZFS filesystem has which Linux lacks.

Linux is not there yet; Linux on commodity hardware is a bicycle, Solaris/*BSD on high-end PC server equipment is a motorbike. Solaris on Sun hardware is a tank.

If you need for a server to have 99.999% uptime, guaranteed: Linux 2.6 is not your OS. Solaris is perhaps an option.

If you can tolerate periodic unexpected outages of a server at bad times that last however long it takes you to reboot the box, or get there physically to diagnose some subtle thing that went wrong, then Linux on commodity PC hardware is for you.

Otherwise, Solaris on Sun hardware is much more robust than Linux on commodity PC hardware.

Can do things you simply cannot do with Linux on most server equipment; for example, turning off a failed CPU or memory stick without completely powering down and physically removing it from the box.

It is also useful to examine the build quality of Sun servers VS one of the thousands of commodity brand PC manufacturers' servers.

I think ultimately Sun is going nowhere, until Linux can give an adequate answer to Solaris.

And if Linux finally attains the state-of-the-art engineering, stability, and robustness, that Solaris has, Sun will still be well and alive selling hardware to run Linux on.

Because there are essentially only 4 manufacturers to find robust enterprise server hardware from : Sun, HP(Compaq), IBM, Unisys.

Sun may prefer Solaris for their servers, IBM may prefer their own tailored flavor of Linux; HP may prefer HP-UX, etc. In any case all of them sometimes have to accept Windows or Linux (commodity solutions).

So long as the manufacturers keep their OS alive, it will remain alive. Solaris is actually good enough and well-integrated enough to be a high selling point in their hardware.

Re:Unlike Linux

[GaryOlson]

Sun may prefer Solaris for their servers...but may sometimes have to accept Windows or Linux (commodity solutions).

Correct. Commodity solutions are how most people are introduced to technology: the rotary dial phone, the serial port non-acoustic modem, the Model T car, etc. But robust, highly reliable technology is usually not a commodity.

Sun had a good run trying to convince the computing community Solaris was the commodity OS everyone needed to use. But commodity means you have to appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator; or create multiple products based on a single solution. Sun as a company is not humble enough to accept either of these options. Solaris will disappear into the technology background like any other automated control system.

outlook not so good

[blakecraw]

articles about unix are forced onto linux.slashdot.org.

It's doomed.

Re:outlook not so good

[TheRaven64]

BSD articles are still on bsd.slashdot.org. There is no opensource.slashdot.org though, which means articles about KDE or GNOME or some other userspace thing get pushed on to linux or bsd, which doesn't entirely make sense (particularly when the program in question also works quite well on Windows).

Stupid flamebait

[jlarocco]

This is like asking when Ford is going to squeeze Chevy out of the automobile market. It probably isn't going to happen, and there's really no reason why it should.

Competition is good. "Monoculture" is bad. Having more than one dominant UNIX-like OS is good. In this case it's great because both products are more or less standards compliant.

Re:Stupid flamebait

[Locklin]

That's what I find funny. Virtually every argument that one system is better than another revolves around one falling short, and the user switching to a "far superior system."

These people should realize that their ability to switch to a system that met their needs was only possible because of diversity.

Re:AIX Of course

[bonkeydcow]

No problem. Just run AIX. In our environment we run all 3 OSes, Solaris, AIX, Linux and windows ( I don't count that one).

Linux is in no way encroaching on the other two.

OT: Computer users ponder future of NYT

[NotQuiteReal]

Meanwhile... everyone else ponders the future of the New York Times, when the Internet and online computing is getting all the buzz.

Can a dead tree publication survive?

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Re:Unification

[farkus888]

the LSB has been a huge improvement. personally I like pacman is best of all of the package managers I have ever used. the only issue with that being standardized across all of linux is that because of the mentality of Arch there is no refined graphical frontend for it. and there really isn't any well supported plan to make one either. honestly I never managed to figure out how rpm became such a force. its improved a lot since red hat 8 when I first started using linux, but it still can't compete with some of the other options.

Of course it will!

[SEE]

After all, the arguments for Solaris's survival are cogent and persuasive. A handful of features, an installed base, a matter of trust, superior solidity, people actually switching back.

All, indeed, the same cogent and persuasive arguments presented in 1998 for why SCO's Unix versions weren't going anywhere anytime soon. And look at SCO today!

Solaris Sparc is dead

[whereiswaldo]

Solaris Sparc is dead. Solaris x86 may have a chance as the performance is good.

Every experience I've had with Sun hardware and software has been a real fucking pain in the ass. Sun has no place in the low to mid range from what I've seen. As for high range, it may be worth the effort but I can't comment from experience there.

Re:Solaris Sparc is dead

[whereiswaldo]

I guess I will remain ignorant until you cite your source.

I Ponder the Future of Solaris In a non-IB world

[amiga500]

I wonder how much the downturn in financial services is going to hurt sales of Solaris. The only companies I know of who go out and buy $500k Sun servers by the pallet are financial services, and perhaps a couple of telcos.

Is Solaris

[Crazy Taco]

Is Solaris one of those Unix OS's that has the "lp0 on fire" error still in its code, just in case it is necessary?

I was thinking about trying it out, but I demand five star safety ratings in all of my operating systems. Fire alarms are a must of course :).

Re:Is Solaris

[MoHaG]

Is Solaris one of those Unix OS's that has the "lp0 on fire" error still in its code, just in case it is necessary?

I was thinking about trying it out, but I demand five star safety ratings in all of my operating systems. Fire alarms are a must of course :).

I have not looked at the solaris code, but Linux has the "lp0 on fire" error even for USB printers...

Re:Is Solaris

[harry666t]

Linux also has "lp on fire". Try "grep -n 'on fire' /usr/src/linux/drivers/char/lp.c". I think all modern Unices still have this (didn't bother to check the BSDs).

Solaris and perception

[Anonymous Coward]

The real question is "how much of a premium will Solaris be able to command?" This is probably connected to the question of how much of a premium SPARC hardware can command.

Sun sells some (really nice) x86 kit. Solaris is certified and supported on HP hardware (though HP is not an official OEM). Dell has an OEM agreement with Sun, and so does IBM. Furthermore Solaris is being ported to IBM's mainframe systems, and it works just fine as a guest in VMware (and xVM, and work is being done with Xen).

