A new study on the major players in the Unix server market has declared IBM the clear customer favorite and brought to light some serious issues with Sun Microsystems’ product line. Most alarmingly for Sun, the company appears to have lost its cachet as the dominant Unix player and done so while alienating customers. Sun finished last in almost every one of the Gabriel Consulting Group survey’s categories, spanning technology performance, customer satisfaction and software tools.
that’s not how we see it where i work, or the companies i work with. sure, Sun is not cheap, but ifyu need itthen they have it, hardware, support, consulting …
that’s not how we see it where i work, or the companies i work with. sure, Sun is not cheap, but ifyu need itthen they have it, hardware, support, consulting
Yeah, the “pizza boxes” and “mini fridge” down in the server room aren’t cheap, but the one time that our IT department really needed Sun, they delivered.
Sun has hemoraged money these past few years as a result of not understanding the shape of business during the 2000-2003 bear market.
I think Sun’s finally starting to wake up to what it will take to survive in the era of cheap 64 bit computing, as opposed to SGI.
Brand loyalty is a powerful thing, but it needs regular maintainance if it is to be kept.
Don’t know about their unix propriety hardware, but there PC servers are total shit. Take a recent AMD based server and compare it with (for example) a HP Proliant.
AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!
The Sun looks like the first cheap clone (but in fact it’s more expensive than the Proliant) where the Proliant shines in it’s hardware design.
Sun loses on the Unix market and is going to loose big time on the PC / intel based market.
Since when did Sun sell PCs or Intel servers?
Of course they don’t perform well – they don’t exist!
Sun have some screaming 64-bit AMD servers, however.
So, overall, I can’t find anything in your comment which makes any sense whatsoever.
(PS. Thanks, osnews, for suddenly requiring registration. That really helps … not!)
You must not have used any of their new Opteron line. Perfect design, awesome performance and reasonable price. Previously I loved the Proliant line, far better than IBM/HP (before they bought compaq)/Dell because of shitty physical design. Must say tho, we like the Sun servers just as much, if not more
AIX ?
When Sun GPLs Solaris
Yeah… Because GPL is the only valid open source license right? Even if OSI says differently.
I can’t stand GPL militancy. It makes the whole GPL / open source community look bad.
GPL Militancy?
We are not the ones marking comments down for mentioning acronyms we dislike.
The GPL is the only open source license I trust to protect my interests.
Why do Microsoft and Sun hate the GPL? What are they so affraid of?
If giving away source code was so bad why is everyone trying to show me how they’re being good “Open Source” kids and sharing nicely now that their stocks are in free fall? What changed? Did they suddenly start caring about us unpriveledged administrators and developers somewhere in their black abyss of a heart? No, they just couldn’t find any other way to make money. Believe me, they tried all the other alternatives before turning to OSS.
This is not the path they would have chosen without the market pressure caused by the GPL. The GPL is forcing Microsoft and Sun to give away source code. Do you think that’s unfair?
> The GPL is the only open source license I trust
> to protect my interests.
You have a right to your opinion. You do NOT have a right to claim that your opinion is the only valid one and try to force it on me like it is a holy religion. And this is where I part ways with the GPL militarists. Because the GPL militarists want to tell me how I have to license my code. And they can go to hell. It’s my code. I will license it however I damn well please.
I will license it however I damn well please.
This is exactly what Sun did. They licensed it closed source and left it that way until the open source and mostly GPL alternatives were creating too much financial pressure and customers that demand open source.
Now Sun has to try to catch up to their competition by opening all their patent and copyright encumbered source code a day late and a dollar short. If Sun’s executive management had any foresight or clue about technology trends they would have open sourced Solaris 10 years ago. But they didn’t.
Or is it possible that somehow Sun’s exec just learned about Open Source? Is Open Source a new thing? Did Sun have an epiphany after their dotindotcom marketing campaign and invent Open Source? Or is that just what we’ll write in the history books to teach the kids?
“They licensed it closed source and left it that way until the open source and mostly GPL alternatives were creating too much financial pressure and customers that demand open source.”
You are greatly overestimating the value of open source to customers. The simple fact is that customers couldn’t care less if it is open source or not. They don’t have the resources to hack it or maintain it themselves. And it would cost them more to pay their own internal programmers to maintain it then it would for them to buy a commercial solution.
What they DO care about, is free. Not open source, but free. Free as in beer “Mr. CEO, we can save a million dollars a year by the fact that we don’t have to pay Microsoft for per-seat licensing fees if we do it this way.”.
That’s what the major corporations care about. Free as in free beer. Not free as in open source.
You hit the nail on the head.
Dave
Why do Microsoft and Sun hate the GPL? What are they so affraid of?
Sheesh, when will people learn? Sun isn’t afraid of GPL, rumours are that the OpenSPARC will be GPL licensed..
The reason opensolaris is CDDL based is because there were parts of Solaris that Sun didn’t own the IP rights to and could not go under the GPL. CDDL was developed to circumvent GPL limitations.
Without CDDL, there would be NO opensolaris!
Ahh dear, and I did expect the parent post to get modded down by the Sun fanboys. Since I can’t reply to the parent post, I’ll reply to yours.
I don’t particularly care what the OSI thinks – they’re in it from a business perspective, and the thing is businesses prefer the BSD style licenses to the GPL, purely because they can do whatever they want with it – take, rape the software and then close it all up and resell it for a nice profit, all without giving back to those that wrote the code originally! The GPL makes you give back to the very same community that spawned the software that you raped.
So, for all of the multitude of supposedly “open source” acceptable licenses that the OSI marks, I really don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, and as many people are concerned, they aren’t true open source unless they are GPL’d.
So, the parent poster has a very valid point – IBM releases stuff under the GPL, whereas Sun doesn’t. I know which companies ethics I prefer.
The parent post should never have been modded down. It’s not off topic, it wasn’t rude or inflammatory, and it wasn’t innaccurate either. So, pray do tell, why was it modded down? Because a bunch of Sun fanboys disagreed with it.
osnews.com has a fundamental problem in that modding down is not being monitored. Posts are being innappropriately modded down, by the very same people I’d say, over and over. This is basically abuse of the modding system, and these very people should either have the right to mod removed from their account, or banned. osnews.com has no intentions of doing this modding properly, and we’re going to continue to see these types of posts being innappropriately modded down, the same as we still see lots of anonymous trolls.
Dave
> they’re in it from a business perspective
So is Red Hat. They have shareholders to keep happy, who couldn’t care less about open source. They only care about how much money Red Hat makes.
“As far as I’m concerned, and as many people are concerned, they aren’t true open source unless they are GPL’d.”
Good for you. No one gives a shit what you think. And militant zealots like you who promote GPL as if it were the one true religion that everyone will go to hell if they don’t believe are the reason I (and many other old time Linux hackers) no longer participate in the Linux community very much and have moved on to other things (after having been very enthusiastic supporters in the pre-Slackware days). Because you assholes ruined it with your damn militarisitic “the holy GPL is the only true open source” bullshit.
Edited 2005-12-16 02:14
I don’t particularly care if you are “part of the Linux community” or not. The MAJORITY of Linux users prefer the GPL, and for the very same reasons that I’ve outlined. I’d rather not have people like you in the Linux community. Go stick to your fake BSD licenses please.
Dave
PS I modded you down since you:
1. used a personal attack
2. used offensive language. Obviously, those who modded your post up are also abusing the moderating system, since they should have modded you down for your abusive and offensive language. It just proves my point that people are modding, not based on the rules, but on what they want to see modded up, because it simply agrees with their personal opinions. Take note osnews.com. You can either fix the problems with the current moderation system, or it’s going to compound itself with a LOT of problems and result in a lot of users moving away from osnews.com.
“The MAJORITY of Linux users prefer the GPL, and for the very same reasons that I’ve outlined.”
The majority of Linux users don’t care at all. All they care about is that it is free as in free beer.
“I’d rather not have people like you in the Linux community.”
And I’d rather not have militants like you in the community who want to wage a GPL holy war against any form of software that is not GPL. You give all of us a bad name.
> Go stick to your fake BSD licenses please.
There is nothing fake about the BSD license. And your militant “I have the only true open source license and all others are fake” is nothing short of religious fantaticism. Do you have a framed copy of the GPL hanging by your bed that you bow down and worship every night before you go to sleep? Do you say your prayers to Richard Stallman? It wouldn’t surprise me given how fanatically you say it is the only true open source license, and all others are fake. And at least the BSD community isn’t full of militant immature childish antics of “It’s not GPL so it sucks and I am going to spread FUD about it.”
