Predictability - nice quarterly releases, where things just work. A huge suite of commercial applications to choose from on Sparc, loads of hardware support, scalability from one sub $1,000 Sparc or X86 box right up to massive campus clusters and terabytes of storage, one company to call for OS, surround apps (cluster, volume manager, etc) and hardware. In terms of SMP support, Solaris scales much higher than Linux, although few customers will need that. Large telcos, service providers and the like will, however. Excellent performance too, particularly on heavily loaded database driven apps. The new benchmarks for UltraSparc IV show significant improvements over what's available now.
The Sparc boxes can even come in at less than the Xeon equivalent now.
That's right. Because Linux has all those commercial apps that run on Solaris and if you have a problem with a storage array, using Linux servers is somehow going to solve the problem.
Show me a Linux vendor who can provide anything like the application support Solaris has, along with Sun's platinum support, globally, for both your hardware and OS, with surround products. Apart from Sun, that is.
Solaris Resource Manager currently lets you have similar functionality in software, with dynamic system domains take it further, allowing you to make changes to hardware configs on the fly whilst the system is running, unlike with HP, which requires a reboot.
Fair-ish point, but these 'products' are all fairly recent. Just because someone in the OSS world comes out with a product doesn't mean that IT departments the world over can instantly rip out what they've been using for the last few months or years and migrate things seemlessly to something that they can't get a support contract for. Also, I doubt very much that Kontact does what the original poster is describing.
Good point. From now on I'll replace word processors with typists and get rid of my voicemail and hire secretaries for everyone to take messages when customers call. Instead of using email we'll get the typists to type letters and delivery boys on bikes to deliver them. If the customers are overseas we'll use some cheap pigeons. As for billing systems and accounting, we'll just hire lots of clerks to work with quills and ink to avoid the costs of ballpoint pens.
Just out of interest, have you actually implemented either of these products in a 300+ user organisation and seen it working with all the functionality that the original Exchange system being used offered? Can it be clustered to make the system highly available and can a comapny send its three support guys on a course to get trained up on it, with someone to call when they get stumped, with a guaranteed response time?
I'm not trying to promote one over the other, it's just that people on Slashdot are always promoting OSS tools that allegedly do something like this - but their knowledge comes from reading feature lists and not actual practical epxerience.
You're right - Sun have not been profitable. In terms of 'expensive equipment' you're out of date.
The V440 is half the price of the equivalent Dell and Sun can't make the V210 and V240 fast enough to meet customer demand. The V60 and V65 x86 boxes have been very successful, too. At the 8 CPU and up range, Sun compete extremely well with the HPUX and AIX kit. Couple that to the new Opteron systems and I think we'll start to see some people on Slashdot waking up to Sun again.
Simply saying 'expensive equipment' is a little childish. There are capital costs and there are running costs, trade offs between features and so on. It's not simply about buying a PC from your local supermarket because it's 'cheap'.
Sorry, but that's nonsense! There are numerous apps available, actively developed, with Solaris as their prime platform, for good reasons. Stability, predictability and support, amongst many others.
Why is Sun in trouble? They are capable of making lots of products - you don't have to keep making the same thing when markets change. Why do you think they've moved towards making X86 based servers and has teamed up with AMD.
Just talking about processors also leaves out the fact that you need an OS to run apps on and Solaris is still superior in many situations.
The tasks it's good at are running the Solaris based high end 3D applications for the vertical industries who need those kind of apps. It's also good for Solaris developers, good as an admin machine, test machine in a Sun server environment, etc, etc.
If you want to run games, get a PC, if you want to a cluster of machines to 'make' a 32 bit supercomputer, get a Xeon based V60 from Sun, if you need a large 64 bit SMP box, buy one of them from Sun. Right tool for the right job.
They care a great deal, which is why they'll have fibre channel or high end NAS devices at the end of a Gb network connection to store those 30Gb seismic imaging files, car designs, etc.
If you were releasing software as complex as Oracle's would you really want to test it on several distros? You'd do what they do - choose the one that's perceived to be ahead in the market and test it with that. Anything else is a waste of time and money. With Linux they even have an extra advantage - they can control the OS as well.
