I don't know how about how often the sunfreeware.com is updated. Note that sunfreeware.com is not run by Sun. However, starting with Solaris 8 Sun started bundling the free software companion CDs with the OS media kits. The ISO images and, possibly, individual packages are also available for download. Lots of good stuff is there, from gcc to gnome and kde. Sun has been updating this CD once in a while now and, given the popularity of free software, they'll probably continue doing so.
The fee that you need to pay is still a fraction of even the yearly support contract that Sun would require you to pay to support it. Also don't forget, that Solaris 8 license used to be free only for up to eight processor servers. I don't really think this fee is going to make a big part of their business. Hardware sales and maintenance contracts is still Sun's bread and butter.
No, its just the whoever posted the store has no clue. The OS license fee a tiny little fraction of the cost of the system you will run it on and probably smaller than even the yearly support/service contract fee that you're paying to Sun every year anyways.
The Solaris 9 license fee is a tiny little fraction of the cost of the hardware or even the anual service/support contract. $240 to run Solaris 9 on a $10 server or, what? $400 is probably not bad at all
for a +$20K quad CPU box. This fee is still symbolic compared to what other unix vendors charge. Even $6000 fee is not bad either if you're paying it to run Solaris 9 on a $200,000 Sun Fire 3800. Don't forget that you get to run it for free on single processor machines.
This is quite different from oracle which charges absoletely crazy fees per concurrent user or per CPU (the cost is in tens of thousands of dollars per CPU and people still buy it)
Simple. They want to charge the big bucks only from people who bought uber-expensive big-iron systems (but then, the OS license fee is laughable compared to the cost of the whole server or even cost of the anual service/support contracts). At the same time, Sun wants to charge nothing or very little from users who use Sun workstations or low-end servers. Is this hard to understand?
This pricing scheme is quite different from say the Oracle pricising which is a real ripoff. ($50K
for -each- CPU, anyone?)
Though, I feel sorry for those SGI hobbysts most of whom can't get a recent version of IRIX to run on their precious O2s and Indys that were purchased on ebay and such. This has not been a problem in the Sun world for the past few years.
Ordinarily I'd agree with you. It's a fact that Solaris has traditionally been the one of staunchest Unix systems available, and its stability has been proven in data centers the world over. However, in recent years, Linux on Sun hardware has improved to the point of actually been faster on Sun hardware than Solaris itself. Of course this doesn't hold true for 64-processor E-10000 systems, or other very high-end Sun systems, but for the average E-450 and E-250?
Linux on anything non-x86 is useless except for embedded applications. Do you wnat to loose all of application support? Do you want to loose the vendor support? Do you want to exchange a stable, robust datacenter quality OS that was designed for this type of hardware for Linux which probably is even less feature-rich and stable on sparc hardware than it is on x86? Do you think people would have paid 2x the price of comparable x86 hardware for those E250 and E450 to run Linux on it? Solaris and its applications is the main reason companies shell out their bucks for sun machines, not the hardware features. If you like Linux, for god's sake, get an x86 box, not a sparc. Viceversa is true for shops that prefer Solaris.
As for portability, although, it is offered only on two platforms, Solaris is still pretty portable, more so than many other unix variants. Solaris was designed and developed in a portable manner. It runs on x86 and SPARC today. Solaris 2.5.1 used to run on PPC but Sun canned that project early on. Rumors from quite respectable sources suggested that Sun engineers had Solaris running IA64 emulator before any other OS did.
In addition to the value-added software mentioned above, the Sun's DiskSuite has been renamed into Solaris Volume Manager and included as part of the OS. Although most Sun admins regard disksuite as something very basic and prefer to use Veritas LVM on the big iron, from my experience with Sun Disksuite and Linux RAID software, I can tell you that the Sun Disksuite -alone- could be a good enough reason to ditch Linux and use Solaris on your servers instead. Linux RAID (and LVM) still feels very amateurish (ever tried to put all parititions, including the boot disk on a mirrored volume after installing the OS?).
