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The Steady Decline of Unix
stinkymountain writes "Unix, the core server operating system in enterprise networks for decades, now finds itself in a slow, inexorable decline, according to Network World. Jean Bozman, research vice president at IDC Enterprise Server Group, attributes the decline to platform migration issues; competition from Linux and Microsoft; more efficient hardware with more powerful processor cores; and the abundance of Unix-specific apps that can now also run on competitor's servers."
BSD confirmed Netcraft is dead.
morcego
Combine that with the fact that Solaris is now in the hands of Oracle, who are squeezing out everybody who doesn't have a support contract and pissing off people who used to use it ... or that HPUX is still in the hands of HP (where technology goes to die) ... and what's even left?
AIX is still around, but I have no idea of how widespread. Beyond that, I'm hard pressed to think of another commercial version of UNIX I've encountered. (That doesn't mean they don't exist, but they were never in any shops I was in.)
That pretty much leaves Linux as the primary UNIX-like-thing for most people.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"Reports of my decline have been greatly exaggerated."
-- UNIX
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
Why do we even need to have this conversation? If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck it isn't a duck unless it is branded a duck? This is so fucking stupid. Linux is a UNIX type of operating system, so UNIX isn't in decline.
Oracle is the reason that my employer is switching from Solaris to Linux. We were one of Sun's biggest customers, too.
I'd be curious to know what exactly the HP-UX server did that could so easily be moved over to a cluster of Windows servers, myself. Apart from believing that one can buy eight servers with Windows Server licences and come out much less than $25k, I'm just trying to sort out what this server would have actually been running that one could simply go "Oh well, we're going to Windows now."
I've found damned few cases in my experience when wholesale moving from one platform ecosystem to another platform ecosystem was a viable activity in and of itself, unless it was part of a long term strategy of retooling and recoding. I've seen some organizations move from Unix to Linux, but generally with the notion that porting apps was relatively easy or had already been done. But to move from *nix to Windows is a big deal, unless you're running everything in Java EE, in which case why would you completely change your ecosystem with other *nix variants out there?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Neckbeard teasing? Or what?
Unix (in some incarnation) is running the world. It runs on servers, on embedded systems and basically all tablets and smartphones (both Android and iOS are Unix).
I cannot believe I'm wasting 30 seconds on this. Die, Slashdot, die.
while some of the worlds largest organizations run Windows Server 2012.
Larger organizations can hide the TCO of an army of IT people better then small ones.
Have gnu, will travel.
Errol Rasit, research director at Gartner, concurs that the primary cause of Unix weakness over the past decade is migration from the RISC platform to x86-processor based alternatives, which can run many Unix workloads, usually at attractive price/performance ratios.
x86 has been implemented on a RISC based core ever since the PentiumPro. RISC won. It didn't wither away. That transition made possible a performance boost allowing Intel to compete against the home-grown processors of the traditional Unix vendors who lacked the cash to invest in fab advancements needed to match pace.
Such are the fools pandering their vaunted "analysis" to the media these days.
Sorry, but it didn't win. RISC didn't get clobbered by CISC or vice versa; rather, they both got consumed by VLIW. VLIW pipelining made the debate over instruction set complexity meaningless, as you get custom sets based on which pipeline is used, due to long instruction chains. You could argue that at the core of each VLIW chip you have a RISC; but you could also argue that the result is really an extremely CISC. It's kind of like arguing about Toyota vs Ford, when in reality, they both have components made by Honda and Mazda, as well as each other these days.
So Errol Rasit's observation is valid. There was a migration -- I know, because my old 32 and 64-bit RISC code is a headache to port to x64, unless it is abstracted. The current registers however handle old CISC x86 code just fine.
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck it isn't a duck unless it is branded a duck?
It's not a DUCK®, it's a Waterfowl That Attenuates Quacking Noises. For copyright reasons, of course.
XNU is a Mach 2.5 kernel with the BSD 4.3 userland layered on top. And it is not "reminiscent of Unix" it is certified Unix.
In the Engineering CAD world, Unix has nearly run its course. All companies have dropped Unix support for the newest versions and only some maintain Linux/OSX versions for newer unix-like machines. Most are Windows only. Automotive companies, which are notoriously slow in technology adoption have mostly abandoned UNIX
Ford will retire their UNIX workstations (HPUX) for suppliers and customers in February 2014. These are largely HPUX 11.11i.
Unigraphics NX stopped UNIX support (HPUX, AIX, etc) as of NX 6 but opened support for Linux and OSX as of 8.
Dassault systems CATIA supported HPUX, AIX (6.1+) and Solaris on V5 - but as of V6 in 2011 they have ended UNIX support and are Windows only.
Pro Engineer quit most UNIX except Solaris until Pro Engineer / Creo 4.0 - at present they are Windows only.