For all the talk of Linux sidelining Windows in the server market, the upstart Linux operating system instead has stolen more glory from the older Unix as buyers flock to cheaper systems. But Unix vendors, even those that have embraced Linux, aren’t giving up on the old workhorse. They’re touting Unix as a complement, and in some cases a grown-up alternative, to Linux on low-cost machines.
Unix Firms Craft Plan Vs. Linux
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Eugenia Loli
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What Linux has done to Unix is very sad. What is even sadder is that a lot of Linux zealots want Unix completely dead. Hopefully, with the price drops and ease of use improvements of Unix, Unix will not go the way of the dodo and we get a nice healthy environment of Unix (Sys V + BSD), Linux, Windows, and etc. Anytime one OS dominates all others, whether it is Windows or Linux, the consumer is left the loser. All aspects of the OS go down; including choice, economics, innovation, stability, and security.
“Don’t get me wrong – we use Linux on certain machines,” said Gerry Vest, a systems administrator for the Genetics Department at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research. “But while Linux has made great strides, the performance and support system Sun offers with Solaris is better.”
Gee, that must be painful for you average Linux zealot to swallow, a person who has bought an x86 system running Solaris. Your average Linux user still refuses to acknowledge the fact that SUN is back with Solaris and is putting 120% effort into its x86 Solaris line.
When will Linux zealots simply accept that Solaris is a great server operating system on the x86.
btw, don’t point saying, “oh, they’re confused”, you want confusion, HP has OpenVMS, Windows 2003, HP-UX and Linux on offer for their Itanium line up. If you want no direction, they’re the kings of this.
A diverse market is a healthy market. Remember back when there were 4-6 US auto makers and a few dozen foreigns? Cars ruled the road! Now, you have, pretty much, 6-7 makers under various brands, and cars are little more than use-em and toss-em commodities.
I like UNIX. I like Linux. I like Mac OS X. Windows… well I like UNIX. 8) I want to see more diversity on the desktop, then maybe stupid virii and script kiddie hacks won’t be so devistating to the economy.
Oh, and MorphOS rocks! 8)
Yup.
It doesn’t make sense with all the bickering between Linux and Unix. They are very close cousins. Infact Linux, Unix, BSD, OSX etc are all of the *nix camp
Now, Windows on the other hand are total different stories
It is true, Sun/Solaris has better support than Linux and the maturity of the OS shows. The problem is cost, for critical services we still use Sun/Solaris but we are moving more and more to Linux systems. In many cases it is actually cheaper to just put in 2 Linux boxes and make one a failover than it is to put in a Sun/Solaris box. When the price gap is that large you know UNIX is in trouble.
The reason for this probably has as much to do with Intel as Linux. Most of the R&D for Xeon has been in the name of P4, and under the wing of the massive desktop market. It is hard to compete with that. As desktop continues the move to 64 bit, you will see AMD/Intel’s market share growing in that area, with Linux being the OS of choice. Things will get ugly the day a 64 bit Xeon launches.
I like dead horses, good with BBQ sauce.
HMMM… good eating…
btw, don’t point saying, “oh, they’re confused”, you want confusion, HP has OpenVMS, Windows 2003, HP-UX and Linux on offer for their Itanium line up. If you want no direction, they’re the kings of this.
I never thought of this, but now that you pointed it out, isn’t this hilarious? And now that Itanium is tanking on the market, wanna bet HP is going to be even more rudderless?
“btw, don’t point saying, “oh, they’re confused”, you want confusion, HP has OpenVMS, Windows 2003, HP-UX and Linux on offer for their Itanium line up. If you want no direction, they’re the kings of this.”
I never thought of this, but now that you pointed it out, isn’t this hilarious? And now that Itanium is tanking on the market, wanna bet HP is going to be even more rudderless?
Hence the reason why IBM moved away from the sinking Itanium. IBM realised, with the help of a new CEO, that it was in their best interests to pump cash into their Power CPU, and what is the result? it out performs Itanium and now they’re scaling it down to blades and up to super computers.
SUN is still amazed that HP threw out PA-RISC, a VERY good architecture for some CPU with an unproven track record and worse still, lacks application availability.
On the other hand, soon you’ll be able to purchase a nice 4 way Opteron system with Solaris and Sybase with all the glory of 64bit goodness without needing to sell the first born child to cover the costs, aka, Itanium.
