With the release of Solaris 10, Sun Microsystems is attempting to revive some of the strength that the Solaris name once carried in the world of unix workstations and servers. At one point, Sun was the dominant name in commercial unix hardware and software. Then came the crash of the dot-com marketplace, so many of whom had heavy investment into Sun in both the hardware & software market.
The crash proved to be a devastating blow to Sun as a company, but not one that they view as insurmountable, and the actions of the past couple of years show this. Solaris 10 is just one more step in the recovery process.
Before we dive into Solaris 10, we need to look at a little bit of history. Until fairly recently, Sun offered two separate products, Solaris was the workstation version of the highly respected and the powerful SunOS that was part of every server, and remains at the core of Solaris. With the release of Solaris 8, that dichotomy was removed. Solaris was the product and it was used on both platforms. During the past two years, Sun has also begun to leverage the Linux technologies into the Solaris platform without losing the tools and features that make Solaris unique.
The problem with these changes is that in order to grasp what Solaris is and what it brings to the table, two perspectives are required, that of the server administrator, and that of the workstation user. These are distinctly different environments, and yet Solaris is tailored to both.
With that said, let’s take a look at the product.
Under the trappings of an X-Windows graphical user interface lies the much improved and updated heart, SunOS 5.10. Most of the functional improvements that benefit both the server and workstation reside here.
Solaris on the Workstation
One of the big things with Solaris 10 is that for the first time in it’s long history, the x86 platform is given a truly equal footing to the Sparc product. Released at the same time as the Sparc platform, it is nearly feature identical to the Sparc product, and the places it is not are all tied to hardware inequalities. Unfortunately, we did not have a Sparc based workstation to test with, so all of our workstation testing was done on an AMD based x86 machine.
Installation is not for the computing rookie, but if you know enough to need Solaris on your workstation, one would hope that you are comfortable with tools like fdisk. The installer ‘feels’ a little clunky, and is probably best compared to the installer of IBM’s OS/2 circa 1994, but since it’s a process that hopefully is done once and not a part of daily usage, we won’t spend any more time talking about it, it’s not easy, but it is usable.
Once installed however, the system becomes much more manageable. During the boot process, the system shows it’s roots with a text based boot process. All modern operating systems do this, some just make more of an effort to hide the arcane messages of the boot process. Unlike competitors, Mac OS X & Windows XP, Solaris makes no effort to expedite the boot process, ideally because there is little need to reboot the system. On the test machine, it boots Linux in about 90 seconds, and Windows XP in about 40 seconds. Solaris takes nearly 2 minutes to arrive at the graphical login screen.
The default login screen is a nice secure affair, and does not adopt the provide a list of users methodology that has become so prevalent, which is a good thing from a security standpoint. It also provides options to perform a remote login from the user interface, something few of the other X-Windows login interfaces do. The login also allow the user to choose between the two different graphical desktop systems provided by default.
The venerable old Open Look Window Manager has been retired for a couple of years now, and from the looks of the things, it’s replacement in the form of the Common Desktop Engine, or CDE, has been placed on life support. From the looks of the defaults, and the general feel of the environment, the Java Desktop System, or JDS, is the desktop of the future for Solaris, and Sun’s Linux offerings.
Using CDE is an experience that has not changed significantly in the years since it was introduced. Existing Solaris users may find it to be a comfortable environment, but it certainly hasn’t seen any major changes or improvements. The one thing that can be said for it is that many of the existing management interfaces for Sun products are designed for it, and therefore enjoy a comfortable look and feel within CDE.
The Java Desktop System is on the other hand, a nice implementation of the GNOME desktop, with many Open Source applications prebuilt and installed, with a few Sun specific tools added in for a nice bonus. The desktop itself is nice, and should feel very comfortable to any Linux user that has spent any time with any of the current distributions. That is where the problems start though.
Adopting so many Linux based technologies in Solaris presents a double edged sword for Sun. It is unlikely to bring in new users, as Linux is perceived to be cheaper and offer the same basic feature set. Many of Solaris’ technical merits will be overlooked by the casual users.
That is unfortunate though, because the platform has so much to offer the workstation user, including the core technologies like DTrace and the Solaris Secure Execution environment. If you have a chance, this is a platform that is well worth investing some time into learning and leveraging on the workstation.
DTrace is a feature that is probably the nicest feature enhancement that targets the Worksation users, particularly developers. Dynamci Tracing, or DTrace, is a compelling technology. With it, it is possible to trace and debug much deeper than traditional code level debuggers. One of the best features however, is the ability to use DTrace on a production level machine, be it a server or workstation to generate trace information about a situation in the applications production environment without contaminating it with developer tools all in real time. While DTrace is not in and of itself unique to Solaris, every major operating system offers trace tools, but none of them available today offer the scope and depth of information as DTrace.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind about Solaris on the workstation though. First and foremost is hardware compatibility. Device support is a little limited on x86 where the sheer volume of odd implementations of the same chipsets frequently make supporting them difficult. It took us 3 tries to find a network card that it liked. Second is the disparity between hardware platforms. x86 hardware is cheap, fast and can be hit or miss on compatibility, Sun’s Sparc based hardware is not cheap, clocked slower, but is dead on for compatibility. For example, and Blade 150 with 256mb of RAM and a 500mhz UltraSparc IIe starts at $1395.00 US, but is going to be ready to go right out of the box, meanwhile a Sun Java Workstation with Solaris 10 using an AMD process starts around $1795.00 US, and appears to be an excellent machine that is supported by Solaris 10, though not installed with it by default.
Solaris on the Server
Server environments is where Solaris, and the enhancements to the underlying SunOS 5.10 really shine. We tested our server configurations on both an AMD based x86 machine and an aging Sun Netra X-1 server. The Netra has been replaced by the Fire V100 in Sun’s hardware lineup, and for $995.00 US, is easily the best steal available for a unix server, given Solaris 10, it’s an even better deal.
