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NYT Ponders the Future of Solaris In a Linux/Windows World
JerkBoB links to a story at the New York Times about the
future prospects of Sun's Solaris, excerpting: "Linux is enjoying growth, with a contingent of devotees too large to be called a cult following at this point. Solaris, meanwhile, has thrived as a longstanding, primary Unix platform geared to enterprises. But with Linux the object of all the buzz in the industry, can Sun's rival Solaris Unix OS hang on, or is it destined to be displaced by Linux altogether?"
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.
Solaris is a great big iron OS. I don't think it will be disappearing anytime soon.
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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...
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it'll just be a niche product.
personally i think it's sad sun blew their chances with solaris, it's superior to linux in security and performace.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
If your only experience with Solaris is v8 or v9, you really need to check out Solaris 10. It is a complete night and day difference in ease of use and features. Add to that the volume of useful enterprise management software from Sun (the N1 stack, and now the new xVM stack) and you have an enterprise that is a dream to maintain.
I've been doing straight Solaris 10 admin for the last 2 years (linux for 4 years before that), and shortly will once again be taking a position that will be 99% linux. I will miss Solaris 10. I still love both OS's, but Solaris wins in my book at the moment.
"Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live." - Mark Twain, "Taming the Bicycle"
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.
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.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
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.
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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!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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.
Similes are like metaphors
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.
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.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
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.
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).
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
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.
The thing is... Linux took off, but people are too busy debating about irrelevant issue to notice, there are millions of Linux users already.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
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.
Maybe not
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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).
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
What does "literally" mean in the context of a fudge word? The difference between "like" and "literally like" escapes me.
We need a "+1 -- nice sig" moderation.
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...
What has Sun done lately in Solaris? Here are some examples:
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).
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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.
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