Weekly Edition
Return to the Press page
| |||||||||||||
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet)
ZDNet
covers Sun Microsystems' new Solaris 10 operating system, and
reveals an almost Microsoft-like marketing campaign concerning Linux TCO.
"Solaris 10 provides a number of enhancements, said Stuart Wells, senior vice president of financial services at Sun. Dynamic Tracing, for instance, enables IT departments to more rapidly tune applications, which, in turn, can lead to higher performance and/or lower costs. Ultimately, Sun hopes that these sorts of additions will demonstrate that running Solaris -either on classic UltraSparc-based servers or Sun's Opteron boxes - is cheaper than running Linux, he said.
One anecdote that will surely be retold on 21 September involves a large financial institution. The company has two employees dedicated to running a Solaris server farm and 42 managing a similar Linux one, according to Sun."
(Log in to post comments)
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 27, 2004 19:53 UTC (Fri) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] One anecdote that will surely be retold on 21 September involves a largefinancial institution. The company has two employees dedicated to running a Solaris server farm and 42 managing a similar Linux one, according to Sun.
I have seen this at other places.. most of the time is that the Solaris server farm is the one that is being replaced and they only need the 2 admins to herd off the remaining people to the newer Linux one. Of course, that is part of the story you never hear :).
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 27, 2004 21:24 UTC (Fri) by ccchips (guest, #3222) [Link] My favorite story of this type is the one I got from one of my bosses---they supposedly went to a Windows NT "lights-out" shop where they only needed 3 people to run a bazillion things.
Now, that I'd like to see.... haahaaa
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 27, 2004 22:25 UTC (Fri) by petegn (guest, #847) [Link] Oh dear
seems like sun has been taking a lesson or two from messers scO and M$ Corp
what they actuall mean is you can replace 42 sun opperatives with 2 Linux People
Pete .
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 28, 2004 14:01 UTC (Sat) by cajal (subscriber, #4167) [Link] It's exactly this sort of "if it's not Linux I'll bash it" mindset that makes me hate large parts of the "Linux community." There's nothing at all about SCO or Microsoft in this article, so why are you name-calling?
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 29, 2004 17:56 UTC (Sun) by lilo (guest, #661) [Link] cajal wrote: It's exactly this sort of "if it's not Linux I'll bash it" mindset that makes me hate large parts of the "Linux community." There's nothing at all about SCO or Microsoft in this article, so why are you name-calling?I can only speculate as to petegn's motives, but possibly he is irritated to see Sun engaging in Microsoft-like, SCO-like FUD.
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 29, 2004 21:14 UTC (Sun) by cajal (subscriber, #4167) [Link] And exactly what FUD was in that article? In many cases, it is cheaper to run Solaris/x86 than RedHat Enterprise Linux. How is that FUD?
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 30, 2004 12:47 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] This is FUD because a bank will not take the trouble to run a Linux clustermanaged by 42 people when they are happy with the Solaris one with 2 admins, unless the Linux cluster give them 20 times more value.
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 30, 2004 14:40 UTC (Mon) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] In many cases, it is cheaper to run Solaris/x86 than Red Hat Enterprise Linux. How is that FUD?Misrepresenting the facts, I would call that FUD. I am willing to believe that no one has actually lied about the figures 42 and 2, but I don't think I have been given the complete picture. Just like your remark is true in itself, but its implication is not. Oh, by the way: if you are into yes-no discussions, try Groklaw (unfortunately) or Slashdot, you'll have a lot more fun there. Here, we actually try to discuss things. ;-)
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 30, 2004 15:00 UTC (Mon) by cajal (subscriber, #4167) [Link] And what implication would that be?
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 30, 2004 15:46 UTC (Mon) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] Notice how you've extrapolated one anecdote, about which we know nothing, to many cases where Solaris is cheaper than Linux? Yours is an empty statement, the opposite is equally true.
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 30, 2004 15:56 UTC (Mon) by cajal (subscriber, #4167) [Link] I didn't extrapolate anything. Look at Sun's pricing for Solaris support. Look at RedHat's for RHEl.Do that math. I didn't say that Linux sucks or that Solaris is always cheaper, just that somtimes it is. My philosophy, as always, is to put the dogma aside and use the best tool for the job.
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 30, 2004 17:06 UTC (Mon) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] In real life, of course, the total cost of a serverfarm is not as simple as the number of cpu's times the OS price (license, support) per cpu. In fact, that is the whole point Sun is trying to make in this article. ;-)Like I said, the statement "sometimes it's cheaper" really doesn't mean anything. I didn't say that Linux sucks or that Solaris is always cheaper I don't think we disagree here.