Identical to the workstation, installation was non-trivial, but not unusable. Once setup though, these two machines proved to be much closer than expected in performance and usage despite a nearly 800mhz disparity in clock speeds. As a server, we ran PostgreSQL, SendMail and Apache2 on both machines to test performance against that of our identically configured Linux machine. The results are simple. Solaris is marginally slower, with the Netra coming in last place in our tests, but not by much.
What is surprising in this is that these tests where performed in a very basic configuration. However, once we started reconfiguring the Solaris servers to take advantage of advanced features, we didn’t see significant degradation in performance. Specifically Containers, formerly called Zones. Containers are not a new idea, but they are a new implementation of an old design philosophy. Virtualization services have been implemented in high end server platforms for more than a decade with great success on the traditional big iron hardware, particularly in the traditional mainframe world. Solaris 10 brings the implementation to a more granular level and offers excellent performance, even on relatively weak hardware. The downside, is that Containers are an adventure to get set up, and tweaked until you are happy with them.
The other big change here are things that we found difficult to artificially stress and test. In particular, the predictive self-healing technologies. While the technology demo’s look great, until we see it work in practice, it’s just that. What we can say is that once we got the server configured to our satisfaction the machine that we left for long term testing has remained stable and not required any significant maintenance in it’s 6 weeks of usage, a bad network cable that I apparently damaged when I put the server back in the rack being the only problem.
On larger scale hardware and deployments, there is very little question that the application of Containers and Secure Execution have enormous potential for both server consolidation and virtualization. In addition to the long proven reliability of Solaris and it’s underlying SunOS foundation, Solaris 10 looks primed to maintain it’s stake in the server rooms around the world, and perhaps even recover some of the lost marketshare from the dot-com crash.
Conclusions
Solaris 10 is a strong player for Sun’s traditional markets, and will be a compelling upgrade for existing Solaris and SunOS customers during the next 18 months, however, it still has some identity crisis issues when targeting existing Linux customers. It will take some marketing, and exposure to bring in those users. The MacOS X and Windows customers are an even harder sell, as the one glaring area that Solaris 10 doesn’t address is manageability. The easy to use tools for managing the enormous power under the hood simply are not there today.
About the Author
Andy Satori is a private consultant and developer of Mac OS X, Windows and Unix software, having used nearly every major and hobby OS available in the last 15 years, covering DOS, OS/2, Windows, Mac OS, Mac OS X, BeOS, Linux, Solaris & AIX as well as a few others…
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
I am not confident on the direction the company as a whole is taking in OSS. If you look at the contributors on OSS from SUN you are amazed. On the same note I would rank the software ported for Solaris from OSS as so so. The conventional wisdom would say that if SUN is contributing to OSS the biggest winner would be Solaris itself. Which is not the case here, there is a lame forum which answers some questions when you are facing problems with OSS in Solaris.
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=279&slide=3…
That sounds quite excessive – I’m fairly sure I’ve had Solaris 10 (and definitely Solaris Express) boot a *lot* faster than that : was that the inital boot after install, which does take a bit longer because the system does a once-off post-installation action of loading SMF manifests)
I’ll check the actual boot time of my laptop tomorrow though. As regards graphical booting, stay tuned for an upcoming release of Solaris Express, that issue is already on the way to being solved.
Companies that run comercial Unix understand the value of a mature operating system. Solaris 10 shines when considered for a PC based Unix solution. I disagree with the author in the respect to managability Solaris is wuite a bet better then Linux in that area but Very behind other commercial Unix offerings like HP-UX.
This article doesn”t bring just anything. It”s just words.
If I substitute Solaris with any other name I will get equally meaningful text. I used to like OSNews.
I think Andy has things confused, at one time there was SunOS, then Solaris was created. SunOS has not been available for years, this link provides the version history:
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/solaris/versions/
I also don’t get the “The installer ‘feels’ a little clunky” comment, maybe Andy should try a SunOS install from tape and tell us about “clunky”. Installing Solaris is straightforward, unless you are accostomed to a lot of “hand holding”. I really don’t know how much easier Sun can make the install process.
Boot time is based on what is running on the system, and how much hardware is connected to the system. When I had to reboot an E6500 connected to several TB’s of T3 arrays, we went out for a smoke while it was booting (typically 15 minutes). Boot time is insignificant and hardly the measure of an OS.
The point about limited hardware support has been beat to death, let’s move on.
The Netra X1 and SunFire V100 are basically the same box (as long as you are using the 500 MHz CPU) with the exception of Gigabit Ethernet on the V100. Neither machine is a “screamer” performance wise. If nothing else I would at least step up to the V120 and use 10,000 RPM SCSI disks over the IDE drives of the V100.
The “benchmark test” is another excellent example of testing “apples and oranges” and is essentially a waste of time. Since we have absolutely no idea how either machine was set up, how do we know if the results are even accurate, bad enough correct?
And what management tools is he talking about that are “missing”? Obviously Andy has never heard of Solaris Management Console (part of Solaris) or Sun Management Center (purchased separately). And Webmin is part of the Full Distribution installation for those who would be inclined to use it.
I don’t mind reading articles from “new” authors, but Andy needs to spend more time with a product before he writes about it, and ensure his facts are right.
Then came the crash of the dot-com marketplace
Sun. We’re the dot in .com
“…I would rank the software ported for Solaris from OSS as so so.”
So does that mean all OSS software is “so so”, because last time I checked pretty much all *NIX-based OSS software can be compiled for Solaris 10 with the GCC compiler included with the Solaris operating system? Or maybe you’ll find the OSS binary for Solaris at:
http://www.sunfreeware.com
http://www.blastwave.org
I don’t mind reading articles from “new” authors, but Andy needs to spend more time with a product before he writes about it, and ensure his facts are right.
Now that i think about it did read almost exactly like the 10,000 YALD(Yet Another Linux Distro reviews that have been posted to this site.
…are very likely in violation of the Solaris license agreement. See:
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/licensing/sla.xml
Section 5(f).
