Linux Foundation's Zemlin Declares Solaris All But Dead
Linked by David Adams on Wed 24th Sep 2008 22:44 UTC, submitted by snydeq
Talk, Rumors, X Versus Y Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin has said it is time for Solaris to simply move out of the way and yield the future to Linux. 'The future is Linux and Microsoft Windows. It is not Unix or Solaris,' he claims, contending that Sun's strength in long-lifecycle apps is giving way to Linux, as evidenced by the rise of Web apps, where Linux holds a decided advantage, Zemlin claims. With capabilities such as ZFS and DTrace, Sun is trying to compete based on minor features, he says. 'That's literally like noticing the view from a third-story building as it burns to the ground.'
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RE: not exactly
by implicate_order on Fri 26th Sep 2008 21:32 UTC in reply to "not exactly"
implicate_order
Member since:
2008-09-26

Some may find his comments offensive, but I agree with him, to some extent. My experience : SunOS 2.9; 2.10, T6300 blades && T2000 platform - extremely slow in disk operations, untar-ing 500 MB file takes ~1 minute - Linux - much more poor machine - 10 seconds for the same file. Solaris 10 - hard to maintain - you have to spend weeks and months tuning and understand the OS, no need - there's Linux already over there. Cost and maintenance - get me the same performance (whatever type of performance you'd like) from T2000 box and compare it, for example with Dell Power Edge with SLES or RHEL for the same price - no way. Flexible tools, human readable format, handy applications, larger community = Linux - can you tell the same about Solaris ? Not really, come on, don't twist the truth. Certainly, everyone out there is free to try and decide for himself.


DISCLAIMER -- I'm not a Sun employee but a very very satisfied customer.

This is a classic FUD-sample that misguides potential users. The Niagara line is known as the throughput-computing platform because of the multi-core architecture. Each core is not a metal-burning heat-generating monstrosity but moderately well performing (1 - 1.4Ghz). The advantage of running apps in this platform is those immensely multi-threaded ones, which can take advantage of the 4 or 8 threads that each core can handle (so instead of running 1 thread super-fast, you run 32 or 64 threads moderately fast). Sure, single-threaded performance is not comparable to the x86/x64 or other sparc procs, but end-result is more computing done faster.

It is very important to choose a right application to do the comparison (there are plenty of benchmarks out there that prove that the Niagara-based systems outperform comparable systems when the workload is appropriate. These are not "one size fits all" solutions, they are specific and highly effective solutions to specific problems.

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