A software support contract is cheaper for Solaris than it is for Red Hat.

The main issue is perception: Solaris is viewed as "old and tired", and Linux is viewed as new and exciting. I do not think this corresponds to any meaningful reality (and I've run DOS, DESQview, OS/2, Linux, BSD, Solaris, and OS X on my home machine since I began computing).

My perfect system would be the core of Solaris, the interface of OS X, and FreeBSD's ports tree. The development model of Linux (and BSD and GNU/FSF), and the freedom it gives you, is the most important thing that Linux has brought to the table, but I don't see anything inherent in the technology that Linux gives that makes it anything special.

Re:Solaris and perception

[udippel]

My perfect system would be the core of Solaris, the interface of OS X, and apt-get.

Gee, corrected that for you!

Re:Solaris and perception

[phantomfive]

You can actually get the Solaris core with apt-get. Check out Nexenta OS, it is what you are looking for.

Re:Solaris and perception

[thogard]

The solution I'm looking for is the Solaris Kernel, FreeBSD system, optional OS X interface and something like apt-get that plays nice with ports. I hate when I have to install several packages to load one small command line tool and most of the times ports makes that far easier to deal with than any other packing system.

Re:Solaris and perception

[jhol13]

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/pkg/ is claimed to be as good as apt-get.

I do not think it is, at least yet, as good and robust. After all apt-get has been around for years.

I'd like to have Bluetooth, and overall better support for peripherals in OpenSolaris. This will, obviously, take a long time, if ever. After that I'd ditch Linux for good.

Re:Solaris and perception

[TheRaven64]

The nice UI and dev tools in OS X are based on NeXT and Sun's OpenStep specification. It's a real shame that Sun stopped shipping an OpenStep implementation around Solaris 8 (their X server does still include a Display Postscript server though). As for apt-get, take a look at Nexenta - they have a version of apt which uses ZFS transactions, making it trivial to roll-back failed upgrades.

Re:Solaris and perception

[nareshov]

http://www.osnews.com/story/20280/Nexenta_Ubuntu_Server_with_ZFS_goodness

Solaris on multicore SPARC machines

[sveiki_neliels]

A fair amount of the future of Solaris is tied to new Sun hardware, as far as I'm concerned. Development of an OS that can target (for finely-tuned performance) the type of multicore systems Sun is leaning towards would be very important.

This is not as big a deal with the multicore and simultaneous multithreading available in the Niagara processors, but there is a potential for Solaris to be the only (or best) choice for extracting every ounce of performance with the new Rock processor they have coming.

I was recently at a talk by Marc Tremblay of Sun about the Rock's Transactional Memory model and scout threading performance enhancements. They should provide performance benefits out of the box, but an OS tuned to use Rock's new architecture would be just as important as the processor itself in determining the future success of both.

More like it's the support

[ducomputergeek]

I've worked in Sun Shops before, and I've seen Sun support folks come in to repair 15 year old boxes that were running mission critical databases. Also, if you write sun certified software, they tend to bend over backwards to ensure it will be backwards compatible. I've even seen Sun send engineers when a Solaris 6 App stopped working in Solaris 8 to help the shop solve the problem.

That may not seem like much to you, but if your a decent sized business that is making millions of dollars per year and it has to work, Sun is a worthy look if for no other reason than you only have to develop that application once with reasonable assurance that it will work on future versions of the OS.

What Has Sun Done Lately?

[filesiteguy]

I ask the question seriously. In fact, I was speaking last night to a buddy of mine who works on Sun midrange systems. Though Java and Netbeans are a great development tool, and Virtual Box is a great virtualization tool, what about the core OS?

I had a chance this week to test just that. I went to a tech forum sponsored by my company (Los Angeles County) and discussed some items with a Sun rep who was there. We apparently have some Sun (along with HP) servers. (We also have several dozen IBM mainframes.) I was given a copy of Solaris 10 and told to try it out. First thing I did was figure - it had to be "better" than the low-life openSUSE I'd been running on my laptop. After all, I was first introduced to UNIX back in '94 on Sparc 5 and Sparc 20 workstations. (I'd used Vax previously while at university.)

I very much remember not being impressed by the GUI or command-line of Unix back then. I'd already been using GUI OS's with Amiga, Macintosh, OS/2 and even Windows NT/3.1 by the time I'd gotten to use a Sun station. Of course, I learned to "like" it as it was part of our product offerings.

Skip forward 14 years and I've now been using Linux - mostly SuSE/openSUSE - for several years and have it on my laptop and several desktops/servers. I am used to doing most tasks with a GUI and will not tolerate being forced to either use a GUI or command line. (I want to choose, depending on my needs and depending on whether I'm doing ssh/telnet into a server or runnign on my laptop.)

I load Solaris. Instead of a nice gui-oriented installation, I get a mostly command-line driven one with little options to choose. I cannot choose between gnome or kde or xfce or icewm. I get gnome. That's it. There appear to be no choices for setting up a user other than root. In fact there appears to be little in the way of configuration tools, such as YaST on openSUSE or Drakconf on Mandriva.

My take - Solaris hasn't improved with the times. Though it may be still beneficial to run on a server, I don't see it ever breaking into the desktop world. In fact, I'd choose SLES on a Z-Series over Solaris anyday, based on what I've seen.

Re:What Has Sun Done Lately?

[TheRaven64]

Wow, you're judging an OS entirely based on third-party software and the installer?

What has Sun done lately in Solaris? Here are some examples:

• ZFS. Want to add disks on the fly? Expand volumes to include them? Tune the amount of redundancy (from something like RAID-6 to double-mirroring, or no redundancy at all) on a per-volume basis? Want to be able to create new volumes as easily as creating directories? Want to be able to make constant-time snapshots? Want writeable snapshots (clones) for testing? Want transactional I/O at the filesystem level to make your DB even faster and more reliable? Then you probably want ZFS.
• DTrace. Want to know where your bottleneck is, whether it's in the kernel, the userspace program, or related to some hardware? You probably want DTrace. There's a reason Apple ported it to OS X...
• Zones. Want to run some Linux binary-only software? Install Red Hat or Debian (or whatever) in a zone. Need something that only runs in an old version of Solaris or a Linux distro? Install it in a zone. Want an isolated environment for testing? Create a zone.
• New networks stack. Want a network stack designed from the ground up for concurrency? If you're doing a lot of serving, you probably do.
• Xen. Want to be able to debug your hypervisor offline? Run Solaris in domain 0 (yes, you can run Solaris as a Xen dom0, no Linux required) and if Xen crashes then the entire contents of memory is dumped to the swap partition and wrapped up into a Solaris debugger image on the next reboot. Keep your production machines running and debug somewhere else.
• SMF. System V init was never a good idea, and there are a number of replacements (RCng, Initng, Launchd), and SMF is one of the cleaner ones.