Edited 2005-12-17 06:46
“Obviously, those who modded your post up are also abusing the moderating system, since they should have modded you down for your abusive and offensive language. It just proves my point that people are modding, not based on the rules, but on what they want to see modded up, because it simply agrees with their personal opinions.”
Boo hoo…. Poor baby… Whine and pout and stomp your feet because some people actually agreed with me that fanatic militarists like you who think the holy GPL is the only valid open source license ruin the entire community and give it a bad name. They have every right to mod me up for suggesting that. And that is the whole point of being able to mod comments ip. Because people agree with the comment another person made. Or find it to be a valid point.
And since you seem to think the GPL is the predominant license by a wide margin, I challenge you: Lets see how long you can go using ONLY GPL software… I bet you can’t last a week. I’d be surprised if you can even go three days.
Edited 2005-12-17 07:02
To some, anyone who doesn’t agree with their opinion is a troll, anonymous or not.
A bit off-topic:
One reason I believe people prefer OSNews (myself included) is that it allows for occasionally expressing one’s opinion, as it is all one does and infrequently, without publicly attempting to stigmatize the true value of Internet.
“So, the parent poster has a very valid point – IBM releases stuff under the GPL, whereas Sun doesn’t. I know which companies ethics I prefer.”
What a load of cobblers, what has IBM released under the GPL, maybe eclipse – oops no that’s CPL, the cloudscape database, oops no that’s under apache. IBM picks and chooses its licenses to suit its own commercial needs just as Sun does. BTW Sun released OpenOffice under the LGPL. I’m no Sun fanboy, but I don’t understand why people insist that Sun is somehow IBM’s evil twin. When it comes to the crunch both companies look after their respective shareholder foremost.
“That a load of cobblers, what has IBM released under the GPL, maybe eclipse – oops no that’s CPL, the cloudscape database, oops no that’s under apache. IBM picks and chooses its licenses to suit its own commercial needs just as Sun does. BTW Sun released OpenOffice under the LGPL.”
It’s also worth pointing out that if you work for IBM, you are not allowed to work on any LGPL or GPL project unless IBM has given their blessing.
At least Sun has no such restrictions. Many Sun employees do create their own LGPL and GPL projects. And many work on existing projects, and don’t need approval from Sun to do so.
“When is IBM going to open-source AIX?” Won’t be until SCOs cold, dead, and buried. That whole lawsuit is about SCO’s claim that IBM can’t open-source ANY of AIX or Dynix without being in breach of their SysV license.
sun has more new and inovative things comming out every day. while IBM on the other hand has been so confused as to wheather it wants AIX or linux and since they seemed to pick linux what distro to suport officialy (currently none). and while IBM claims to be the open source leader Sun has given more code and more open specifications by 100 times over than IBM. Sun is going ot stay in the game. for a while they didnt have a plan but they seem to have got there act together and it really looks like smooth sailing from here on out.
come on… wake up!
Did you see the financial results from IBM?
No clue? IBM has definitely got a clue. They go for linux. And provide AIX for old-time high-end customers. No, they don’t have an IBM specific Linux distro, but they sure know what their doing.
And the claim about OpenSource? Hmmm… I presume you base your statement on the release of StarOffice.
Or maybe Java? But who is the leading company in Java? Yes IBM. BTW, Java is NOT open source..
i was refering to a lot of things but lets start with, oh say, solris…..how many entire operating systems has IBM open sourced?
how many entire operating systems has IBM open sourced?
As many as Sun has..
If IBM setup a website called OpenAIX and gave away a few thousand lines of code they would have done exactly what Sun has.
There are a couple distributions of OpenSolaris, and they may be usable operating systems, but OpenSolaris(TM) is not. It is unusable sourcecode without a compiler, tools and preexisting operating system to build it on.
“If IBM setup a website called OpenAIX and gave away a few thousand lines of code they would have done exactly what Sun has.”
Oh come on. There is a HELL of a lot more than a few thousand lines there.
“There are a couple distributions of OpenSolaris, and they may be usable operating systems, but OpenSolaris(TM) is not. It is unusable sourcecode without a compiler, tools and preexisting operating system to build it on.”
Remind me again when the definition of open source required that pre-compiled binaries be made available by the company releasing the source code?
oh… And please tell me when you figure out how to compile Linux in thin air… ie, build it without a compiler, tools, and pre-existing operating system to build it on.
Your argument is nothing more than a totally illogical strawman because you hate Sun.
Remind me again when the definition of open source required that pre-compiled binaries be made available by the company releasing the source code?
The definition of operating system would require binaries in one form or another that “operate”.
OpenSolaris is not functional. It is millions or billions or trillions of lines of source code, just like Linux and BSD, yes. But its useless unless you like looking at algorithms.
Until they make an OpenSolaris Operating System why not just call it source code or package or something non-functional.
Linux is relatively easy to build. When was the last time you tried to build and install OpenSolaris? You begin to run into licensing problems for redistribution around Step #3 because the copyright for the build tools and libraries might prevent redistribution.
But I’m sure its as easy as Gentoo or FreeBSD, and with a company like Sun and a license like the CDDL behind it, we should expect it to replace Linux any day now.
> Linux is relatively easy to build.
Actually, no it isn’t. I will give you a Linux box with build tools on it, and then give you all the source code for the kernel, system utilitities, etc. and as you to build a Linux distribution. And then we will see how far you get. No you can’t build a pre-existing distro. That’s cheating. You have to make your own. There is no Linux operating system. Ther are only third party vendors that produce operating systems based on Linux and the GNU utils. So unless you want to say that Linux is not an open source operating system, then you can’t say that OpenSolaris is not an open source operating system either.
In fact, OpenSolaris is more of an open source operating system than Linux is. At least it is a full operating system. Download “Linux”, and you have nothing except a kernel. Then you get to hunt down everything else you need manually.
“You begin to run into licensing problems for redistribution around Step #3 because the copyright for the build tools and libraries might prevent redistribution.”
Nope. There are no licensing problems. OpenSolaris is certified under an OSI approved license.
What do you know about building Linux, Simba? I automated the process. Its really quite simple. I build my own Linux systems daily.
I can take just about any liveCD distro and run my scripts on it, have them automaticly download the packages and compile them, assuming the standard tools, gcc, make, etc. exist. I can build Linux on the default out-of-the-box install of most Linux distros without worrying about copyright problems preventing me from redistributing my binaries.
Nope. There are no licensing problems.
That’s not what Sun’s documentation says:
The encumbered binaries tarball contains
complete binaries (libraries, kernel modules, commands) that are compatible with the source. These are binaries that cannot be built using only the source tarball for one reason or another. If you wish to build the kernel (or some portion of it), or if you wish to build a complete set of installable archives, you will want the encumbered binaries.
OpenSolaris is certified under an OSI approved license.
http://opensolaris.org/os/licensing/opensolaris_binary_license/
Is this an OSI approved license?
OpenSolaris can’t make pkgadd packages, zone’s don’t work, doesn’t build with gcc, etc.
I don’t see how its easier to work with than Linux, sorry.
Yes their are binary non OSS components required to build. I genuinely believe that the reason for this is that it is not possible to open this code (yet. or at all), you cant OS code that’s not yours. I think people are underestimating just how much of an ahievement it has been for Sun to release this code, it is not as simple as chucking a CCDL header at the tope of each source file.
Look if the way Sun is behaving doesn’t mesh with you then don’t deal with them. If you feel that something is an issue, present it in an educated and coherant manner. Personally I think they are making a tremendous effort and appreciate that this process is quite a lengthy one.
“I think people are underestimating just how much of an ahievement it has been for Sun to release this code”
Exactly. After all, lets not forget that all of the other commercial Unix vendors said that they thought Sun was bluffing, and said that Sun would not be able to open source Solaris even if they wanted too because there was too much code they didn’t own the rights too. But Sun did manage. They manage to get all of that code out, and release it as open source.
“What do you know about building Linux, Simba? I automated the process. Its really quite simple. I build my own Linux systems daily.”
I can take just about any liveCD distro and run my scripts on it…”
That’s cheating. You can’t start with a LiveCD distro. You have to start with a compiler, the sources from kernel.org, and the sources for the GNU utilities… Now tell me that is easy? It’s not.
