Dell CIO Says "Unix is Dead" 656
An anonymous reader writes "I thought this might spur some good discussion on this board, including jabs at Dell and MS, which I always enjoy reading. Dell's CIO believes that the end of Unix is here, in fact his opening slide in a recent presentation was "Unix is dead." Specifically, he talked about the savings he claims in moving Dell's Oracle databases from Solaris to Red Hat.
since 1980.... (Score:2, Insightful)
For those of you who came in late, Unix and its workalikes (Linux etc) have grown in use exponentially since 1980.
Dell Trolls (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyways, so what?
-Sean
OH PHEW!! (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess not.
Well, I wonder if he's *ever heard* of freebsd or openbsd or netbsd. They are real unix. They won't easily die for a long time.
Then who's alive? (Score:2, Insightful)
BeOS? Dead. (the open source clones/alternatives are far from ready)
Windows? Even 2000 and XP aren't nearly as stable as Unix and are completely non-portable.
Sorry but I don't see any other OS ruling the server market for quite some time.
And to banks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:since 1980.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. The point of the article is that Unix has fallen behind its workalikes, specifically Linux in this case.
And no, *BSD trolls, he did not say that *BSD is dying.
nice one timothy (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe you should have made the headline "Dell CIO Says Closed-Source *n*x is dead". Oh, wait, that might not be quite as good at causing knee-jerk reactions.
Tell him to get a real job (Score:3, Insightful)
When you spend hundreds of thousands to millions for custom software running on a mainframe, you arent going to be replacing the hardware every year.
Red Hat != UNIX ?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering that I've migrated from systems such as NeXT and AIX to Linux-based solutions with very few problems, I'd put forth the assertion that any Linux distribution would qualify as `UNIX' to most lay definitions of the term. I've even taken applications from Oracle/WinNT to Oracle/RedHat with minor issues. Computer operating systems are simply getting better; more commoditizied, which is why Microsoft is afraid of Linux right now. The "UNIX vendors" are still shipping machines, but with Linux installed instead of their "big iron" legacy UNIX systems. I think that he should have said "Operating Systems are Dead" instead -- which is how it should be; the computer should simply get out of our way and let us get jobs done in an efficient manner.
What used to be home-user shops, such as Dell, can now ship high-quality UNIX solutions thanks to Linux and BSD. Quibbling over the proper definition of UNIX seems silly. If it looks like UNIX, acts like UNIX and runs the source found on "legacy" UNIX systems, well, what is it?
I've got to agree (Score:5, Insightful)
Tomorrow's sysadmins and software chiefs are mostly today's CS students. Considering the enormous popularity of Linux with students (for obvious reasons), these new faces will enter the field with much more programming experience and familiarity on Linux than [insert properietary UNIX here]. So, except for very specialized scenarios, I don't think Unix stands a chance.
Just my 2 cents.
-- A humble CS student.
Vested interest???!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is about as surprising as Microsoft claiming that open source software is crap.
To me, This just smacks of wishful thinking and marketing.
Nah. (Score:5, Insightful)
The code has changed completely - but the core ideas are exactly as they were back in 1976 when I used UNIX on a PDP-11.
There are more people using UNIX-like OS's now than there have ever been.
Re:Dell Trolls (Score:5, Insightful)
If I had any mod points, this would get moded up as "Insightful". Really, this is irrelevant. I admin Solaris, HP-UX and AIX systems, and I'd have to say that Linux isn't significantly any differnt from them than they are from each other. Arguably, Unix as a single, discrete OS expired decades ago. There's never been a time when you run out and buy a "Unix" application, throw it on J. Random Unix System and have it run. Other than in a legal sense, that is, copyrights on the name and some specific software, the term Unix hasn't had any real meaning in years. It's become a generic term, like Kleenex or Xerox.
If it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck...
Re:Then who's alive? (Score:3, Insightful)
In that order, as opposed to skipping steps 1 and 2 like you seem to have done.
He's saying the days of solaris/etc (propriatary unix) on "big iron" are gone, and the days of linux on commodity hardware are here.
Re:since 1980.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OH PHEW!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Dell Trolls (Score:5, Insightful)
Ironically, Byte *is* dead (Score:3, Insightful)
(Yes, Byte lives on in an electronic version - I even subscribe to it - but it's a fading shadow of its former self. It's a lot closer to death than UNIX.)
Re:since 1980.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldn't pay it a lot of attention, the author of this article was, by his own admission, trolling. Check out this line of the article:
"I thought this might spur some good discussion on this board, including jabs at Dell and MS, which I always enjoy reading..."