It’s nice to boast Solaris features but how come a big corporation like Sun can’t provide drivers for many of the PC hardware already supported by Tux ?
The day they will make it possible to install Solaris on most PCs then I’ll try it. Meanwhile, I’ll stick with Linux or the BSD. At least, these aren’t limited to 4 or 5 motherboards, 6 or 7 videocards, etc.
Excellent argument! But how come a big community like the Linux community can’t provide drivers for many of the PC hardware already supported by Windows98??
It’s nice to boast Solaris features but how come a big corporation like Sun can’t provide drivers for many of the PC hardware already supported by Tux ?
The day they will make it possible to install Solaris on most PCs then I’ll try it. Meanwhile, I’ll stick with Linux or the BSD. At least, these aren’t limited to 4 or 5 motherboards, 6 or 7 videocards, etc.
1) Video cards are not important on servers, they have a nice interface which can be accessible through a Java enabled webbrowser.
2) SUN sells servers pre-loaded with Solaris, the Solaris pre-loaded has all the drivers required for the hardware sold thus making your drive arguement completely and utterly a load of bullcrap.
3) If you want exotic hardware to be supported then obviously you’re not running a server. Solaris is a server operating system there for its developers concerntrate on supporting server centric hardware and not desktop.
4) If you want a desktop from SUN either purchase an Blade 150 or use their JDS offering on a standard PC from Dell.
The difference sun is a large company with deep pocket and no obligation to release it as open source so they have no problem signing NDA if needed. Still they can not support hardware supported by Linux and xBSD (and probably other free oses)
Sun was a decent serverplattform on x86 last time i tested it (solaris x86 7) but i wouldn’t have installed it instead of linux for a x86 server but i wouldn’t have been sad if i could have bought a sparc server instead.
Solaris x86 might be good as a bundled os on sun-made x86 computer but on a generic x86 server i’m not sure if it is very good and as desktop it is worse than Linux which is proven by its adoption of Gnome.
The reference customer never said anything about x86 which is a classic marketing trick.
But after running cobalt i’m not impressed by sun and x86
The main arguments for sun is complete systems and support but ibm, hp and others does that too.
Solaris x86 might be good as a bundled os on sun-made x86 computer but on a generic x86 server i’m not sure if it is very good and as desktop it is worse than Linux which is proven by its adoption of Gnome.
I’d really like to know how your head is working.
Clearly we have some x86 Solaris Zealots here. Many seem to forget that x86 Solaris is slow, especially on UP systems. It scales nicely. Having said that, 2.6.1 is out now. Major distros will be migrating that way shortly. Much of the appeal for higher-end x86 Solaris is gone. Low-end appeal never exists except for the zealots.
Now that Linux 2.6.x is out, x86 Solaris just doesn’t make sense. You can now get serious scalability, excellent I/O capabilities, a diverse set of supported hardware, and shortly, your pick of distros. Why would anyone but a zealot go with a slower or equal OS, with limited hardware support? Are you in that much of a hurry to have an empty wallet with no benefit?
Two months ago I installed Solaris 9 on a spare PC and it worked. My company’s IT group has decided that everyone should have those cheap ugly Dells on the desk and Dell servers on the rack. They then had some obsolete no-name clones in stock ready for the garbage bin. I took one and installed Solaris 9 on it. The only problem was it used a Reltek on-board LAN which Solaris did not recognize. No problem, I installed a salvaged 3com card. Solaris 9 has been working happily for 2 months without incident. I’m very happy with it.
So the moral I think is, if you have a decent x86 configuration using brand name parts Solaris will run on it. But if you have a cheap machine with low end parts then stick with Linux, it will most likely work.
You make two premises that are likely to be wrong, but in any case you wouldn’t know one way or the other:
1. Linux 2.6 on the same hardware as Solaris 9 will scale better and offer better performance
2. The Opterons that Sun is going to roll out with Solaris 9 are going to be slower than an equivalent (but as of yet, inexistent) competing hardware with Linux 2.6
Not to go off on a tangent but the new SGI Itanium servers (Altrix 350) are looking nice if only i had 21,000 US dollars to buy a 4cpu one!
I don’t see the fact that HP offers several OS’s on Itanium as a bad thing, after all it gives us the consumer choice. Whenever they get NSK (non stop kernel) up and running then they’ll be offering 5different OS’s on Itanium.