That's just off the top of my head. Then, of course, there's the stuff Solaris was already well-known for (scaling up to large numbers of processors, handling large I/O loads, stable ABIs allowing you to run really old software on a modern system, and so on).

Re:What Has Sun Done Lately?

[filesiteguy]

To answer your question - yes. I absolutely am judging the software on the installer and the GUI. I expect them to make the experience pleasing and trouble free.

You pointed out some examples - ZFS is something that may be helpful for servers. Not a laptop or single-user like in my example. DTrace - no idea why I'd use that unless I'm writing kernel-level code. Zones does look cool. Seems similar to Xen (which I have in SLED as well). Not sure what SMF, RCng, Initng, Launchd are or how I can get my spreadsheet done better by using them.

Re:What Has Sun Done Lately?

[TheRaven64]

ZFS is something that may be helpful for servers. Not a laptop or single-user like in my example.

Really? You don't think constant-time snapshots are useful? How about something like Nexenta's apt-clone, which takes a ZFS snapshot, performs an update, and lets you revert it in a single operation if something went wrong? How about being able to snapshot something you're working on, break it, and either discard or revert to the snapshot after a bit of testing? Or even just setting up a cron job to snapshot your ~ every day in case of accidental deletion?

DTrace - no idea why I'd use that unless I'm writing kernel-level code

Something on your system running slowly? DTrace lets you find out why easily. Maybe not so useful to someone who never writes code, but if you do, or if you're running some critical infrastructure then it's invaluable.

Zones does look cool. Seems similar to Xen (which I have in SLED as well)

Not really. Zones are much more lightweight - closer to FreeBSD jails. Combine the with ZFS for storage and they're trivial to create and allow you to isolate things much as you would with chroot, only with much finer control.

Not sure what SMF, RCng, Initng, Launchd are or how I can get my spreadsheet done better by using them.

Oh, I'm sorry, I mistook you for someone who might be qualified to make an assessment about an operating system. It sounds like Solaris, Linux, BSD, Windows, Haiku or AROS are pretty much equally useful to you.

Re:What Has Sun Done Lately?

[filesiteguy]

Oh, I'm sorry, I mistook you for someone who might be qualified to make an assessment about an operating system. It sounds like Solaris, Linux, BSD, Windows, Haiku or AROS are pretty much equally useful to you.

No, I'm a manager over application development with only about twenty years experience in various OS's (note my original post) including VMS, OS2, Unix, Linux, DOS, Wintendo, MVS and zOS. I have no qualifications. Whatever gets the job done. In any case, it is the end-user experience that must be satisfied. Without that, you end up with nothing useful.

Re:What Has Sun Done Lately?

[sethstorm]

What Has Sun Done Lately?

Killed off platforms(and making it a Cardinal Sin to suggest anything regarding opening them up), developed ZFS and Dtrace, and evangelized those two features. Of course, they also make shiny clones and servers.

Re:What Has Sun Done Lately?

[alcourt]

ZFS isn't yet stable enough for me to use in the enterprise. Every six months, my company looks at it again, and rejects it again. Still not ready, some key part missing, should be delivered Real Soon Now.

There are great things in Solaris 10, but I still can't get ZFS to do what I want and Sun to agree that it is ready for me to use.

Solaris works well with enterprise software

[rshondell]

I've seen advantages with Solaris over Linux in my environment (1500+ servers) mainly in the compatibility with "enterprise" class products. IO multipathing software is a big one for us, as we have a large (350+ TB) SAN environment. We use Veritas Storage Foundation on Solaris extensively for volume management, IO multipathing and clustering. vxdmp on Solaris is simply rock solid in our environment. Running it on Linux has been a much larger hassle, and things like sdd or native multipathing on Linux have burned us with path failures causing systems to crash. LVM, although leaps and bounds above raw disks, is still no match for VxVM in terms of ease of use and feature set. Volume/filesystem shrinking and online relayout of disk characteristics (like turning a concant into a stripe or changing a 4 way stripe into a 6 way stripe) are so effortless with Solaris.

I know, this mostly comes out as pro-Veritas and not so much pro-Solaris, but I can't overstate the value of knowing that these products will work together so effortlessly in a very large environment. We have the luxury of plugging them together and knowing it will be stable. Veritas and Linux have just not worked together as well for us (YMMV), meaning more man hours devoted to debugging and setup and fewer focused on architecting the next solution for the problem that's just around the corner.

I love Linux, I use it on my laptops (Solaris definitely is not beating Linux is the desktop space) and used it almost exclusively on servers when I worked in smaller environments. But right now, in my environment, Solaris is giving me more stability with less tinkering for the same price.

home user stuff

[CustomDesigned]

I dabble in Solaris at a customer, but run Linux on our own servers and at home. Solaris is *way* ahead of Linux in Logical Volume Management (ZFS), virtualization (xVM and Zones) and other "enterprise" features involving storage, memory, and security. However, if you want to edit video, record a MIDI performance, or use cheap consumer hardware not carefully selected for Solaris drivers, you had better be able to port the Linux driver from source - or just use Linux.

To oversimplify, between the GPL kernels, I'd say Solaris in the server room, and Linux on the Desktop. That's not to say that Solaris isn't improving its consumer desktop support - or that Linux isn't improving its LVM.

Also, Linux has had a lot of attention given to scaled down versions for mobile devices - Solaris hasn't.

Re:Unification

[syousef]

I can't believe your post got modded up like that.

We already have that. We have Red Hat (RPM) based distros and Debian (APT) based distros.

You're confusing package formats with distributions. When software moves between each seamlessly requiring the same steps and instructions exactly on each distro that uses that package format, with no extra effort from end users or developers, then what you say will be true.