Also, a staroffice 6.0 CD has been tossed in into the Solaris media kit for free. Lots of GNU software is now included in the OS, wu-ftpd, a rebranded version of OpenSSH, apache. Good stuff.
Essentially Sun is saying that if you have a single processor box (that is a cheap machine), the OS is free. If you have a multi-processor workstation, you have to pay a license fee, however, this fee is much lower than the server fees are. $200 is not bad at all for a license to run this OS on a box that costs $5, $10, $20, or $30 thousand dollars (such as Sun Blade2000, aniversary edition). Finally, the price for server licenses is not bad at all either. A dual processor license is only $240 Now do you know how much a new dual processor Sun box costs? $10,000 -minimum- (with discounts). Maybe more. Quad and eight processor licenses, again, are not bad at all considering the overall price of the server. I also really doubt Sun would charge $400,000 even for a big-iron 100+ CPU Sun Fire 15000 server. Which I believe, can be bought for under 3 million dollars.
The only problem with this pricing scheme is that it does penalize people who use very old, slow, obsolete, but still very reliable and useful hardware such as sparcstation 10, sparcstation 20, and Ultra2 all of which can be bought very cheaply on ebay.
and don't forget free patches and support 4 years
on
Solaris 9: Sticker Shock
·
· Score: 5, Informative
One thing that many people don't know is that Sun supports the OS for much longer time than any Linux vendor -has existed-. This is a huge value. I am telling you as a system administrator who supports many many critical servers and hunders of desktops.. once you the OS machine is installed and running and it is doing what you need it to do, the -last- thing you want is to keep upgrading it every year. However, frequent upgrades are a norm in Linux world but it doesn't -have- to be that way. Do you think it is fun having to upgrade 200 or so boxes every 18 months or so? Fsck that. I am interested in doing fun stuff.
However, Solaris 2.6 is five or six years old and Sun said they will support it for two more years. Do any Linux vendors support an OS version for six years, or five, or four? They hardly support it for three years. Last year I had to upgrade a bunch of perfectly well working RedHat 6.0 servers. Why? Because redhat stopped releasing updates for 6.0.
Also, Sun backports the drivers to old Solaris versions. For example, they used to offer Solaris 2.6 and 2.5.1 until a year ago preinstalled on all of it's UltraSPARC II machines. Now, can you buy brand new IBM or Compaq x86 server with RedHat Linux 5.0 preinstalled? No.
This is a huge value for real production environments. That's why Solaris is so popular..
Sun sells more UNIX servers than HP, IBM, and SGI combined. I don't know about Yahoo, but the reason Amazon uses HP servers for the database backend is that HP was so depressed about their small market share that they sold a bunch of servers to amazon at much lower than usual price just to say "Amazon uses HP hardware"
As for Oracle, Solaris is THE platform to run it on as Oracle people have told many times, Solaris is the prefered Oracle platform because Oracle is developed on Solaris and then ported to other OSes.
No, Solaris doesn't suck. It is a damn good, mature,
robust, stable OS tailered for enterprise use. Linux doesn't touch it and probably won't even get close
any time soon. However, Sun's first problem (and reason for a Sun Linux distro) is that the price/performance of the low-end Sun/SPARC servers
is pretty bad.
Sun has been loosing market in the segment to other x86 vendors, and so, they decided to start making x86 servers too. As to why they choose to run Linux instead of Solaris/x86 on those machines is still puzzling. Most likely Sun decided to get a free ride from the hype that surrounds Linux. I can't think of technical reasons why Solaris x86 couldn't be used instead.
It's all about the hype.
The current generation of IA64 is not really meant for the general public. It is useful only for early adopters (that is developers). We'll be able to tell whether IA64 succeeded or not a few years down the road when it is somewhere in its third generation..
Yes, solaris is ahead of Linux. That's not news and I frankly doubt Linux will catch up any time soon. Linux is a nice OS for desktop or a light server. Solaris is a perfect datacenter OS however.
