
TBray Response: Sun Should Stop Sucking - soundsop
http://kirkwylie.blogspot.com/2008/11/tbray-response-sun-should-stop-sucking.html
======
cabalamat
Sun want to sell servers. They can either become a commodity box-shifter on
razor thin margins, or they can make their products better so customers want
to pay a premium.

To make their boxes better, they'd have to come with pre-installed server
software, all the normal stuff you'd see on a web server, and tightly
integrate the OS / file system / database so that (e.g.) MySQL is running very
fast.

Kirk Wylie is right that no-one cares anbout Solaris anymore. If they'd open
sourced it ten years ago, things might be different. But today, Linux is king
on servers. I use Ubuntu on the desktop; I use it on the server too out of
convenience -- I know that i can install new package on both systems in
exactly the same way using apt-get, I know that the diorectory structure is
the same, I know that I can test a feature on my desktop then port it to the
server without getting wierd incompatibility problems.

The only way I'd consider using Solaris is if it worked exactly like Ubuntu,
i.e. make the Solaris kernel a plug-in replacement for the Linux kernel in the
Ubuntu distro. Fortunately, such a thing exists: [http://foss-
boss.blogspot.com/2008/11/nexenta-can-you-say-so...](http://foss-
boss.blogspot.com/2008/11/nexenta-can-you-say-solabuntu-part1.html)

Then, in order to be a one-stop shop, Sun should get into the hosting
business, setting up datacenters around the world running their
hardware/software solution. They could even do a system that automatically
mirrored a web server at different locations around the world to make it more
resilient.

~~~
briansmith
On servers, Solaris is better than Linux. DTrace, ZFS, Zones, resource
management framework, RBAC, service management framework, among other things,
are all better. Solaris already has most of the Linux userland available. A
lot of it is even installed by default; it just isn't in the default PATH. If
you change your default path, you can get access to a lot of the inferior
Linux tools that you are used to.

Yum and apt-get are better at patching and package installation than Solaris
tools. However, the experience on Solaris isn't so bad that the whole OS has
to be thrown away because if it. Besides, when IPS is released Solaris's
package management will be better than both Yum and apt-get.

~~~
bretthoerner
> "Solaris is better than Linux."

That's a very blunt statement of fact.

Yes, DTrace is great. ZFS has a lot of greatness if you overlook the bugs
production systems have had (see: Joyent) to fix still (systems down for a
week while they hand-fixed the FS - Yeah, fun stuff). Zones are cool, but has
its drawbacks (and advantages) when compared to something like Xen.

> "A lot of it is even installed by default; it just isn't in the default
> PATH."

Uh, you know that when people talk about "Linux" they really mean "common
GNU/Linux distributions such as Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/RHEL", right? You realize
they mean more than gmake and gfind and gcc, right? Sorry, Solaris has
absolutely nothing like the apt repositories available on Ubuntu (I know
they're working on this, but that is still the not-so-stable-or-bug-free
OpenSolaris, and it still isn't anywhere close, and we're talking about today,
right?). Can I pull down svn, git, mercurial, bzr in a simple command? How
about lighttpd, nginx, haproxy? What about a recent vim and emacs? Recent
memcached, python/perl/ruby client for it? Those are all basic and well known,
that isn't even the hard stuff. What about something a little more specific?
PostGIS, GDAL, Proj? I can grab all of those on Ubuntu in a few seconds.

And of those you can compile from source yourself on Solaris, you'll find many
a quirk because the project maintainers tend to run either a flavor of Linux
or FreeBSD.

Yeah, Solaris is "better than Linux on servers", and my time isn't worth
anything.

~~~
astrec
_I can grab all of those on Ubuntu in a few seconds._

You're absolutely right, but when it's time to do something _serious_ \- in
the Cal Henderson, irony laden, finger quote sense - you'll recompile them
just the same.

~~~
bretthoerner
I will?

Sorry, I've never bothered to recompile svn or python or many other things
that my Linux install comes with. And I've use them every single day. For
money. To feed my face hole.

