Sun’s upping the ante against Linux with Solaris 10. First, it will be available free for download, with a pay-for-support model. Also, a feature called Project Janus allows users “to create a virtual container inside Solaris in which they can run Linux applications.”
I don’t doubt you bro! So does it have the option to install JDS on top? Or Gnome?
> In the linux, Windows, and BSD (Including MAC OS) worlds most people use SMB not NFS. Older versions of NFS were very insecure and slow on data transfer.
Err, may be at home it is SMB if you’ve got a PC to share your files with. In the enterprise it is all NFS, unless there is Windows involved. Get a freaking clue, nimrod.
“I don’t doubt you bro! So does it have the option to install JDS on top? Or Gnome?”
The default install installs both CDE and Gnome. The first time you login to the system, you are given a dialog to select which one you want to use as your default. You aren’t stuck with the default though. You can choose either one from the login manager.
Lots of folks claim solaris is more stable than Linux, I find this doubtful.
Personally Linux has never crashed or ceased to work, for me…. ever! Under any load, albeit, my system is primarily not used as a server.
If it is truthful that Linux is not as stable, or scalable, as solaris, why do people continue to buy Linux based super computing clusters? Why not vie for a solaris alternative?
Why is IBM’s Blue Gene/L going to be running on a Linux based super computer, the fastest cluster and super computer?
Why is second fastest super computer/cluster running Linux, along with the fourth fastest?
Surely a company, government, or organization would not trust its investment to a operating system kernel not as stable as “slowaris” or “*bsd”?
“You are right cause that is a SMALLLL world. (Besides the BSD’s)
In the linux, Windows, and BSD (Including MAC OS) worlds most people use SMB not NFS. Older versions of NFS were very insecure and slow on data transfer.
Why would Windows support NFS, which MS didn’t develop? MS developed CIFS? Samba is a SMB/CIFS implementation to help you connect to CIFS services.”
Apparently, you don’t live in the IT world, either. Sure, Windows enjoys a huge market share. The statement that the UNIX world is small “besides the BSD’s” does not make sense to me. Are the BSD based operating systems holding the second largest market share.
The reasons for using NFS in a UNIX to UNIX environment far outweigh those of using SMB. I don’t know where you see that most Linux and BSD / OSX people use SMB over NFS. Granted, I work in the academic community, which works differently than the corporate world. Either way, I would be highly suspicious of an admin who set up their Linux clients to use SMB from a Linux server.
Older versions of SMB were very insecure and slow on data transfer. It’s 2004. Should I care? Things are vastly different now for both NFS and SMB.
I know what SMB is for. I run Samba for my Windows and mobile OSX clients. It seems like a poor choice for a fixed UNIX client/server model.
I am not trying to be an ass, but you don’t really seem to have the whole picture, or really know what you’re talking about.
“If it is truthful that Linux is not as stable, or scalable, as solaris, why do people continue to buy Linux based super computing clusters? Why not vie for a solaris alternative?”
Cost. That’s the main reason. A cluster of cheap x86 nodes is probably about $200,000 compared to say 1.5 million dollars for the top of the line Sun Fire server.
Cost. That’s the main reason. A cluster of cheap x86 nodes is probably about $200,000 compared to say 1.5 million dollars for the top of the line Sun Fire server.
I know IBM’s Blue Gene/L uses SUSE for some of its nodes. I heard a poster comment on how SUSE is more than solaris, though I am not sure if this is even true.
The Blue Gene/L runs about 30 thousand + powerpc cpu’s at 700 mhz, this is very expensive, way more than my 2.5 ghz celeron.
I am sure if you are willing to pay tens of millions for a cluster like Blue Gene/L, a reliable operating system to take advantage of the hardware is a plus?
“Personally Linux has never crashed or ceased to work, for me…. ever! Under any load, albeit, my system is primarily not used as a server.”
How many users? What software are you running? Under heavy loads, supporting thousands of users, running huge applications, I would prefer Solaris. From the VMM system to the CPU scheduler, the OS architecture is well designed for scalability. Not only that, but as mentioned before, Solaris knows how much their customers are paying for stability and 99.99% uptime, which leads them to test all aspects of patches and update releases before they are made public. When I upgrade Solaris (be it a simple patch cluster, an OS update release, or a new major OS version), I have never been concerned that it will break any of my exisiting applications. And to that end, it never has. I cannot say the same thing about Linux. Many of our Linux systems are running at old versions because upgrading them will present an unusable system to the end user. That said, If I’m running a small to mid range site, or if I was not concerned with 99% availability, I would be fine with Linux.