If Andy has permission to publish such “benchmark” results, then great (except the “benchmark” itself leaves much to be desired…). If not, he might expect a visit from the black helicopter gang…
Why an Os should “make more of an effort to hide the arcane messages of the boot process” ?
Even if the user can’t understand all the boot messages he can simply ignore them in the normal use.
Ouch!! That could explain the lack of Solaris benchmark results!
I wonder how much time this guy spends doing system administration. From time to time reading those “arcane” boot messages helps in the troubleshooting process.
i agree 100%
.
i just can’t understand this “always GUI+eyecandy” trend,
even more when we’re talking about a server oriented OS like solaris.
> The easy to use tools for managing the enormous power under the hood simply are not there today.
I don’t think Solaris 10 out of the box is any less manageable than RedHat/SuSE or any other Unix OS on the market. If better manageability is high on your list, may be you should use Sun MC, which in my opinion probably is the best server hardware management tool on the market (Base Management is free for use on unlimited number of systems).
First, if you look at the other boot times mentioned for the test machine – 90 seconds for linux, for example – you can see that this is just a slow machine. The numbers he put up are nice because they show Solaris booting just a little slower than Linux – not that boot times are ultra-important in the server market.
As for graphical boot and such, these are things that aren’t required. Of course, neither is paint on a car but you don’t see a lot of people driving cars with their natural metal color. People like things that are nicely polished. Functionally, a graphical boot isn’t better, but it is prettier and confuses new users less. While one can debate exactly how much value this is, the fact is that it has value. If one plank of siding on your house rotted, would you not paint a replacement plank to match the rest of the house? It makes no functional difference just like graphical boot, and yet most people would paint it.
The Netra X1 does not have a frame buffer, so X performance would be real bad. The bigger question is why would you run X on a web server anyhow? All that does is take away resources that could be used to run other apps. That could very well explain the “slowness”.
Except we’re talking about a server OS, where I’d sure as hell hope the person installing/using/administering it isn’t a “new user”. It’s not like this is something average joe would be installing on their desktop PC.
Well, does Sun just want it to stay as a server OS? I mean, I don’t think that the Java Desktop System (or anything desktop) is really needed in a server OS and yet Sun has put it in. Sun has put a ton of desktop applications into this “server” OS. Is Linux just a server OS?
While Solaris might be just servers right now, I’m sure Sun wouldn’t mind people picking Solaris over Linux for their desktops.
This is part of the dichotomy that is Solaris, it’s both a Server OS and a Workstation OS in the same box, and cater to both, and neither in different areas. Ultimately it’s probably a ‘Server’ first, and a Workstation second. Based upon that assumption, the installer, and lack of a graphical startup is largely irrelevant, but since it’s both, it becomes relevant…
Yes the Solaris Management Console is present and remains a solid tool. It’s certainly not up to the ease of use levels of say, Mac OS X’s Server Tools, or even the much maligned Windows MMC setup, these are the customers that I specifically mention as a harder sell. The commercial Linux offerings have some pretty decent tools too, YAST2 being one of them. The problem is that many of Solaris’ tools are still MOTIF / CDE apps, or command line tools. These remain good tools for the experienced Solaris or SunOS administrator, but for new users, they are not key selling points.
Robert,
Solaris is the “Operating Environment” and SunOS is the actual OS.
Login to a sun box and do a uname.
<grin> Unless things are different with Solaris 10 (haven’t used it yet).
Don’t get caught up in Sun’s naming madness, Solaris 8 and 9 were called Operating Environment, Solaris 10 is called an Operating System (straight off the box I have on my shelf). They are the same thing, trust me.
Thanks for the thoughtful comments, folks. I’ve sent an email regarding the licensing issue folks uncovered, just to see what the underlying logic is (if any).
As for boot time– hell yes, we care! We worked hard to get boot time down in S10, and we actually have ship criteria around boot time. With the advent of the Service Management Facility, we can actually start services in parallel at boot time. So on a two+ proc system (or your dual core), we boot a lot faster. We do have some issues surrounding 1-cpu boot, and we’re working on addressing those. We care enough about boot time that Eric and I worked to make bootchart work on Solaris (see http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/eschrock/20050106#boot_chart_resul… ) as an additional tool to measure boot performance (we had some already).
Also, it sort of depends on how you measure boot time. If you wait for all of the stupid menus at boot to auto-timeout, then yes, especially on x86, the boot can be slow. When we get the so-called “new boot” in another couple of months (it’s in B14 and higher for those scoring at home), all of that crap goes away; the system boots grub, and grub boots the OS.
As for the installer– I think we all want it to be better. One way to look at it is that it isn’t “google fast.” Right now, the priorities with respect to install are around enterprise features (Zones, Live Upgrade, etc.) but I am optimistic that we’ll work to improve the overall installation experience in the next 12-18 months. Certainly, having CD/DVD DMA on-by-default in Solaris Express helps a lot with the install responsiveness and speed, in my subjective experience.
(Standard disclaimers apply: I speak for myself)
i just can’t understand this “always GUI+eyecandy” trend,
even more when we’re talking about a server oriented OS like solaris.
Bloody heck, it IS a server AND a workstation operating system, BUT with that said, those who would use it for a workstation operating system, would be technically knowledgable, and would have very little need for eye candy like a flash start up screen – their task; get on the computer, get the work done and piss off. If it does the job, great.
I’m hoping that there will be a revision soon, AGP support, and 3D OpenGL support (hardware based) for their Nvidia cards soon, along with something called APPLICATIONS! no server ones (Solaris x86 already has more than you can shake a stick at), I’m talking about workstation applications. Pay for the porting, license the source code – who care how it is done, just do it.
Don’t get caught up in Sun’s naming madness, Solaris 8 and 9 were called Operating Environment, Solaris 10 is called an Operating System (straight off the box I have on my shelf). They are the same thing, trust me.