WHat I am saying is that the people who want to critisize OpenSolaris are critisizing it for reasons that could apply to Linux just as well. Sun has not given you an out of the box operating system. They have given you a ton of source code that you can turn into an operating system, and there are at least four projects working on releasing “Open Solaris distributions”
This is the same problem Linux has. Linux has not given you a functional operating system. Neither has GNU. What they have given you, is a mass of source code you can turn into an operating system. Of course, there is no shortage of third party vendors that have already solved that problem for you and built operating systems from this mass of Linux and GNU source code. Solaris isn’t much different really. The only real difference is that it hasn’t been out long enough for third parties to complete “ready made” distributions of OpenSolaris.
What do I know about building Linux? I know that if you started with nothing but source code from kernel.org, a compiler, and a mass of source code that is the GNU utilities that make up a typical Linux distro, that it is anything but simple to build Linux.
“Is this an OSI approved license?”
OpenSolaris is licensed under the CDDL. And yes, CDDL is an OSI approved license.
That’s cheating. You can’t start with a LiveCD distro. You have to start with a compiler, the sources from kernel.org, and the sources for the GNU utilities… Now tell me that is easy? It’s not.
I got news for ya. Linux ain’t opensolaris. I don’t have to play your silly games, Simba. With Linux I can get to work right away and get my job done before you have time to type up your next post.
BTW, I’m almost done timing my Linux build.. its nice to have easy-to-use tools, friendly licenses like the GPL and modular and efficient GNU designs, where benchmarks and source code speaks for itself. I hate market-driven technology like the Ultra 5. Technology must be driven by the religion of science, not capitalism. And that, my friend, is precisely what the GPL is all about and why Sun doesn’t like it.
“BTW, I’m almost done timing my Linux build.. its nice to have easy-to-use tools, friendly licenses like the GPL and modular and efficient GNU designs, where benchmarks and source code speaks for itself. I hate market-driven technology like the Ultra 5. Technology must be driven by the religion of science, not capitalism. And that, my friend, is precisely what the GPL is all about and why Sun doesn’t like it”
Oh we have a GPL Zealot on our hands, nothing hath such fury as a GPL fanatic…except for an evangelical southern baptist perhaps
“I got news for ya. Linux ain’t opensolaris. I don’t have to play your silly games, Simba. With Linux I can get to work right away and get my job done before you have time to type up your next post.”
I didn’t say it was OpenSolaris. What I said is that you are critisizing Sun, when what you really should be critisizing is that fact that no one has yet created a distribution of open Solaris build from that source code. Although there are at least four projects in the works.
Critisizing Sun for this is the same as critisizing Linus Torvalds for not giving you a working operating system, instead of just the source code for a kernel.
“Technology must be driven by the religion of science, not capitalism. And that, my friend, is precisely what the GPL is all about and why Sun doesn’t like it.”
I hate to be the one to break your little bubble of socialist utopia. But I AM a scientist. And in the real world, science and capitalism go hand and hand. Who is going to fund scientific research? the government? They only have so much money to go around… Maybe private doners? Yeah right… You might get $20 here, $20 there, but not nearly enough to fund research… How about corporations? Ah yes… That’s where the big money for scientific research comes from… Ah wait… But there is a catch… Corporations aren’t going to just fund research out of the goodness of their hearts. They want a kickback… And usually that kickback comes in the form of exclusive distribution rights, or some other form of rights that ensures they will get a financial return on their investment in funding your research.
Yes, it may suck. But that’s how it works in the real world. Science and capitalism are inseperable.
Edited 2005-12-15 23:47
I thought you said Sun was competing with RedHat, not Linux..
Sun has a LONG way to go to compete with Linux. They haven’t even caught up with RedHat yet.
“Sun has a LONG way to go to compete with Linux. They haven’t even caught up with RedHat yet.”
hahaha… Yeah right. In your dreams maybe. Sun’s market capitalization is over 3 times higher than Red Hats. And Sun’s stock value is up over 20% over the last 30 days.
I think the one thing you also need to point out with government funding is this; it is subjected to the stupidity of the average voter – the nuts who disagree with cloning, stem cell research etc. all because their sky pixie might ‘rain the earth with hell fire or brimstone’ or claim that abortion plus gay marriage will result in the apocalypse.
As soon as something unpopular occurs, your funding is removed – atleast with business, the motive is either: the person wishes to make a contribution for the betterment of humanity – aka Bill Gates OR they demand a profit off the particular research, for example, the eventual result of years of research at SUN which resulted in Niagara.
“I think the one thing you also need to point out with government funding is this; it is subjected to the stupidity of the average voter – the nuts who disagree with cloning, stem cell research etc.”
Unfortunately, it is a lot more complicated than that. Remember that one person’s passion is the next person’s pork barrel project. Who decides what should get funding? And how? There obviously isn’t enough money to fund everything.
in a word, pathetic, it seems like your using linux only because it’s GPL, people actually buy your crap?
you said it yourself, source code and benchmarks speak from themselves, check the specs to see how solaris 10 which is the basis of opensolaris has been doing; and while youre at it, step by opensolaris.org and start reading the opensolaris code
someone brought this up already, but you seem unable to understand that the GPL is not the only opensource license available, CDDL is also an opensource license.
and where the hell did you hear sun didnt like GPL? does openoffice ring a bell to you? and I’ve also read that opensparc will also be released using the same license
get your facts right before talking out of your ass or keep compiling and timing linux and just shut up
Linux is not an open source operating system. It’s an open source KERNEL.
“Linux is not an open source operating system. It’s an open source KERNEL.”
Exactly, which only proves my point. The critisism of OpenSolaris not really being open source because Sun doesn’t provide you with a readymade binary distribution, and it is too hard to build from source is totally invalid.
And for those who say that it is too hard to build OpenSolaris from source, I challenge you to build Linux from source, without starting with a distro. Just download all the source you would need and get to work. I bet you will find it a LOT harder than building OpenSolaris from source.
THe Linux vendors are the equivlanet of the 4 projects producing OpenSolaris binary distributions. The only difference is that Linux has been around longer and has vendor provided distributions already. Back when Linux first appeared though, that was not the case. Back then, you rolled your own, and you did it from source by gathering everything you needed manually. It was far worse than building OpenSolaris is. But saying it was not really open source for that would have been a totally unfair criticism. Just as it is unfair to critisize OpenSolaris as not being really open source just because you can’t download a pre-built binary distribution from Sun.
Relatively easy to build you say? When’s the last time you built an LFS (Linux From Scratch) system? Not exactly what I would call easy. Not horribly difficult I think since the documentation is quite adequit, but definitely not for the faint of heart.
Still though, it’s pretty tough to to make it any easier than FreeBSD with it’s 5 line ‘build the entire operating system’ instructions:
make buildworld
make buildkernel
make installkernel
reboot
make installworld
Now that’s what I call an easily buildable OS.
> Now that’s what I call an easily buildable OS.
You forgot about mergemaster… Oops… Not so easy anymore… Unless you are an expert and know what should and should not be changed.
Ouch, you got me there. I did forget about mergemaster.
In case someone hasn’t pointed out … Sun indeed made the compilers available for free. Arguably the best compiler, at least when it comes to SPARC. Besides, to bootstrap OpenSolaris you can use either one of the available OpenSolaris distribution, or the one from Sun itself.
Sun opensourced Openoffice and Opensolaris, and Glassfish, and Looking Glass, and Opengrok, and a lot of parts of java, and netbeans, and gridengine, and… , seems like you are the one that should be waking up, I doubt any company in the world contributed as much as Sun did to the opensource
I wouldn’t pay much attention to these kinds of studies as it is probably funded by IBM borrowing one of the tricks of can you guess who?
btw, IBM does have a clue, they put linux in their toy boxes and AIX in the big ones (not including clusters)
Solaris 10 was just released in a market that is traditionaly averse to changes, you know the saying, “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” so it will take some time
ohh, I was forgetting about opensparc, they opened that too
IIRC Looking Glass was not started by Sun MicroSystems, but “Adopted” as a Sun Sponsored Project, it was Open-source before Sun got interested, so really Sun hasn’t “Open-Sourced” Looking Glass as it was OSS before they discovered it’s existance
> it was Open-source before Sun got interested,
> so really Sun hasn’t “Open-Sourced” Looking Glass as
> it was OSS before they discovered it’s existance.
If you read your own articles:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=12926
You might find the opposite is true.
But really, does it matter?
Does it change the fact that Sun (for whatever reason) supports Open Source?
No you don’t recall correctly. Looking Glass was a pet project of a Sun employee. Sun supported his efforts and opened it up.
