“Sun recently confirmed that they will do a full 64-bit port of Solaris to the AMD64 platform. This work started 6 months ago, with a beta expected in spring 2004 and a full release in the summer. Almost certainly, the AMD64 port will start with Solaris 10 – I would expect Solaris 10 to be released for SPARC, x86 and AMD64 on the same day, probably in Q3 2004.” Read the article at AcesHardware.
Solaris 10 – What’s coming in 2004
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I have to say, this sounds great. My company is getting to the point that we’re investigating a move to an alternative OS on the servers. I’ve been pushing Linux, but with Novell/SuSE and Solaris 10 on the way, I have a whole sea of viable options now.
AHhhh… SOLARIS.. the most dependable and cheapest OS there is.. hmmmmmm
I hope it beats linux on the x86.. currently linux rules x86 over solaris according to benchmarks.. I bet sun has fixed that problem 😉
Now nobody can touch solaris on the SPARC… but what about the AMD64?
(BTw, when i said cheapest I ment good deal- for only $99 you get a lot of software bundleed with it worth alot of money)
People also don’t NEED linux, they need an operating system that is compatable with linux because its a standard. Scott McNealy knows this because I pointed it out to him and their Software CEO.
Peace everybody.
I’m definately with you on that one. We need to push commercial software as much as possible. Come one people, corporations need to turn a profit! I hope the SCO lawsuit proves once and for all that you can’t rely on pimply-faced communist teenagers to develop mission critical enterprise solutions.
And how, exactly, does the SCO lawsuit prove that?
It proves to me, if anything, that corporations like Microsoft and Sun have recognized they have a common enemy afterall. Unfortunately they didn’t recognize this enemy is their own lack of ambition, motivation, creativity and technical ability to deliver the quality software their customers expect and require from them. But hey, who ever said they got it?
Even their marketting departments know what those corporations should be innovating. Trusted Computing, Sun ONE, etc. They want a unified network of system that work well together. But they refuse to cooperate with their competition long enough to hash out the technical side of the plan. So it always flops and we fall for it every time, paying them lots of money. And then we turn around and pay our IT departments lots of money to fix their broken stuff.
But at least they hire lots of contractors from time to time and continue playing this game of monopoly. Its fun!
But to do it the right way the first time you have to do it yourself and use OSS software. Anything else is just a waste of time.
What are the advantage of having Solaris on SPARC hardware.
Is it
– highly scalable
– works well under load extreme load.
please fill this in for me since I am not that familiar.
With each CPU architecture and OS has different characteristics right?
Therefore I wonder if Solaris for AMD64 was made to the best it can be, what different characteristics would it have Vs SPARC.
“Come one people, corporations need to turn a profit!”
You think Sun, IBM and others are not turning a profit on Linux?
John,
The benefits of Solaris on Sparc hardware is:
1. Support for up to 128 CPU’s
2. Enterprise level volume management (Solaris Volume Manager)
3. Both Solaris Sparc and Trusted Solaris evaluated at Common Criteria EAL4
4. IP Network Multipathing (the ability to combine two network interfaces into a group for fault tolerant network connections)
5. Supports a variety of SBus (for those of us still using 3500/4500/6500’s) and PCI Sparc hardware
6. Solaris has been 64-bit since Solaris 7 (for Sparc hardware that supported it)
My experience with Solaris under load is one night I was troubleshooting a Remedy problem on a 20 CPU 32 GB E6500 when I discovered that Remedy was spawning rappsvc (Remedy Application Services) processes at the rate of five a second! The tool prstat showed the load at over 15 across the board and the users hitting Remedy and the Oracle database saw no performance issues!
BTW, what are the current advantages the SPARC has still got over x86, Opteron and PPC?
SPeed it isn’t, power consumption doesn’t seem to matter for servers (see Itanic), so what?
does the gain justify the cost of developing their own arch?
You think Sun, IBM and others are not turning a profit on Linux?
They’d be making more from proprietary software! Face it, no matter how good Linux is technically, it violates the constitutional right of a corporation to make profit. Therefore, it must be stopped, otherwise we will begin a slippery slope to communism.