You actually get a box? my experience, you look on the website, a box is shown, but when it arrives, all it is, is a flimsy cd book with sleeves in it 😉
Bah, it would be also nice for SUN to include some dead wood with their CDs, something like a beginners administration book – written by the engineers outlining all the cool features and how to exploit them
I am using Solaris 10 x86 on my workstation at list last 6 month. It is not bad, a lot of usefull staff. But even GA release has too many problems to be really ready for desktop.
For example:
*When you login as a user JDE would not start ones for every
six, seven times
*Accidently, in JDE I tried drag drop file from FTP site to the home directory, like you can do in the IE, and my machine rebooted itself.
*Try compile something with gcc (installed from Solaris CCD)
and you will get an strange errors messages.
*And so on
Some of that problems, like gcc problem can be fixed by user. But why it suppose to be so painful and time consuming?
Look on the JDE screenshot!
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=279&slide=3…
Look on Launch button! It’s not like it suppose to look!
The picture ( applet ) on the button is missing.
And that is final release. Can you imagine that on the
Win XP Start button?
I do not think that will attract a lot of technically knowledgeable users.
Sure…as a desktop its not really up to OSX standards.
As much as it is moving in the desktop direction as well it quite clear where Sun have been putting in the dev time, zones, dtrace and zfs are definitely not going to be of that much use on your average desktop.
For documentation there is always docs.sun.com if you are one of those people who insist on dead wood send me an email [che at xolinc dot com] with whatever doc you want printed and i’ll send a copy out to you.
once we have the net/os consolidation under the CDDL we can implement what we want as a community and not have to rely on Sun.
Sure…as a desktop its not really up to OSX standards.
It sounds like its not even up to Linux standards.
>Sure…as a desktop its not really up to OSX standards.
>It sounds like its not even up to Linux standards.
This is totally absurd. You can run any GUI that could be run over linux on Solaris like XFCE etc. There’re tons of other freely available DEs I’d choose over OSX interface any day all of which could be run over Solaris.
As far as I am concerned no OS feels good on desktop until one configures it properly. In that sense Solaris is no exception. What makes Solaris really strong is its quality of documentation and coherence as a whole OS which is unmatched by anything apart from BSDs.
agreed…i think what most people are reffering to with the whole desktop thing are things like hotplugging. its not as if people using unices are using a different branch of x.org, kde or gnome now is it (OSX is a different story of course).
e17 should be a great leap for all unix and linux desktop users, and we are almost guaranteed to have it running on Solaris thanks to Ben Rockwood.
Desktop idiosyncrasies I can put up with, that isn’t the issue – Pickiness about hardware, heck, I can put up with that too, especially if they demand quality, name brand hardware.
The dearth of workstation applications are what is missing from Solaris x86 is what keeps me from not touching it with a 40foot pole. If there is no advantage over Linux in respects to application availability, end users will simply say, “I might as well stick with Linux” – so when it comes to crunch time, what is SUN’s advantage going to be? from what I see, as a workstation, there are no advantages.
Promises have been made in regards to new features, and yet they haven’t made their way in – the question should be asked, what did they do with the claimed $500million they invested into Solaris (Pizza and beer each night for the programmers), and why on one hand they’re firing *GOOD* employees like there is no tomorrow, and yet at the same time, there is a whine from upper management that people should have patience.
Sorry, they fired programmers who write and design the code, and now they have less, they’re now doing less. Doesn’t take a frigging rocket scientist that the less people you have, the less you can do.
Do you relize what the revenue-employee ratio is at sun?
Some argue they have too many employees. I think they are heavily invested in R&D–hoping something invented will turn the company around, and they may be right
Not always true. It depends how skillful your employees are. For example, some employees that are very experienced can code something in 1 hour what an employee that is less experienced takes 1 day to code. Some employees even slack off. Some work themselves to near death, some take plenty of smoke breaks.
It really depends on who you get rid.
Scott McNeely is an economist, really not a CEO although he’s done ok as one. He made some big huge mistakes down the road like not downsizing from the start revenues dropped. He only put action in place once things liked grim for sun and allowed someone else (Schwartz) to operate. Sadly, Schwartz and McNealy both seem to keep preaching about their damn ‘dreams’ constantly and telling how markets are, although i am impressed with how he operates.
It does not take a rocket scientist to understand how to make a company make money so your stock price does not go insane. I don’t see how buying heavily SCO-involved tarantella is going to help sun, they already dont make that much money on software. Their CEO just kept saying “laying off employees isn’t going to help”. It won’t help the revenue decline but it will help the profit decline which makes investors not want to invest so you can make some meaningful acquisitions! Software that isn’t enterprise-based like sybase and oracle are not profitable that much!! Stick to hardware and try to sell your hardware to OEMs.
I mean heck, If you can sell me a motherboard in an aluminum box why cant you sell me just a motherboard? why cant you make it affordable to make volume purchases like AMD does? EH?!!! Arghh.. I won’t understand these people. A tiny european company can even sell us motherboards and transmeta a tiny cpu company can even sell us motherboards.. but no, sun cannot sell is motherboards because “Why buy a part when you can get the whole car”–Scot McNealy, at a sun launch event.
>I think Andy has things confused,
>at one time there was SunOS, then Solaris was created.
>SunOS has not been available for years,
>this link provides the version history:
This is similar to what MS did with DOS 7 and Windows. Its the underlying unix (SunOS 5.10) with a GUI on it (Solaris)
You can still see it telling you its booting Sunos 5.10 when it starts the boot process. (At least you can on Solaris Sparc, Much prefer Linux on Intel)
Take the Marketroids with a pinch of salt
>also don’t get the “The installer ‘feels’ a little clunky” >comment, maybe Andy should try a SunOS install from tape
>and tell us about “clunky”. Installing Solaris is
>straightforward, unless you are accostomed to a lot of
>”hand holding”. I really don’t know how much easier Sun can
>make the install process.
I agree. If you want a UNIX that an idiot can install, use Linux. I personally wouldnt recommend Solaris as a desktop machine unless you have a specific use for it, in which case, you are likely to know what you are doing anyway.
