

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed? - qhoxie
http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C400693880002574CE00371FE1.html?ref=technology

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131072
Linux vs. Solaris -

Linux: Seg-fault in the gcc toolchain. After casting about for several days,
we couldn't even find someone willing to take our money to fix it. Digging
into the code (ld), it's so cryptic it may as well be written in undocumented
assembler. Responses from mailing lists and forums: "Go back to Windows"
"Restructure your project to avoid that problem" "Why are you complaining, fix
it yourself, it's open source" etc. We couldn't submit a test case, because it
would have required making public a lot of code containing trade secrets.

Solaris: Seg-fault in the Solaris compiler toolchain. We called Sun, and were
talking directly to dev tools engineers within minutes. They put the case on
24 hour support and had a patch for us to test a day later. We could submit a
reproducible case because Sun accepted the code under NDA.

Not the kind of thing that shows up in feature bullet point comparisons, but
when you have 30 developers held up on one side and the clients need the code
to calculate their bid for an eleven-figure project (as in this case), it
makes a difference.

In other words, Sun is at a disadvantage, since one of their main selling
points requires an understanding of IT risks that most people, unfortunately,
do not have. IT guys may think linux is 'cheaper' but they don't have their
end-users' acute desire to minimise the already-remote chances of some random
problem costing them millions in commission. Edit - it is also an unfortunate
reality that being able to pin the problem on Sun (or Microsoft, etc) can save
your career in a situation like this. There's no-one to blame if you are using
open source and it goes wrong. The buck stops with you not just for your code,
but for the code of any free tools you are using. I wish that wasn't how it
worked, but there it is.

Plus, if you stay 'on piste' doing stuff that has been proven to work (you
could hardly argue against Linux + apache for example), you have a relatively
small chance of stepping on these engineering landmines.

~~~
orib
If you pay for support, you get support. I doubt that there would have been
much difference in your experience if you were paying for a support contract
with one of the larger Linux distributors, like Redhat or Novell. Linux
doesn't mean you're stuck without vendor support, although that's a common
misconception.

I don't know how Sun's support compares to the various commercial distros, but
comparing an unsupported Linux install to a supported Solaris install isn't an
apples-to-apples comparison.

~~~
astine
This is true.

What would be interesting however, would be a nice comparison of a supported
Linux with a supported Solaris.

Then again, when you've paid for Linux support, do what is price difference
between it and Solaris then? Whit is the price difference between a supported
Solaris install and a supported Red-Hat install? Is Red-Hat significantly
cheaper? Does it's less restrictive licensing bring about an advantage? Does
it have features that compare with Solaris?

In addition to Red-Hat, Novell and supported Ubuntu are also worth talking
about. Ubuntu may be free, but support licenses sure aren't.

You could also then compare supported Linux distros to unsupported Linux
distros, but that's a whole other box of worms.

~~~
131072
Indeed, you can buy Linux support from Red Hat and other companies. But this
rings hollow - they do not provide the level of support that Sun or Microsoft
does - try getting them or anyone else to fix an obscure bug in the GNU
linker, especially if you're not using their distro (even if you want to pay).
If you think you're going to convince the likes of prickly GNU toolchain
developers to prioritise the development or release of a patch your company
depends on, guess again.

And those support contracts cost money, just like Sun/MS support contracts.
And as soon as you start relying on software that isn't in their distro, you
rapidly run into uncharted territory. The Linux meme of 'you can get support',
is, I think, promoted mostly by people who haven't worked on critical IT
systems, or have done so without understanding their responsibility.

That's not to say Sun's engineering is better than OSS (after all, we got
their compiler to segfault as well as gcc, and my BSD/Apache shared hosting
has had better uptime than my landline and TV for the last few years, and I'm
sure many people want to set fire to the source code for NFS). Linux and other
OSS provide the bulk of features that most people use. And you're probably
better off with an unsupported apache server than some of the hideous
commercial webservers that used to be around.

The bottom line is Sun charges a lot of money to mitigate somewhat nebulous
risks that are hard to understand and communicate, and their OS has no killer
features. They have also mastered the art of alienating potential enthusiasts.
All of which put them on shaky ground. It is a shame, because platform
diversity is one of the best defences of the internet as a whole.

(If you have access to dtrace, learn it. Understanding what it does and being
able to use it will make you a better and probably richer developer).

~~~
orib
As I said, I have no clue on how Redhat's paid support compares to Sun's,
although I know they hire lots of developers working on things throughout the
entire stack, so I'm assuming that if you paid enough they'd set one of their
developers on your problem. I'm not qualified to judge how helpful they are
though.

Interestingly, I seem to have the entire opposite experience with unpaid
support. If I asked nicely, I quickly got help about where to dig into the
software and what to look for when fixing stuff. The programmers on the
projects were quick to respond with requests for more information and
suggested fixes, and often the problem was solved within a day or so. All I
did was poke them on IRC.

