[GRLUG] Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed?

[Ben DeMott]

ZFS - How big do you have to get before GFS, LVM2 becomes prolematic?

Amway (Alticor) here in MI uses alot of AIX for DB2 and Oracle stuff -
Corporations need a solution that is marketed and comes with a suit.

ZFS is cool, but it really only matters for the 0.1%
>

I agree with the point, and would add - It sometimes frustrates me when
people say "Bladecenter ... bla bla bla, (enterprise technology)" - I don't
need or want a proprietary blade center, I hate my proprietary 2u servers
enough - 91% of the companies out there are SMB's - Most SMB's are 10 or
less servers.

I look at some of the Sun as being this way about Solaris in some ways -
they haven't incorporated enough of the new and useful technologies to make
it worthwhile to people like me.  Solaris is the Remedy of the *nix world to
me.

Server Hatred Story #1:
Broken Optiplex Motherboard - attempting to restore raid array, Dells
solution: Buy an identical Optiplex.
Server Hatred Story #2: A Single HP Proliant refuses to boot without
bypassing a warning screen indicating a fan has failed.  In fact no fan has
failed or fallen below rpm range - the zone sensor has failed - to replace 1
diode, you must replace 8 fans, and a circuit board.
After several calls to HP and a week going by, I have the new part, install
it .. fixed.

Sometimes I just want to burn my server room down, gather a bunch of crappy
tiny dell boxes have them scattered about and not care what happens to my
hardware - I really think in the long run that would be more efficient/cost
effective than the headaches of Vendor Lock-in.

The other thing I run into a lot, is people think they need to upgrade
technologies, when they just aren't using the technology they have correctly
or to its potential.

My Cad designers always complained of slow file access - when I started at
company their switch architecture (of daisy chaining 1gb backplanes) left a
total backplane of 2gigabits/sec across the entire 140 workstations.
Nevermind the fact that purchasing a $700 all Gigabit switch with a
96gigabit backplane fixed the problem - they wanted to upgrade all of the
$1200 100mbit Adtran switches. (sigh)


On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 4:32 PM, Adam Tauno Williams <
adamtaunowilliams at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 2008-09-24 at 14:22 -0400, Casey DuBois wrote:
> > I had to share this link with the group.
> > Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? Linux backers claim Solaris is
> > irrelevant; Sun of course disagrees
> >
> http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/09/24/39NF-linux-killing-solaris_1.html?source=NLC-DAILY&cgd=2008-09-24
>
> That seems pretty much spot-on to me.  The only advantage Sun trots out
> are the mentioned Dtrace and ZFS.  When was the last time people got
> really excited about a filesystem?  ZFS is cool, but it really only
> matters for the 0.1% of the market that has **HUGE** filesystems.  For
> everyone else any modern filesystem is sufficient.
>
> This is pretty much a literal exchange:
> ZFS guy to me: you never have to think about inodes ever again.
> Me to ZFS guy: Uh, inodes?  I haven't thought about them in years.
>
> I think the real argument against Solaris is: "Why bother?  I can just
> use LINUX.  No licensing hassle, better hardware support, larger support
> community."
>
> I've considered Sun dead for along time, along with HP-UX and AIX.  But
> "death" in IT is a very long and protracted event.
>
> As for Dtrace, it or an equivalent, will be here shortly.
> <
> http://oracledoug.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/1309-DTrace-and-Linux.html>
> among other links.
>
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