They’d be making more from proprietary software! Face it, no matter how good Linux is technically, it violates the constitutional right of a corporation to make profit. Therefore, it must be stopped, otherwise we will begin a slippery slope to communism.
You crazy troll, stop it! You are killing me with laughter…
“They’d be making more from proprietary software! Face it, no matter how good Linux is technically, it violates the constitutional right of a corporation to make profit. Therefore, it must be stopped, otherwise we will begin a slippery slope to communism.”
And how exactly does it violate this ‘constitutional right?’ I suppose there’s a chance that you’re just trying to be funny, but I think it’s more likely that you’re just a tad misguided or dim.
it violates the constitutional right of a corporation to make profit. Therefore, it must be stopped, otherwise we will begin a slippery slope to communism.
I’d even add that what you just said is very anti-capitalistic; stopping competitors and thinking that anybody is “entitled” to a profit even if they can’t offer a better/cheaper solution is totally against the concept of a “free market”.
They’d be making more from proprietary software!
They wouldn’t, because IBM, like SUN and Apple, isn’t a software company. It’s a hardware company. They sell servers, not Linux.
If they sold their servers with prorpietary software, their prices would be much higher and they wouldn’t be as competitive.
“Therefore, it must be stopped, otherwise we will begin a slippery slope to communism.”
Are you serious? Do you know what communism is?
In communist countries you have no choice but to take what they give you -it’s “take it or die” and that’s exactly what MS wants.
“I hope the SCO lawsuit proves once and for all that you can’t rely on pimply-faced communist teenagers to develop mission critical enterprise solutions.”
I am wondering how many “pimply-faced communist teenagers” MS and SCO have employed.
Please, open your eyes to reality. No one forces you to use Open Source, no one! I am not using it myself very much, but i hate the thought to be forced to use MS products because I have no other choice.
I am also interested in learning the advantages of SPARC over x86. How do we accurately compare the two different architectures in terms of speed? Looking at the “GHz” numbers, x86 always comes out on top… but something tells me there’s another half of the story?
Thanks,
J
I, for one, am woefully unimpressed by the USIII chipset. That big L2 cache doesn’t make up for the fact that it’s 2 years behind Intel/AMD in technology.
Sun’s hardware is horribly overpriced (especially their desktop line – jesus, what crap) and, unless the USIV is something special, you’ll see more folks sticking Solaris on less expensive hardware and ditching the overpriced Sun servers.
Maybe it’s Sun’s goal to get out of the hardware business eventually. If so, this is a step in the right direction.
What makes you think that Intel/AMD have superior technology to UltraSparc, cpu clock numbers? UltraSparc is still by far the most sucessfull 64-bit processor in the server space and will stay that way in the near future and may be for long time. UltraSparc seems to be doing a much better job at applications requiring a lot of throughput and scalability such as high-end database application and ERP. As for “Sun servers are overpriced” argument, expensive compared to what, your PC budget? There is not a whole lot of hardware that can at least approach the same levels of performance and scalability leave along be cheaper and by the way comparable solutions from IBM and HP actually tend to be more expensive than Sun’s. Sun UltraSparc platform running Solaris is still a price/performance leader in the higher end space and forsee it stay the same despite the ignorant comments made boneheaded analysts having no understanding of what is going on in enterprise computing.
Thanks Robert
Kobayashi: what you are praising is SUn processor interconnect technology
. The Sun CPUs themselves are quite mediocre. Now if Sun released an Opteron-based mainframe, things might get interesting…
Well, I just priced out a Sun Fire V240 against a Dell 2650, using the “Large” Sun Configuration. Both are 2U, 2 CPU machines with redundant power and hot swappable drives.
The Sun prices out at $6,495.00 while the Dell hits $5,670.00.
The Dell price doesn’t include any software (not even the OS), but it can take more RAM, and one extra HDD, and faster CPUs.
The Sun comes with their full gamut of Solaris and its services.