What flaws have the distribution channel got exactly then?
Sun are doing fine with the pricing of the Xeon based kit they sell. Why do you assume that Sun are randomly going to sell extra expensivie Opteron kit and expect people to buy it?
Why should the Sun set? Just because new technology comes out doesn't mean that a company can't adapt and use it, hence the collaboration with AMD to product Opteron based servers, the existing Xeon based machines, the UIIIi CPUs for one to four CPUs and the continuing development of UltraSparc for the really high end. Don't forget too the thousands of commercial apps for Sparc that aren't available for any Opteron based platforms. In the high range IBM and HP can certainly not 'beat them out' in all categories - that's a ridiculously glib statement.
Something tells me the money the Isreali armed forces spend on US weaponry will keep the balance of trade in a decent state.
Re:Solaris X86 is no different than a Linux distro
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Solaris 9 x86 Review
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· Score: 1
Sun aren't working on something that will scale to higher clock rates - clock rates on cpus is only a small part of the story. Sun's principal current effort is building balanced systems, which run business apps well and predictably. The research is focussed on what Sun are calling 'throughput computing' - basically getting as much from a cpu without the need to increase clock cycles massively and continually, something which is unsustainable, unless you want your 1 RU server to have 20 RUs of fans cooling it.
Re:Solaris X86 is no different than a Linux distro
on
Solaris 9 x86 Review
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· Score: 1
The fact that it's that cost used, implies it's a quality machine, worth paying that price for, which is quite a recommendation. Also, if there's anything that UltraSparc does well, then surely scaling is it! 106 CPUs in one system and near linear scalability (71 cpus 'worth in a 72 cpu system) - how is that 'not scaling worth a damn'?
Slashdot Mirror
How is buying products and services from two American companies, IBM and Suse (owned by Novell) not going to benefit America financially?
Shame, considering what's happening now with Sun in terms of Solaris x86 and the lower cost Sparc kit!
Why are you migrating exactly?
Predictability - nice quarterly releases, where things just work. A huge suite of commercial applications to choose from on Sparc, loads of hardware support, scalability from one sub $1,000 Sparc or X86 box right up to massive campus clusters and terabytes of storage, one company to call for OS, surround apps (cluster, volume manager, etc) and hardware. In terms of SMP support, Solaris scales much higher than Linux, although few customers will need that. Large telcos, service providers and the like will, however. Excellent performance too, particularly on heavily loaded database driven apps. The new benchmarks for UltraSparc IV show significant improvements over what's available now.
The Sparc boxes can even come in at less than the Xeon equivalent now.
That's right. Because Linux has all those commercial apps that run on Solaris and if you have a problem with a storage array, using Linux servers is somehow going to solve the problem.
Show me a Linux vendor who can provide anything like the application support Solaris has, along with Sun's platinum support, globally, for both your hardware and OS, with surround products. Apart from Sun, that is.
Sun's actually a lot, lot less expensive now. Check out the V440, which can come in much cheaper than an equivalent 4 way Xeon.
Solaris Resource Manager currently lets you have similar functionality in software, with dynamic system domains take it further, allowing you to make changes to hardware configs on the fly whilst the system is running, unlike with HP, which requires a reboot.
Fair-ish point, but these 'products' are all fairly recent. Just because someone in the OSS world comes out with a product doesn't mean that IT departments the world over can instantly rip out what they've been using for the last few months or years and migrate things seemlessly to something that they can't get a support contract for. Also, I doubt very much that Kontact does what the original poster is describing.
Good point. From now on I'll replace word processors with typists and get rid of my voicemail and hire secretaries for everyone to take messages when customers call. Instead of using email we'll get the typists to type letters and delivery boys on bikes to deliver them. If the customers are overseas we'll use some cheap pigeons. As for billing systems and accounting, we'll just hire lots of clerks to work with quills and ink to avoid the costs of ballpoint pens.