As regard Itanium sales, aye they are quite low but SGI has shipped systems that in total add up to 10,000 Itanium 2’s. So it looks like it’s found a niche (technical computing & alpha/PA-RISC replacement)
http://www.sgi.com/features/2004/jan/altix350/index.html
As far as I’m concerned, every *nix system I’ve tried I’ve liked. I have run Solaris 7 on a sparcstation to debian on my thinkpad T40. I think linux maturing is causing older unix systems to develop better software. Solaris 9 is a good solid OS, and an improvement on previous versions. 2.6 is a solid kernel (I’m using it right now). We are definitley improving…
“Now that Linux 2.6.x is out, x86 Solaris just doesn’t make sense. You can now get serious scalability, excellent I/O capabilities, a diverse set of supported hardware, and shortly, your pick of distros. Why would anyone but a zealot go with a slower or equal OS, with limited hardware support? Are you in that much of a hurry to have an empty wallet with no benefit? ”
Why exactly doesn’t it make sense? If Solaris supports my server hardware, why would I care it doesn’t support the hardware I don’t use. Here are reasons why I would use it, it is stable, scalable, secure, professional, affordable, configurable, and backed up by a large corporation. Can I find that in a Linux distro? Probably… but I don’t see any reason not to choose Solaris over Linux.
Also, you are forgetting that Solaris offers a lot of bundled server applications, such as a J2EE server, an Active Directory equivalent LDAP directory, Exchange Server equivalent mail-server. And Sun has signed up quite a lot of companies to support Solaris 10 x86, including Sybase, Oracle. So tell me again, why should I not use Solaris?
The consumer is left the loser not because of the choice Linux offers, but because of the cold cruel reality of capitalism. Products die because companies won’t spend money for something that isn’t profitable. Is this Linux’s fault? Absolutely not!
Is this all our fault for believing in capitalism? Perhaps. Perhaps we shouldn’t put so much value on money afterall. Perhaps we should build products for the love of building the product, not the love of getting rich. Perhaps we all should just quit whining and deal with reality. Products die, get over it.
UNIX doesn’t have to go away. At any time Sun can license it under the GPL. The same goes for Windows or any other commercial products.
Why should you not use Solaris? I don’t know.
You should use Solaris. I’m the one who needs to save money.
“You should use Solaris. I’m the one who needs to save money.”
Scrolls to redhat.com. See’s Enterprise Version / Server = $2,000 + server cost. Scrolls to http://www.sun.com. See’s Solaris x86 free w/ server purchase. Both too expensive. Looks for home solution. Goes to Fedora.redhat.com, free download. Goes to http://www.sun.com, free download. Scratches head in confusion.
I think what it comes down to is what level of expertise you have in house. One problem with running servers in general is that you need to be able to pick good generic hardware that’s well supported. In my opinion people are far more likely to run Linux at home than Solaris as a primary desktop system, so you’re more likely to find people with Linux/x86 experience than solaris/x86.
My personal experiences with both systems is that Linux is far easier to administer and has far better tools for diagnosis and trouble shooting. But that’s just my experience. Btw, I spent 6 years developing software (and administering) on Sun boxes, been running Linux since ’91 and developed software (and administered) it now for 4 years.
I think what it comes down to is what level of expertise you have in house. One problem with running servers in general is that you need to be able to pick good generic hardware that’s well supported. In my opinion people are far more likely to run Linux at home than Solaris as a primary desktop system, so you’re more likely to find people with Linux/x86 experience than solaris/x86.
That end user could also run FreeBSD which has slight simulatarities with Solaris. Would using FreeBSD on the desktop put them at a disadvantage if they had a Solaris server? nope, not in the slightest.
I moved from Linux to FreeBSD without any hassles and when I setup a Solaris server I mearly used the experienced gained from running Linux and FreeBSD, learn new tools that were included with Solaris and I found that I had no problems managing the Solaris server.
The only two things I have problem with Solaris is the lack of sound support and lack of decent drivers for X. Lets *assume* for a second that this is a home configuration and you download it for free. Since you get the operating system for free, why not purchase X-Acccelerate, Summit Driver and OpenSound. This would still make Solaris cheaper than Red Hat Enterprise WS and better still, you get a unlimited patches for the life of the product.
Looking at it from that angle, Solaris comes out pretty good in terms of price but then again, why would you want to run Solaris as a desktop? it makes no sense. It was never designed for desktop operations hence the reason to use it is pretty much null.
and for bringing Solaris into the modern age ( both x86 and Sparc). By this, I mean adding the latest utilities and commonly available programs, shells, etc.