The Sun also has its Lights Out Management which lets you remotely manage the server even if it’s not booted, dunno if the Dell has something similar.
So, you can quibble about whether the Xeon 2.4 is comparable to the USIIIi 1GHz, but I’m betting that the difference between the two is not substantial for most applications.
Anyway, for this example, the Sun isn’t horribly disproportionate in price with a dominant force in the PC industry, and the bundled software can easily tip the scales.
> Kobayashi: what you are praising is SUn processor interconnect technology
. The Sun CPUs themselves are quite mediocre. Now if Sun released an Opteron-based mainframe, things might get interesting…
Weather Opteron can scale is still a BIG question, since it is targetted at the lower end of the scalability range. Plus it will take years before the architecture is trusted enough for mission critical deployments, just look at Itanic. But it still looks like Opteron is going to be a hoot for 1-4 processor machines.
Listen I have worked with Compaq, Dell, HP, custom built intel/amd, mac servers, DEC Alphas and Sun hardware.
With the exception of DEC Alphas no other HW manufacturer could touch the quality of Sun products.
The Sparc could get faster. Actually, I do not give a flying flip what kind of CPU they use as long as its fast and all the 3rd party stuff supports.
It is the quality I need. Someone also made the comment on the workstations. From a price/speed overview a PC running linux is a better *Nix workstation solution IMO than a Solaris box. However, if you look at a price/quality viewpoint the Solaris workstation closes a lot of gaps. Why? They are not built like cheap pieces of PC sh*t. My personal opinion is that linux is still a better workstation but server? No way.
Quality of hardware actually matters in a real server environment for mission critical enterprise apps.
You use linux on the chrooted sftp servers, apache servers, news servers and dns servers. They make good app servers when large redundant groups behind say a Foundry ServerIron.
Still, if I need a rock solid Oracle server or other Enterprise level server give me Sun.
Why is it that we can’t have an actual technical discussion without politics being thrown in? Just watch, every damn time someone brings up a non-Linux unixish OS the whole gotta be OSS shit starts up. Not that I have anything against the idea, I just don’t see why it’s intrinsically superior.
On another note the next machine I buy will be a SUN box. Probably a blade 150 or whatever is the most affordable model when I get the cash together.
Doesn’t Linux scale up to 512 processors now?
Doesn’t Linux scale up to 512 processors now?
Solaris does scales up to 128 CPU on Fujitsu Siemens Primepower servers.
But, you can affregate 8 of those so as to have a 1024 CPU machine that runs under a single instance of Solaris.
In fact, the Solaris libraries allows to scale for even a bigger nomber of CPU.
> 1. Support for up to 128 CPU’s
>
And that big iron is needed where exactly? And why would I want to run Linux on that kind of machine, instead of Solaris or S/390 which are extremely optimized for such a big beasty?
There’s no hard limit to the number of CPUs you can run Linux on. There is however a hardware limit of about 12 CPUs on the x86 architecture.
Anything more and it would become too complicated giving you little or no benefit at all. Do some reading about SMP if you wish. One of the main bottlenecks is cache-snooping — making sure that any one CPU has the latest piece of data. If you want to go beyond 4 CPUs, you’ll be better off setting up a Beowulf cluster.
If you want to go beyond 8 ways, you wouldn’t use SMP, instead you would look at something like NUMA or what ever UNISYS uses for their 32way Xeon box.
> 2. Enterprise level volume management (Solaris Volume Manager)
>
Linux has LVM (renamed to “DM” aka. “Device Mapper” lately).
> 3. Both Solaris Sparc and Trusted Solaris evaluated at Common Criteria EAL4
>
Linux is evaluated at Common Criteria EAL2+.
Up to now, nobody has financed the evaluation for a higher CC evaluation rating (like EAL4).
> 4. IP Network Multipathing (the ability to combine two network interfaces into a group for fault tolerant network connections)
>
who needs that
doesn’t network bonding does the same kind of stuff?
> 5. Supports a variety of SBus (for those of us still using 3500/4500/6500’s) and PCI Sparc hardware
>
SBus?
