Elektronkind » More Linux/Solaris FUD wars

Elektronkind » More Linux/Solaris FUD wars

No breadth? Just what is the breadth that Mr. Zaitcev thinks is missing? Is breadth in this case even quantifiable? Is his supposition based solely on the age old (and aged) driver count argument? Does Mr. Zaitcev think that all Solaris is, is an ancient kernel which happened to have a few new concepts tacked on top of it?

I would bet that if Mr. Zaitcev sat down and tried to use Solaris in a real-world environment, he’d soon learn that Solaris has everything one needs in a data center environment… he just hasn’t discovered them (or read about them, natch) yet for himself. Who knows, perhaps he’d even appreciate them.

Calling this FUD is unkind.

Problem is that Solaris has to convince people to use it, not the reverse. Fancy tech like good marketing gets the eyes balls on the game, but unless the first 30 seconds give people enough to ride out the next 30 days using Solaris then there is going to be lots of comments like Pete Zaitcevs.

I know, I’ve spend the last several weeks learning Opensolaris while putting together a zfs iscsi storage server. It is not easy. I feel like I’m stuck in the 90s compared to the easy at which I can set up any Linux solution.  Even with the new tech it is not all plain sailing, zfs on Opensolaris is cutting edge code. The core system of course are stable, other the interest new bits flaky constantly.  Unfortunately these are the bits that make Solaris worth looking at, without a good stable iscsi on zfs system its better for me to look at DRDB on Linux.

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3 Comments

  1. Richard Parry Said,

    April 16, 2007 @ 7:55 am

    It’s a perplexing problem. Solaris is != Linux, and shouldn’t really try to compete with it.

    On Linux, you get +tools+ aplenty – this is your way of doing things quickly and easily. Package management? No problem. Want to manage devices in some way? No problem. Etc.

    On Solaris, it’s completely different; as you say, it’s quite old school (System V pure). What you get is stability and a lot of really good IP. If you look around you’ll find useful tools like the Solaris package management stuff that’s a lot like Debian packages, and once you’ve got those you’ll start getting your tools.

    But pretty much anything modern and current is going on, on Linux. So just use Solaris for what you want – really good container stuff, really good stability, and some fancy IP. It handles load really well too. But it won’t give you the neat new tools you’re used to, that’s better on Linux.

    (If you’re feeling the pain try AIX – that will teach you pain 😀 )

  2. stateless Said,

    April 16, 2007 @ 8:41 am

    AIX doesn’t have anything new. Why would I bother unless I was work at some government department. 😉

    I think it is a mis-characterisation to call Solaris stable and then call Linux modern in the same comment. As you know I’ve had a Debian instance running on Xen with an uptime of almost 700 days.

    Linux is very stable and very modern. The thing Sun is struggling with is stories like this, and the fact companies like Google or Paypal wouldn’t really exist without Linux. 10 years ago with Google had to use Solaris it’s productivity would have been much lower and thus it wouldn’t be were it is today. You could claim it might have used BSD, but in the end I think this would have caused the same level of problems. BSD suffers from the same issues that Solaris has. Monolithic system which a very stable, work incredibly well, but lack a certain flexibility you get with Linux.

    Classic example is Openbsd, I found it more secure to run Debian with the ability to apt-get security updates quickly, then being forced to ‘make build’ the whole system. Solaris has the same issue, although LiveUpdate is very nice, it does have some issue and it takes a lot of time to run. And I know about the blastware stuff and pkg_add. They don’t really help for the base system unless you have a software subscription from Sun.

    I could go on, but everyone has there point of view. At the end of the day what works for you given the time and knowledge you have is the best choice. Like any user I can only say “This is what I want”, and then hope someone doing it thinks it is a good idea. Otherwise I have find other options.

  3. Pete Zaitcev Said,

    April 16, 2007 @ 3:37 pm

    I think you can safely ignore the ranting at the Electronkind and go for the root of the argument as I and Jeff put it down. It should be far more rewarding reading. In particular, the last Jeff’s comeback about the near-death-experience explains how the age-long tension between SMCC and SunSoft was ultimately resolved. This seems to be a point missed by the previous commenter who linked it. I quite agree with Jeff that what he calls “near-death experience” was very good for Sun if only because it made SPARC and server people to come to terms with the crash.

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