There has also been a lot of talk about LSB that could help unification (which, honestly IMO is not needed and will just be a waste of work on distros for a failed standard)

LSB is certainly NOT what I'm talking about. I'm talking about everyone downloading and installing the same software when they talk about Linux. I'm talking about a wide variety of companies hosting that same software. Nothing's more compatible with a distro than another copy of that distro (assuming similar config)

I can't see Apple wanting OS X to become dominant. They make $$$ of of hardware sales to fanboys. The die-hard Mac fans. Apple honestly wouldn't be able to keep up with the demand if Macs had 25% or more of the marketshare.

I think you're hallucinating. They couldn't cope with such demand today but if they have the ability to capture that kind of market share in a way that allows them to grow sustainably I'd bet body parts they'd take it. They'd still produce an elite line of hardware and focus on selling that of course. The 2 aren't incompatible.

Much as how Ferrari doesn't want us all to be driving Ferraris, it loses the prestige of driving one.

That's where you spin off a new company to cater for a different segment of the market so you don't dillute the brand. Do you really think business men running Ferrari wouldn't jump at the chance at running a second company catering for lower end cars (assuming that's a profitable market segment)?

Ummm... How is that bad? There are dozens of versions of Apache, one for each OS, yet it still manages to be a unified server.

I really need to answer that question on slashdot??? It's bad because there's effort in maintaining multiple versions, customising to various systems etc. That's time and effort wasted. Why do you think installers and exes on Windows are seen as simpler? (and even then users don't like going to the effort of understanding and running the installer).

DTrace!

[spedrosa]

I've just installed OpenSolaris because of DTrace.

Find me a similarly powerful tool under Linux.

For the foreseeable future, DTrace will remain a bonus for Mac and Solaris users.

Re:DTrace!

[codepunk]

Just as the article stated, Sun keeps hyping DTrace like it is some sort of must have feature. It may be a little useful for
a developer but if I have to restore to dtracing a system it is time to move to a different app or os.

Yes dtrace is nice but it is far from being the killer app that will keep people on Solaris.

Re:Unification

[mysidia]

We already have that. We have Red Hat (RPM) based distros and Debian (APT) based distros. Just about any major distro can fall into that category

Oh really?

What about Slackware, Gentoo (emerge), RPath Linux (conary package manager), Foresight Linux, Pardus (PISI package manager), CRUX, Arch Linux, Gobolinux, Sorcerer/Lunar Linux, Lycoris, Nitix, ?

Re:Unification

[atraintocry]

Wow, if Unix took off...that'd be something, huh? The discussion about the server market, where Unix is very much widely adopted. And that's despite the fragmentation of everyone having their own version of it.

As for the desktop...it's getting easier and easier to write cross-platform apps. If you write an app in Java, you can let Sun worry about the OS support. I think the desktop monoculture served a purpose, but now it's more important that the technology centers around open/documented standards than that everyone runs the same OS. No doubt you've heard this before, but I don't think having lots of distros is a weakness of Linux...it's a strength.

Re:Unification

[atraintocry]

I'm a huge pacman (+ yaourt) fan as well, and like you, I haven't found a graphical frontend for it that comes close to being as useful as the actual version.

Re:Unification

[borroff]

I think you may be mistaken about OS X. If the rumors about sub-kilobuck Macbooks are correct, they may be cutting their margins and seriously going after market share. They've taken a chunk of the laptop market already.

Where is UNIX (HP-UX, Solaris, AIX....etc) headed

[adewolf]

Seems to me (a 20 year UNIX veteran) that any interesting new UNIX development is happening in Linux and OSX. Seems to me that all the UNIX vendors will eventually move to Linux and we will see the death of UNIX.

Solaris 10 - totally rocks

[jamej]

I run Solaris 10. It is rock solid and bullet proof. Add the Hypervisor and it's magical. I am not an OS theologin. But, I sure have developed a strong bias for all things Sun. I think Solaris and Sun will survive based on their own merits. I don't know a technology that beats them.

Why Sun?

[tqk]

Why single out Sun? How many of you want to run AIX these days (including IBM)?

Re:Unification

[Nevyn]

Why most people don't standardize on APT, though... it's beyond me.

Have you asked anyone? And I don't mean in a stupid Debian fan boi way of asking "Don't you guys still install everything by hand using rpm?"

Personally I find apt a horrible user interface, the fact it splits the user operations up between a bunch of different commands seems totally insane ... and don't get me started on the whole "each user much manually synchronize their metadata" snafu.

But then I think all of the package management interfaces could best be described as "a long way to go before they are finished" ... picking a std. now and stopping development would be like giving up when you had the penny farthing. Not that some consolidation wouldn't be helpful, feel free to suggest Debian uses rpm's and yum ... they are both supersets in functionality of the Debian tools (but feel free not to CC on the NIH flamewar that ensues).

Re:Unification

[Nevyn]

We already have that. We have Red Hat (RPM) based distros and Debian (APT) based distros. Just about any major distro can fall into that category, CentOS, RHEL, Fedora, Yellow Dog, and even openSUSE can be considered to be with Red Hat based (RPM) distros. On the other hand, Ubuntu, Debian, KNOPPIX, Xandros, DSL, etc.

RPM != APT ... RPM == DPKG. APT is more commonly used with DPKG based distributions, but apt-rpm has been around a long time now. SuSE uses Zypper instead of APT, RHEL uses yum. Which is to say we are most certainly not down to two flavours of package mangement atm. (which isn't that bad given how much all of them need to improve).

Excellent features in Solaris/OpenSolaris

[benignbala]

Hi,

        Solaris is here to stay forever is what I believe. Sun was intelligent enough to "open" a major part of the solaris code base as OpenSolaris and with that its too has a cult following. Some of the stuff that Solaris provides are really excellent and must be appreciated. One such example is the ZFS file system. Another example is Dtrace. mdb debugger can be taken as a third example.

      And because of its code base going open, it now supports a larger range of hardware and utilities. A few years ago installing Solaris on a 512MB x86 was impossible. But now it is all possible. And with Belenix catching up well, it is bound to penetrate into the Desktop market as well.

Re:Excellent features in Solaris/OpenSolaris

[Ash-Fox]

.One such example is the ZFS file system. Another example is Dtrace.