My understanding is that redhat's current support statement looks like this "We will support all minor releases of the current major RedHat Linux release and the latest version of the previous major release." That means that right now 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 are supported but once 8.0 is released, only 8.0 and 7.3 will be supported. If this is true I will be scrwed big time because I just finished upgrading some 50 6.2 boxen to 7.2 and I was thinking that since 7.2 is the latest (and the last) minor release of 7.x series, I can keep on running those machines for a couple of years without upgrading. Now, if RH stops providing updates for 7.2 after 8.0, we'll be screwed big time. Can someone confirm or deny my fears?
Consider not building your own kernels. RedHat's kernel packages are very flexible and there should be very few users who really need to compile a custom kernel.
Uh, come on. I agree about most that you have said but waiting for 2.6.x kernel is a bit silly. I am pretty certain RH isn't waiting for a 2.6.x kernel to release the 8.0 (just like they didn't wait for 2.4.x in 7.0). The work on 2.5.x just started. That probably means that we'll probably see Linux 2.6.x a couple of years from now..
My understanding is that redhat's current support statement looks like this "We will support all minor
releases of the current major RedHat Linux release and the latest version of the previous major release." That means that right now 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 are supported but once 8.0 is released,
only 8.0 and 7.3 will be supported. If this is true
I will be scrwed big time because I just finished upgrading some 50 6.2 boxen to 7.2 and I was thinking that since 7.2 is the latest (and the last) minor release of 7.x series, I can keep on
running those machines for a couple of years without upgrading. Now, if RH stops providing updates for 7.2 after 8.0, we'll be screwed big
time. Can someone confirm or deny my fears?
The problem is that Internet2 interconnects the large universities only. All traffic between those universities is routed through internet2 by default.
Yes, it is true that the speed will be limited by the local LAN speed which is usually 100Mbps. But many universities don't have connections faster than 100Mbps to the regular internet and if they do, it is still unlikely that you could talk to a remote site at 100Mbps because the connection is shared. You're certainly much better off when traffic is being routed through I2.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know how about how often the sunfreeware.com is updated. Note that sunfreeware.com is not run by Sun. However, starting with Solaris 8 Sun started bundling the free software companion CDs with the OS media kits. The ISO images and, possibly, individual
packages are also available for download. Lots of good stuff is there, from gcc to gnome and kde. Sun has been updating this CD once in a while now and, given the popularity of free software, they'll probably continue doing so.
Most Sun customers cut the deals with the Sun
sales representatives directly, avoiding sunstore on the web.
Of course, he's talking about IBM's RS/6000 (aka pSeries) products.
The fee that you need to pay is still a fraction of even the yearly support contract that Sun would require you to pay to support it. Also don't forget, that Solaris 8 license used to be free only for up to eight processor servers. I don't really think this fee is going to make a big part of their business. Hardware sales and maintenance contracts is still Sun's bread and butter.
No, its just the whoever posted the store has no clue. The OS license fee a tiny little fraction of the cost of the system you will run it on and probably smaller than even the yearly support/service contract fee that you're paying to Sun every year anyways.
The Solaris 9 license fee is a tiny little fraction of the cost of the hardware or even the anual service/support contract. $240 to run Solaris 9 on a $10 server or, what? $400 is probably not bad at all for a +$20K quad CPU box. This fee is still symbolic compared to what other unix vendors charge. Even $6000 fee is not bad either if you're paying it to run Solaris 9 on a $200,000 Sun Fire 3800. Don't forget that you get to run it for free on single processor machines.
This is quite different from oracle which charges absoletely crazy fees per concurrent user or per CPU (the cost is in tens of thousands of dollars per CPU and people still buy it)
This pricing scheme is quite different from say the Oracle pricising which is a real ripoff. ($50K for -each- CPU, anyone?)