Correct. And while Solaris may not be as popular as it used to be in the traditional (high-end) UNIX server market, it is (successfully?) positioning itself in the the middle- and low-end. They have already made significant moves toward these markets by opening up Solaris and making it free of charge.
And I think they are doing pretty well in this segments, amongst its Linux fellows. And in this segment, I’m pretty sure that Sun can compete with Linux and Windows very well.
Sun is at the bottom of its release cycle. The new AMD Galaxy’s are only a few months old, and so are the UltraSparc IV’s. Finally, they just release the new Niagra based systems.
So, most of the new stuff from Sun hasn’t even really been around long enough for many companies to let them cycle in to their appropriations cycle.
The next study in 6 months will be more interesting.
The only other thing is that Sun may want to look at improving their customer relations and service, at least according to this study.
And while Solaris may not be as popular as it used to be in the traditional (high-end) UNIX server market, it is (successfully?) positioning itself in the the middle- and low-end.
What an absolute load of tosh. Solaris and Unix is not low and middle end and never has been. It’s the high end or no end for Sun, Solaris and SPARC. That’s where the money has traditionally come from and that’s where the money has now gradually diminished.
Actually, it’s not a load of tosh at all. Sun’s new AMD line of servers is specifically targetted at the low to mid-range that they have been ignoring in the past. Prices for Sun servers now start at around $700 for the AMD-64 models.
They also are producing workstations these days based on AMD-64 that even the average home user can afford. Ultra 20 Opteron based workstations start at under $900.
Actually, it’s not a load of tosh at all. Sun’s new AMD line of servers is specifically targetted at the low to mid-range that they have been ignoring in the past. Prices for Sun servers now start at around $700 for the AMD-64 models.
Except, as a CTO of a small company, their servers just didn’t cut the mustard. I needed a 1U system with 2+ Opteron processors, 4 GB RAM, 2x 300 GB hdd, and room for 2 more. Sun couldn’t do it. I ended up buying a system from http://www.avadirect.com AVA Direct based on http://www.tyan.com/products/html/gt24b2891.html a Tyan whitebox system.
I’m utterly happy with it – as a Databsae server, it cuts several queries taking as long as 2 seconds all the way down to 56 milliseconds on a uniprocessor P4! A 10 minute database load drops in time all the way down to <25 seconds!
Sun’s computer couldn’t handle the 300 GB drives, and only had two HDD drive bays. (WTF? That’s just stupid! I want RAID 1 for 2 drives, and room to grow from there)
“Sun’s computer couldn’t handle the 300 GB drives, and only had two HDD drive bays. (WTF? That’s just stupid! I want RAID 1 for 2 drives, and room to grow from there)”
You want RAID 1 for 2 drives… and room to grow… In a 1U system? I sense overheating and thermal problems in your future.
“And while Solaris may not be as popular as it used to be in the traditional (high-end) UNIX server market, it is (successfully?) positioning itself in the the middle- and low-end. They have already made significant moves toward these markets by opening up Solaris and making it free of charge.”
I can confirm this with a hard fact. We have about 300+ servers running on HP servers and SCO UNIX and we are currently evaluating Solaris 10 on Sun x86 hardware to replace them. We would not have done this even a year ago. Sun must be doing something right. Why are we not looking at linux? Because Sun are cheaper than both RHEL’s offering and Novell’s offering, plus we’re impressed with Dtrace, Zones, ZFS and the performance. From where I’m looking Sun are doing a lot of things right!
Let me guess… Study sponsored by IBM.
I think that this report caught Sun in transition from an old, expensive line to a new, innovative, inexpensive line.
Solaris just went Open Source a few months ago, the new line of AMD-powered Sun Fire servers are V1.0 and only a few months old, and Niagra was released last week.
Give sun a few more months and they will turn it all around. Now is the time to buy Sun stock, before the analysts see the turnaround results.
BTW…
Given the source of this article (The Register), it’s almost certainly exagerated and blown out of proportion. Things are almost never as bad as the The Register’s sensationslist headlines and doomsday writing style try to make them look.
Edited 2005-12-15 20:58
Sun have the most major features in the world of Unixes with dtrace, smf, zfs and now brandz zones. Have UltraSPARC opensource CPU, Solaris platform, JAVA… a lots of bussiness software… Either Linux or FreeBSD or AIX or HP-UX DON’T have (yet) this technologies. And the same bussiness model: opensource, not viral-GPL, but with OSI-aproved license.
And now IBM? IBM has Domino and PPC.. This is nothing (XBOX 360, Apple for a few time..) Nothing more than this.
Perhaps ¿Rex? Sorry for the irony :o)
Or did they just quote the press release since the study costs $499.00 (introductory price).
http://www.gabrielconsultinggroup.com/purchase.php
There are people stupid enough to pay $499 for a study from a little known consultancy group? dear lord, C*O’s are dummer than they look!
Sorry, if you need to pay a cosultancy firm to tell you the obvious, then maybe the best thing to do is resign from your job and looking for an occupation that does not require brain operation – work on an assembly line or something.
Sun’s Unix problems can be summarized in one phrase “Hostility to Linux”. I am a Sun certified Solaris Unix Administrator. I earned my wings rooting for Sun and supporting Sun hardware but today I will not recommend Sun if IBM is available. This is is the story I hear over and over again on the shop floor.
Many Solaris administrators are also Linux/BSD enthusiasts. Sun’s undisguised hostility to Linux and pugnacious marketting strategy has turned many of it’s friends into enemies or at best disinterested bystanders of which I am one.
Which means what to me? Just because a company has a view about a particular competing product doesn’t influence my buying decisions. An operating system is a tool, and for my money Solaris has the best tools (with the exception of smitty).
And if you think IBM is going to “carry” Linux forever, just wait until IBM starts losing money with their investments on Linux, IBM will drop it like a hot rock.
“And if you think IBM is going to “carry” Linux forever, just wait until IBM starts losing money with their investments on Linux, IBM will drop it like a hot rock.”
IBM is not going to lose money on linux because the market is hungry for hardware companies that will support factory installed Linux . IBM is actually making out like a bank robber on Linux. Apart from this study go ask IBM competitors like EDS. They are taking a serious beating at the hands of IBM and Linux is one of the tools against which they cannot offer any competition.
“Sun’s undisguised hostility to Linux and pugnacious marketting strategy has turned many of it’s friends into enemies or at best disinterested bystanders of which I am one.”
Sun is NOT hostile towards Linux. They are hostile towards Red Hat. And that is business. Like it or not, it is. Red hat is competition for Sun. And Red Hat is hostie to Sun for the same reason. Competition.
“There are a couple distributions of OpenSolaris, and they may be usable operating systems, but OpenSolaris(TM) is not. It is unusable sourcecode without a compiler, tools and preexisting operating system to build it on.”
So I guess the opensolaris machine I have running 24/7 must be a figment of my imagination…
“Sun opensourced Openoffice and Opensolaris, and Glassfish, and Looking Glass, and Opengrok, and a lot of parts of java, and netbeans, and gridengine, and… , seems like you are the one that should be waking up, I doubt any company in the world contributed as much as Sun did to the opensource
I wouldn’t pay much attention to these kinds of studies as it is probably funded by IBM borrowing one of the tricks of can you guess who?”
This is all nice and dandy for open source as an ideology but these open source moves don’t tend to make a company a lot of money. in fact, sometimes open sourcing is a way for a company to farm out support to the community. That’s what CA did with Ingres, and what IBM is doing with Cloudscape/Derby.
Open sourcing all these projects is Sun’s way of gaining credibility in the OS community, not a way of making money.
Cddl (Code 4Sun4free)$$$$$$$ Open Solaris is too little Too late.
I can’t stand GPL militancy. It makes the whole GPL / open source community look bad.??????
If you cant or wont write your own,drivers programs,desktop make up an Open source license.
I can’t stand Suns position on CDDL.
“There are a couple distributions of OpenSolaris, and they may be usable operating systems, but OpenSolaris(TM) is not. It is unusable sourcecode without a compiler, tools and preexisting operating system to build it on.”
Open Solaris is in a pretty young and developing phase. It’s great for getting early release stuff like XFS and Grub before the official Solaris release. I downloaded teh Schillix release a few weeks ago and it runs fine for what I want to do.
And you know, I think Solaris is a fine alternative to Linux. Who says Sun has to like Linux? Linux came along and almost cut Sun off at the knees. Now Sun is responding in a big way. I think over the next year we will see Sun making the case that Solaris does most of what Linux does but in a more reliable, more scalable, and more secure fashion. I look forward to the benchmarks.
