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.""

Solaris runs on x86, free as in beer

[axus]

Linux beats it in hardware support, but Sun has the whole overpriced reliability image which some might find attractive. If you're paying the big bucks you can get a good response from Sun, though I'd suspect people working on Linux could make those bucks go further.

Re:Unix to Windows?!?

[b0s0z0ku]

hen you already own the hardware, paid for the software, and have huge support contracts, consider expansion with Linux.

Or expand with UNIX -- BSD and Solaris both do fine on commodity hardware. And are cleaner setups than either Windows or any Linux distro that isn't stripped down.

-b.

Re:Commodity hardware

[laffer1]

Please review what UNIX is... http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix.html [unix.org]

Many BSDs have not been tested officially to use the UNIX name. If you simply look at the specification, IBM has done a lot of work with Linux to make it pass. This is a big gray area. The GNU is not UNIX but Linux slowly is becoming an implementation of the standard...

Almost everything runs on ia32 now. People have a choice which is what open source is all about. My personal belief has always been that each OS has an advantage for a specific task or series of tasks. That makes all systems relevant.

As for databases, I think SQL Server isn't that bad but for very large deployments there are a few other options that make more sense. Most people don't need Oracle, SQL Server or DB2. MySQL or Postgresql are adequate. You can get them to run on almost anything.

Windows? hah.

[JustNiz]

A place I used to work planned to move everyone from sun workstations to windows boxes as a cost-cutting exercise.
It ended up costing way more overall because all of a sudden our IT department went from a single sysadmin who was hardly ever busy, because everything just worked, to a whole department of IT staff needed to second-guess MS exchange and a now very unreliable network (even though no network hardware or configuration had changed), and Windows PC's that were always slowing up or crashing, especially after that stupid automated windows update.

Unix vs. Linux

[ubuwalker31]

Can somebody explain how Unix is different than Linux? Most Linux distributions are mostly POSIX, SUS and ELF compliant. Is the underlying code better somehow?

Conflation of hardware and OS platforms

[The Man]

Anyone who conflates "Unix" and "large, expensive custom/proprietary hardware" in 2007 isn't worth reading. While there are indeed some Unix operating systems that only run on custom hardware produced by the same vendor, that's by no means universally true. Note especially Solaris, which runs just as well on the very same cheap and ubiquitous x86 (whether from a tier-1 vendor or homebrew) systems used by some to run Windows or GNU/Linux as it does on the big, expensive SPARC hardware that Sun and Fujitsu offer. Anyone who wants to have a meaningful conversation about the IT industry needs to start by separating the hardware options (driven mainly by economics) from the software discussion (driven mainly by technical and business factors). While there are business problems that can only be solved on high-end hardware that's often limited to a single choice of OS, those are the minority of deployments and form a distinct market from the volume space. Talking about competition between high-end and low-end solutions is pointless; either you need high-end performance, capacity, and features or you don't. If you do, you're simply not in the market for a low-end hardware platform and the OS you run will depend largely on the hardware vendor you choose. If you don't, it would be silly to spend money on high-end gear, and you'll be able to choose from among several operating systems - including those named here - based on your individual business needs and the features offered by each product. But it's a sure mark of ignorance to discuss the two as if it's all one market in which a choice of Windows/GNU/Linux/Solaris/BSD on a uniprocessor PC competes directly with HPUX on Himalaya and Solaris on Starcat. One can see why commentators are always talking about Unix's imminent demise; they fail to recognise two key aspects of the market: Unix's strong and capable presence on both low-end and high-end hardware, and the segmented nature of the server market. Not much to see here, I shouldn't think.

Linux is way too easy now

[soren100]

The sheer ease of starting a business with Linux and other open-source technologies (MySQL, PHP, ruby, etc) gives Linux the the advantage over Unix. If the company grows, we will just keep using what works.

I am currently working in a 10-man startup company that delivers employment training over the Web. Our system runs off a cluster of 3 boxes in a LAMP configuration, and we never paid a dime for server software.

Linux dedicated hosting is much cheaper than Windows dedicated hosting, and there are so many tutorials and packages out there that make it really easy to learn and deploy open-source systems.