I do get fedup of hearing these two features recited continuously. I have no need or interest for either.

Re:Excellent features in Solaris/OpenSolaris

[benignbala]

Hi, Well, saying no need is agreeable. But if you say you have no interest, it just means, you must stick to windows,as you openly say you are not interested in Great technology. Please create a 128 bit FS and I agree you are a great and also that I will never make a post in slashdot. Can you do that ? Not only that it is a 128-bit fs, it just made a few decades of FS obsolete. Be patient and have the heart to accept technology And, by the way, i mentioned three, you didn't read it fully, I presume. The third was mdb. I can give a bigger list, which include _more_ stability than Linux(My primary OS is Debian GNU/Linux).

Re:Excellent features in Solaris/OpenSolaris

[Ash-Fox]

But if you say you have no interest, it just means, you must stick to windows,as you openly say you are not interested in Great technology.

Look, I am often a fan of great technology. I consider LVM more suitable than ZFS - it maintains the file system layer technology and is compatible over a variety of file systems that out perform ZFS. I use backstepping debuggers like "TotalView Debugger", dtrace isn't offering something that unique anymore. My issue however was more of the fact, ZFS, "stability" and dtrace are the only things people ever come up with which are good with Solaris. Nobody mentions things like Solaris containers or zones - and it's likely because the Linux technologies generally out do Solaris in the majority of areas.

I am fed up of hearing, that after all these years, the only thing people can come up with, is still, ZFS (which one can use under Linux with FUSE by the way) and dtrace. I could come up with so many different technologies on Linux that are 'great', from UML, LVM to adept cpu frequency controls, some of the best diagnostic tools (from wireless to power management).

You generally don't hear people repeating the same technologies all the time when they promote GNU/Linux - it has so many different broad uses.

Please create a 128 bit FS and I agree you are a great and also that I will never make a post in slashdot.

I made a very bad file system for AROS four years ago - I made really stupid assumptions when designing my own ext2-like file system.

Not only that it is a 128-bit fs, it just made a few decades of FS obsolete.

ZFS broke the file system layer model on Unix.

And, by the way, i mentioned three, you didn't read it fully

My rant was over people repeating the first two continuously. I have no opinion about the modular debugger because I haven't used it on anything beyond very simple projects.

I can give a bigger list, which include _more_ stability than Linux(My primary OS is Debian GNU/Linux).

I would like that.

So far my experiences with Solaris have been numerous, but nothing has struck me that ground breaking or amazing to stick to using it (Getting KDE to run on Solaris is really, really a pain). I have messed with networking booting, paranoia security (which reminds me, where are file system ACLs on Solaris?), virtual file systems, zones, containers, RBAC, heartbeat setups etc.

Re:Excellent features in Solaris/OpenSolaris

[sethstorm]

Sun was intelligent enough to "open" a major part of the solaris code base as OpenSolaris and with that its too has a cult following.

Explains why they vigorously defend the parts that remain.

And because of its code base going open, it now supports a larger range of hardware and utilities.

Except for parts like the sun4m/sbus codebase which they want to keep closed (save for an activist shareholder).

A few years ago installing Solaris on a 512MB x86 was impossible.

Now, getting them to do the same feat on some of their own "preferred" machines(read sun4m's, even with ROSS's) is practically impossible.

Of course, there are some that will beg to differ, and say that it was good to kill that platform. Of course, they forget the lack of documentation (SunPC/PCI, and such)

Re:Is this 2005?

[SocietyoftheFist]

Funny thing at my work, it is all AIX for the serious stuff and Linux for servers that are less important. When large amounts of money are changing hands, you often find UNIX working. Linux is great, but the hardware/software integration that big Vendors can provide is the extra yard that a lot of high throughput applications need. Lots of testing was done and in the end, AIX on Power was the best solution for us. Linux just couldn't cope.

Re:Unification

[fahrbot-bot]

Will the Solaris product remain as a niche even after this happens?

Niche? This really depends on the audience. Step into a production datacenter for a large corporation running payroll, financial services, or tele-communications and I think you'll find Linux (and BSD) the niche players in many cases. Most of the systems will be enterprise Solaris, HP-UX / MPE, MVS, Tandom, etc... systems that can have almost zero downtime - ever. Of course, these cost $$$$, but their uptime is important.

Netcraft confirms it! :)

[Xtifr]

Sheesh, it's free/libre/open source these days, so the only thing that's likely to kill it is...well, honestly, I can't think of anything. If FLOSS were easy to kill, BSD and Linux would both already be dead. Anyway, I really don't care all that much what's under the hood as long as the userspace is GNU. GNU/{Linux,BSD,Solaris} are all good enough for me. No, it's not because I'm a freedom fanatic; it's because GNU software is top quality. In fact, I tend to think that GNU/Solaris would be my ideal system.

Re:Unification

[howlingmadhowie]

... which in total take up somewhere around 1% of gnu/linux installs.

Re:Unification

[Alioth]

When software moves between each seamlessly requiring the same steps and instructions exactly on each distro that uses that package format, with no extra effort from end users or developers, then what you say will be true

One word: Autopackage.

http://www.autopackage.org/ . We've been using it for Oolite since 2005. The game installs in exactly the same way on every distro that we've tested.

Limits?

[Sobrique]

Can't see it myself - my experience of Solaris is it's about the most stable hardware/OS combination I've ever used. Even with Linux on a server platform, it's still not quite there with the level of stability, and it's still the case that Sun leads the game with hardware too.

Maybe X86+Linux will overtake Sun+Solaris, but it's not there yet.

Re:Limits?

[Ash-Fox]

my experience of Solaris is it's about the most stable hardware/OS combination I've ever used. Even with Linux on a server platform, it's still not quite there with the level of stability

There is stability issues with Linux server hardware? I have never seen it.

Maybe X86+Linux will overtake Sun+Solaris, but it's not there yet.