Remember this, when there are alternatives to choose from, everybody wins. This is true even when there is an alternative to the alternative 😎
Remember this, when there are alternatives to choose from, everybody wins.
But don’t forget, once one business becomes a monopoly everbody loses.
Our goals should be to help the competing alternatives survive, not support the tired old monopolies.
Sun probably has more money than RedHat, Debian, Slackware, Mandriva, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Knoppix, Mepis, YellowDog, Gentoo, WhiteBox, Crux, Puppy, YellowTab, ReactOS, Syllable, Schillix, AmigaOS, Foresight, Xandros, and rPath combined.
Is there a reason y’all like supporting the monopoly over these little guys? Were they more stable, faster, cheaper, more open than their competition, or do they just have a name you can remember?
“Is there a reason y’all like supporting the monopoly over these little guys?”
Sun has more money yes. But having money does not a monopoly make.
If anything, Red Hat is the company that is on its way to becoming a *nix monopoly. They have the vast majority of the commercial sector. They are the only distro offered by the majority of hardware vendors that will preload Linux. And the vast majority of commercial applications that run on Linux will only give you support if you are running on Red Hat.
being a successful company with positive revenue’s doesn’t make them a monopoly, these are basic concepts which you obviously do not understand.
Of course Sun has more money than most of your little list, probably because most aren’t even companies
Yeah definitely, its the name, no actually it is because Solaris is stable, it is faster on many workloads, it is cheaper and as a company that can offer support, hardware, software that is coherant they are the most open.
Actually, SUN doesn’t have much money right now, they spent $4.1billion purchasing StorageTek – it will be interesting whether it pays off, or whether the ‘angel of death’ comes along, like so many of SUN’s acquisitions, and kill any possible value that could have been made out of the deal.
Question for SUN devotee’s: why does SUN really suck when it comes to integrating and geting the most out of acquistions? I mean, they’re worse than Computer Associates, who buy companies but don’t really integrate it, but they don’t seem to fall apart as badly as SUN’s acquisitions.
“Question for SUN devotee’s: why does SUN really suck when it comes to integrating and geting the most out of acquistions?”
They don’t. Sun’s aquisition of SeeBeyond has paid off big time and netted them major contracts with GE, GM, and several other major enterprises.
I expect the StoregeTek purchase will pay off as well. One of Sun’s biggest strongholds is the large datacenter. Datacenters like Ebay, which relies entire on Sun technology to store truely massive amounts of data and handle millions of dollars of transactions a day. StorgeTek will play an important role in these kinds of markets, especially with Sun signing on new JES customers practically every day.
<points out to the owners of the site to get a decent bloody database rather than relying on some POS like MySQL that chokes on a heavy load>
Anway, I was mainly talking about the likes of Cobalt, who had a different customer based and yet SUN still insisted on integrating their products and sales into the large SUN organisation – net result? no one could purchase a damn thing unless they proved themselves worthy via getting an account with SUN.
As for the customer service, maybe a SUN employee can point out why it is so abysmal – I wanted to purchase an Ultra 20 workstation, I made a quote requestion, along with that, sent a question – here I am, a few months later and no reply – Conclusion, they don’t want my business, there for, Apple won it.
Want to win a customer, how about returning a damn inquiry promptly!
I alwasy get reply in about an hour.
You’re probably located in the US, down here in New Zealand, we’re basically nothing according to SUN – unless of course you’re….no, they couldn’t even be bothered winning a government contract.
Personally, they might as well pack up leave going by the lack of any passion to win business down under.
You are a lucky fellow. I have had to call Sun to get quotes. I think that Sun has to really fix their website. Have you tried downloading the code to Java after signing your life away? If you have not, I will brief you, it is tough. Kept getting errors and did not get to “just download” it without having to call Sun. Oh, and I am not the only one that has had this problem. Don’t get me wrong, I like Sun, but they really need to spend some time and effort on customer service. As for the article, I have to disagree, I have dealt with IBM in the past and their service has been severly lacking. Contacted their sales staff inquiring about thin clients and it took them 3 months to get back to me after I repeatedly called them for pre-sales info.
“If you have not, I will brief you, it is tough. Kept getting errors and did not get to “just download” it without having to call Sun.”
I have downloaded the code for Java multiple times and never once had any problems at all. Never once got an error. And never had to call Sun.
“Anway, I was mainly talking about the likes of Cobalt”
I’m not sure what the deal was with the Cobalt purchase. That was kind of an odd one. The only thing I think I can say about it is that it is the father of Sun’s current Galaxy line of AMD-64 servers.
“As for the customer service, maybe a SUN employee can point out why it is so abysmal – I wanted to purchase an Ultra 20 workstation”
I’ve personally never had a problem with Sun’s customer service.
“Conclusion, they don’t want my business, there for, Apple won it.”
I do not know that no matter how good Apple’s customer service may be, I’m not willing to pay their ridiculous prices though.
<points out to the owners of the site to get a decent bloody database rather than relying on some POS like MySQL that chokes on a heavy load>
Yeah. Seeing the damn janitor every couple of clicks is getting rather old.
Actually, SUN doesn’t have much money right now, they spent $4.1billion purchasing StorageTek – it will be interesting whether it pays off, or whether the ‘angel of death’ comes along, like so many of SUN’s acquisitions, and kill any possible value that could have been made out of the deal.
BTW, Storagetek had some 1-1.5+ odd billion in cash reserves that Sun acquired as well. So Sun actually paid some thing 3 billion for Storagetek.
Quote: “Open Solaris is in a pretty young and developing phase.”
eh? It’s nearly six months old now. It didn’t take Fedora Core or OpenSuse six months to release iso images. OpenSolaris is nothing but a PR spin for Sun, to make it look like they’re actually doing something that’s “open”. Since the GPL is the predominant “open source” license (by a LARGE margin I might add) for software, it would have made sense to release OpenSolaris under the GPL wouldn’t it? The GPL has long been the true measure of openness. You basically have to be running Solaris to compile OpenSolaris, good one Sun!
Dave
Are we ignoring the legal landmines that Sun (or any other major UNIX vendor (IBM or HP)) would have to go through to “open up” their OS? Since Fedora Core and OpenSuse are basically free of any legal issues, and are part of a long established OSS development model, of course they are going to be released faster. How about comparing apples to apples for a change instead of trolling?
If my memory serves me correctly, it took some time before Linux was “ready to roll”.
“If my memory serves me correctly, it took some time before Linux was “ready to roll”.”
It took 10 years for Wine to get to a beta 1 release. 10 years… And he’s having a cow about 6 months…
His real cow is that he is just a Sun hater. So no matter what they do, he is going to find a way to spread FUD and misinformation about it, and try to make it look bad. Because it’s not being released under his holy GPL that he worships as the only true open source license.
Ah well.
I can remember the times, when the first Linux kernel was released and just 3 month later, Fedora Core relaesed this wonderful stable first version called FC-10.
Man? *knock*
What are you talking about?
> eh? It’s nearly six months old now.
I’m going to ask you again. Please show me where it is a requirement of open source that the company providing the source make it available to you in a readily installable binary form. It’s not. It never has been.
“OpenSolaris is nothing but a PR spin for Sun, to make it look like they’re actually doing something that’s “open””
False. Completely and totally false. Sun is open sourcing more and more of their software all the time. So stop spreading FUD.
“Since the GPL is the predominant “open source” license (by a LARGE margin I might add)”
You don’t know what you are talking about. The predominant open source license is actually the Apache Software Foundation license. And it has spawned a lot of additional open source licenses.
“The GPL has long been the true measure of openness.”
By your opinion. And that’s all it is. your opinion. And no, it is not the true measure of openness. When it comes to open source licenses, the GPL is by far the most restrictive one there is because of its viral clauses.
“You basically have to be running Solaris to compile OpenSolaris, good one Sun!”
Again, you don’t know what you are talking about it. If you did, you would have have heard of something called a cross-compiler. In simple terms, NO you DO NOT have to be running Solaris to compile OpenSolaris. And even if you did, what’s the big deal? You can get Solaris for free… Oh… That’s right… It’s not licensed under your holy GPL, which is the one true open source license.
Again, stop spreading FUD. It makes the entire community look bad.
Edited 2005-12-17 06:50
because fedora was very usable in the first release right?