“If it is truthful that Linux is not as stable, or scalable, as solaris, why do people continue to buy Linux based super computing clusters? Why not vie for a solaris alternative?”
Well, some people do. And a scientific compute cluster is bound to have problems due to the nature of the processes, specialized interconnect hardware and scheduling software used therein. No one expects every node in a cluster to be up 100% of the time. Where I work, we have a few Linux clusters and a few Solaris clusters. All of these machines will at some point fall down, although the Linux ones tend to fall down more often. I can’t expand as to what the cause of this is – I don’t work on these systems.
Finally, scientific compute clusters are concerned with one thing – speed. They get the most bang for the buck from x86 hardware, for which the prominent UNIX is Linux. This is a stark contrast from the goals and requirements of a database server, or an application server, or a file server, etc.
“Why is second fastest super computer/cluster running Linux, along with the fourth fastest?”
And the Earth Simulator was 1st on the list for 2.5 years running SUPER-UX. This point does not contribute to your argument.
“Surely a company, government, or organization would not trust its investment to a operating system kernel not as stable as “slowaris” or “*bsd”?””
It depends on the value of the data. It also depends on who makes the decisions. OS or Hardware bigots have varying influences over the purchasers. Many purchasers do not have the technical knowledge to say yea or nay over a technical staff’s recommendations.
Say a new senior sysadmin is hired and a year later it’s server purchasing time. The shop may have run all their enterprise operations on AIX since the dawn of time. However, the admin presents a new plan to the management: spend a fraction of the money on faster x86 hardware and run BSD or Linux. It sounds great. In many cases, the simple argument of money easily wins the management over to the new plan, and it’s done.
The downside may come later when the support the company used to enjoy is not there. The software the company has now vested their corporate health in is maintained by a thousand small groups of developers across the world who do not necessarily have the time or desire to support problems with and resolve bugs in their software.
A good example of this is that I use Sun’s bundled DHCP server. I would rather run ISC DHCP, but I choose not to, because should I encounter a DHCP server problem, I can force Sun to fix it with my service contract.
In the end, the fact that running Solaris may cost more doesn’t matter. When you pay the extra money for Solaris, you are also paying for a solution that must, under all circumstances, work.
“The Blue Gene/L runs about 30 thousand + powerpc cpu’s at 700 mhz, this is very expensive, way more than my 2.5 ghz celeron.”
Only the frontend runs Linux. The backend runs a stripped down custom operating system.
“I am sure if you are willing to pay tens of millions for a cluster like Blue Gene/L, a reliable operating system to take advantage of the hardware is a plus?”
Blue Gene/L sells for about 1.5 million, not 10s of millions. But as far as reliable operating system. I’m not saying Linux is unreliable. Only that I don’t think it is as reliable as Solaris in transaction heavy enviornments.You won’t notice any difference in environments that aren’t transaction heavy.
When you look at the typical super computer application, its not very transaction heavy. It is typically designed to do one or two things, but do them extremely quickly. It’s not handling thousands of users at the same time like a datacenter server is.
But also, when it comes to research projects like this, Linux is often used because it is easier to fix problems with it if something doesn’t work right. For example, chances are IBM had to make some pretty heavy kernel mods to get Linux to do what it does in Blue Gene/L. That kind of thing would be much more difficult in Solaris.
I should also say that although it looks like I think Solaris is the best OS in the world, I am not trying to spark another useless OS war. The truth is that I know there are pros and cons to all OS’s and I would not recommend one OS for all situations. Most modern OS’s are ideal for one situation or another, from Windows to Linux to HP-UX. I say all that to make this point:
Many people here are starting to sound like the typical Windows bigot. “Windows is obivously the best. I don’t know much about any other operating systems, but my friend Steve said that XyzOS is a piece of crap, so I’m sticking with Windows.”
Try dropping the assumptions you have about Solaris based on what you heard about Solaris 7. I’m not judging Linux on the way it performed in 2.0.
Install Sol 10 is nice fast more fast than Sol 8 much more but not fast inaff as my Gentoo custem GNU/Linux Kernel and is not more faster than FreeBSD 5.3 with good configuration.
