"Solaris/x86 is a joke, last I heard. (It has) very little support for any kind of strange hardware. If you thought Linux had issues with driver availability for some things, let's see you try Solaris/x86."
I'm sure the comment will be taken all out of context...can't wait to see the mud slinging that ensues. Check Schwartz's blog/marketing tool for the comebacks in the next few days. Torvalds comments are mostly true for the non-server market, and Sun first and foremost is going after the server market with Solaris x86 although they are actively porting JDS to Solaris x86 which I think will run into problems that Linus mentions above.
To personally counter some of Mr. Torvalds other claims, historically Solaris x86 was a non-starter, but with a company like Sun pushing it now fully (especially on x86-64), it shouldn't be hard to find proper driver support for the majority of server installs from IBM, HP, Sun (of course), and Dell going forward. Where they're going to have to work hard is getting all the ISV's to port apps to another Unix with very small marketshare. Money always helps in that department and Sun is not shy about the fact that they have billions in the bank...so it could happen.
As for Linus' comments about Linux being superior to Solaris, I'm not so sure about that. Perhaps from a licensing perspective, and some aspect of the kernel might be as tight...but...
Solaris 10 has some neat features that don't fully exist in Linux or lack the polish that is found in Solaris.
Zones, fair share schedulers, zfs looks neat..., dtrace is amazing,
If Linux can polish up some the projects that do similar things as the above mentionned items than I think there isn't much reason to consider Solaris anymore.
If Symantec is buying Veritas, I'm not share how much they understand Veritas' business...I don't expect good things.
Does anyone know of any good example of similar technology company mergers that have created better products for their end users? Compaq/DEC=failure, HP/Compaq=failed, IBM/Lotus=mostly failed...
I don't get it? Who said anything about BogoMIPS? No I'm not kidding you.
Find me any data that indicates that any Sun server hardware platform is superior in any aspect to competitive offerings from HP/IBM/Dell in comparable configs, ie: CPU count, form factor, I/O slots...please top that off with any benchmark that would lead me to beleive that their hardware provides better bang for the buck.
Then show me any independant study that shows their hardware provides any reliability or management advantage. Any server shipped from any tier 1 vendor for the at least the last 3 years has remote management capabilities available.
I'm sure you're happy with the service, that's one of the areas that Sun still does a good job at, but arguably similar or better service can be found from other vendors, and often most people don't need million dollar support contracts because the hardware is so cheap now it's cheaper to buy redundant systems and cluster them.
Solaris x86 has always played second fiddle to SPARC edition, Sun originally viewed it as a training tool for the most part. They went so far as to "cancel" the 9 release...until they figured out that SPARC was such crap and that x86 (from Opteron in particular) was their saviour.
I personally keep hearing rumblings that Solaris 10 for x86-64 wont ship concurrently with SPARC, but I also hear otherwise, we'll see in January 2005 I guess. I never said it didn't have the same features although one has to wonder how optmized the kernel is for x86 when it has a dozen years of being written to take advantage of the SPARC platform...not a bad thing in itself...it just may take time to squeeze all the performance out of the Opteron. (RedHat/SuSE face similar problems with their non x86 ports)
Commodity from Sun...it's only starting to wake up... I guess it depends on the customer, most large customers I consult for that have histories of buying SPARCen machine do not even hear much about the Opteron offerings...one would guess that SPARC boxes sell at higher margins, that may be the reason or perhaps the sales force is taking its time to adapt...who knows for sure. One thing is for sure, they have less than 1% of the x86 market...
Sun has about 5% of the Java app server market last time I checked, and the dollar value they charge is nothing compared to a similar amount of licensed product from BEA or IBM. Their development products have very little marketshare as well, Eclipse a free product has the lions share.
Their cost to develop the language is huge, their cost to market it is huge, their cost to maintain their certification is something to consider as well.
The only real revenue they have incoming is the app server space, licensing to 3rd parties (couple of forms, full J2EE ala BEA and IBM) and to hardware vendors for embedded devices (mobil phones) here they make little money as well because their still trying to grow marketshare and interest.
I've personally met Scott McNealy and asked a lot of tough questions, and around Java he even conceded that Sun has made less money than BEA or IBM. Their tactic is to turn IBM and BEA licensing on its head by doing per employee pricing...so far that hasn't caught on, I think because their product sucks...it's like offering to sell someone an old shitty car when you really need a new one.
For the last 5 years you'd have to have your head in the sand to think that the SPARC platform was superior. On the low end (4 cpu or less) they've been being crushed by x86 platforms...hence their adoption of Opteron...finally clueing in.
On the high end a 32 way IBM machine outperforms their 72 and 144 way E15K and E25K. Even HP's SuperDome has proven to be more scalable.
Find me some publicly auditted benchmarks that even indicate any direct comparison that SPARC platform if faster at anything and I'll change my mind.
Sadly the reason why everyone laments that Sun is dieing is because the evidence is all around you, you're just too biased to see it.
Losing money quarter after quarter, (except MS payouts), losing market share faster than anyone else, failing to deliver CPU/server advancements relative to the competition. Cutting employee headcount, discontinuing products (Solaris x86), failure to acknowledge commodity computing, failure to embrace OpenSource (about 4 years late to the party), failure to monetize Java (created Java, yet BEA and IBM make more money on Java related products than Sun does!)...etc.
We'll probably have 30-50 megapixels cameras or high resolution motion cameras that use these censors to capture at 30 fps!
Some people seem to think that faster CPUs and bigger hard drives are not needed. They obviously don't play with this kind of stuff.
In maybe 10 years this stuff will be so cheap and common, you'll be able to photograph/film (film is an analogue word - doesn't apply anymore but I can't think of anything else) the pores on peoples faces with the right lenses and huge resolving power of these censors.