No support contracts at all.

------
jwilliams
A better question is - is SPARC on it's deathbed? If yes, then Solaris (as we
know it) probably is too.

Answer is probably only "maybe" at this stage. The SPARC/Solaris combination
(usually w/ Oracle) is a mainstay in the financial industry, so the current
climate might be a significant hit for Sun.

~~~
tptacek
SPARC deployments are a fraction of Solaris deployments, which are in turn a
small fraction of server deployments. That's for an entire computer
architecture. SPARC has also been displaced by MIPS on the high-end and PPC on
the low end of "pizza-box" and network infrastructure, and the embedded market
seems to belong to ARM.

Financials and WebSphere farms definitely do still run Solaris/SPARC, but
plenty of huge financials have also transitioned to RHEL.

~~~
jwilliams
Yeah I agree - I know they are not totally encumbered. Think it's more of a
question of buoyancy. If SPARC deploys were to drop off it might be enough to
drop below the waterline.

I guess I should have said that Solaris is actually being eroded on two fronts
- On the x86 architecture they are under growing threat from Linux (and
Windows). On the SPARC front Solaris is still a mainstay, but the SPARC market
is being eroded... That is to say, if SPARC goes into serious decline they are
in trouble.

SPARC has a good multicore strategy, but remains to be seen how this
progresses. Again, a key market for this is financials (e.g. hedge funds like
these architectures).

Solaris/SPARC still deployed in a lot of scenarios where (1) midrange is
required, (2) it's a vendor requirement and (3) where there is security
paranoia (e.g. Internet Banking, particularly in the DMZ) - Not saying these
can't be achieved with other architectures, just the correlated factors I've
witnessed.

Unfortunately, most of these are holding positions rather than growth areas.
You're right about RHEL in the financial industry - particularly as Oracle is
now more at home with Linux. It used to be Oracle and Solaris going hand in
hand (anyone remember Oracles "Raw Iron" strategy?).

Interesting times for Sun all round.

------
patrickg-zill
No it is not.

I have run both side by side, and still do run Linux for some customers and
Solaris for others. Linux wins on ease of installation and apps available,
Solaris wins on just about everything else (better threading, VM pager, etc).

If you have the source code to your application and it runs on both platforms,
Solaris will run it better.

~~~
tptacek
I don't doubt that for totally standard three-tier apps with no OS-specific
customization, on a J2EE stack, Solaris will run your app "better". I strongly
doubt it runs it better enough to cost-justify. Many of the largest web apps
today scale horizontally, instead of trying to squeeze blood from stones in
the VM system and thread scheduler.

------
iigs
I know that the plural of anecdote isn't data, but our experiences with
Solaris at work seem to not be unusual.

Over the past ten years Sun has NOT had their story straight on the
availability of Solaris x86 ISOs and support patches (formerly packaged as _X_
_Recommended bundles). While I could download x86 and install it when I was
considering trying it out for an important but non-funded project (replacing
authoritative DNS servers for our domain), AFAIK the only way to install
updates was to download individual patches from a FTP server and apply them
one by one -- and there was no way to tell which applied or why.

I think CentOS is saving RHEL's market penetration... if CentOS (or
equivalent) wasn't available to cover all of those little cases that nobody
would ever fund in a business, all of the Linux expertise would move on to
other distros. I think Sun might have figured that out now (OpenSolaris), but
if not they have an even harder road ahead as they continue to lose more
market share.

~~~
briansmith
RE: x86 support for Solaris: How recent was your experience?

Re: CentOS: I agree, I am considering "upgrading" from CentOS 5.2 to RHEL 5.2
to get support for some servers. If CentOS didn't exist then I wouldn't
probably went with Debian or Ubuntu on those servers when I set them up, and
then I'd be looking to get support from Canonical.

~~~
iigs
The specific moment I'm referring to was in 2007. I believe it's still the
case that you can not download patch clusters without a support account. I'd
love to be proven wrong about this, though.

There was a previous time (circa 2002) when I was considering it for another
company but they pulled the freely available x86 ISOs altogether. This lack of
commitment on Sun's part means I can't trust the free stuff for test / low
end, even if they started offering everything again today, because I no longer
trust that they won't do the same thing again next week.

------
cturner
What are the advantages of Solaris and RHEL in these settings over FreeBSD? Is
it all about commercial support?

I've found FreeBSD to be a nicer environment from a few aspects - better man
pages than the GNU world and less SysV-vs-BSD cruft than Solaris. But my
perspective is based on my experience as an operator rather than any big-
picture considerations.

~~~
shankys
Zones, ZFS, and DTrace are the main differentiating technical advantages for
Solaris.

~~~
tptacek
Zones are inferior to almost every other OS's virtualization/isolation
strategy, a fact that Sun seems to be recognizing now. If virtualization is a
key part of your IT strategy --- and it is for most large enterprises ---
Solaris isn't your OS.

