Comment The future of Solaris x86: It's back! (Score 1) 131
Beside the anouncement of Sun Linux, Solaris x86 is back at Sun, with Solaris 9 and 10 apparently in the Pipe. After struggling with the Solaris x86 community since the beginning of january, when Sun looked like they were killing the x86 version, Sun's Graham Lovell revealed the hopefully bright future of Solaris on x86 hardware.
The Solaris x86 community is cheering over in alt.solaris.x86 and on the Solaris x86 mailing list.
Solaris x86, now offered side by side with Sun Linux on the new BigBear line of Intel based servers at Sun is quite useful, even on generic x86 hardware.
Companies can add cheap edge servers based on commodity x86 hardware to complement their Solaris/SPARC installations which integrate well with each other and offer essentially the same administration tools. If the need for power grows, existing software is easily transferred to bigger, expensive SPARCs. This makes Solaris x86 unique, since this way a commercial grade Unix is available across the whole scale from small cheap x86 boxes up to 106 processor SPARC SMP machines.
For students and developers Solaris x86 is great, since they can use existing x86 hardware to dip their toes in the waters of Solaris without having to shell out for SPARC hardware.
Having to develop and support Solaris on more than one architecture forces Sun to keep Solaris portable, and that may be very useful if the SPARC architecture might prove to be a dead end, with only a small niche market left that actually needs and affords it.
It's also quite nice to have the usual Solaris envionment available on normal x86 based laptops.
While I personally use mostly Linux and Mac OS X it's nevertheless great to see other Unices alive and kicking. Competition in the x86 Unix market is good, and having the commercial versions competing with the free versions keeps everyone on their toes.
The Solaris x86 community is cheering over in alt.solaris.x86 and on the Solaris x86 mailing list.
Solaris x86, now offered side by side with Sun Linux on the new BigBear line of Intel based servers at Sun is quite useful, even on generic x86 hardware.
Companies can add cheap edge servers based on commodity x86 hardware to complement their Solaris/SPARC installations which integrate well with each other and offer essentially the same administration tools. If the need for power grows, existing software is easily transferred to bigger, expensive SPARCs. This makes Solaris x86 unique, since this way a commercial grade Unix is available across the whole scale from small cheap x86 boxes up to 106 processor SPARC SMP machines.
For students and developers Solaris x86 is great, since they can use existing x86 hardware to dip their toes in the waters of Solaris without having to shell out for SPARC hardware.
Having to develop and support Solaris on more than one architecture forces Sun to keep Solaris portable, and that may be very useful if the SPARC architecture might prove to be a dead end, with only a small niche market left that actually needs and affords it.
It's also quite nice to have the usual Solaris envionment available on normal x86 based laptops.
While I personally use mostly Linux and Mac OS X it's nevertheless great to see other Unices alive and kicking. Competition in the x86 Unix market is good, and having the commercial versions competing with the free versions keeps everyone on their toes.