There are already distributions of opensolaris that you can download, and there is solaris express too (granted, not every part of solaris express is opensource) so no, you don’t have to have solaris 10 installed
I will say it again because you seem to have problems understanding what you read, perhaps you should go back to school or something. Releasing solaris under the gpl would have meant releasing and unusable and unable to boot os, and that would be worthless to me, you and everyone else, so no it would not have made sense to release solaris under the gpl. The cddl is open enough and I fail to see what is it that you have against it.
You seem to overestimate the opensource, how many of the linux users do you think mess with it’s code? to them the part of free as in “gratis” it’s what’s important.
Btw, the bsd license is more open than gpl and so is the cddl, i’m shocked by the fact that people dont seem to realize that
“Btw, the bsd license is more open than gpl and so is the cddl, i’m shocked by the fact that people dont seem to realize that”
Well, the bsd license is more open. But what the GPL people don’t like about that is that it allows a third party to take BSD code, make some changes, close source it, and sell it as commercial software without providing source code or giving redistribution rights. So in effect, the BSD license allows code stealing.
My ideal license would be something along the following:
You may redistribute this in source or binary form as long as you are not making a profit from it in any way. If you are making a profit from it, you are required to compensate the original author of the code with a certain percentage of royalties.
This way companies like Red Hat would not be able to parasatize on the community under the guise of “We aren’t selling Linux. We are selling support for Linux”, when the simple reality is that without the efforts of an army of volunteer programmers, they wouldn’t have anything to sell support for.
I don’t like the fact that thousands of people are doing the work, while only a few are actually getting paid for it. In a truly egalitarian community, either everyone who contributed work should see financial gain, or no one at all should.
Gee, why is this IBM sponsored study taken so seriously. It nothing but a lame attempt to beat the competition while it’s down referring to the past/old weaknesses that do not exist any longer. I guess the timing for this so called “study” is pretty good, since now Sun has it all over IBM. Sun beats IBM on processors, hardware, OS, middleware, you name it as far as capabilities/value are concerned and definitely poised to take back what it deserves, so instead of standing up to the compeition is IBM is pulling low punches with fiction. IBM was always a master of FUD (check mainframe days) and I’m not surprised even a little bit by this “study”. There is not a chance in hell I would rate IBM technology and the way IBM does business in general ahead of Sun.
BTW, who in the right mind would put HP ahead of Sun? HP lost their plot a long time ago and they clearly have no vision for recovery of their server business. All they’ve got is the richest collection of antique operating systems that are not going to live very long and a total piece of crap of a processor known as Itanic. Itanic will die a slow lingering death and HP’s enterprise division will go down along with it. I have never seen a single person that would ever rate HP higher than Sun. This study is a load of crap.
IMHO Sun is a company that has done a 180 degree turn around in PR.
While financially, I don’t know what sort of impact opensourcing Solaris has done for them, or even giving licenses away; but I can certainly see that Sun have made alot of new friends by the move.
I used to be a FreeBSD advocate ( and still am ), but now, I got to try Solaris because of the free download and I LOVE it.
One thing for sure, I’m now looking at studying for Solaris Sys Admin cert.
freaking rules!
<sarcasm>Thank you so much for your input</sarcasm>
But don’t forget, once one business becomes a monopoly everbody loses.
Our goals should be to help the competing alternatives survive, not support the tired old monopolies.
Sun probably has more money than RedHat, Debian, Slackware, Mandriva, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Knoppix, Mepis, YellowDog, Gentoo, WhiteBox, Crux, Puppy, YellowTab, ReactOS, Syllable, Schillix, AmigaOS, Foresight, Xandros, and rPath combined.
Is there a reason y’all like supporting the monopoly over these little guys? Were they more stable, faster, cheaper, more open than their competition, or do they just have a name you can remember?
I don’t see how you sould possibly imply that Sun has or will have a monopoly. They provide an excellent alternative to Linux. But they can never replace Linux to the extent of having a monopoly.
And yes, they have a lot more money than all those “little guys”. You want some reasons why? Sun has been around for 20+ years. They are a diversified company which includes hardware, software, and services.
Many of the companies you list are simply NICHE players and will always be small. I have run Red Hat, YellowDog, BeOS, MacOS. This season I am running my stuff on Solaris and I really like it and I like the direction it is going. I kind of liked Red Hat but I didn’t like getting dicked around with the whole Fedora thing.
I don’t think that will happen with Solaris. I can’t wait to try out XFS, and Zones, and the optimizing Sun C compiler, and Grid computing, and Xen and Grub, all with Solaris. There’s a lot there and as an added benefit really large companies use Solaris and that’s where the IT jobs are.
In my part fo the country there are few jobs for Linux development. All that stuff gets outsourced.
While IBM does shows strong promise with their focus on Linux, Eclipse and Power Processor line, there is just no way that study could be given any credibility. I work in New York as a Systems Administrator and I DON’T hear people ON THE SUBWAY talking about AIX. They are talking about Sun Microsystems, about Solaris, and about Sun servers. [this happened indeed yesterday]. I just have not heard that much about cool technology from IBM, period, even here on osnews. When asked about reliability and strong OS design I think of Solaris. [And sometimes FreeBSD.] ;-D
<s.o.b.>
You don’t hear much about z/OS on OSNews either. That dosen’t mean that people aren’t using it.
AIX 5L is doing things that Sun can only dream about doing half as good. The only reason you don’t hear about it is because IBM dosen’t waste millions of dollars marketing something everyone wants to buy anyway.
“AIX 5L is doing things that Sun can only dream about doing half as good.”
Uh huh… Sure… One word for you: dtrace. Actually, make that two. dtrace, and zfs.
Let me know when AIX has anything as remotely powerful as dtrace and then you can try to convince me that Sun can only dream about doing have as good. dtrace is best inovation in performance tuning and debugging to come along in a very long time.
“Science and capitalism are inseperable.”
Sad but true. No doubt why pharmaceuticals are so insanely overpriced
No, that is due to the concept of ‘ever greening’ in the US patent legislation which blocks cheaper generic drugs coming on the market, even though the original patent had expired many years ago.
Blame the company? no, they’re merely using a loop hole that YOUR representatives refuse to fix up because they have a nice vested interest in ensuring that the gravy train continues.
Can I just try, again, to explain that Sun could not use
the GPL to license Solaris because they do not have the
rights to all the code. Using the GPL would have resulted
in Opensolaris distributions not actually being
distributable (due to the GPL clause that dependent
objects must also be distributed under the GPL). A file
based license had to be used. Believe it not, the work
to open source Solaris has been going on for a long
while.
Sun competes with Redhat (the business) vendor of a Linux
distribution – this should not be conflated with a ‘
hatred of linux’.
“Sun indeed made the compilers available for free.”
Is the Sun C compiler really free? That’s amazing. This is probably the best C compiler ever written, no holds barred. The man page for the options alone goes on for many, many pages. It used to cost about $1000, after the 30 day trial ran out.
Speaking as a computer science major who wrote a partial compiler in class, this compiler is awe-inspiring.
Does anyone have a link to this?
Sorry this is off-topic!
http://www.sun.com/software/products/studio/get.xml
keep in mind that the source is not available, it’s free as in gratis not free as in opensource
here:
http://www.sun.com/software/products/studio/index.xml – Marketing
https://jsecom15c.sun.com:443/ECom/EComActionServlet;jsessionid=7C7F… – Download (Requires free SDC account)
In a few months many things will change as now Sun has open sourced Solaris and announced its brilliant Niagara chips…
> AIX 5L is doing things that Sun can only dream about doing half as good
Such as what??! I’ve been administering both Solaris and AIX machines for years now. Though the years there hasn’t been a time when AIX would come out as “superior” to Solaris. AIX is still the most weird Unix OS on the market and it sill being called “Unix for drunken aliens”. The only things in AIX that are a little bit more comfortable to work with compared with Solaris are SMIT, LVM, mksysb and that’s about it. But that is nothing compared with everything Solaris 10 has to offer. AIX has absolutely no answer in the pipeline for DTrace, Zones, ZFS, RBAC, Trusted Extentions and a host of other features. Solaris 10 leaves AIX in the dust easily and doesn’t look like AIX has a shred of chance to catch up, considering the fact that IBM is de-emphasizing AIX in favour of Linux (stupid). Sorry dude, but you’re full of shit with your lame attempt to glamourize AIX. AIX 5L is POS compared with Solaris 10.