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"Solaris/x86 is a joke, last I heard. (It has) very little support for any kind of strange hardware. If you thought Linux had issues with driver availability for some things, let's see you try Solaris/x86."
I'm sure the comment will be taken all out of context...can't wait to see the mud slinging that ensues. Check Schwartz's blog/marketing tool for the comebacks in the next few days. Torvalds comments are mostly true for the non-server market, and Sun first and foremost is going after the server market with Solaris x86 although they are actively porting JDS to Solaris x86 which I think will run into problems that Linus mentions above.
To personally counter some of Mr. Torvalds other claims, historically Solaris x86 was a non-starter, but with a company like Sun pushing it now fully (especially on x86-64), it shouldn't be hard to find proper driver support for the majority of server installs from IBM, HP, Sun (of course), and Dell going forward. Where they're going to have to work hard is getting all the ISV's to port apps to another Unix with very small marketshare. Money always helps in that department and Sun is not shy about the fact that they have billions in the bank...so it could happen.
As for Linus' comments about Linux being superior to Solaris, I'm not so sure about that. Perhaps from a licensing perspective, and some aspect of the kernel might be as tight...but...
Solaris 10 has some neat features that don't fully exist in Linux or lack the polish that is found in Solaris.
Zones, fair share schedulers, zfs looks neat..., dtrace is amazing,
If Linux can polish up some the projects that do similar things as the above mentionned items than I think there isn't much reason to consider Solaris anymore.
If Symantec is buying Veritas, I'm not share how much they understand Veritas' business...I don't expect good things. Does anyone know of any good example of similar technology company mergers that have created better products for their end users? Compaq/DEC=failure, HP/Compaq=failed, IBM/Lotus=mostly failed...
I don't get it? Who said anything about BogoMIPS? No I'm not kidding you.
Find me any data that indicates that any Sun server hardware platform is superior in any aspect to competitive offerings from HP/IBM/Dell in comparable configs, ie: CPU count, form factor, I/O slots...please top that off with any benchmark that would lead me to beleive that their hardware provides better bang for the buck.
Then show me any independant study that shows their hardware provides any reliability or management advantage. Any server shipped from any tier 1 vendor for the at least the last 3 years has remote management capabilities available.
I'm sure you're happy with the service, that's one of the areas that Sun still does a good job at, but arguably similar or better service can be found from other vendors, and often most people don't need million dollar support contracts because the hardware is so cheap now it's cheaper to buy redundant systems and cluster them.
Solaris x86 has always played second fiddle to SPARC edition, Sun originally viewed it as a training tool for the most part. They went so far as to "cancel" the 9 release...until they figured out that SPARC was such crap and that x86 (from Opteron in particular) was their saviour.
I personally keep hearing rumblings that Solaris 10 for x86-64 wont ship concurrently with SPARC, but I also hear otherwise, we'll see in January 2005 I guess. I never said it didn't have the same features although one has to wonder how optmized the kernel is for x86 when it has a dozen years of being written to take advantage of the SPARC platform...not a bad thing in itself...it just may take time to squeeze all the performance out of the Opteron. (RedHat/SuSE face similar problems with their non x86 ports)
Commodity from Sun...it's only starting to wake up...
I guess it depends on the customer, most large customers I consult for that have histories of buying SPARCen machine do not even hear much about the Opteron offerings...one would guess that SPARC boxes sell at higher margins, that may be the reason or perhaps the sales force is taking its time to adapt...who knows for sure. One thing is for sure, they have less than 1% of the x86 market...
Sun has about 5% of the Java app server market last time I checked, and the dollar value they charge is nothing compared to a similar amount of licensed product from BEA or IBM. Their development products have very little marketshare as well, Eclipse a free product has the lions share.
Their cost to develop the language is huge, their cost to market it is huge, their cost to maintain their certification is something to consider as well.
The only real revenue they have incoming is the app server space, licensing to 3rd parties (couple of forms, full J2EE ala BEA and IBM) and to hardware vendors for embedded devices (mobil phones) here they make little money as well because their still trying to grow marketshare and interest.
I've personally met Scott McNealy and asked a lot of tough questions, and around Java he even conceded that Sun has made less money than BEA or IBM. Their tactic is to turn IBM and BEA licensing on its head by doing per employee pricing...so far that hasn't caught on, I think because their product sucks...it's like offering to sell someone an old shitty car when you really need a new one.
For the last 5 years you'd have to have your head in the sand to think that the SPARC platform was superior. On the low end (4 cpu or less) they've been being crushed by x86 platforms...hence their adoption of Opteron...finally clueing in. On the high end a 32 way IBM machine outperforms their 72 and 144 way E15K and E25K. Even HP's SuperDome has proven to be more scalable. Find me some publicly auditted benchmarks that even indicate any direct comparison that SPARC platform if faster at anything and I'll change my mind. Sadly the reason why everyone laments that Sun is dieing is because the evidence is all around you, you're just too biased to see it. Losing money quarter after quarter, (except MS payouts), losing market share faster than anyone else, failing to deliver CPU/server advancements relative to the competition. Cutting employee headcount, discontinuing products (Solaris x86), failure to acknowledge commodity computing, failure to embrace OpenSource (about 4 years late to the party), failure to monetize Java (created Java, yet BEA and IBM make more money on Java related products than Sun does!)...etc.
We'll probably have 30-50 megapixels cameras or high resolution motion cameras that use these censors to capture at 30 fps!
Some people seem to think that faster CPUs and bigger hard drives are not needed. They obviously don't play with this kind of stuff.
In maybe 10 years this stuff will be so cheap and common, you'll be able to photograph/film (film is an analogue word - doesn't apply anymore but I can't think of anything else) the pores on peoples faces with the right lenses and huge resolving power of these censors.