I'm surprised Slashdot gave him airtime.
Dvorak also said.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of all the pundits out there, Dvorak must have the largest database of being both for and against the same thing; perhaps multiple times. I can even recall him claiming that the Internet was dead. His credibility for me has been zero for several years. I'm amazed anyone reads anything he writes any more.
I'm sick of the quote... (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's why Randy Mott, Dell CIO, is wrong:
1: DELL only deals with Intel-based hardware. Intel is cheap-assed commodity based bargain basement garage sale type of junk. Yeah, it works and the speed is increasing more quickly than other architectures, but it's cheap and reliability among different Intel-based systems is inconsistent. Read as: Not big-money mission critical trustworthy.
2: Extremely large database installations running Oracle still choose HP 9000 RISC based machines running HP-UX, Sun machines running Slowlaris, SGI machines running Irix, or IBM machines running AIX. BTW, it's not Linux that isn't trustworthy, it's the chintzy hardware that it runs on.
3: Corporations still want highly reliable iron to run their mission critical processes on. Intel based junk can do it in some cases, but the bigger iron has had better regression testing done on it, and has a better redundancy infrastructure to it, which these companies are willing to pay for. This big iron still runs UNIX, and UNIX still rules the big iron, and rightly so. UNIX -is- however, losing out in the "little iron" and is losing market share from mid-size down, but it's not "dead."
4: Corporations are still willing to pay for all this testing and corporate support for the big iron, if that'll mean big uptime.
5: The only UNIX that is REALLY threatened is the actual AT&T System V that is now owned by SCO-Caldera-SCO again. I used to work for a SCO dealer, and was told by SCO at the time that Unixware 7 was going to revolutionize UNIX on Intel. I told my salesman and managers not to hold their breath waiting for people to line up at the doors to get their copy of SCO Unixware 7. I was right. We sold about three copies of it in two years. We sold ten or twenty times as many of the old Open(Archaic)Server 5.0.x licenses in the same amount of time. Eventually, the new installs became mostly Linux or Winblows, but we only dealt with Intel based junk.
Had Mott qualifed his opinion to mean Intel only, he might be getting close. UNIX isn't dead. I still have clients who would rather run a Sun or HP 9000 any day of the week over an Intel-based machine.
Last paragraph says it all (Score:3, Insightful)
This is exactly right. And this is why Dell is very wrong. Them saying Unix is dead is like me saying "Ford is dead" because I personally don't own a Ford. What one company uses is irrelevant. Unix is going to be around for a very long time. Companies don't change platforms willy-nilly, and those that do usually aren't around for very long.
Re:Byte agreed.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, I still greatly prefer UNIX or workalike to NT for any enterprise application. But the extremely expensive, huge geophysical mapping application that I once was the build manager for--which, at the time, was supported on AIX, Solaris, IRIX, and HP/UX--eventually was ported to NT and probably Linux. Also, for example, tons of enterprise-class companies--unwisely, in my opinion--use 2K and IIS and SQLserver.
If you look at what happened in the workstation/server market that UNIX lived within, you'll see that on a market-share basis, UNIX lost an enormous amount of ground to NT/2K. So, the prediction was in a sense accurate but not precise. NT "replaced" what would have otherwise been UNIX installations. However, the overall market increased significantly such that UNIX has managed to remain significant and viable where it still is clearly (and very noticably) superior to NT/2K.
What this reveals is that predictions of these sorts usually have built-in assumptions that are proven false over time. Often, the assumption is of a static environment. This prediction assumed a static market for UNIX and NT where, naturally, the cheaper and sufficiently powerful NT would marginalize UNIX and eventually kill it. If the entire market hadn't dramatically grown and changed in some interesting ways, this would have been true. But why assume that? A more responsible prediction would have been, "NT will replace UNIX in many applications". Which it has.
Re:Dell CIO Confirms: Unix is Dying (Score:2, Insightful)
He is right (Score:2, Insightful)
-IBM has chosen to eventually replace AIX with Linux. This will take for a while, but in a few years >90% of IBMs server will run Linux instead of AIX.
-HP is ditching it's PA-RISC CPU. HP-UX doesn't have any advantages compared to Linux on Intel platform.
-SUN is the only one who invests in own UNIX (Solaris), but it still plans to use Linux in blade servers.
Sure they will be people who will use various BSDs in the future, but from the commercial perscpective UNIX will be dead quite soon (=no new development).