>Such as what??! I’ve been administering both Solaris and AIX machines for years now. Though the years there hasn’t been a time when AIX would come out as “superior” to Solaris. AIX is still the most weird Unix OS on the market and it sill being called “Unix for drunken aliens”. The only things in AIX that are a little bit more comfortable to work with compared with Solaris are SMIT, LVM, mksysb and that’s about it. But that is nothing compared with everything Solaris 10 has to offer. AIX has absolutely no answer in the pipeline for DTrace, Zones, ZFS, RBAC, Trusted Extentions and a host of other features. Solaris 10 leaves AIX in the dust easily and doesn’t look like AIX has a shred of chance to catch up, considering the fact that IBM is de-emphasizing AIX in favour of Linux (stupid). Sorry dude, but you’re full of shit with your lame attempt to glamourize AIX. AIX 5L is POS compared with Solaris 10.
DTrace – not once have I had a customer say “boy, I wish AIX had something like DTrace”, they just want the thing to run. forever.
Zones – are you kidding? AIX has had LPAR for several years now and is light years ahead of zones in terms of performance, security, privilege separation, flexibility, etc.
ZFS – JFS2 seems to keep my customers happy, most couldn’t probably tell you what the name of the filesystem is, once again, they just want it to run. forever.
I’m not familiar with RBAC or Trusted Extensions.
“DTrace – not once have I had a customer say “boy, I wish AIX had something like DTrace”
Well, I’ve never said it on AIX. I’ve said it on Linux though when trying to debug an application, or track down a performance bottleneck. You probably have to have used dtrace though to appreciate just what a powerful and amazing tool it is.
> ZFS – JFS2 seems to keep my customers happy
ZFS has some very powerful backup capabilities and such that other filesystems can’t match.
And whether your customers want it or not is not really the issue. THe issue is your claim that Solaris is inferior to AIX. And that is simply false. Solaris is a far more advanced and powerful OS than AIX–especially with Solaris 10.
DTrace – not once have I had a customer say “boy, I wish AIX had something like DTrace”, they just want the thing to run. forever.
But where do you think developers like Oracle will go? – Oracle has already announced that Solaris 10 is their primary dev platform. That means apps appear on Solaris first, so customers choose solaris. DTrace allows the app developer to ensure that the customer gets the best experience from their software. So, Dtrace is important.
Zones – are you kidding? AIX has had LPAR for several years..
LPARs required IBM hardware, as dynamic system domains under Solaris require Sun hardware. Compare like for like, domains are the comparison to be made with LPARs. Zones however can run on any Solaris box (my laptop runs 4 zones right now). Try running LPARs on a laptop!
ZFS – JFS2 seems to keep my customers happ
You just display your ignorance. ZFS is not simply a filesystem – it only appears as one. It’s far more than that, effectively replacing the whole storage stack, from raw devices, through volume management (ie. no need for SVM or VxVM) up to the filesystem. Before making inane statements such as this, please read up on, and understand what you are talking about.
>DTrace – not once have I had a customer say “boy, I wish AIX had something like DTrace”, they just want the thing to run. forever.
Of course when there is a performance problem you just want thing to run and spend another $$$$$ buying hardware from IBM. Having DTrace you can just check (it is easy !!!) what is a root of the problems. And in most cases you save the $$$$$.
>Zones – are you kidding? AIX has had LPAR for several years now and is light years ahead of zones in terms of performance, security, privilege separation, flexibility, etc.
Isn’t it that having LPARs performance of your system drops up to 30 % ?
>ZFS – JFS2 seems to keep my customers happy, most couldn’t probably tell you what the name of the filesystem is, once again, they just want it to run. forever.
And if product X keep you happy does this mean that product Y couldn’t be better then X ? Did you read about ZFS ?
And if were really familiar with AIX you would be talking about the CAPP/EAL4 install option (AIX 5L 5.2/5.3). I only had a short time to play with that and it appears to limit access to specific system tools for users that are not administrators. The ability to create an LPAR was a feature added in 5L 5.2, so it hasn’t been there all that long. And you could only create LPAR’s on specific IBM pSeries machines, and this is better than Zones or Containers how?
And yes I used to administer AIX machines, the only advantage I see in AIX over Solaris is better administrative tools (smit/smitty over SMC), especially for a new sysadmin or one that is not familiar with AIX.
So what are “crazy 8’s”?
> You don’t hear much about z/OS on OSNews either. That dosen’t mean that people aren’t using it.
The only reason z/OS is still being used is because the platform is so proprietary it is almost impossible to get off of without major expenses (IBM won’t help you). Mainframes are about the most inefficient form of computing on the market at the moment and you have to be an absolute idiot to get on the mainframe bandwagon — if mainframes were airplanes, they would have had pedals for propultion. Mainframes cost you an arm and a leg and all you get in return is the worst vendor lockin in the computing history.
Actually, thats incorrect about Mainframes; they’re good for certain tasks; they’re great for massive batch transactions like what is done in a bank, but most of the time, rather than them being used in many cases, a large SUN box could do the same thing without too much fuss; its not about ‘suckage’ its about using the right tool for the job.
.. So if the study is accurate, why will IBM be offering Solaris 10+ on their blade systems? When IBM themselves stated that it was due to customer demand?
> Sun has a LONG way to go to compete with Linux. They haven’t even caught up with RedHat yet.
HA, HA! Dude, you’re a freaking idiot, obviously you don’t have a shred of a clue. Sun employs almost 30 times as many employees as RedHat and has far larger coverage than RedHat. Sun is a system company, RedHat is pidly hype factory that rips off the comunity of their donations and makes a profit off of it. The only thing RedHat can claim at the moment is overinflated stock price, other than that the whole company is smoke and mirrors. If it wasn’t for the overinflated price of RedHat stock, Sun could have bought them ten times over.
Just wait and see..
Sun has to pay all their employees. Sun has to fund R&D for all their tech. Sun’s hands are tied. They are stuck being who they are. They can’t just flip the company around and promote Free Software. If they could they would have done it by now.
Its like how Pres. Bush can’t talk about Iraq without selecting his words very carefully. If they say the wrong thing their competition with eat them alive. They can’t admit they were wrong because it makes them look weak.
But we all know the truth about them. By now it should be obvious. If its not, well, I don’t know what to say. Don’t worry, be happy.
“Sun has to pay all their employees. Sun has to fund R&D for all their tech.”
Yep. Where as Red Hat parasitizes off the open source community like a slimy leech, getting rich off the efforts of volunteer open source programmers, most of whom will never see a dime for their hard work.
Nice ethical company you are promoting there.
> Actually, SUN doesn’t have much money right now, they spent $4.1billion purchasing StorageTek – it will be interesting whether it pays off, or whether the ‘angel of death’ comes along, like so many of SUN’s acquisitions, and kill any possible value that could have been made out of the deal
I don’t see what the big deal with people questioning the StorageTek purchase and “integration” issues. I don’t think there is much to integrate, Sun and STK complement each other perfectly. Remember STK gear hold about 70% of *all* data worlwide, so STK opens up a *lot* of doors for Sun to get into accounts, especially IBM ones — the majority of mainframes out there are backed up to STK kit. Other Sun aquisitions were different in a sense that there was quite a bit of overlap between homegrown and aquired product lines inevitably leading to canibalization usually withering away the newly aquired products (Cobalt comes to mind). This time STK is a very good compliment to the existing product line, so I don’t see STK fruits just rotting away.
> DTrace – not once have I had a customer say “boy, I wish AIX had something like DTrace”, they just want the thing to run. forever.
Oh yeah, pleading ignorance is always a good answer… Look, I’m an AIX administrator and I sure as hell would appreciate if AIX had something even remotely resembling Solaris DTrace. Just accept it, AIX is far behind Solaris 10 and it doesn’t look like IBM is trying to catch up.
> Zones – are you kidding? AIX has had LPAR for several years now and is light years ahead of zones in terms of performance, security, privilege separation, flexibility, etc.
HA, HA! Apparently besideds not knowing anything about Solaris you don’t know shit about AIX or pSeries gear. LPAR’s and micropartitions are extremely performance hungry and can gob about 40% of your CPU in pure overhead if you’ve got more than 10 micropartitions configured — POWER hypervisor saps a lot of power to provide LPAR or uPAR support. With Zones on the other hand you don’t suffer pretty much any overhead at all — you can have literally hundreds of zones running on single CPU without any additional overhead. Security-wise there is no difference — both LPAR and Zones provide pretty much the same level of separation. Flexibility-wise, if you run Zones on the domainable high-end gear, Zones are actually more flexible simply because you can take advantage of DR. Overall Zones can give you a whole lot more in terms of utilitzation and manageability than LPAR — you can have 8000+ zones on the same system, ask if IBM can do 1/100 of that on their pSeries systems (hint — they can’t).