Besides i remember my last Solaris install being pretty trivial (That was Solaris 8 on a Sparc 20) with the only thing that may confuse novices being the Network administration.
Actually i did install an old version of SunOS 4.1.1 off a QIC tape not so long ago onto a SS2. (I collect old Sun machines), and it was pretty easy. It asked some pointed questions about networking (This is before DNS/DHCP was a standard in UNIX distributions so this was more tricky than usual) other than that it just chugged away merrily while i watched Futurama and asked me to change tapes half way though.
>Bah, it would be also nice for SUN to include some dead
>wood with their CDs, something like a beginners
>administration book – written by the engineers outlining
>all the cool features and how to exploit them
This seems to be the way all OS’s are going. With the copy of SunOS 4.1.1 above, i got nearly two shelves of manuals detailing everything from the basic “This is where this plug goes” manual to driver writing. With my Solaris 8 media kit, i got some basic installation notes.
Saying that, we just forked out for Red hat enterprise linux (Which i will have to check, but i am relatively sure is a damn signt more expensive than Solaris), and got two manuals, one about clustering and one basic installation guide.
“The dearth of workstation applications are what is missing from Solaris x86 is what keeps me from not touching it with a 40foot pole. If there is no advantage over Linux in respects to application availability…”
Just curious, what workstation applications are not available for Solaris but are available for GNU/Linux?
If you are looking for specific apps that you think should be “packaged” with Solaris you should let them know. (They do monitor these forums, occasionally.)
I think using the right tool for the right job is an important context to consider in anyone’s choice of an operating system. Maybe it’s Solaris or Windows or OSX or Linux/etal or BSD or others…. I don’t recall reading anything from Sun about Solaris being a direct replacement for Grandma’s internet/email access computer or Joe Gamer’s new intertainment platform!? So if Solaris 10 doesn’t work for you then you should choose something that does, isn’t freedom a great thing!
That said, if you want a server to run a *NIX OS in a 2 to 64+ SMP environment with features like zones/containers, predictive healing, and dtrace-type features you have a short list of real competitors, and one of those is Solaris. If you want a “packaged” desktop environment for end users of all levels, maybe Solaris isn’t for you. And I’m pretty sure Sun is not targeting Solaris for that demographic at the current time.
It’s only going to get better! While the Solaris user’s would say, “great can’t wait for new innovations”, the naysayers can be heard saying “well it’s about time”. Guess you can’t please everybody all the time (and that goes for all OSes)!
Do you relize what the revenue-employee ratio is at sun?
They’re obviously not focused then. How many sales people could be replaced by having a one-stop online shop like how Dell has? does SUN realise that the vast majority of Dell customers, who purchase in volume, NEVER meet a Dell representative?
Some argue they have too many employees. I think they are heavily invested in R&D–hoping something invented will turn the company around, and they may be right
No, I’d say they’re like Apple – pre-Jobs era. Spending money on pie-in-the-sky R&D ideas of sitting down, outlining what needs to be developed, and making sure that the R&D is spent in the right areas and products are actually being delivered. Right now, SUN is as bad as PARC, billions spent on R&D, producing NO real products.
Do these people in R&D actually realise that their *CORE* function is to develop technologies to put into products and thus, actually make a return on the investment spent on the initial R&D involved to make it?
Not always true. It depends how skillful your employees are. For example, some employees that are very experienced can code something in 1 hour what an employee that is less experienced takes 1 day to code. Some employees even slack off. Some work themselves to near death, some take plenty of smoke breaks.
It really depends on who you get rid.
They’re getting rid of coders, whilst going nuts about getting sales staff. Thats the stupid part. They spent millions on marketing that is NOT targeting those who actually make the decisions. Sorry, advertising on slashdot.org will NOT get your SPARC IV monsters into Fortune 500 companies. Advertising in DrDobbs developer magazine will NOT get your Opteron machines into an established financial institution.
Scott McNeely is an economist, really not a CEO although he’s done ok as one. He made some big huge mistakes down the road like not downsizing from the start revenues dropped. He only put action in place once things liked grim for sun and allowed someone else (Schwartz) to operate. Sadly, Schwartz and McNealy both seem to keep preaching about their damn ‘dreams’ constantly and telling how markets are, although i am impressed with how he operates.
Well, there was some logic to the madness. He was hoping that it was a correction in the marketplace, and that something would pickup the slack – what he failed to take into account has been the rise of x86 vendors to glue their systems together and provide a solution that is “good enough” for the vast majority of cases. So instead of purchasing a 1/2million SPARC machine that runs like a dog with no legs, these companies decided to purchase half a dozen pocket-rockets and create a solution that out performs a big honky SPARC machine.
McNealy should have waited 6-12months, saw there was no change, and simply looked at re-structuring the company and getting refocused on what the market was demanding. No necessarily turn into a Linux fanboy, but had they worked on Solaris x86 way back when the first revenue declines occured, SUN wouldn’t be in the mess they’re in today. They would have been able to cleanly and orderly moved their exising SPARC customers over to Solaris x86, and would NEVER have lost them to Linux in the first place.
It does not take a rocket scientist to understand how to make a company make money so your stock price does not go insane. I don’t see how buying heavily SCO-involved tarantella is going to help sun, they already dont make that much money on software. Their CEO just kept saying “laying off employees isn’t going to help”. It won’t help the revenue decline but it will help the profit decline which makes investors not want to invest so you can make some meaningful acquisitions! Software that isn’t enterprise-based like sybase and oracle are not profitable that much!! Stick to hardware and try to sell your hardware to OEMs.
The purchase of a Tarantella will allow them to push their products into environments which require interoperability with Windows, HP-UX, mainframes, the works. So yes, for all intensive purposes, if they include Tarantella as part of the $100 per employee server package, it would be a bloody great deal. They should continue expanding their software portfolio – purchase Mainsoft and bundle it free of charge with their developer tools; making moving to Solaris from Windows so stress free, that people will ignore the Linux option altogether.