Though, I feel sorry for those SGI hobbysts most of whom can't get a recent version of IRIX to run on their precious O2s and Indys that were purchased on ebay and such. This has not been a problem in the Sun world for the past few years.
Linux on anything non-x86 is useless except for embedded applications. Do you wnat to loose all of application support? Do you want to loose the vendor support? Do you want to exchange a stable, robust datacenter quality OS that was designed for this type of hardware for Linux which probably is even less feature-rich and stable on sparc hardware than it is on x86? Do you think people would have paid 2x the price of comparable x86 hardware for those E250 and E450 to run Linux on it? Solaris and its applications is the main reason companies shell out their bucks for sun machines, not the hardware features. If you like Linux, for god's sake, get an x86 box, not a sparc. Viceversa is true for shops that prefer Solaris.
As for portability, although, it is offered only on two platforms, Solaris is still pretty portable, more so than many other unix variants. Solaris was designed and developed in a portable manner. It runs on x86 and SPARC today. Solaris 2.5.1 used to run on PPC but Sun canned that project early on. Rumors from quite respectable sources suggested that Sun engineers had Solaris running IA64 emulator before any other OS did.
In addition to the value-added software mentioned above, the Sun's DiskSuite has been renamed into Solaris Volume Manager and included as part of the OS. Although most Sun admins regard disksuite as something very basic and prefer to use Veritas LVM on the big iron, from my experience with Sun Disksuite and Linux RAID software, I can tell you that the Sun Disksuite -alone- could be a good enough reason to ditch Linux and use Solaris on your servers instead. Linux RAID (and LVM) still feels very amateurish (ever tried to put all parititions, including the boot disk on a mirrored volume after installing the OS?).
Also, a staroffice 6.0 CD has been tossed in into the Solaris media kit for free. Lots of GNU software is now included in the OS, wu-ftpd, a rebranded version of OpenSSH, apache. Good stuff.
Essentially Sun is saying that if you have a single processor box (that is a cheap machine), the OS is free. If you have a multi-processor workstation, you have to pay a license fee, however, this fee is much lower than the server fees are. $200 is not bad at all for a license to run this OS on a box that costs $5,
$10, $20, or $30 thousand dollars (such as Sun Blade2000, aniversary edition). Finally, the price for server licenses is not bad at all either. A dual processor license is only $240 Now do you know how much a new dual processor Sun box costs? $10,000 -minimum- (with discounts). Maybe more. Quad and eight processor licenses, again, are not bad at all considering the overall price of the server. I also really doubt Sun would charge $400,000 even for a big-iron 100+ CPU Sun Fire 15000 server. Which I believe, can be bought for under 3 million dollars.
The only problem with this pricing scheme is that it does penalize people who use very old, slow, obsolete, but still very reliable and useful hardware such as sparcstation 10, sparcstation 20, and Ultra2 all of which can be bought very cheaply on ebay.
One thing that many people don't know is that Sun supports the OS for much longer time than any Linux vendor -has existed-. This is a huge value. I am telling you as a system administrator who supports many many critical servers and hunders of desktops.. once you the OS machine is installed and running and it is doing what you need it to do, the -last- thing you want is to keep upgrading it every year. However, frequent upgrades are a norm in Linux world but it doesn't -have- to be that way. Do you think it is fun having to upgrade 200 or so boxes every 18 months or so? Fsck that. I am interested in doing fun stuff.
However, Solaris 2.6 is five or six years old and Sun said they will support it for two more years. Do any Linux vendors support an OS version for six years, or five, or four? They hardly support it for three years. Last year I had to upgrade a bunch of perfectly well working RedHat 6.0 servers. Why? Because redhat stopped releasing updates for 6.0.
Also, Sun backports the drivers to old Solaris versions. For example, they used to offer Solaris 2.6 and 2.5.1 until a year ago preinstalled on all
of it's UltraSPARC II machines. Now, can you buy brand new IBM or Compaq x86 server with RedHat Linux 5.0 preinstalled? No.