> ZFS – JFS2 seems to keep my customers happy, most couldn’t probably tell you what the name of the filesystem is, once again, they just want it to run. forever.
Give me a freaking break, ZFS is simply in a whole new league compared with JFS2. I’m not even gonna waste my time explaining all of the, just RTFM.
>HA, HA! Apparently besideds not knowing anything about Solaris you don’t know shit about AIX or pSeries gear.
I guess my CATE certification, 5 years of AIX/LPAR experience and several million dollars worth of pSeries sales don’t count for anything.
>LPAR’s and micropartitions are extremely performance hungry and can gob about 40% of your CPU in pure overhead if you’ve got more than 10 micropartitions configured — POWER hypervisor saps a lot of power to provide LPAR or uPAR support
This is just plain wrong. Show me some documentation that proves this. I have installed several machines with more than 10 partitions and haven’t noticed anything of the kind. Don’t tell me what I don’t know shit about. I didn’t attack anyone personally, why do you?
>Security-wise there is no difference — both LPAR and Zones provide pretty much the same level of separation.
Really? What if the OS instance that hosts all of your zones is compromised. Would they not have the ability to compromise or at least disable all of the zones?
>Flexibility-wise, if you run Zones on the domainable high-end gear, Zones are actually more flexible simply because you can take advantage of DR.
Really? Can you reboot all of the Zones and the host OS independently? You can on LPAR, because they are completely independent of each other.
>you can have 8000+ zones on the same system, ask if IBM can do 1/100 of that on their pSeries systems (hint — they can’t)
Well, you could potentially have 640 completely independent partitions on a p595. Let’s see, 8000/100=80. You are wrong. Name me two companies that have more than 640 zones on a single Solaris box. Why would you even need this?
>Give me a freaking break, ZFS is simply in a whole new league compared with JFS2. I’m not even gonna waste my time explaining all of the, just RTFM.
Okay, educate me. What are the groundbreaking new features that ZFS has that JFS2 doesn’t?
“I guess my CATE certification, 5 years of AIX/LPAR experience and several million dollars worth of pSeries sales don’t count for anything.”
Well, anyone can claim certifications and such on the Internet.
But whether or not you know AIX or not is not really the issue. The issue is you obviously don’t know shit about recent versions of Solaris, so you can’t compare the two and make the statement you did. You said Solaris sucks compared to AIX. But then basically showed you don’t know shit about modern versions of Solaris. So that was a dishonest statement, that you didn’t even have any personal experience with modern versions of Solaris to back up.
Once again, you are being very belligerent and attacking me personally, which I don’t understand.
Nevertheless, I never said “Solaris sucks”. Maybe some other poster I responded to did, but I never did. All I said, was that the Solaris features mentioned that were supposed to be so much better than AIX had never been an issue with any of my customers. Customers buy machines and the original article was about sales of UNIX boxes.
I could easily claim that you don’t know shit about AIX, based on your comments, but I did not. I even asked you to be kind enough to educate me on ZFS, to tell me why it’s better than JFS, but you didn’t.
> This is just plain wrong. Show me some documentation that proves this. I have installed several machines with more than 10 partitions and haven’t noticed anything of the kind. Don’t tell me what I don’t know shit about. I didn’t attack anyone personally, why do you?
Here is an excerpt from IBM’s RedBook “The Advanced POWER Virtualizationon IBM Eserver p5 Servers Architecture and Performance Considerations” p.116:
4-way SMP (4 cores) 1.00 relative performance
4 partitions dedicated (1 core each) ~1.05 relative performance
4 uPARs (2 cores each) ~.96 relative performance
2 uPARs (4 cores each) ~.90 relative performance
4 uPARs (4 cores each) ~.75 relative performance
On page
115, of the same IBM reference, it states the reasons for this enormous
overhead involved. It is summarized as follows:
* The inability to guarantee the availability of sets of physical CPU cores
into the virtualized uPAR space, dispatched at 10 millisecond intervals
* Cache thrashing when multiple virtual threads compete for cache lines
* SMP lock contention on dispatching boundary
* Simultaneous Multi Threading (SMT) only makes this worse, which partially explains why POWER5’s SMT is sometimes turned off in some benchmarks
IBM’s own reference strongly suggests POWER5 systems with more than several uPARs, each with several cores, may require so much overhead that it may drag system performance well below 50% of full SMP mode. Extrapolating IBM’s data from IBM’s chart from 4 to 8 cores in 4 uPARs, results in a relative performance of 35%.
So perhaps you should know a little more about the systems you sell or you’re one of the IBM GS folks who as a rule don’t know shit about the products they are trying to support/sell.
> Well, you could potentially have 640 completely independent partitions on a p595. Let’s see, 8000/100=80. You are wrong. Name me two companies that have more than 640 zones on a single Solaris box. Why would you even need this?
640 partitions on p595? What a load of crap, where did you pull out that fact? Out of your ass? Read the RedBook above, that should tell you that it is virtually impossible without grinding your system to a complete halt.
>Here is an excerpt from IBM’s RedBook “The Advanced POWER Virtualizationon IBM Eserver p5 Servers Architecture and Performance Considerations” p.116:
First of all, I think you meant p126. On page 116,it actually says “Note: The impact on performance when implementing Micro-Partitioning can
be both positive and negative.”
Your performance numbers, from p126, are taken way out of context. If you’d read a little closer, it says that those result were due to increasing the number of virtual processors in each partition. The number of virtual processors allocated is up to the sys. admin and can be adjusted dynamically. The recommendation is to run with as few virtual processors per partition as possible (also noted on p126). So, the performance gets worse as you do something that is not recommended. Surpise, surprise.
And yes, I realize that no one would try to run 640 partitions on a p595, but that takes me back to the point I made at the end of the paragraph: why? Why would anyone put 8000 zones, or 800 or even 80 on any one system. This is just stupid and poor design to begin with.
And you didn’t answer my question about being able to reboot all of the zones AND the hosting OS independently of each other. Nor did you answer the question about the host OS being compromised.
So you can have 8000 zones and your dick is bigger than mine. Yippee. That doesn’t mean you should.
> You’re probably located in the US, down here in New Zealand, we’re basically nothing according to SUN – unless of course you’re….no, they couldn’t even be bothered winning a government contract
> Personally, they might as well pack up leave going by the lack of any passion to win business down under.
Oh gee, kaiwai, you’re either ignorant of what is going on around you in your own country and “down under” or you just never asked questions — perhaps you should check with Telecom New Zealand and Telstra — they are basically gigantic Sun shops nowadays. I live in Australia and Sun’s presence here is pretty big regardless of what sector you go to.
> I live in Australia…
Then you should have noticed that every sector is gradually dumping Sun in favour for Linux.
> Then you should have noticed that every sector is gradually dumping Sun in favour for Linux.
Yeah, dream on you idiot. Solaris trumps Linux in every single category nowadays. Even the price or “open” argument does not fly in favour of Linux anymore — Solaris is cheaper than any commercial Linux distribution out there and is open source while giving you better performance and tons more features. You must be seriously brainwashed to pick Linux over Solaris.
On a mid-range or high and server, that is. I’d seriously doubt I’d pick Solaris 10 over Linux on my laptop or desktop, or even a small scale server.
“On a mid-range or high and server, that is. I’d seriously doubt I’d pick Solaris 10 over Linux on my laptop or desktop, or even a small scale server.”
Personally, I have found Solaris 10 to outperform Linux on my desktop. I don’t know that I would try it on my laptop though just because on a laptop, I would be surprised if I didn’t run into hardware compatibility issues. It runs great on my desktop though, and outperforms Linux.
Guys, this has been a very interesting discussion from all sides. Let’s please stop the name calling and stick to facts and well-supported opinions.
Thanks,
AndrewZ
Credibility of the report depends upon who sponsored it.
Well maybe, yes. But you are forgetting one very important detail. Performance isn’t the only key enabler to be successful on the desktop. Does is support my iPod, webcam, nvidia card, tv-out, intel wireless etc? Some may work on Solaris, but I’m pretty sure that the majority of my devices is not yet supported.
I know they are working on it, but while their technology may be superior (on a server, that is), but it takes more to get me to install it on my laptop.
> > Well, you could potentially have 640 completely independent partitions on a p595
Well, booting 640 *PAR’s on p595 sounds like fictions even though p595 is a major piece of hardware. Compare that with booting and running 600 zones without breaking a sweat on a comparatively low-end 4 processor v880:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jclingan?entry=up_for_a_v880_zones