Considering Sun's shift to x86 systems... Their 'Sun' hardware isn't that special anymore.

in other news, Honda CVC replaces container ships

[An dochasac]

In other news... Honda's president announced that there is no longer a need for ocean freighters, He said "Honda's CVC is smaller, gets better gas mileage and faster than almost any ocean going container ship." He also pointed out that they are much more popular. "There are millions of Honda civic out there but only a few thousand ocean going freight ships. Our product is much more popular" Therefore he suggested that shipping companies, and oil companies begin immediately using Honda civic to ship their products around the world. When asked how he intends to handle the fact that Honda's don't float. He said, "Yes this does make it slightly more challenging to carry products across the Atlantic, but how many people really do that anyway? Besides, we are working on that feature. It should be in the 1.9 rev of the CVC kernel"

Hard responsibility of OS's being minimised?? WTF?

[Viol8]

What exactly do you think all these VMs run on top of , magic pixie dust on an infinite turing machine? All the current vogue for VMs mean is that there are now more OS installations with the same amount of hardware , that hardware hasn't gone anywere and it still needs something to run it.

But Solaris 8 & 9 were compering against...

[Viol8]

Linux 2.0 & 2.2. In that case I think Solaris would wins hands down , in fact with hands tied behind its back with a gag in its mouth!

Solaris will last, but won't be any more popular

[fortapocalypse]

SunOS/Solaris had its heyday already. It is unlikely that it will gain much more share of the market than it already has. While OS X will continue to gain more share on the desktop, Linux will probably end up dominating the server side. But Solaris won't go away.

Re:Linux deserves to get something from Solaris

[MrPink2U]

Very doubtful, but thanks for starting my Friday off with a chuckle. Linux didn't prop up a failing Unix market. Big iron would still be around without linux and it would probably be as expensive as ever.

Solaris is the only good action around

[Lally Singh]

Let's face it: Linux has stagnated. It used to be the hot new kid around, bringing together all the new-world desktop technology with the old-school unix reliability, modularity, and maintainability. It did it by being somewhere in between the two. And it took off! People loved it over windows.

But, look at it now. When's the last time it did something *well*? Its standard was always Windows, which is a very low bar to aim for. It's full of sprawl and half-implemented ideas that you have to constantly hack at to make the system work. It's been 10 years and Linux is still a maintenance pain-in-the-ass.

Most people don't care: they're happy to run a tomcat or php stack on top of it. For them, it's really just a SATA and ethernet device driver, which then lets you use your favorite app server.

Containers/Zones, ZFS, dtrace, and SMF blow linux out of the water in every category the affect. What's linux done in the last 4 years? More Windows Ketchup? Thanks but no thanks. I'll take good documentation, manageability, and stable behavior any day. Sorry, but Linux is still too much of a hobby instead of an OS for my book.

Re:Solaris is the only good action around

[sergstesh]

Actually, you are _very_ correct and should have gotten +5 moderation.

brain dead NYT

[fixmedaily]

No wonder print is dead. NYT could not report on a true story with facts if they were sacked up and thrown at them. www.opensolaris.org Windows is dead!

Linux is web HA, Solaris is critical and financial

[justanetgod]

Having worked extensively with both - there is a financial and criticality point where Linux falls short and Solaris pulls ahead. Google runs on linux. Ebay runs on Solaris and SUN hardware. Informational versus transactional. Financial companies where oversight and regulation meet serious financial risk, use invariably SUN and Solaris. Because it just works and the cost of support and hardware makes that worth it.

Re:in other news, Honda CVC replaces container shi

[An dochasac]

I stand corrected, I guess Linux can be used for large loads

BTW, just because Linux can be used on a supercomputer doesn't mean it is the best OS to use for large clustered environments or massive datasets. Traditional "supercomputers" are usually optimized to be superior for CPU bound problems with relatively small datasets. Solaris's traditional sweet spot is massive datasets which are I/O bound. CPU speeds have increased dramatically over the past couple of decades. I/O by comparison is still hideously slow. It isn't a problem you can easily get around with brute force, (the Linux/Google approach) it takes engineering.

Is Solaris really *that* reliable?

[walterbyrd]

I have seen many posts bragging 99.999999% uptime for Solaris.

But, I worked a temporary contract at Sun's Broomfield campus in Colorado, from Sept-2007 to Feb-2008. I monitored about 2000 Sun boxes. I saw those things go down all the time.

Re:Is Solaris really *that* reliable?

[swordgeek]

Broomfield Campus. Isn't that the place where they (a) constantly muck around with systems for training, (b) experiment with cutting-edge builds, and (c) don't have any strict uptime requirements?

Most of Broomfield was not designed to be highly reliable, because it doesn't have to be. You design your whole environment--hardware and OS included--around the sort of reliability you need. Banks, for instance, architect their Solaris environments differently.

Re:Is Solaris really *that* reliable?

[ToasterMonkey]

I have seen many posts bragging 99.999999% uptime for Solaris.

But, I worked a temporary contract at Sun's Broomfield campus in Colorado, from Sept-2007 to Feb-2008. I monitored about 2000 Sun boxes. I saw those things go down all the time.

Let me guess, the closest you got to Solaris was seeing the OS name in some monitoring software?

Bravo.

"Are Porsches really *that* fast?"
I have seen many posts that Porsches are fast cars. But, I lived in northern Virginia from 2006 to 2008. There are thousands of porsches there. I must have passed hundreds of them, like they were standing still, on I95 to DC with my Civic.

Take the hint.

Re:Is Solaris really *that* reliable?

[walterbyrd]

Let me guess, the closest you got to Solaris was seeing the OS name in some monitoring software?

Your guess is completely wrong. I worked on Solaris boxes, all over the world from CLI. Many of the boxes belonged to Sun's customers, Sun maintained them, but did not own them. Some of the boxes were over ten years old. But, many of the boxes where brand new. They all went down.

15,000 HTTP requests per second

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the problem with Sun: they make the most amazing systems, for a market that doesn't exist.

Like serving 15,000 HTTP request/s, simultaneously?

http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/2006/03/27/niagara-benchmarks-update/

And this is a two year old bench mark. Sun now has faster systems.

Re:15,000 HTTP requests per second

[jedidiah]

This would be one of those classic "it's so easy to
cluster it isn't even funny" sort of problems. This
is how a lot of people are already doing this sort
of thing. Even Sun's own customers probably aren't
all too excited about a benchmark of this kind.

Re:GPL "workaround"...

[sergstesh]

Just compile locally a copy of ZFS and link it with any GPL code.

As long as you do not distribute the binary, you are OK - GPL FAQ explicitly allows this.