Nimrod? And PLEASE tell me how many emviorments have NOOO windows machines. Shoot even Linux supporters and some venders use windows (Like Novell, IBM, HP etc) I would like to know what ENTERPRISE is using all NFS, one company (Besides SUN)
Yes people use NFS between UNIX servers but from the people I talk to they use NFS cause they have no clue or don’t know how to use anything else! Not cause NFS is the best solution. Next you will tell me the best thing to do is to pair NFS with NIS that is a secure and easy way to manage users? LOL! Please.
RE: By Spitfire “Either way, I would be highly suspicious of an admin who set up their Linux clients to use SMB from a Linux server.”
Ummmm, redhat and novell have several white papers on how to user Openldap with Samba3 for directory services, file sharing, printer sharing etc. In Suse enterprise 9 there is a nice tool that allows you to add your novell linux desktop to a Samba3 domain with edirectory or Openldap as your directory server. Or using samba3 you can add your linux desktop or server to a Microsoft Active Directory domain and be very secure while sharing files etc without anyone knowing that you are not running Windows. This is what people are doing in the business world. I don’t know what they are doing in schools or Unix shops. But it’s what Novell’s Nterprise Linux Services are all about.
You are correct, but let’s remember that Linux started off as a poorly designed hobby OS that was ment to be something better than MINIX. Linux evolved over time with the help of millions of dollars in funding. I personally think The BSD people did more impressive things with much lower funding.
But anyway, I’m a solaris, darwin(tweaked freebsd without the bugs), HURD (best designed OS ever!) fan.
I just wish solaris would start getting support from software companies.
“Solaris is a more stable and secure OS.”
This depends on how you setup the actual OS. For instance with most OS installs it starts out very insecure and you have to secure it–with some it starts out pretty secured like openbsd.. but that dosen’t neccesarily mean it’s more secure.
The question is how easy is it to secure and how much support does the OS have? Since solaris is becomming open sourced I think there is huge potential to compete
Due to scability, stability, and especially overall OS design(any kernel eng. would agree on the design issue) Solaris comes out ahead greatly on the SPARC CPU, but solaris 9 x86 was poorly ported and thus solaris 10 is supposed to be the OS that stops people from saying Slow-aris on the x86.
It also depends on the applications you use and your knowledgable employees. I would have to say that linux has distros that are more secure simply because of it’s open souce ways but since development can be open and anyone can submit patches–no more waiting on sun to release ‘official’ patches.. solaris is something to watch very closely! I’m sure you’ll agree
> It says 512 MB minimum on the specs page:
> http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/specs.html
> Is that a typo?
yes.
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-0544/6mgbagb0v?a=view
People act as if 10 is going to be the future of computers and save Sun?
See companies like Suse and Redhat are making money because they didn’t go up against Microsoft or Sun etc with the Microsoft Business model they came with something new and different that has changed the whole computer world.
Now what Sun is doing is trying to fight RedHat and Novell useing the RedHat way of doing business (Not the Sun way of doing business)
They are giving away a product that was the core of their business model and made a LARGE chunk of their profits (Which is why they have not had a profit in almost 2 years) It would be like MS giving away Windows.
People now say that Red Hat costs too much. Red Hat only costs too much in relation to Red Hat not in relation to MS and not in relation to the former Sun. Oh wait Sun is only giving away solaris for non business use. You still have to pay for it if you have a business and for support. Just like with Red Hat.
And people talk about Open Source. How are they going to Open Source something they pay a license fee for? (To SCO) I see a BIG ole lawsuit coming their way. Which is why there was NOOOO mention of Open Source in their press release today. And why it was not opened sourced today. (Too much Sun does not own in Solaris at this point)
But we will see. Lets look at Suns profits 6 months from now and lets see if they are growing!
> And PLEASE tell me how many emviorments have NOOO windows machines.
There are a *lot* of enterprise environments that have no Windows machines, but you wouldn’t know that since you’re just a clueless moron who just discovered Linux and haven’t seen anything bigger than your PC. Pretty much all midrange environments are practically completely devoid of Windows in any form or function. Telecom is another place where you would need to look for Windows with a flash light.
Tymiles, please don’t state your speculation as fact. You have no idea of what Sun owns and does not own with regard to Solaris.
You are going to be surprised at just how much of Solaris Sun does own. The plan is to be able to build a distribution from what we make available.
