Unix Vendors Get Creative Against Windows & Linux

coondoggie writes "As x86 servers become increasingly capable, IT managers are taking a closer look at their Unix installations to determine whether a move to Linux or Windows might make sense, analysts say. "The defensible hill for Unix is the big, vertically scaling, mission-critical application, which is usually some type of database serving," says Andrew Butler, a vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "But increasingly, the appeal of Windows- and Linux-based systems running on cheaper, commodity hardware is becoming more and more compelling.""

Unix to Windows?!?

[truthsearch]

I've worked on some huge Unix systems (mostly for databases) and never once did anyone mention Windows without laughing. No way are people with truely large-scale critical Unix servers considering switching to Windows. When you already own the hardware, paid for the software, and have huge support contracts, consider expansion with Linux. Windows is only intruding on the smaller scale Unix installations.

Gartner is known for sometimes putting out some fluff but this just sounds silly.

Re:Unix to Windows?!?

[truthsearch]

Yes, that's a very good point. The largest systems I've worked on were based on Solaris anyway. So now that it's cheap and supports commodity hardware it would be a natural expansion.

Re:What exactly do they smoke?

[truthsearch]

the island defended is getting smaller. In my experience databases are not growing in a similar speed like hardware is anymore

My experience contradicts this. Companies are analyzing more and more information and using larger data warehouses. Where in the past I'd see a variety of small databases spread throughout financial firms I now see more cosolidation into data warehouses. It aids in analysis, cuts some costs, and increases security. Even many web sites are now growing huge databases.

Migrate from Unix to unix

[ajs318]

The big advantage that BSD and Linux have over Windows in this space (migration away from commercial Unix) is that most of what you have already learned is, as near as damn it is to swearing, directly portable. Even most of the applications you are already running, need no more than a swift recompile.

News at 11: if you don't innovate, people move on

[iamacat]

X windows is 23 years old. UNIX, with trusty system calls like open() is around 38. Without radical innovation, its no wonder that customers are moving to low cost alternatives that coincidentally do open() or X-Windows just fine. If Sun wants its market back, they should have photorealistic 3D graphics, real time, robotics control, neural network security system, files presented as memory mapped data structures of type-specific format... There are opportunities, market and technologies that are still left for $1M price tag of high end Sun servers or Cray supercomputers. Its just that these companies have been overrun by management that has too much money and too little brains to care.

Re:Image is still something...but learning curve..

[X_Bones]

linux [...] comes with less of a learning curve...however still a lot more of a curve than your run of the mill windows server guy would like, I've met so many bleeding heart MS guys that would use/try Linux if they didn't have a misconception that it is infinatley harder than windows...

Wait, what? Linux has a steeper learning curve than Windows, yet Windows admins have a "misconception" that Linux is harder for them to use?

Either it's easier to use (in which case the learning curve isn't as steep as you claim), or it's not (in which case there's no misconceptions, only reality).

Re:Solaris runs on x86, free as in beer

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm typing this on an Ultra20 Opteron workstation that I bought last year under one of their offers. 3 year service and support (Hardware and software including the dev tools) for $1k, and they bill my credit card for 3 payments over that time, no interest, no BS.

So when will sata_nv be in Solaris 10? Right now the U20 does PATA-emulation in Solaris 10, and I'm not about to go installing a non-production OS on my box (which I may use to build Solaris x86 pkgs).

It's kinda pitiful that Linux has better support for Sun-branded hardware than Sun does..

(also, Sun x86 stuff uses 20+ year old BIOS junk, not EFI or OpenFirmware. And the ALOM is a PITA)

Re:What exactly do they smoke?

[Anonymous Coward]

Today, a very large database is 100+gb

I beg to differ. Here where I work, our main customer database (which is OLTP, NOT a data warehouse) just crossed over the 20TB mark. Our data warehouse is up in the hundreds of TB range, and growing very quickly.

Like all things with technology, as things progress and get larger and faster, people find ways to use that new power.

There is a _large_ market for high end systems. We're talking 32+ processors and TERABYTES of RAM. Commodity hardware has increased in power and flexibility, but the big Iron has as well.

Re:Solaris runs on x86, free as in beer

[segfaultcoredump]

I've been using linux since '95ish (slackware something or other installed from floppies). I've been using solaris since '97 (2.5.1).

On the topic of servers, if given a choice of what to run on x64 hardware, its Solaris 10, hands down. Device management is much easier, kernel modules are a snap to deal with (no recompile with each kernel upgrade), folks dont change schedulers as part of minor patch releases, stable API's, etc, etc. Toss in things like zones and dtrace and I'm sold (and no, uml and strace are not the same). I usually dont need crazy hardware support on my servers, just fibre channel and AMD cpu's, so the "better hardware support" of linux does not buy me anything. These are servers, not toys in my basement. When they go down, I have 1000 people calling me and yelling. Its not worth the $250 savings to go with an off-brand NIC or anything other than a qlogic FC card.

Now, on the desktop, its linux. There availability of destop apps and hardware drivers for strange things that just work are much better (acrobat, firefox, flash, etc).

To make things even more interesting, if you want support, Solaris is actually cheaper (compared to redhat). Dont need support? Then they both cost the same.

I'm in the process of moving our Oracle environment from Solaris SPARC to Solaris x86/64 on a mix of Sun x4200's and HP 585's (or Sun x4600's if I can torture the sales rep enough). It involves about 60+ oracle instances that will be moved onto 4 systems. I know that solaris can deal with the load of 1000 procs all running at the same time.
 

Required OS X Post

[cadeon]

FYI, OS X Leopard *is* Unix, it's been offically certified as such and will be marketed as such, unlike the previous versions which were 'Unix Like'

Re:Image is still something...but learning curve..

[Stormx2]

Wait, what? Linux has a steeper learning curve than Windows, yet Windows admins have a "misconception" that Linux is harder for them to use? Actually that is fine. Initially, linux can have a steep learning curve (first week or two) but after that it is easy. Windows admins have to misconception it starts difficult and stays difficult.

Getting ready to flame you, but you're right!

[HighOrbit]

I checked at unix.org (i.e. the Open Group website) and OS X is *not yet* showing up in either the 95, 98, and 03 certifications, but I then checked wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.5 [wikipedia.org]. Here is the apropos part:

Leopard is set to be fully UNIX compliant as Apple intends to submit Leopard and Leopard Server to the Open Group for certification. This means that software following the Single UNIX Specification can be compiled and run on Leopard without the need for any code modification.

They got that from http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/ [apple.com].

Very informative. Good job in bringing that to light. I guess that also will settle the litigation issue between apple and the open group over the UNIX trademark, about which I've been very curious but haven't seen any developments on.

.net is platform agnostic?

[mikemcc]

From the article: "especially now that Web-based applications are written in operating system-agnostic languages such as Java and .Net."

I just went to Microsoft's page for the .net framework, and it sure looked 100% windows to me. Perhaps the author is considering "multiple flavors of windows" to be "multiple platforms." My bias leads me to a different conclusion.