I mean heck, If you can sell me a motherboard in an aluminum box why cant you sell me just a motherboard? why cant you make it affordable to make volume purchases like AMD does? EH?!!! Arghh.. I won’t understand these people. A tiny european company can even sell us motherboards and transmeta a tiny cpu company can even sell us motherboards.. but no, sun cannot sell is motherboards because “Why buy a part when you can get the whole car”–Scot McNealy, at a sun launch event.
They’re a system builder, but what they lack is a complete services wing like IBM has. Interesting, thing about his whole “Why buy a part when you can get the whole car” speech, back at the end of 2003, I said the same thing at a Java Users Group to a SUN employee in Australia – the idea of selling the complete system – ‘software, hardware and services in a box’ – it seems that the idea got up there, too bad Scott couldn’t impliment the bloody thing properly <rolls eyes>
Could you please read what I wrote:
“If there is no advantage over Linux in respects to application availability, end users will simply say, “I might as well stick with Linux””
The operative words are; ‘application availability’ and ‘advantage over Linux’
I never said there were applications available for Linux, but not for Solaris.
What I am talking about is mainstream, workstation applications; from database to graphics, from high end audio to computer aided design suites. All these area are lacking software, both Linux AND Solaris.
Hence the reason I said, if Solaris doesn’t have the application advantage over Linux, then what advantage will it have? if Solaris doesn’t have the applications I want, and Linux doesn’t have the applications I want, but I am willing to put up with the lack of them, how is SUN going to win me over?
I mean, SUN needs some heavy soul searching to actually work out the type of company they are; none of the managers can tell you, they’re too busy crappy on about software when in reality it isn’t the software or the hardware, it is the combination of the two to deliver a solution to the customer, the fact is, they’re not selling a solution, they’re simply selling software – you don’t win customers with that logic. Damn, if the founder of IBM were still alive, he’d laugh his ass off at the stupidity that SUN is currently in, and the complete lack of any focus on what the larger goals are.
correction:
Spending money on pie-in-the-sky R&D ideas of sitting
should be
Spending money on pie-in-the-sky R&D instead of sitting
When Sun used to ship documentation, you got a number of volumes that would fill a bookshelf. And it cost over a thousand dollars, this included programming manuals. Accessing docs.sun.com may be cumbersome for some people, but at least its quality documentation.
How about posting the output of /var/dt/Xerrors and maybe we can figure out what the JDS problem is. And why did you have to install GCC from the Companion CD when it is part of the Full Distribution installation? And it works just fine for me, I have been running benchmarks on two machines using iozone since the 24th of last month with no issues.
Casper Dik has indicated in his blog (http://blogs.sun.com/casper/) that in future, the boot system for Solaris/x86 will be based on a version of Grub modified to handle UFS. They will also get rid of the existing real-mode boot tool.
A big step forward.
When Sun used to ship documentation, you got a number of volumes that would fill a bookshelf. And it cost over a thousand dollars, this included programming manuals. Accessing docs.sun.com may be cumbersome for some people, but at least its quality documentation.
True, but it would be nice for them to describe setting up a PPP connection a little better, especially in regards to killing a connection and restarting one. But with that being said, why isn’t PPP and network configuring part of the Solaris Management Console?
I have never set up PPP on Solaris, but this site has the best information that I know of:
http://www.stokely.com/index.html
Against my better judgement, I will try to pursue a dialog with someone who appears to have some sort of deep rooted vile against Sun.
First: you are correct. I misinterpreted your statement about software being available for Solaris meaning that is available for GNU/Linux. The composition of your statement was alittle ambiguous, and your clarification is appreciated. But you have not provided a list of applications that you point out as “mainstream” that are not available for Solaris (or GNU/Linux). Which OSes do these apps work on, have you contacted the software developers about this OS incompatibility? How can Sun make these perceived critial apps available unless you list them? (Solaris does have “self healing” aspects, but not “mind reading” ones, that I know of
Second: Sun selling online compared to Dell. They DO! Even on eBay as well. Now, you being from outside of the US, you may not be able to take full advantage of this scenrario, but Sun sells systems online all the time. That has more to do with US import/export laws than anything else. Next, the largest system Dell sells online is a 4-way server. Do you expect Sun to sell 64+ systems online too?!? There’s a real clue we need to make sure we forward to McNealy and Schwartz on the big market in NZ they are missing out on, probably could turn the whole company around…such fools!!!
Side note on sales persons, what’s the big deal if you get a sales call to make sure you are getting what you really ordered? That used to be called customer service.
Third: Yes, Sun makes business mistakes. You don’t have to agree with the Sun management to use their products. (Unless your into the “libre” OSS thing, but that would be another discussion.) By the way the Tarantella move should work nicely into Sun’s thin client solutions (as you noted). And yes Sun is looking to be moving forward after a few bumps in the road, guess we’ll all have to see what shakes out.
Sun’s R&D has produced alot! Read latest Solaris (and near future OpenSolaris), OSS contributions, Java, OpenOffice, NFSv4 and others. Sun is far from being dead yet, and layoffs are not a true indicator of company health, it’s not that simple!
Forth: As I stated before, “I think using the right tool for the right job is an important context to consider in anyone’s choice of an operating system. Maybe it’s Solaris or Windows or OSX or Linux/etal or BSD or others…. I don’t recall reading anything from Sun about Solaris being a direct replacement for Grandma’s internet/email access computer or Joe Gamer’s new intertainment platform!? So if Solaris 10 doesn’t work for you then you should choose something that does, isn’t freedom a great thing!”
If you use Solaris great! If you don’t great! (Just let Sun know why, maybe they’ll make it better to you liking.)
