Death of a (Solaris) salesman...not really (Score 1)

Sounds like a lot of people posting here haven't seen the inside of a big Fortune 500 datacenter. When you're a multi-billion dollar company that measures downtime in millions$/minute, you're going to look for products with the following: 1) Reliability - This is self explanatory. 2) Scalability - There are two kinds of scalability, vertical and horizontal. Sun does the vertical scalability better than the other Unix vendors. (hint: this is also where the better margins are...) They also do horizontal scalability pretty well, albiet with hardware that might not be quite as deeply discounted as wintel/lintel competitors. However, in the Solaris world (and to some degree other commercial unixes) you can start an application out on a small server and then move it to increasing larger servers as needs dictate. Solaris has demonstrated decent linearity up to 72 processors in a single instance of Solaris. What about Linux? I understand that it doesn't do well past (4) cpus. In any case, with Linux, you're pretty much limited to horizontal scalability. With Solaris you can do both. 3) Manageability - While it's not as newbie friendly as Windoze, sys admins have a lot of features at their disposal here. Managing a single, scalable SMP server is a lot easier than managing a lot of smaller boxes in say a Beowulf cluster. 4) Availability and Serviceability - kinda realated to the last point. The tight integration of Solaris and SPARC provides a lot of really interesting capabilities. Dynamic System Reconfiguration balck flags bad components during POST so the system can come up even if it's got bad hardware. Dynamic Reconfiguration allows a tech to add/remove hardware on the fly without bringing the system down for a reboot - even the cpu and memory boards. Dynamic System Domains allow the sys admin to move resources from one domain to another without a reboot. I think Oracle just came out with additional support to take advantage of this where if you moved cpus and memory to a domain, Oracle could take advatage of the resources without restarting. Sun also provides a mechanism to automate this moving of resources around on the E10k. Sys admins can write scripts to automatically move resources around based on time of day (say at night to support large batch jobs) or based on measureable criteria (like CPUs really busy, so let's take resources from the QA domain and put them into the production domain until the load decreases). There are others I'm sure, but you get the idea. These are the kinds of things that large data centers want in their server platforms. 5) Probably the most important thing of all to the Fortune 500 exec is the ability to pickup the phone and chew out McNealey and Co. If you are have an EBay incident, it becomes a CNN moment. Accountability is a huge part of selecting a vendor. How accountable is the Linux community for fixing a problem with the OS? Now, this is a different question from "how responsive." I know that there are many eager Linux developers out there that are willing to help out, but who's door is the CEO going to bang on if some Linux driver dies. Maybe the answer is, go hire a bunch of Linux people to maintain critical components of the OS. Well then, you're bringing the support in house and not taking advantage of one of the best things about Linux, the community. 6) Linus' scalability - I'm seeing more and more about the issues surrounding Linus' ability to include desired fixes in the kernel. Commercial vendors can be "encouraged" to fix or enhance their OSes. I've even seen specific bug fixes named after companies that requested them. This is no means a shot at Linus' abilities, he's obviously a smart guy. WRT SGI, Sun is in a very different boat from SGI. Yah, Sun's best days may have been during the dotcom buildout, but you know what they also did during that time frame? They got into the core business processing datacenters of large companies. With great success, Sun was able to leverage their dotcom exposure to broaden the scope of their hardware, much to the dismay of IBM, HP, and DEC (rip). I've seen a big financial datacenter get rid of its IBM boxes and DEC Alphas to run the core financials on SPARC/Solaris. SGI painted itself into a corner by staying focused on scientific apps and graphics while Sun broadened its customer base. What's really funny is that SGI needed to increase its marketshare by getting more into commercial apps. Instead, they bought Cray! Then they sold one of Cray's business units over to Sun. This was the technology that basically became the E10k. I bet Sun's laughing all the way to the bank on that deal. Maybe I'm rahashing old, already over done history, but Sun is in a very different position from SGI. I've seen Sun boxes running printing presses at a large newspaper publisher. I've seen Sun boxes processing orders for a large cable TV company, I've seen Sun boxes cut checks and purchase orders for one of the largest telcos in the US. The point is that Sun's gear is all over the place. I think Sun's announcement that it will expand it's Linux efforts is a recognition not that Solaris is dead, but that Linux is mature enough to adopt as a viable platform. I think it fits very well with Sun's strategy. Big systems at the core of the heavy pushing with cheap replaceable Linux boxes at the edge (web/app servers and whatnot). There are two basic business strategies - differentiation and cost reduction. All other strategies fall into one of these two. I've seen some posts commenting on price. Well guess what, you're right, PCs are cheap, but that's not Sun's target strategy. Dell is an MBA model of cost efficiency. Dell doesn't really make anything, they bend sheetmetal and combine technology made elsewhere with better cost containment than their competitors. Sun on the other hand is an inovator. Many of the standards that we take for granted today came from Sun. NFS,XML,Java, and lots of other stuff have strong ties to Sun. A lot of people think Java is all hype and that its heyday has come and gone. But y'know what? I was just watching someone install a Brocade switch today and guess what the management interface was? You got it, a Java applet in a web browser! Looked really good, too. sorry for the tangent... I don't think Sun's expanded interest in Linux is a way to beat the Dells of the world at making cheap PCs. Seems to me it allows Sun to round out their already extensive product portfolio. Time will tell how Sun's strategy holds up, but I'm rooting for them. As one of the few (only)commerical vendors that supports open standards - people insist on calling SPARC proprietary, but it's actually an open standard (http://www.sparc.org/basic.shtml) - I for one hope they stick around... someone's gotta keep jabbing at Microsoft. All the other vendors have wussed out and have joined the Dark Side. At least Sun had the balls to stand up to Bill and Co. kden!