> 6. Solaris has been 64-bit since Solaris 7 (for Sparc hardware that supported it)
>
Linux has been 64bit for almost 9 years. (since 1994)
Solaris 7 Final was release in late 1998 — almost four years after 64bit Linux.
Linux is every bit as good as Solaris is. Today, you’d be hard pressed to find areas where Solaris clearly smacks Linux. However, I have noticed that Solaris has excellent, well designed, advanced and very powerful server tools and system management applications dearly lacking in Linux.
Also, Linux is new and experimental to extremely high end, high load, high volume computational transactions. In the next 7 years, I see Linux outpacing Solaris and any other operating system in market, in terms of scalability, portability, desktop performance as well as high end, high load and high volume computational transaction. That is if IBM, SGI and HP continue to contribute such resources to Linux.
If current trends continue, OS in the future will be free. Businesses like SUN, SGI, HP, IBM, will compete on the basis of hardware technology and high quality services. But I doubt all these will happen, I think IT will be infiltrated and corrupted by politics and politicians.
Linux is every bit as good as Solaris is.
Each has its own advantages and disadvantages in my opinion. Listen, I have worked in a *Nix environment for 6 years now. I could write a paper or maybe a small book on just this topic. This is especially the case since in my former job we were moving our workstations, web servers and some app servers or to linux. We kept our NAS, Oracle and a few other app servers Solaris.
I think the advantage/disadvantage in my mind however can be boiled down to in my experience that Solaris is more stable but its slower. Linux is faster but not as stable as Solaris. I am talking high-demand server needs here.
Once the 2.6 kernel comes out I will be very interested to see how the SMP work, virtual memory handling improvements and scalability improvements work out.
I think a lot of people have a**-backwards. Sun should go improve their hardware (whether they stick to SPARC or go to a AMD solution) and slowly move their software to a free linux base or push a free/open source Solaris hard and make some serious improvements like the stuff in Solaris 10. Hardware is where they make their money.
Yes, I have also seen companies over-engineer a solution and buy much bigger *Nix iron than they need. Then everyone starts to talk the smack about how expensive Sun is. Inexpensive Netras anyone?
But, I have already seen a few enterprise examples of companies trying to save by using cheap PC hardware and turning back to the old *Nix iron when the reliability of the hardware bit them in the butt.
For me, the mere existence of LOM (lights-out management) in Sun servers, justifies the difference in price, compared to Intel-based servers. With SUn, however, you have a host of other available management options, all of which are still alcking from a similar Dell-offered server.
On another note the next machine I buy will be a SUN box. Probably a blade 150 or whatever is the most affordable model when I get the cash together.
I’ve had a Sunblade 100 on my desk for about 2 years and it’s a dog. The USII chip is about, megahertz for megahertz, the equivalent of a Pentium III. I do plenty of compiles (along with other “normal” desktop tasks) and I can tell you that my Best Buy special blows the doors off the Sunblade, and costs less to boot.
The only reason to get a Sunblade is if you need to develop on Solaris sparc for Solaris sparc. If the company wants to pay, fine. Otherwise you’re wasting your money. You’re better off buying a PC and installing x86 Solaris.
…in case you want to use it as a small server: all the Sun workstations can be accessed through the serial port, as a console port. The system console reverts automatically to the serial port if a keyboard is not found. So you have access to all the openboot goodies and can completely manage the Blade remotely through a serial console/terminal program. I think that really rocks, in case you want to use it as a small server.
However, if you look at a price/quality viewpoint the Solaris workstation closes a lot of gaps. Why? They are not built like cheap pieces of PC sh*t.
Ever seen the inside of an Ultra 5, 10 or Sun Blade 100?
Cheap pieces of PC sh*t indeed.
I remember when a workstation used to come with reliable SCSI disks and a decent graphics subsystems. Just last week I was replacing another failed Seagate IDE disk in an Ultra 5. That would make it something like 20 systems this year. The potential for the loss of 20 x 8GB of data, if you are stupid enough to trust Sun’s hardware expertise. But since we’re planning for failure anyway, might as well go with cheap PC sh*t, huh?