Yes, when the time comes I _can_ recompile anything on Ubuntu, but you know
what? I'll take their already existing package, add patches, and easily create
a .deb I can distribute among all the machines I use. Based on the existing
package, with existing Ubuntu patches added that fix existing problems for me.
Rather than going from scratch all alone in Solaris land.

~~~
astrec
For the purposes of this discussion nothing you've mentioned falls under the
_serious_ banner. I mean no snark at all in saying that - just that those with
half a dozen 12 CPU boxes packed with nearly 200Gb of RAM tend to be cutting
their own path.

------
Tekhne
There seems to be some Sun-focused FUD and Linux-focused fanboyism flying
around here and on Kirk's blog. Obviously, that's no way to evaluate competing
solutions. We need facts. We need apple to apple comparisons of hardware and
operating systems, where we can get them.

Of course, every /serious/ business can and should get into the details, but
for the sake of argument, I invite you to compare a couple apples from the
barrel: Sun Microsystem's Sun Fire X4150 (used by Kirk's site), and Dell's
PowerEdge 1950 III.

They support /very/ similar hardware options (rack units, CPUs, memory,
network, internal storage, out-of-band management, power, expansion slots,
etc.), have roughly the same price depending on options (~$7500), and run
roughly the same major software (Linux, Solaris, VMWare). Based on that one
example, I don't see how Kirk justifies decrying Sun.

I could go on with more hardware or a light comparison of Solaris vs. Linux,
but you get the point. Stop with the hyperbole and try presenting facts in a
digestible format.

~~~
tptacek
After pointing out that the author of the article is too biased in favor of
Linux to do an honest comparison, you then base your substantive critique on
the argument that Sun hardware really isn't more expensive than the X86
hardware web shops use to do the same job.

My question is, do you actually believe that?

------
Tichy
I wonder if the high prices are something we "normal" guys simply can not
understand. Maybe they just trigger the "reassuringly expensive" button at
companies that don't care about money. Or there are some complicated tax
evasion schemes or whatnot at work, that make it mandatory to waste some
money.

I've witnessed it for years in the Java world where every application had to
run on Bea Weblogic and Oracle, when Open Source applications would have been
available and actually were more suitable to the task.

Also, it seems to work for Apple...

~~~
jimbokun
"Also, it seems to work for Apple..."

I see irony here, in that I'm old enough to remember when Sun was killing
because everyone needed high end server hardware to get on the web and so Sun
could charge a good premium, and Apple was getting killed because they were
trying to sell a premium product into a market that had been commoditized by
the PC.

Interesting how things change. I'm not sure what the equivalent of the "Apple
strategy" would be for re-establishing a premium brand in the server space.

~~~
blasdel
Correction: everyone _thought_ they needed

~~~
kmavm
I was around during the dot-com bust, and this little piece of revisionist
lore always irks me. Something called "Linux" existed in 1998-1999, but it is
not the "Linux" you know today, and when stacked up against Solaris running on
Sun hardware, it didn't really work. People wanted to run their entire back-
end on a single system, and that single system pretty much _had_ to be a Sun
E10000 running Oracle, because nothing else could scale up as high. The LAMP-
stack scale-out style of system-building had not been invented yet.

~~~
blasdel
I agree with you that people liked scaling using a single big machine back
then, and Sun had the biggest and best machines (and still does to some
extent).

The problem is more that a ton of those people didn't actually need to scale.

~~~
gaius
No-one _planned_ not to need their servers...

------
cpr
Sun is just a bunch of really smart developers surrounded by a bunch of fairly
bozo sales and marketing folks, and headed by no one with a real vision.

They might as well give up.

"Without a vision, the people perish." (quoting scripture)

Sad, too, as I remember the early Sun quite well (at the 10-15 people phase),
as they were a neighbor of ours in Mountain View, and we (Imagen, later QMS)
swapped early laser printers for early Sun workstations.

~~~
gjm11
Misquoting a mistranslation of scripture, unfortunately. (The actual proverb
seems to mean something like "without prophecy, the people cast off
restraint", which is both less poetic and less sensible.)

------
known
I think Sun should offer Sparc chips at half the price of Intel chips.

------
sahaj
everyone keeps talking about what sun should or should not do. no one talks
about how they will actually do any of it. sun is barely surviving; they don't
have the money to do much.

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greyman
Sensible response.

~~~
jwilliams
Is it?

The rebuttals don't seem to align at all with Tim's statements... And the
"What Sun Could Do" seems to boil down to: sell more hardware and storage...
Doesn't seems like a killer strategy to me.

~~~
gjm11
Maybe they don't _have_ a "killer strategy". They've been struggling for quite
a while. It seems pretty plausible that the best they can hope for, for now,
is a "survival strategy".