Just look at Fedora

[kabloom]

Lessons learned from five years of Fedora

The most valuable thing I've learned watching Fedora is this: Patience. It takes time and steady, incremental growth to build a solid community. If you'd asked me two years into Fedora's development whether the project would succeed, I'd have been somewhat skeptical, but looking at the project five years down the road, I'm convinced.

Solaris may be similar.

Re:GPL "workaround"...

[Patrick Georgi]

The "GPL workaround" that the FSF invented, yes?

By the way: OpenSolaris is CDDL. Oh, and no-one forces you to contribute back (ie. you have the right to fork)

Bad quote from article

[Slithe]

One fear that Broadwater had in moving to Linux was degradation in performance, but he has been pleasantly surprised such degradation has not occurred. For example, the company's IBM Cognos BI application runs faster on x86 Linux boxes than it did on Sparc Solaris, he says.

WTF? That is an apples-oranges comparison. If you really wanted to do benchmarks, you would run both OSs on the SAME HARDWARE!! A Sun Blade 100 with Solaris 10 will run much slower than the latest whiz-bang x86_64 workstation.

Re:Where is UNIX (HP-UX, Solaris, AIX....etc) head

[swordgeek]

Don't know about that. Haven't seen a lot of interesting stuff in Linux for ages, except for UI stuff and fast hardware adoption.

Solaris has added dtrace, persistent services, zfs, zones, branded zones, and more. dtrace and zfs are completely new paradigms in the Unix world. Persistent services are similar to cluster services, and in fact Solaris 10 has been called a single-node cluster OS. Behind the scenes, there was a complete rewrite of the network stack which cut CPU usage by an order of magnitude. (Remember 1x400MHz per GB interface? Not any more by a looooong shot.) More stuff coming down the pipe is a (long overdue) patching/packaging/requisite model, which promises to be quite interesting.

Solaris and MacOS seem to be where interesting stuff is happening, in my eyes. Linux is gradually growing up, but really isn't offering anything NEW or DIFFERENT. HP-UX used to be cutting edge, but got shot through the brain about 7.3 seconds after Carly Fiorina took over the company. AIX quit development on anything "new" after dynamic LPARs. To be fair, one could say that there's not a lot that needed to be done after that point. If Unix itself dies, then it'll be because traditional enterprise computers are no longer needed. Instead, we'll have enterprise-like environments made with junk hardware and mediocre OSes, but massively redundant. At any rate, the 'nifty' parts of Unix will get carried onto other OSes, either MacOS or BSD, or even Linux if the GPL zealots can get over themselves.

perhaps the "sun4m question" comes to mind...

[sethstorm]

Perhaps Sun seems to think that issues like Dtrace can kill platforms and most add-on documentation as well.

If Sun's competitors did as Sun did:

IBM: Anything less than a 7044-170(POWER3-II) would be stuck in AIX 4.3 and have no documentation for its addons. They'd stonewall you despite the 7043-150 being CHRP and having the ability to take similar hardware. They'd discourage people from using 7043-260's due to some "unresolvable to IBM" bug, but you could still use them. You'd have kernel devs telling you that an upgrade to smit was why they dropped it.
(yes, they dropped POWER3-II after 5.3, but at least they gave microchannel some use with AIX/L and POWER3/-II boxes have good support under Linux.)

HP: They'd drop the entire architecture and not tell you. You only find out when the next model up has an HP logo but a Dell body.
(Given the heritage of HP's Hurd, I would not be surprised if they go that route)

Any questions?

Re:Where is UNIX (HP-UX, Solaris, AIX....etc) head

[alcourt]

HP-UX ceased to be cutting edge around the time of 10.0. Even 11.0 always felt like "10.x with all the patches pre-loaded", which is exactly what HP branded it as.

AIX doesn't just rest on LPARs, they still claim mksysb and their LVM as the best and only equivalent around. (Sarcasm for the humor impaired).

Mod up parent

[ToasterMonkey]

You're not alone.

I don't know what people's problems are, emotional attachment, idealism, hypocrisy, extremism, ignorance, a desire to be a part of something (and put a razor-wire fence between it and everything else).. I could go on. There's a lot of Linux coolaid drinking going on around here though, that's for damned sure.

Try working with a bunch of "everything must migrate to Linux" nuts in a mixed Solaris/Linux SAN environment, that's a joy.
Gag me with a spoon the next time I have to troubleshoot a storage issue with "cat /proc/scsi/scsi", and guess where T.F. "sde" is coming from.

I got into Linux because it was neat technology to me, and coming from a Windows desktop background it didn't take much to impress. Compilers included.. ohhh, ahhh. I really liked the development models. It was obvious a LONG time ago that much of the Linux community was focused on just one thing, beating Windows. I used to think Linux could become a really kick ass system optimized for software development and computer hobbyists. Those dreams are long gone, it has made ZERO progress in that direction. Yes, it is great for developers and hobbyists.. but it hasn't gotten any better at it since the mid 90's. Linux has only succeeded at syphoning old features from other OS's. I even believed in all the "everything must be Linux" propaganda until I started using Solaris at work, when I realized that much of the Linux community 'TODAY' doesn't know dick about UNIX. That (and working alongside bearded mainframers) opened my mind up about computing in general, and I bought a Mac, with zero prior experience with them, mostly out of curiosity. All I will say on that is the Linux desktop crowd had better start aiming a lot higher than Windows...
to the Linux in the enterprise crowd... wake up. Just wake up already.

It's scary how people (OK, geeks) can be so polarized when it comes to computing. All OS vendors out there today have some pretty awesome, unique attributes, that's including Linux. If someone was going to dedicate their life to computing, it should be to advance the state of the art, or maybe make our lives better, not "push Linux; make Linux better". You can't just take the best bits of everything all at once and mash them together continuously, it wont work. There should be nothing wrong with using Microsoft software to it's full potential, or Apple's, or Sun's, or IBM's, etc. Screw "lock-in", and monopolies, we only have real problems when a bunch of idiots rush to one side of the boat too quickly.. see Windows.. and now Linux.. If you take a good, unbiased look at what's out there right now, there's little reason for everything to be so lopsided for/against any particular platform, or architecture even.

Re:Mod up parent

[Diag]

>If you take a good, unbiased look at what's out there right now, there's little reason for everything to be so lopsided for/against any particular platform, or architecture even.