Solaris 8 was the first Sun product that didn’t feel like a StoneAge Unix.
I’ve seen a lot of talk about Solaris scalability but it appears to have come at a cost on servers with fewer than 8 processors. Yet, after working for 3 National ISPs over the last 5 years, I have yet to see a server with more than 4 CPUs.
The big problem with Unix is that the major vendors were horrendously overpriced. That is a major reason why NT began to make inroads when it was just so inferior in its early incarnations.
It was a major reason why Microsoft-hating admins were willing to sneak xBSD or Linux onto production servers.
The big Unix vendors can bitch and diss Linux all they want but they were/are their own worst enemies. Of them all, only IBM has the right idea – take the best of what they had in their own versions, migrate it to Linux and standardize on Linux for the future.
Technical superiority is not enough – if that were the case, Microsoft would never had made it off the ground. Mindshare is more important when trying to get a bigger slice of the pie or when trying to hold on to your share.
It is in this respect that the Unix vendors and, to a lesser extent, the xBSDs have failed themselves.
Yet, after working for 3 National ISPs over the last 5 years, I have yet to see a server with more than 4 CPUs.
Ummm… that sucks. That really sucks, but then again, ISPs don’t necessarily need to have very high processing power.
But I must say, I am shocked that the 3 National ISPs in Canada of all places, wouldn’t have a computer with more than 4 CPUs. Not even one?
Of them all, only IBM has the right idea – take the best of what they had in their own versions, migrate it to Linux and standardize on Linux for the future.
Why would that be the right idea? I don’t see any proof that would support your statement. Just by inserting the magic word “Linux”, in your text, does not make it any more correct.
>>>But I must say, I am shocked that the 3 National ISPs in Canada of all places, wouldn’t have a computer with more than 4 CPUs. Not even one?
Not to my knowledge. But as one of them had server rooms in several cities, they may well had bigger boxes than those of which I’m aware.
>>>Of them all, only IBM has the right idea – take the best of what they had in their own versions, migrate it to Linux and standardize on Linux for the future.
>>>Why would that be the right idea? I don’t see any proof that would support your statement. Just by inserting the magic word “Linux”, in your text, does not make it any more correct.<<<
Please read further down in my post. By whatever means, Linux has managed to capture a fair amount of mindshare. It is my opinion the divisiveness of the Unix camp has worked against them and that Linux offers a ready-made base for them to build their mature proprietary technologies on.
I mentioned IBM previously but have a look at what Novell has recently done or intends to do – and they have a longer row to hoe compared to SUN or HP.
btw, don’t point saying, “oh, they’re confused”, you want confusion, HP has OpenVMS, Windows 2003, HP-UX and Linux on offer for their Itanium line up. If you want no direction, they’re the kings of this.
I never thought of this, but now that you pointed it out, isn’t this hilarious? And now that Itanium is tanking on the market, wanna bet HP is going to be even more rudderless?
I think you are confusing choice with lack of direction. Itanium allows customers using HP hardware to run three different OSe’s in the same box using hard partitions. What more could you ask for? PA-RISC is an awsome architecture but only through intel’s backing could you convince Microsoft to develop an OS for a new processor architecture. Itanium is a gamble that now seems like a bad idea. I am confident that between the might of both intel and HP that it will eventually become an awesome platform.
I would argue that its SUN that has no direction. They change their busniness focus on a whim. if something they come up with is ill recieved in the market they dump it rather then listening to customers needs and to improve it.
btw, don’t point saying, “oh, they’re confused”, you want confusion, HP has OpenVMS, Windows 2003, HP-UX and Linux on offer for their Itanium line up. If you want no direction, they’re the kings of this.
I never thought of this, but now that you pointed it out, isn’t this hilarious? And now that Itanium is tanking on the market, wanna bet HP is going to be even more rudderless?
I think you are confusing choice with lack of direction. Itanium allows customers using HP hardware to run three different OSe’s in the same box using hard partitions. What more could you ask for? PA-RISC is an awsome architecture but only through intel’s backing could you convince Microsoft to develop an OS for a new processor architecture. Itanium is a gamble that now seems like a bad idea. I am confident that between the might of both intel and HP that it will eventually become an awesome platform.
I would argue that its SUN that has no direction. They change their busniness focus on a whim. if something they come up with is ill recieved in the market they dump it rather then listening to customers needs and to improve it.