You're all missing the point (Score:2, Insightful)
a key point in Mott's presentation: CIOs and IT managers need to focus the lion's share of their IT resources on innovation rather than maintenance of the status quo. Otherwise, said Mott, companies and even entire industries will never realize their full potential.
Industries that don't plan for obsolescence will get out of date and they will turn out to be different industries than what they could have been. said Mott.
...
To get out of the rut of obsolescence, Mott recommended a cultural shift. Rather than spending 85 percent of a company's resources on the status quo or keeping the lights on, and 15 percent on development and innovation, the ratio should be turned around.
Now, how doe this square with the responses to the earlier Ask Slashdot about Pointless IT Innovations Considered Harmful [slashdot.org]? Most people there seemed to agree that a lot of the "upgrade cycle" was pointless, but here we have someone from Dell claiming that we should spend even more on useless upgrades becuase the industry depends on it. Hmm.
Unix is NOT dying because.... (Score:4, Insightful)
So what makes something Unix? All of them have some differences, but there are a number of commonalities. You'd never mistake an MS operating system for a Linux system, for example. Though it's not correct to say so in some circles, I say that Unix is as Unix does. If it looks like Unix, and more importantly, ACTS like Unix, it's a Unix.
Basically, if it uses most of the standard Unix commands, and it uses one of the Unix shells (Bash, Korn, etc), and the OS code looks like a Unix (Kernel, Shell, Window system, etc), its a Unix. Even the Kernel isn't as thorough a guide now, as there are enough signifigant differences in "real" Unix systems to make this factor somewhat iffy (monolithic kernels vs. microkernels, for instance).
So to say that Unix is dead because Linux is replacing many traditional Unix systems seems a little disingenous. Just my 2 cents on the issue...
Check your sources... (Score:1, Insightful)
Article Title misleading. (Score:2, Insightful)
The claim that the fellow is moving "away from unix" is ridiculous and misleading.
Re:Dell Trolls (Score:3, Insightful)
IBM is starting to come around by embracing and supporting Linux. HP is doing the same, especially with the Itaniums. That leaves us with Sun and Solaris. Sun is behaving kindof erratically here lately. With their Cobalt cubes, their own flavor of linux, and their blade systems that run Intel or AMD chips. Sun has a lot to offer, but I think its time for them to either get their Sparc archetecture up to speed, or ditch it and just become and integrator with comodity parts. Solaris is rock solid, and has been for years. I would love to see some of the maturity of Solaris folded into Linux, but I would imagine that this would be a very difficult thing to do.
I hate to say it, but I kinda agree with this guy. But as it stands right now, unless commercial UNIXes do something drastically different, this will not be a big win for Linux, but rather a win for that other little company from Redmond. Because as it stands, Linux is not ready to assume all of the functionality of mature UNIXes.
Reality Check (Score:3, Insightful)
Many of us know that the PC platform is unpopular as a hardware environment for commercial unices.
Could it be that Dell's CIO is really saying "The hardware that runs UNIX, such as SPARC, for example, is dead. Buy a PC with Windows or Linux and never have to worry about having obsolete hardware."
That's what I read between the lines anyway.
Re:Nah. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:since 1980.... (Score:5, Insightful)
So that explains the GNU fetish for "info" style documentation. No matter how stupid you are man pages work - up, down, search, etc., are all pager specific and therefore more likely remembered.
info? Never managed to get the knack. I can just about to drill down - but get back up? And why re-invent the wheel? what's wrong with HTML & lynx if you MUST have a tree based organisation?
which is incredibly wrongheaded
Indeed.
Re:Linux is the next MS (Score:3, Insightful)
The correct statement would be "The Linux community's investment in R&D is impossible to estimate in monetary terms, but is likely to be less than Sun's".
Just because the research effort is not centralized, paid for from a single source, and is difficult to account for, doesn't mean that "the community" doesn't still spend a lot of man-hours, hardware and software in R&D.
That includes individuals contributing their time and resources for free. But it also includes companies and corporations invest money, to earn more money: from Linux distributors to corporations like IBM (whose investment in Linux has a lot to do with R&D).
I'm not saying that the Linux approach is better, but to pretend that just because no single company is paying the bills there was no investment is incorrect.
Re:Dell says the floppy is dead too (Score:3, Insightful)
Businesses trust Sun because of the support? (Score:5, Insightful)
Said Schwartz, "I don't think businesses are really prepared to trust their mission critical systems to technologies where, if something goes wrong with the open source, nobody is responsible for fixing it and doing all the testing on a timely basis. With Sun, you've got a single throat to choke and we can respond instantly."