Just out of interest, have you actually implemented either of these products in a 300+ user organisation and seen it working with all the functionality that the original Exchange system being used offered? Can it be clustered to make the system highly available and can a comapny send its three support guys on a course to get trained up on it, with someone to call when they get stumped, with a guaranteed response time?
I'm not trying to promote one over the other, it's just that people on Slashdot are always promoting OSS tools that allegedly do something like this - but their knowledge comes from reading feature lists and not actual practical epxerience.
You're right - Sun have not been profitable. In terms of 'expensive equipment' you're out of date.
The V440 is half the price of the equivalent Dell and Sun can't make the V210 and V240 fast enough to meet customer demand. The V60 and V65 x86 boxes have been very successful, too. At the 8 CPU and up range, Sun compete extremely well with the HPUX and AIX kit. Couple that to the new Opteron systems and I think we'll start to see some people on Slashdot waking up to Sun again.
Simply saying 'expensive equipment' is a little childish. There are capital costs and there are running costs, trade offs between features and so on. It's not simply about buying a PC from your local supermarket because it's 'cheap'.
Sorry, but that's nonsense! There are numerous apps available, actively developed, with Solaris as their prime platform, for good reasons. Stability, predictability and support, amongst many others.
Why is Sun in trouble? They are capable of making lots of products - you don't have to keep making the same thing when markets change. Why do you think they've moved towards making X86 based servers and has teamed up with AMD.
Just talking about processors also leaves out the fact that you need an OS to run apps on and Solaris is still superior in many situations.
The tasks it's good at are running the Solaris based high end 3D applications for the vertical industries who need those kind of apps. It's also good for Solaris developers, good as an admin machine, test machine in a Sun server environment, etc, etc.
If you want to run games, get a PC, if you want to a cluster of machines to 'make' a 32 bit supercomputer, get a Xeon based V60 from Sun, if you need a large 64 bit SMP box, buy one of them from Sun. Right tool for the right job.
They care a great deal, which is why they'll have fibre channel or high end NAS devices at the end of a Gb network connection to store those 30Gb seismic imaging files, car designs, etc.
If you were releasing software as complex as Oracle's would you really want to test it on several distros? You'd do what they do - choose the one that's perceived to be ahead in the market and test it with that. Anything else is a waste of time and money. With Linux they even have an extra advantage - they can control the OS as well.
I don't have any links, but I do know that Cobalt bought ChiliSoft shortly before Sun bought Cobalt.
So denying them work is supposed to help them? There's a reason they are cheaper.
If she was Albanian, how come she had a Hungarian accent?
What flaws have the distribution channel got exactly then?
Sun are doing fine with the pricing of the Xeon based kit they sell. Why do you assume that Sun are randomly going to sell extra expensivie Opteron kit and expect people to buy it?
Why should the Sun set? Just because new technology comes out doesn't mean that a company can't adapt and use it, hence the collaboration with AMD to product Opteron based servers, the existing Xeon based machines, the UIIIi CPUs for one to four CPUs and the continuing development of UltraSparc for the really high end. Don't forget too the thousands of commercial apps for Sparc that aren't available for any Opteron based platforms. In the high range IBM and HP can certainly not 'beat them out' in all categories - that's a ridiculously glib statement.
Something tells me the money the Isreali armed forces spend on US weaponry will keep the balance of trade in a decent state.
Sun aren't working on something that will scale to higher clock rates - clock rates on cpus is only a small part of the story. Sun's principal current effort is building balanced systems, which run business apps well and predictably. The research is focussed on what Sun are calling 'throughput computing' - basically getting as much from a cpu without the need to increase clock cycles massively and continually, something which is unsustainable, unless you want your 1 RU server to have 20 RUs of fans cooling it.
The fact that it's that cost used, implies it's a quality machine, worth paying that price for, which is quite a recommendation. Also, if there's anything that UltraSparc does well, then surely scaling is it! 106 CPUs in one system and near linear scalability (71 cpus 'worth in a 72 cpu system) - how is that 'not scaling worth a damn'?
I read the article and didn't come to the conclusion you'd need a support contract? All the docs are online anyway, or available with the CDs.