~~~
patrickg-zill
Only someone who hasn't actually USED zones would say that.

Sun never said that zones were the ultimate in virutalization - which is why
they are coming out with XVM (their Xen implementation, basically).

I have made plenty of actual greenbacks with zones.

~~~
tptacek
I've done more than "use" zones, but I'm not going to go into details; you can
infer what you'd like from my background.

On the other hand, you didn't actually make any arguments here. All you did
was assert that I'd never used the zones feature, make a point about something
unrelated to zones, and then say that you made money with zones. Nobody is
disputing that there is money to be made selling people Solaris instead of
Linux.

I would at this point be more comfortable running applications under FreeBSD
jails than zones, but, for obvious reasons, I would be much more comfortable
running those same applications under virtualized Linux.

~~~
patrickg-zill
OK, I will expand on my original comment to give you a better idea of my
perspective.

Zones are a useful tool because they provide the needed amount of separation
(for me anyways) without a lot of overhead. They are portable to whatever the
Solaris kernel is ported to (x86, x64, SPARC, and there is a PPC port being
worked on).

A zone with /usr, /opt, etc. mounted read-only in the zone, is more secure
(assuming no security holes to bypass the read-only property) than a non-zone
Solaris system, yet it works exactly the same way. I can compile something in
the global (root) zone and when installed under /usr it is available in every
zone, and if there is a security hole that involves writing to e.g.
/usr/bin/ping , it will fail.

Note that the kernel only loads one copy of each library, no matter how many
programs reference or use it; this saves RAM compared to e.g. VMWare, and may
reduce disk accesses if you have short lived processes as the library may
already be loaded and resolved by the link editor.

You could duplicate this, of course, under any OS with a combination of NFS
read-only mounts (loopback or over ethernet) and jails, although the
administration overhead would be higher.

My reference to XVM (Sun's customized Xen) was to point out that if you don't
like zones, you can still use "full" virtualization from Sun; it is not an
either/or choice.

~~~
tptacek
NFS is a great example of something that has subtle, _bad_ security
interactions with zones.

------
aagnihot
Linux Foundation is funded by IBM, HP, Intel. So I guess its just an anti-sun
attack. Its just a negative-PR. >>["The future is Linux and Microsoft
Windows," says foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin] Stop
predicting...Start working!! Michael Dell once predicted similar thing about
Apple. But look at where Apple is today!! And look at Dell!!

------
ShabbyDoo
Around '95, I was a college student with a brand new Pentium-90. I had read
about this Solaris thingy that could run Windows apps and thought, "Hey, I'd
love to try that out..I have 64 megs of RAM!" So, I called Sun to ask about
getting a student copy. $600! I was a sophomore in college. When I asked the
Sun salesperson why I couldn't have a copy for $50, she explained that they'd
be losing money that way since they had to recoup their R&D costs! My argument
that I wouldn't be purchasing a copy for $600 anyway fell on deaf (dumb?)
ears? Right after that, a friend helped me install Linux -- no small feat as a
kernel hack was required for network connectivity in the 0.9 kernel!

To this day, I have never owned a computer that ran Solaris. However, I work
on a project with over 500 Linux production servers. Serves Sun right for not
being nice to me when I was nineteen.

------
known
Analogous to Lotus versus Excel Spreadsheet Market
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9893>

------
streblo
Interesting read. Especially considering the school of engineering at my
university just replaced its last Solaris station in favor of some flavor of
Linux.

~~~
briansmith
There's really no reason to use Solaris on the desktop. It is even worse than
Linux is.

------
qhoxie
I manage number of Solaris servers for a major university and we face the
decision of switching to RHEL every budget cycle. We are already moving some
over piece by piece.

I will note that OpenSolaris is promising, and tools like dtrace and zfs, if
positioned correctly, can give Solaris better leverage than they do.

~~~
gaius
Solaris x86 vs RHEL is a no-brainer from a budgetary perspective.

~~~
iigs
Forgive my ignorance, but I haven't done the pricing for both. How do they
work out?

~~~
gaius
RHEL is _shockingly_ expensive for what you get. Either you do what they
approve (in which case you won't really need their support, so you might as
well be using CentOS) or you don't (in which case you won't get any support,
so you might as well be using CentOS). But RH has the mindshare among
developers; if you need to run something like Oracle on x86 then your options
are RHEL or Windows.

Solx86 is free and of very high quality (far better than RHEL in package
management alone!). But application vendors (e.g. again, Oracle) treat it as a
tier-2 platform. So in many cases, it's just not an option.

------
henning
I'd be more inclined to use Solaris if there were a virtual machine image I
could try out from my present platform of choice. Why doesn't Sun make those
available? And without annoying promotional crapplications and trialware
asking me to buy when I'm just checking stuff out.