This is a huge value for real production environments. That's why Solaris is so popular..
Sun sells more UNIX servers than HP, IBM, and SGI combined. I don't know about Yahoo, but the reason Amazon uses HP servers for the database backend is that HP was so depressed about their small market share that they sold a bunch of servers to amazon at much lower than usual price just to say "Amazon uses HP hardware"
As for Oracle, Solaris is THE platform to run it on as Oracle people have told many times, Solaris is the prefered Oracle platform because Oracle is developed on Solaris and then ported to other OSes.
No, Solaris doesn't suck. It is a damn good, mature, robust, stable OS tailered for enterprise use. Linux doesn't touch it and probably won't even get close any time soon. However, Sun's first problem (and reason for a Sun Linux distro) is that the price/performance of the low-end Sun/SPARC servers is pretty bad. Sun has been loosing market in the segment to other x86 vendors, and so, they decided to start making x86 servers too. As to why they choose to run Linux instead of Solaris/x86 on those machines is still puzzling. Most likely Sun decided to get a free ride from the hype that surrounds Linux. I can't think of technical reasons why Solaris x86 couldn't be used instead. It's all about the hype.
The current generation of IA64 is not really meant for the general public. It is useful only for early adopters (that is developers). We'll be able to tell
whether IA64 succeeded or not a few years down the
road when it is somewhere in its third generation..
Yes, solaris is ahead of Linux. That's not news and I frankly doubt Linux will catch up any time soon.
Linux is a nice OS for desktop or a light server. Solaris is a perfect datacenter OS however.
Why is everything for sale?
First space tourists and now space shutles for sale.. have Russians completely lost their pride?
Isn't IA64 binary compatible with PA-RISC?
IA64 was HPs next PA-RISC processor before they gave the IP to Intel.
Compaq has annouced plans to phase out the Alpha processors after EV7. What's going to happen with OpenVMS after that happens?
My understanding is that redhat's current support statement looks like this "We will support all minor releases of the current major RedHat Linux release and the latest version of the previous major release." That means that right now 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 are supported but once 8.0 is released, only 8.0 and 7.3 will be supported. If this is true I will be scrwed big time because I just finished upgrading some 50 6.2 boxen to 7.2 and I was thinking that since 7.2 is the latest (and the last) minor release of 7.x series, I can keep on running those machines for a couple of years without upgrading. Now, if RH stops providing updates for 7.2 after 8.0, we'll be screwed big time. Can someone confirm or deny my fears?
Consider not building your own kernels. RedHat's kernel packages are very flexible and there should be very few users who really need to compile a custom kernel.
Uh, come on. I agree about most that you have said but waiting for 2.6.x kernel is a bit silly. I am pretty certain RH isn't waiting for a 2.6.x kernel to release the 8.0 (just like they didn't wait for 2.4.x in 7.0). The work on 2.5.x just started. That ..
probably means that we'll probably see Linux 2.6.x a couple of years from now
My understanding is that redhat's current support statement looks like this "We will support all minor releases of the current major RedHat Linux release and the latest version of the previous major release." That means that right now 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 are supported but once 8.0 is released, only 8.0 and 7.3 will be supported. If this is true I will be scrwed big time because I just finished upgrading some 50 6.2 boxen to 7.2 and I was thinking that since 7.2 is the latest (and the last) minor release of 7.x series, I can keep on running those machines for a couple of years without upgrading. Now, if RH stops providing updates for 7.2 after 8.0, we'll be screwed big time. Can someone confirm or deny my fears?
http://www.bero.org/gcc296.html
The problem is that Internet2 interconnects the large universities only. All traffic between those universities is routed through internet2 by default.
Yes, it is true that the speed will be limited by the local LAN speed which is usually 100Mbps. But many universities don't have connections faster than 100Mbps to the regular internet and if they do, it is still unlikely that you could talk to a remote site at 100Mbps because the connection is shared. You're certainly much better off when traffic is being routed through I2.