I've used Solaris on Sun SPARC hardware and it is a very strong environment for heavy duty enterprise applications, especially if you have to use Oracle and/or

I've used Solaris on Sun SPARC hardware and it is a very strong environment for heavy duty enterprise applications, especially if you have to use Oracle and/or Java. But very expensive solution. With Oracle now owning them, I don't think the cost of ownership is going to be coming down, but the quality of support might. If you are using FibreChannel and SAN attached storage, then Sun might still be a good option. But seriously I'd look at HPUX and AIX as well. My experiences with OpenSolaris on x86 (non-Sun) hardware has been disappointing. Maybe I had high expectations due to the SPARC experiences. These days, I only use Ubuntu Server LTS editions. APT and the Debian infrastructure meets my needs well. Also use PostgreSQL rather than Oracle RDBMS.