The thing is, that level of support comes with support contracts, not with simple purchases. Once you start making the case that the superiority of your OS is based on how you will respond to support contracts, however, you've gone pretty far down the slippery slope, IMHO. Perhaps it is impossible for a Linux distro (or some third party) to ever offer that same level of support, but I wouldn't bet money on that. What will Schwartz say in Sun's defense then? Of course, he may be working for a commercial Linux distro by that time, and will have no interest in trying to come up with a defense for Sun, anymore. Who knows?
The thing is, I don't find that "something goes wrong" with the kind of regularity that Schwartz seems to fear. Most of the time when we have Sun or Dell out here to service a server, it is to replace a hard drive in an array. The service contract is basically a way to avoid having replacement parts around for mission-critical systems. Is that enough reason to go ahead and buy the extended warranty on your OS when you make your purchase? I guess businesses will continue to decide that over time, as Dell has.
We don't need reliable hardware or software. (Score:3, Insightful)
The same is going to happen with databases. While there doesn't seem to be a good open source, distributed, redundant database for Linux yet, many people are already effectively building such databases out of MySQL. Yes, MySQL. You see, not only can the hardware be less than stellar in redundant, distributed systems, the software can be as well. And if you like a COTS solution for Linux, IBM already offers it.
Scalable databases will become as simple as buying a bunch of PCs with large disks, plugging them into a high-speed switch, and network-booting them. If you need more power or one breaks or goes down, you just plug in another one.
In the end, combining lots of redundant, cheap units gives you much better reliability for less money than the overly expensive and overly engineered "reliable servers". Because, no matter how reliable a single server may be, sooner or later it is going to break, even if it just because someone spills a comp of coffee into it. And the solution to that people are using right now? They are buying two very expensive high-end servers and use one as a hot standby.
Re:since 1980.... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) By many popular definitions, Linux and BSD are unices. The announcement that "UNIX is dead" is too sweeping a term to be safely used.
2) We have no way to quantify what differences in performance are attributable to software rather than hardware in the given example, nor does one anecdotal application constitute a complete comparison between Solaris/SPARC and RHL/ia32.
This article seems to have more to do with squabbles between Dell and the traditional iron peddlers over market share in the enterprise sector than anything else.
Re:Red Hat != UNIX ?!? (Score:2, Insightful)
Is
Not
UniX
and
Gnu's
Not
Unix,
thank you very much!
Re:Dell Trolls (Score:5, Insightful)
1.)I have hot swapable drive support. HP is working on this for w2k but does dell have this?
2.)I can upgrade the hardware while the system is running!
3.)I have 64 bit memory access and integers for workstation cad apps as well as database access. Type double in C/c++ does not allow enough precision. Int64 ?? I can use larger numbers with more decimal points.
4.) I have a scalable server that has supperior clustering software that NT and Linux lack
5.) With up to 128 processors I can have one fast mutha.
6.) World class stability. Linux has serious VM problems and the filesystem has been known to corrupt under large disk loads. Ask any database admin who uses oracle in Linux. Real servers need 24x7 support and linux is close and is very stable but has some rough edges in heavy server use. A reboot could be disasterous and cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. May god help you if your wharehouse database crashes or if your factory goes offline for a system reboot.
7.)WOrld class support. If a chip fails you can have an engineer from Sun with a replacement part be at your office within a matter of hours if your a gold member!
Ya Unix is dead. Not.
I know Brown associates 4 years ago did a study that pissed off alot of slashdotters giving linux a very poor review. Basically the remarks were the 7 I stated above. Its not just about a stable workstation but managability and vendor support as well as hotswapable hardware. WindowsNT4 also got a shitty review to make things fair.
Funny that Dell is weak in these area's described above except for support. But its hard to match suns gold memember. Its also funny that they want to compete agaisnt sun right when the the CIO says "Unix is Dead". He says its dead because he wants it to be true. Say a lie enough times and it becomes fact according to Stallan.
Thanks to the AMD and Intel race, sun's and sgi's are now slower then pc's. However Sun is planning the sparcIv and sparcV later this year and late next year which will catch up and surpass Itanium and the pentiumIV. Sun had chip fabrication problems which delayed the sparcIII and Iv which hurt them. But they are now in fast gear to be the fastest machines on the planet.
Once this happens many customers will consider Sun again. Customers like bang for the buck and this is the only advantage of Windows2k. If you need results Unix is still the only option.
