So, Windows is no longer cutting the mustard and you need a more scalable, reliable and higher performing environment. You may be running Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft or any of a number of ERP applications. Or you may be looking to deploy a new Web portal with something like IBM WebSphere with a DB2 backend or WebLogic and Oracle.
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Member since:2006-04-30
"but Linux still cannot scale as much as Unix."
Yeah right - a quick google turned up one article that suggested that 301 of the top 500 supercomputers run Linux. Hard to say how accurate that is, but I think it pretty strongly suggests that Linux has no problems scaling.
I think the author was talking about scaleability within one copy of the OS. Most of the top 500, and google run many OS instances. Personally I consider these as a collection of computers rather than a single unit. They can (some are) be a mixture of OS's.
Member since:2005-07-23
I think the author was talking about scaleability within one copy of the OS. Most of the top 500, and google run many OS instances. Personally I consider these as a collection of computers rather than a single unit. They can (some are) be a mixture of OS's.
You might well be right, but it's a bit hard to tell exactly what the author meant because he didn't explain that part in much depth, or provide any sort of hard data to back it up ;-)
Member since:2006-01-12
>>"but Linux still cannot scale as much as Unix."
Yeah right - a quick google turned up one article that suggested that 301 of the top 500 supercomputers run Linux. Hard to say how accurate that is, but I think it pretty strongly suggests that Linux has no problems scaling.<<
How many of those 301 are actually clusters in which case you don't have one kernel controlling everything? Granted the SGI patched kernels for Altix can scale up to something like 512processors in one system image, but that isn't the standard kernel from kernel.org
Also HPC scalability is in many ways a whole different kettle of fish to commercial workload scalability.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
2005-07-23
"Unlike Linux, Unix is typically packaged with vendor hardware. Because it is so closely tied to the hardware, Unix offers all sorts of performance and reliability advantages because the operating system has been optimized for a specific hardware platform."
I'm not so sure it being 'closely tied' to the hardware really makes as much difference as all that. Reliability has a lot more to do with whether there's a nasty bug in the code or not than what architecture it runs on.
Sun seem to be pretty happy to offer Solaris on Opterons as well as on SPARC - you'd think if it was that big a deal, they wouldn't.
Or for another example, OSX (which Apple likes to tout as a form of Unix) is definately closely tied to Apple's hardware - but it's known to have some nasty threading issues, on either PPC or Intel. The hardware has zero to do with that, it's all a software problem.
"but Linux still cannot scale as much as Unix."
Yeah right - a quick google turned up one article that suggested that 301 of the top 500 supercomputers run Linux. Hard to say how accurate that is, but I think it pretty strongly suggests that Linux has no problems scaling.
I'm sure there are arguments the other way too - I'm not really intending to bash it just 'cos I don't like what it says about Linux, I suspect that they needed to research a little better on both sides of the debate.
Edited 2006-10-09 04:36