At least they haven’t thrown out the slow 64-bit RISC CPU, yet. I guess some of you still think a 600 Mhz USIIi is fast. I’m sure it is if your favorite desktop interface happens to be CDE.
I’ve used all them workstations, DEC/Compaq Alphas, all SGIs, most HPs, Sun Sparcstations, etc. I remember when the Sparcstation 20 was a kick-ass, fast and powerful workstation, back when I had a little IPX. And I remember when 3DFX released their first PC 3D accelerator and change everything. Today workstations are held up to higher standards, the standards of your average everyday PC. And we’re finding that you don’t get what you pay for, when a Sun Blade 150 still costs $1500.
Everyone knows what Apple has available and the prices they have set. PCs are and will continue to be cheaper. But for Sun to attempt to sell their 600 Mhz systems at the same price as an Apple G5 1.6 Ghz system..
Well, I’ll let you tell me how much your Sun Blades kick ass and how wonderful and stable they are and how their 600 Mhz performs like 3.0 Ghz. Tell me whatever you want. You know you’re always right.
Doesn’t Linux scale up to 512 processors now?
That is the basic core of the kernel. Everything else falls to pieces once you get to that level. The key is to to have a kernel that is fully fine-grained from the core right to the services that surround it.
As for the SGI usage, they’re nothing more than glorified number crunching machines and hence only a small, microscopic part of the kernel actually has to be scalable.
You’ll NEVER see an Oracle server scale that high because it would require a heck of alot more fine grained kernel locking to be added to Linux.
At least they haven’t thrown out the slow 64-bit RISC CPU, yet. I guess some of you still think a 600 Mhz USIIi is fast. I’m sure it is if your favorite desktop interface happens to be CDE.
Glad to see you can’t bother to read all of my earlier post.
I said that PCs have the price/speed matrix all over the Sun boxes. I even said I prefer a linux solution for the desktop. I will preface that by saying for unix engineers and programmers.
I even said that after the statement on the price/quality that you quote.
PCs are typically built for crap. I have worked in a PC/unix workstation split environment supporting mostly Ultra 5 and have had very little trouble from the those Seagate IDE drives you are talking about.
Even that said I said once again I feel that linux on a PC is better workstation option.
You mention Apples and that is a good point. The G5 is a good box but even MacWorld reviewed the G5’s as a slower box than their PC counterpart boxes. But that is ok, it is gaining ground and they are NOT built for crap. Ooops, wait a sec in the same MacWorld issue I get an exception for the 15″ inch Powerbooks (3 out of 6 with issues out of the box also from MacWorld).
Tell me whatever you want. You know you’re always right.
Where in the hell did that come from? People have corrected me here when I got specs wrong and stuff.
I don’t mind and you are completely right about the speed issue.
Though you are just reaffirming what I have already said in a previous post if you had actually bothered to read it.
“At least they haven’t thrown out the slow 64-bit RISC CPU, yet. I guess some of you still think a 600 Mhz USIIi is fast. I’m sure it is if your favorite desktop interface happens to be CDE. ”
There is no 600 mhz US IIi, the USIIi’s stopped at 440MHZ in the ultra 10s. The sunblade 100/150 went from 500, 550,600,and 650 MHz and are USIIe.
The SB100/150 were ultra 5 replacements, the Ultra 10’s true replacement is the sb1500 which has a 1.06 GHz USIIIi with DDR memory and ATA100 drives. The Ultra 5/10 were release in 1997 and EOled in 2001 I think. Comapring to todays PCs in terms of performance is ridiculous. Compare them to PCs of that era.
Try running linux on a 333 MHZ PII with X and gnome it is not snappy and is a total Dog too. I have an old Dell 333 Mhz PII box I cna barely stand using it with linux and my ultra 10 440Mhz still serves me well with uptimes of 215+ days with many processes running.
Try using a sb1500 before you go on about desktop performance of the sun blade series.