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 27, 2004 23:00 UTC (Fri) by sidboyce (guest, #10891) [Link] They will clutch at virtual straws. Managing Solaris is by far harder than managing Linux as anyone having anything to do with will testify. Now I've heard it all -- may be.Sid.
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 28, 2004 2:55 UTC (Sat) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link] Agreed, I've admined solaris and other unix variants for years, and a modern linux distro is so much easier to manage that it's not even funny. Sun must be getting desperate to resort to this sort of unbeleivable tabloid fud.
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 28, 2004 14:47 UTC (Sat) by cajal (subscriber, #4167) [Link] Actually, I don't think that managing Solaris is that hard, compared to a Linux distro. Installingpatch clusters and firmware updates isn't hard, and Sun has a new tool called PatchPro out that only downloads the patches you need. For 3rd party software, both SunFreeware and Blastwave have Debian-esque network-aware installers. And you have to admit that Sun's p-tools are much more advanced that what Linux has to offer.
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 28, 2004 17:49 UTC (Sat) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] I think Sun admin tasks seem difficult to the first-timer. I know the first time I took delivery of a Sun box, and the only thing on it was the kernel, cat, ed, and ksh, I seriously considered putting it back in the box and sending it home. What are you supposed to do, zmodem in the ftp binary so you can try to download some stuff from sunfreeware? Also /opt/SUNWSPro is not a very intuitive place to look for the compiler, and /usr/ucb is sort of annoying.
If Sun wanted to make their stuff more manageable, they'd ship it with everything from sunfreeware installed already.
But that's just the Linux admin's point of view.
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 28, 2004 18:52 UTC (Sat) by cajal (subscriber, #4167) [Link] Well, I can't speak to your odd experience with that Sun machine, other than to say that it'scertainly a border case - Sun ships their system pre-installed with Solaris, and even a minimal Solaris install certainly has more than the kernel, cat, ed and ksh installed. As for /usr/ucb - you shouldn't be using it - it's there for legacy apps that need compatibility with SunOS.
Oh, and Sun does ship their machines with SunFreeware preinstalled - it's in /usr/sfw. Of course,
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 29, 2004 5:42 UTC (Sun) by dododge (subscriber, #2870) [Link] I know the first time I took delivery of a Sun box, and the only thing on it was the kernel, cat, ed, and ksh,In my experience, step #1 with any piece of Sun gear is to immediately grab the installation media, wipe the system clean, and install the Solaris "all plus OEM" option -- at least if you ever expect to do any development on the machine. Oh, and if you accept the default partition sizes and layout (in particular for /var) you're just asking for trouble, unless they've fixed this in recent years. Also /opt/SUNWSPro is not a very intuitive place to look for the compiler,Sure, but of course that compiler won't even run if you didn't buy a license for it. I'm accustomed to using gcc and building everything myself on Solaris, though I know there were some issues with gcc and 64-bit code a few years back. they'd ship it with everything from sunfreeware installed already.You can probably get that, but see step #1 above. If any of the Suns I worked with even had a factory load, I doubt it was ever on there long enough to actually complete booting.
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 30, 2004 13:57 UTC (Mon) by ndye (subscriber, #9947) [Link] Installing patch clusters and firmware updates isn't hard, We found that patch clusters seem targetted at common workstation configurations. After a year of quartely outages, we were missing updates for kernel drivers and important server software, which led (front-line) tech support people to demand we patch and reboot. and Sun has a new tool called PatchPro out that only downloads the patches you need. And I hope you enjoy getting that to work! The only tool we found useful is the daily patchdiag.xref file (here's wishing they could afford Quality Control). :^P From the daily patchdiag.xref file, we download new patches and delete patches marked BAD; so our patch "bank" has all good versions of each patch. Now we can generate a complete patch cluster for any given date, and the cluster applies in minimal time based on the list of installed packages. (Remember not to install week-old kernel patches if you want decent uptimes.)
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 30, 2004 17:47 UTC (Mon) by cajal (subscriber, #4167) [Link] Again, I've not had any of these problems with Sun Patch Manager. smpatch analyze and smpatchupdate have always worked fine for me. Occassionally I will have to install a missed patch to get an app to work, but it's fairly rare.
Sun woos Wall Street with new OS (ZDNet) Posted Aug 28, 2004 19:51 UTC (Sat) by huffd (guest, #10382) [Link] For me the best part of the article was the last paragraph.
"The push for Opteron, however, does mean that at least for now, Sun must promote Linux. Approximately 70 per cent to 80 per cent of Sun's Opteron servers ship with Linux, Fowler said."
got_to_love_it!
|
|||||||||||||