You sound like you've never had to mediate a 3-way vendor argument between the hardware vendor, the linux support vendor and the HBA vendor, all claiming that it's someone else's fault that the hardware/OS/HBA combo doesn't work, even though they assured you that it did before you bought it. Oh, and you're a top customer, so they want to keep you really really happy. But not "it actually works" kind of happy.
I was talking about Solaris on Intel. Not sure where you got this from. In fact, you kind of reinforce my point: running Solaris on other people's hardware is just asking for trouble like this, which WAS MY POINT!
Anyway, if you really want to play this game, I'd be more than happy to pull up some of the various support cases I've opened with Sun and Oracle about Solaris and get you to try to explain each one to me, since you're such a bigot for Solaris.
Spoken like someone who has never run them side by side in a large estate
I have and do at my current gig, so shut your pipe. I have also done software development for both. So I know the ins and outs of both OSes pretty damned well. I even admitted to you that Solaris is the better OS, yet you're still not happy with my response. Spoken like a true fanboy you have.
There is one advantage to Solaris and it is the vendor lockin, namely the fact that you have limited hardware combinations, whereas with Intel you have literally hundreds of combinations of chipsets and configurations to support and test against. Again, this is one reason why I do *NOT* recommend Solaris on Intel unless you're buying one of Oracle's own Intel servers where they have actually tested the OS and the hardware together.
Or who want to run large databases with more than a few GB of RAM. Small databases seem fine on Linux, but Oracle or DB2 or Sybase don't seem as stable on Linux as on Solaris when you get up to 32+GB RAM.
I'm running rather large databases, much larger than that, with OEL on Dell branded hardware. It just works for us.
Yes, and it's a crying shame. Oracle are terrible. I know of whole enterprises who jumped ship when Oracle took over. But Linux still isn't there, even though most places I'm working at these days have more Linux than Solaris, HP-UX or AIX, and usually more than all other Unix combined. But there's still too much of the amateur around Linux.
Your only indictment against Linux is that you have some specific hardware issue, that's not really convincing and pretending that Solaris doesn't have those issues is just plain laughable and absurd.