Sun and company have started their battle way too late for anything but niche deployments -- the King of "Big Iron", IBM, long ago threw in the mainframe towel in favor of Linux.

My Dad used to run a university library, and he was always very forward - looking in terms of IT. He wanted to get a Sun server to run thin-client systems for the library patrons to use rather than having to clean the Windows systems every day, and he could not get a Sun salesperson to talk to him (this was about 12 years ago).

The main library software ran on Sun servers (that they bought through the software vendor), and he was highly impressed with the stability of the Sun boxes. He was so impressed that when the time came for PC's to be installed in the library, he wanted to put 20 thin-client terminals in that ran sessions on a second Sun server. That plan ended because he could not get Sun to talk to him -- he literally could not get the sales people there to call him back to sell him the system.

The end result was that he had to install the 20 PC's and deal with the viruses, downloaded software and other daily headaches of the Windows world and Sun lost an easy sale because they were too arrogant to care.

Sun should have been fighting way back then -- Linux is way too mature now, and way too cheap and easy to deploy. In these days of Ubuntu livecd's and Macs running on top of Linux, anyone who is not a Windows person who is interested in computing will learn Linux. Sun may have a few legacy apps, it looks like they will just be a niche player at best. Sun was legendary for their stability, but our Linux boxes have all the stability we need.

I am sure Unix will have it's niches here and there, but Linux is way too strong at this point.

Re:Solaris runs on x86, free as in beer

[thsths]

> Solaris has a big advantage. Solaris is Unix.

So? What is Unix anyway? It is only a name, and a code base developed in the 70s and 80s.

POSIX is what people want (although it is just a bunch of specs written by a committee). Some places suck badly, but others are quite useful. Of course most systems are POSIX nowadays, including Windows.

Just my 2p.

Re:Unix vs. Linux

[gmack]

"linux" is usually done by nice people who want to give something away to the comunity, which is great and has been working excelent, but it can't beat commercial unixes.

Except that this hasn't been the case for some time now. Most of the developers are payed by Linux distros (Red Hat, Suse, hardware vendors(dell, AMD, Intel, Adaptec), UNIX vendors(IBM, SGI), software vendors(oracle), large companies whose business relies on Linux(Google) or a consortium of the above (Linux-foundation (formerly OSDL)).

And I'm not just talking about the kernel.

windows in the front, party in the back

[teh_chrizzle]

I've worked on some huge Unix systems (mostly for databases) and never once did anyone mention Windows without laughing.

i would imagine that is the case in many large datacenters. to paraphrase the great philosopher jules winnfield: mission critical enterprise applications are not in the same ballpark as windows and linux on x86. it's not even the same sport.

the one big shop i worked for in central ohio used mainframes, unix, and windows. mainframes for a lot of legacy data (like stuff from the 70's and 80's) unix for all things oracle, and oddly enough, windows for the front end web hosting. so all of the customer facing web front ends were windows based, but the data itself was hosted and served up from sun gear. inside the firewall, the company itself was seriously MS centric, being used for a number of MS case study/whitepapers on replacing X and Y with stuff from microsoft. i haven't worked there in several years, but i would imagine they are still all MS until you get to the data itself.

there was also a big project in the mid to late 90's to replace the aging development workstations. the sun workstations were replaced with windows NT4 running eXceed. again, windows on the front end, but the serious work is in unix. the support costs for having a sun on the desk for development and a wintel for office and email were offset significantly by replacing both with a powerful (for that time) PC and host emulation software. in all of the "unix substitutions" that i had seen, not once was the proprietary data hosted on anything but IBM mainframes or SUN unix.

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.

IBM will occasionally hit the IT trade rags with ads and op-ed pieces about "server sprawl"... a kind of out of control proliferation of low-end (in IBM's opinion) servers or even clusters that handle one or two tasks instead of running everything from a handful of multi-million dollar godlike servers. i would imagine that sun will eventually take the same approach.

i think that larger and more well established datacenters will always feature commercial unix at their cores thanks in large part to the investment and contracts that you mention. but i think newer companies will focus on large numbers of commodity servers (ala google). i think that is where MS and commercial unix will fight a pitched battle with linux.