I’ve been participating in the pilot for a few months now and we are getting great feedback from this forum. Believe it or not (and you probably won’t) there are a lot of non-Sun folk particpating in this pilot.
The discussion that has been going on as a part of this group has been nothing short of fantastic.
The promise from both Scott and Jonathan is an OSI compliant license.
Redhat- Sun is competing with Redhat on a company/company basis. That’s what companies do.
Sun’s history is to re-invent itself as required and has done so a number of times in it’s history. Each time before the re-invention, we were written off.
Guess what, We’re still here.
As I just commented in my blog, it will not surprise me when we do the actual open source release to see very few comments like “Oops, guess I got it wrong”.
You sound very familiar with Novell. Are you familiar with any other products, or setting up a hybrid UNIX environment without it? Do you know anything about NFS, or just what people tell you?
I have Windows machines. I’m not saying I don’t use SMB. You don’t get it. You’re ignoring what we’re saying. Does Sun use NFS entirely? Sun bundles Samba directly with Solaris! Can I put it any clearer than the RedHat EL manual, under the Samba section?:
“To share files between Linux machines only, use NFS as discussed in Chapter 23 Network File System (NFS).”
I am not saying that SMB can’t be done, I’m just saying it doesn’t make sense for the UNIX client/server model.
“Yes people use NFS between UNIX servers but from the people I talk to they use NFS cause they have no clue or don’t know how to use anything else!”
This is one of the most ignorant statements I have ever heard.
From samba.org:
“Samba is freely available, unlike other SMB/CIFS implementations, and allows for interoperability between Linux/Unix servers and Windows-based clients.”
I don’t care about the guides or the interoperability products. I don’t care that it works. I understand that it works. THIS IS THE POINT: Samba is not, nor was it ever intended to be a UNIX to UNIX network file system. Will it do it? Yes. Is it decent at this task? Yes. Is it ideal? No. It’s why NFS exists.
I am not going to use a protocol designed to try to keep up with Microsoft’s attempts to prevent it’s compatibility. I would prefer to use a time tested, UNIX based, standardized protocol explicitly designed to communicate with itself.
I have the utmost respect for the Samba developers and the project. It’s a great piece of software. However, I don’t use a grill to toast bread, I use a toaster.
Solaris 10 is cool! In action:
http://portal.fsn.hu/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=7254
But i don’t think that Solaris will be a big rival of Linux. Because Solaris lack of good (broad) hardware support.
Alan,
Thanks for chiming in on this… also, the buzz around LISA concerning 10 is tremendous. The Solaris Internals course was excellent. I think Sun is very, very proud of this product, and it seems rightly so.
“They are giving away a product that was the core of their business model and made a LARGE chunk of their profits (Which is why they have not had a profit in almost 2 years) It would be like MS giving away Windows. ”
Please direct me to where I can buy hardware from Microsoft on which to run their operating sytem.
And people talk about Open Source. How are they going to Open Source something they pay a license fee for? (To SCO) I see a BIG ole lawsuit coming their way.
Just to agument Alan’s point, for the small amount of code that Sun doesn’t own, there’s a simple solution. Sun just has to perform a clean-room re-implementation of the suspect source code. Once that has occurred, it’s no longer encumbered and can be released by Sun since it’s their property.
As Alan suggested, it’s pretty foolish to speculate about the legal implications of OpenSolaris when you’re not a lawyer and don’t have access to Sun’s 3rd Party license agreements. In all seriousness, Sun is being very scrupulous about the legal aspects concerning OpenSolaris. They would not release it if they thought that it would be open to such liability.
I don’t care about the guides or the interoperability products. I don’t care that it works. I understand that it works. THIS IS THE POINT: Samba is not, nor was it ever intended to be a UNIX to UNIX network file system. Will it do it? Yes. Is it decent at this task? Yes. Is it ideal? No. It’s why NFS exists.
I am not going to use a protocol designed to try to keep up with Microsoft’s attempts to prevent it’s compatibility. I would prefer to use a time tested, UNIX based, standardized protocol explicitly designed to communicate with itself.
I see that you don’t know much at all about SMB. For one SMB was created by IBM and put into the public domain, Microsoft has no control over SMB which is why Samba exsists. The only relation that Samba has to Microsoft is using it to communicate with Microsoft machines, they don’t have to keep up with Microsoft to make it work between LinuxUnix machines. Hello that is why almost EVERY os on the market has some kind of SMB in it including Linux, BSD’s, SOLARIS, WINDOWS, MAC OS, OS2 etc.