Solaris isn’t a Ubuntu/Linspire/Mepis/(entire your favorite desktop linux distro here) killer. Never has meant to be that, probably never will. It’s a server OS with workstation/desktop capabilities. And if you understand Solaris you can do pretty much anything you can do with any GNU/Linux distro plus MORE. But it means you will need to commit to the product…learn, config, then relearn and probably reconfig to turn it into the desktop distro of choice. In the mean time, it’s a pretty kick ass server OS. And if you don’t think so, then we’ll just have to put you in your own Solaris zone and reboot you when you disagree.
Cheers!
Sun has never been big on graphical management tools, from SunOS (which had none), Solaris which had AdminTool then SMC. The best single administration tool I have ever used is smitty (AIX). Smitty provided the same functionality as smit without the graphical overhead. Note to all *nix vendors, don’t forget the CLI tools, some of us do have to manage things over a serial console.
For those of us who are mandated not to use X (US Government) there is no choice but the CLI tools. The problem I see is that you have people who become dependent on the GUI and move into environments (such as the one I work in) where there is no GUI at all, and these people become instantly unproductive. Learning how to administer a *nix machine should start with the command line, then move to graphical tools. You are never going to learn it if you never use it.
Before we go “off the deep end” here I think we should find out what is causing the two minute boot time. If Andy is running the GUI on a machine with 256 MB of RAM and a host of apps then I think it is obvious why it takes so long. Yeah quicker boot times is nice, and the effort is appreciated. But I also think boot times have to be in context with what the machine is doing, etc, etc. I have read too many “crying wolf” stories on online forums from people who don’t quite have it right.
While I agree that learning the CLI is a good thing, I don’t think it’s a selling point that’s going to earn you many new customers in todays marketplace. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I didn’t have a Sparc box just laying about to test with :-). I think Sun is headed in the right direction, and if my biggest gripes against a Unix OS are management tools and poor installers, ( I don’t consider boot time to be an issue, and tried to say as much in the article, it’s Solaris, you shouldn’t be rebooting it often enough to care), then the platform itself is solid.
On the subject of boot time, the machine is running a default installation, with Apache2 and PostgreSQL added to the boot time. The issue with the boot time is disk, and it’s reflected by the times for the other environments as well, Windows XP and Suse Linux 9.3. I gave all three so you could have a good relative measure. I don’t really consider it out of line to require 2 minutes to boot a machine with 800gb of disk on a hardware RAID controller. The memory in the test machine (AMD) is 1.5gb. The processor is an older Athlon, 1800 if memory serves (I’m not at the office today).
Hopefully it came across in the article, but I’m bloody impressed with Containers/Zones. I’ve spent time with IBM mainframes a couple of times in my career, and Containers bring that level functionality down to an environment that small and mid size businesses can leverage. The long term benefits to both the consumer, and to Sun by providing an entry point that then scales well as the company grows is huge. The problem is explaining the concept without a lengthy article in and of itself. Unless you know you need them, you probably aren’t going to go ‘cool, I need that for my SOHO business’.
I’m toying with replacing 3 linux boxes which are under utilized but exist solely for segregation of resources into one Sun Fire using S10 and partitioning the services into Containers. This should be more than enough power for the usage, running Hula, Apache2/SubVersion, and a small PostgreSQL database (8 users, under 5gb in size).
Solaris and SunOS were not seperate products. SunOS was renamed to Solaris when they switched to the System V codebase from the BSD code. This happened long before Solaris 7. Solaris is just the newer version of SunOS in the same way that Windows 2000 and XP are the newer versions of NT.
Solaris 2.6, for example, when you typed uname, was reported to be SunOS 5.6. There was never a ‘Server’ version and a ‘Workstation’ version of Sun’s UNIX, under any name. It’s been a while, but I think Solaris 7 and 8 reported SunOS 5.7 and 5.8, respectively.
I don’t like to judge articles on simple mistakes, but it’s hard to give an author credibility when such an obvious mis-understanding of the product line in general is shown. It makes me wonder how much I can trust the rest of the articles information.
-Jeremy
Andy, there is a very good reason why Solaris doesn’t have many GUI admin tools. The reason is, Sun customers do not need them. The fact is that CLI tools are much more flexible and useful, because they can be incorporated in all sorts of scripts and applications, thus allowing you to develop a more sophisticated framework that suits your needs, perhaps achieving a very high level of automation and/or precision (reliable execution).
For example, I have not used any of the existing Solaris graphical tools in at least 36 months, and yet I administer and develop on Solaris for a living, every workday.
A lot of noise is made about graphical tools and I think they are for the most part not done very well, or they don’t integrate well. Solaris is simply about doing things through a prompt, and at one time so was Linux (early 1990’s). I think too many people have the desktop and the server confused. The only reason why I would use the GUI on a server is to install Oracle (and I am looking at how to quickly use Oracle’s response files so that the GUI is no longer required). The rest of the time the text console would be available, the memory saved could be better used for applcations.
Zones simply rock, I would love to carve up our 4800’s and lose a bunch of older/slower machines. Unfortunately it is a battle for another time.
Right, for the record, my nv_14 laptop boots from power off to a gdm login screen in 86 seconds (and if I turn off some services I don’t need, it’ll probably be faster)
Just as an aside ….. they did offer ATX Motherboards, look here:
http://solutions.sun.com/embedded/databook/pdf/manuals/805-5865.pdf
They couldn’t sell them, so obviously the market wasn’t there, I guess you would have bought one though, if you’d looked around.
Also, it always amazes me that some believe the Sparc processor is owned lock stock and barrel by Sun Microsystems. That is entirely untrue. Sparc is a trademark of SPARC International, Inc. Of which Sun is a member, but also includes Fujitsu and Tadpole and Toshiba and Texas Instruments and … and … and.
Pinnacle Computers is happy to sell you a Sparc based ATX board, look here:
http://www.pinnacle.com/products/appspecific/xip.pdf
or Aries Research:
http://www.ariesresearch.com/_content/products/sparc_product_ariusi…
No offense, but really, a google before you spout is usually a good idea.
Well, what can I say.
It is a funny point of view saying Solaris made some efforts to become some kind of a Linux like UNIX system.