Agreed.

These discussions are always frustrating on /. because you end up with opinions across all ranges of the spectrum, from the person who tried to install Linux on their desktop once 5 years ago and gave up because it didn't automatically recognise their USB wi-fi adapter, to someone who maintains hundreds of servers running a mix of Linux, Solaris, HPUX, Windows, zOS (MVS - IBM mainframe), and whatever else.

On the desktop, I run Windows XP. I do have an affection for Linux, and have for a long time. The first Linux distribution I installed was downloaded on my 28.8kbps modem, saved to several floppy disks, and installed on an Intel 486 based PC with a whopping 4MB of RAM. I think the distribution was called "Yggdrasil". That would have been about 1994. Back then, I enjoyed tinkering with my computer at home. It was kinda fun, but I eventually switched back to Windows. I have tried heaps of distributions since then, and it is easier these days with VMware, but the parent post is right when he says "it hasn't gotten any better at it since the mid 90's". When I try a Linux desktop, I STILL end up spending hours and hours trying to get basic functionality working. I don't enjoy that any more. I just want my home computer to browse the internet and play my media. I don't want to mess around with config files at home - that's what I do at work.

When I do my next desktop refresh, I will probably go Mac. I've always stuck with Windows because I liked to play the occasional game, but I don't game much these days, and OSX looks great, and has a nice, accessible, Unix-ish heart (ie - a real command line).

At work, I look after storage - SANs and data backup systems. When I started, it was all IBM mainframe. Then it went Solaris and HP-UX, with a bit of AIX. A bit later, Windows as a server started encroaching, which was a complete pain in the butt.

Of those Operating Systems, the MVS mainframe was the most reliable (and still is), but also the most .... inflexible. But putting the mainframe aside, Solaris was by far the easiest to work with, the easiest to pinpoint problems, the least troublesome of them all. And compared to the HP-UX and Windows servers at the time, it's performance ROCKED.

I went and worked for Sun for a while - just when Solaris 10 came out, and their T1000 and T2000 models. I still think they are awesome boxen and am sad that I haven't had a chance to work with them.

I went back to the company I started with. Today, the highest profile project running is the "RISC to Intel" project. They are moving all of their back-end Tier 1 servers off HP-UX and Solaris, and onto Redhat Linux on IBM servers.

The decision to move to Linux was not made due to any technical or cost benefits, really. It was made because the company I work for "partnered" with IBM. And IBM have pushed Linux on IBM hardware to the upper level management.

At first, I was really worried about this. REALLY worried.

However, after a year or so of running several Tier 1 applications (Oracle, mainly) on Redhat, and setting up and maintaining a relatively high-throughput Netbackup system running on Redhat and IBM 3850 servers, it has all been more stable than I was expecting. I am getting great throughput on those 3850s.

Now I tend to think, taking all of the above into account, is that the operating system is kinda irrelevant, at least from my perspective as a storage person. As long as the O/S is efficient and can drive the hardware to it's limit, then, these days, I couldn't care less what O/S it's running.

As long as it's not Windows.

And as long as you can work out some of the obscure Redhat commands - like to scan for a new SAN attached tape drive... I don't have the exact command handy, b

The 90's called...

[HomerNet]

...they want their headlines back.

Re:Unification

[Anonymous Coward]

may i ask you - in a "debian fanboi way" of course - why you use pure apt when there are userfriendly frontends like synaptic (X) or aptitude (ncurses). aptitude's more powerfull than anything i've seen and for sure the best packet manager in existence. there is a easier way to do all this selecting tasks, you know, if you're not fit on the commandline and confused by the the fact a program offers you more than three parameters to choose from. the hole architecture of Debian package managment is layered: dpkg -- apt -- aptitude/synaptic. it never let me down, so i don't really understand what your problem is, troll...

Re:Linux is web HA, Solaris is critical and financ

[rubycodez]

sounds like fanboy talk. really serious financial places use mainframes or non-stop or heck, an OpenVMS cluster can have an uptime in decades as machines are moved out and upgraded. no skanky Slolaris box is going to touch that.

Keep *running* or sink

[debatem1]

Obsolescence is not the enemy; downtime is. The vulnerability-by-vulnerability, patch-by-patch turf warfare technique that secures joe blow's basement server is a firing offense on the kind of system we're talking about.

Re:GPL "workaround"...

[GNUPublicLicense]

Nope... because if that was the case, the LGPL would not need to exist...

Re:GPL "workaround"...

[GNUPublicLicense]

You cannot contribute(mysql/opensolaris/openoffice) without releasing your rights to Sun. So you cannot contribute without being screwed of the control of your code, and many GPL coders want their code to stay free and not be used in proprietary software, thing they lose if they contribute to such software. Some will say that the FSF is doing the same thing on GNU projects: assuming the behavior of the board of Sun will be the same that the FSF is quite misleading... as they do not have the same goals.

Re:GPL "workaround"...

[Patrick Georgi]

The behaviour of the FSF will be different from Sun's, but the Sun variant of the agreement is much nicer to the contributor than the FSF variant. I'll still sign neither and yet hack on whatever I want, incl. GNU stuff and OpenSolaris. Upstream is no concern to me.

Re:GPL "workaround"...

[sergstesh]

Do you want me to point you to the exact FAQ item ?

LGPL was invented to allow redistribution of code,
possibly in binary-only form, redistribution meaning the one who produced the combined (*GPL + non-GPL) code ships the code to another company.

In-house use is not considered redistribution according to that FAQ item.

Re:GPL "workaround"...

[GNUPublicLicense]

Down to the point, those agreement does the same thing: make you give full rights on your code to somebody else. From there, only the behavior of the guy you give your rights is important, not the tone of the agreement.

Re:GPL "workaround"...

[GNUPublicLicense]

My mistake, I missed the *not* for the distribution part. I do apologize. Indeed, till you do not distribute (in a broad definition) GPL code, you are not mandated to publish your improvements and/or modifications.

Re:GPL "workaround"...

[Patrick Georgi]

The GNU variant also makes you liable for whatever happens the FSF legally with regard of your code. Bad legislation on the other side of the world, and the FSF loses because of that (even if you did nothing wrong)? You pay their lawyers.