Re: Man!
Please read and don’t take Suns word for what they CLAIM they are going to do as far as Open Source.
“That, said analysts, could take longer than expected with 54 different open-source license architectures to consider, not counting the possibility that Sun could be developing its own license.
“Even if Sun goes through the exercise [of OSI approval], you could expect an immediate challenge from the SCO Group that will tie this whole process up in another venue, which is litigation,” Kusnetzky said.
That brings up a thorny issue: intellectual property rights. The SCO Group, which has gained a reputation for being a litigious organization, owns Unix . Solaris is a derivative work of Unix, and Sun paid the former owner royalties for many years before the code ownership was transferred to SCO.
“It’s rather difficult to understand how Sun is going to persuade the SCO Group to give up its rights to Unix,” Kusnetzky said. “Sun is making the presumption that the intellectual property was given into Linux. That hasn’t yet been proven in court.”
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Sun-Stalls-on-Open-Source-Solari…
Expanded Rights
The Sun-SCO licensing deal expands the rights Sun acquired in 1994 to use Unix in its flagship Solaris operating system. Sun is the leading vendor of Unix systems.
Under the terms of the recent agreement, Sun is permitted to use software from SCO’s Unix System V Release 4. This allows Sun to use the Unix driver components that the company needs for its version of Solaris developed for Intel servers.
As an additional part of the deal, SCO will permit Sun to purchase up to 210,000 shares of SCO stock at $1.83 per share. “That’s what the stock price was for the company at the time [Sun] did the licensing bill, so that’s why they’re able to get it at such a great price,” Stowell said.
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:OyaDvSqEXBwJ:www.newsfactor.co…
So as I was saying before, is SUN open sources Solaris exspect sun to face as big if not a bigger law suit then IBM (Because Sun has already said by buying licenses from SCO that SCO must own UNIX.
I’m done arguing with you. You have an insurmountable wall of ignorance that I apparently can’t breach.
My final points:
I didn’t say anything about Microsoft controlling Samba. Why you even bring that up is questionable. You seem to implicate that different code is used when communicating with UNIX clients and servers than UNIX -> Windows, which is absurd. By your logic, I should use RIP on all my routers since RIP comes on everything, regardless of the fact that protocols like BGP may be far better for what I want to do. “Because it’s there” is not a compelling reason to use something.
Your continued ignorance in “countering” Alan’s point with some quotes from market analysts is idiocy. You’re telling someone who works at Sun and is involved in the very project which you claim to know so much about that someone outside of the project is right, and he is wrong.
If I read it on the web, it must be true!
oh I see. so all enterprises now run on dell and hp software all over the world. fascinating that people come up with such poor excuses for solaris lack of drivers for x86 in a competitive manner
No Genius, I didn’t say all enterprises are run on Dell and HP hardware. I said most serious Linux deployments use name brand server hardware. Why? Mainly because of the end to end solution offered by these companies and the integration with major distributions of Linux. I am sure you are happy recommending that your company run is mission critical applications on a white box PC that Jed’s Computer Barn built for you.
Only the frontend runs Linux. The backend runs a stripped down custom operating system.
Not really. It runs entirely on SUSE GNU/Linux or Linux dirivitives, all nodes.
I would prefer Solaris. From the VMM system to the CPU scheduler, the OS architecture is well designed for scalability. Not only that, but as mentioned before, Solaris knows how much their customers are paying for stability and 99.99% uptime, which leads them to test all aspects of patches and update releases before they are made public.
The default Linux O(1) schedular is able to scale to hundreds of processors, with support for scheduling domains. The VM has support for numa.
Linux obviously has the potential to be just as scalable as solaris, and as of the late of the choices of folks buying super computers, probably more so.
And the Earth Simulator was 1st on the list for 2.5 years running SUPER-UX. This point does not contribute to your argument.
My arguement is that Linux is just as, or more stable than solaris — stability in the sense of maintaing performance over a significant amount of time.
Trusting Linux to run on expensive hardware and run correctly, indicates a certain degree of assurnace the people at IBM have in Linux, and the people at SGI, and the people at Penguin Computing.
IBM did not put their AIX, or solaris, or anything else on their million dollar+ super computer. IBM believes Linux is the future of UNIX like systems, for a reason.