The article gives the impression to being a joke and I have to much experience with Solaris to believe what I can read here.
One more thing, CDE = Common Desktop Environment, not Engine.
At least, it still tedious comparing Solaris, Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and whatever it might comeing up in the future.
From a company point of view, Solaris or even any commercial UNIX is a better choice than Linux.
Not the features or enhancements are the only decision to take, but the entire environment whether your System fits in or not (Support, Partnership with third parties, etc).
But even if we talk about features, I don’t see the Linux advantages.
If you are looking for specific apps that you think should be “packaged” with Solaris you should let them know. (They do monitor these forums, occasionally.)
Just to test this theory, I’d love to see the Xilinx dev tools available under Solaris. If Sun could get Xilinx to offer a Webpack for Solaris, I’d worship them. I’ve been keeping windows around for single apps for way too long…
I have never set up PPP on Solaris, but this site has the best information that I know of:
http://www.stokely.com/index.html
Thank you for the link. I can set up a connection and bring one down, no problems. The problem is, however, SUN will need to convert Windows boxes to Solaris boxes – when basic things like network connection configuration and setup cannot be done via their Solaris Management Console, one really wonders what on earth is happening at SUN.
It would be a 100 line plugin that could make life alot easier for all concerned on Solaris, but SUN can’t be bothered investing in something so simple; they’d much rather tackle the “cool’ things rather than the nitty-gritty, small, unsexy, but bloody important things.
Why do you assume I have deep rooted vile against SUN? I have owned a Blade 100 and a Blade 150 – both of them, IMHO, *VERY* reliable machines. Sure, they won’t set the world alight in the speed records, but if you want a rock solid workstation for basic work, no problems – runs Framemaker not too badly, but the Motif gui does look rather fugly when used in conjunction with JDS – then again, it could be worse 😉
– Adobe Creative Suite
– 4th Dimension or something similar (why not buy out Corel for $1billion, make Corel Wordperfect Suite 12 (with Paradox (yeah!)) and use that instead of OpenOffice.org? all the work has be done in the usability, features and compatibility department).
– Support for iPod – sure, it isn’t a “core workstation” thing, but it would be nice to be able to sync with my music; some of us do listen to music at work (god forbid!), so why not approach Apple, hand over a cool $10million and yet Quicktime and iTunes ported natively to Solaris/JDS?
– A decent graphical user interface system configuration tool; the WHOLE system can be configured via the GUI – network, printer, etc, the works.
– The printer system that actually *WORKS*; it NEVER worked out of the box, thus requiring the installation of CUPS – god only knows why they keep using the crap that they do, when CUPS could solve the problem in one swoop. Maybe someone at SUN has some sort of LPR fetish or something.
No, sell all the low end stuff online. Nothing stopping SUN selling directly to a customer in New Zealand; unless they parallel importing laws have changed since the last time I looked, it is perfectly legal for SUN to bypass local distributors and sell directly to the client, just as it is perfectly legal for them to sell goods into New Zealand and yet have no physical presence in the country itself (many companies that operate in New Zealand have no offices here) – why not take advantage of that situation to downsize their NZ presence and yeild a higher profit? I’d say thats a good motivator if anyone was looking for one.
Hmm, try dealing with them, “Oh, you have to go through zyx blah blah blah”, sorry, unless I can buy directly off YOU and get the whole package off YOU without needing to dick around with resellers, I don’t want to do business with you.
When you start involving resellers and crap, you’re saying to me, “I don’t give a toss about your business; you’re of no valuable to us, so piss off and annoy some other company” – that is what SUN’s current posture is in New Zealand. Sorry, no dice.
Ring up Apple, however, “sure, no problems, what would you like? hey, thats all good, so how are we going to be paying for that today sir?” – thats how it SHOULD be – order, confirmation, payment.
Well, quite frankly, I’m neither here nor there with OSS. If it does the job, great, if it doesn’t, I’ll kick it to the curb and look for something better.
It isn’t the management decisions relating to downsizing I have problems with, it is the management decisions ralating to their products which I have problems with. Over $1000 for a bloody development suite? Jesus F’ing Christ! atleast if I were a small business, Microsoft would be providing me a great discount to their development suite; heck, I’ve got a mate up in Auckland, developing a Director like clone, and they were flooded with software from Microsoft to make their life easy.
When was the last time you saw SUN do the same thing? heck, it was an effort in itself just to get the damn company to acknowledge blastwave and give some compilers (you’d think that something that increases mindshare and marketshare would be valued alot more than it is by SUN at this moment).
Too bad they don’t market it heavily enough. That @home idea, great, sell the machines for $100, chuck the customer on a 12 month contract, charging them $30 per month, and that’ll give them internet and application availability. It would definately drive down the cost of computing IMHO, especially those who want a computer, but don’t want the hassle of having to look after one (and the maintainence).
R&D doesn’t produce OpenOffice. Java and NFSv4 are old school stuff, its basically building upon what was developed years ago. I’m talking about their current work. Their revenues are declining from their SPARC business – why don’t they speed up their SPARC processors so that they CAN charge a premium for their hardware, and thus stop the revenue decline? imagine a SPARC IV 2.2Ghz, couple that with services and softwar, voila, you have a enticement to customers to purchase a product with a better price/performance ratio than the current x86 line.
But I want to use it as a technical/graphical workstation. Sh-t, my requirements are pretty low compared to the complex requirements that an end user needs fulfilling. Give me a stable operating system (done), good graphical user interface (done) and some applications (still not done). Its the application end of the equation that needs fixing, everything else is swimming along nicely.
I mean, to solve mine and many other users problems, it would only cost SUN a manner of a few million; but of course, they’d much rather spend their time going on about “new pricing models”; someone *really* needs to pull Scott and John aside, give them a b-tch slap and say, “its the applications stupid!”; little wonder their x86 workstation sales are crap – and yes, look at the numbers, they’re crap. So crappy infact, they make Apples look half decent – AND THEY’RE DECLINING!