Re:Tell him to get a real job (Score:2, Insightful)
When you come right down to it the majority of companies out their use IT as a tool and not there livelihood, these are companies that are interested in storing records and processing different types of internal transactions (not just web based). It's probably being done by custom apps (maybe running on PCs) which are interfacing to a database.
These people don't want to be on the head of the curve for new and/or untested technology. I'll admit that Linux is great, I use it myself...
But when you're an insurance company (for example) processing thousands of transactions per day, you want to use hardware and software that is professionally designed and rigerously tested to perform whatever function you need it to perform...
It's not a great deal to use open source if that means that once a week the whole system comes down because some little glitch trips everything up.
Dell the box maker is a shameless parasite (Score:4, Insightful)
By it's own admission, Dell profits from other people's R&D budget. This is one of the richest company in the computer industry with no technology other than cheap box making skills and makes zero contribution to the world. It's well on the way to become an MS-like monster playing every trick in the book to kill its rivals.
I for one can't bear the thought of a world full of ugly Dell boxes with dirty Windows. For the sake of our industry, we need the innovations of Apple, Sun, IBM and many others, so let's boycott Dell boxes - they are not even cheaper anymore.
Info = (man was) INvented Far Overthere. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll second that.
Info always was a pain in the butt - especially for those who don't use emacs as their preferred editor. And now that HTML (and its augmentations) is here and browsers are essentially universally available, info (which never achieved the user penetration of man) is itself at least as "obsolete". Considerably more so, in fact, precicely due to that lack of penetration.
Sometimes an adequate standard is better than a "better" multi-standard solution. Books, for instance, are not obsolete (even if clay tablets have been depreciated for a while.) Man is just a convenient online set of loose-leaf notebooks (suitable for hardcopying for those times a spare square-yard of screen isn't handy).
Needing a mix of tools to read the minimal subset of manuals is so broken it hurts my head just to think about it. The "man is obsolete and gnu won't support it" case of Not Invented Here is one of the biggest impediments to general conversion from proprietary software to Gnu offerings.
Fortunately there are info-to-HTML translators. Unfortunately, I have yet to meet one that conveniently ports all the info functionality into the browser environment - which is a problem, since the "info" manuals were written assuming it and pretty much require it for effective use.
Just Cannot Agree (Score:1, Insightful)
Here's my (admittedly anecdotal) experience:
* Intel hardware just does not have the bandwidth to keep up on general business apps. We do quite a bit of batch processing under Oracle, churning through tens of gigabytes of data per day, and every time I test the same apps under Oracle or MySQL or Postgres on a Linux box, the machine just endlessly grinds away, even when the Intel gear is running radically higher clock rates.
* Linux seems to collapse under higher processing loads. We routinely get our V880 to load averages of 12 or more, with 1000+ processes, and all it does is get progressively more sluggish. I have yet to see a Lintel machine stay above a load average of 4 without falling apart.
* Linux apps/developers seem to be enterprise-hostile (or at least unaware). When we switched away from Openwindows, we tried KDE, but had trouble setting a common launch menu for all of our users (attached to the Sun via X terminals). Worse, some logins had to stay Openwindows (for a variety of reasons) and there seemed to be absolutely no way to keep openwin-menu and the binary KDE menus in sync. A message to the KDE developers asking for advice resulted in childish responses about our organization living in the past. We went with Ximian Gnome for the menuing support. The sick thing is that the most recent Ximian Gnome (1.4?) gets confused when the same person logs in from multiple terminals. A message to the Gnome developers asking for advice yielded no response. There is still no graceful way to systemwide disable xlock. 50 users running xlock on a central machine eats up the CPU and floods the net. We have a hack that we do to keep xlock off of the machines, but it gets overwritten by each Gnome upgrade.
* Solaris, and I presume AIX and HP-UX, are very upgrade friendly. We have come from Solaris 2.2 to Solaris 8 and swapped the server hardware twice over the past 10 years with no disruption to our 1000+ custom legacy applications. The worst problem we ever faced in an upgrade is that we run a non-standard sendmail and Solaris will occasionally stomp on it in an upgrade. Each new Linux upgrade seems to bring new layouts to
Hopefully Linux will grow up and be ready for larger installations. I am still waiting.
I have a saying... (Score:1, Insightful)
"Don't advertise your own stupidity.'
Unix is dead, 640KB is enough for everyone.. It's a new economy... etc
Just don't.
Isn't UNIX the model? (Score:4, Insightful)
Clear then this article was little more than an argument between Dell and Sun over Dells switch from Solaris to Linux. How this spells the end for the UNIX model is quite beyond me.