No doubt Solaris on SPARC was more reliable (particularly on higher-performance boxes) than Linux on x86 at the time, but tons of decent-sized hosting-type comp

No doubt Solaris on SPARC was more reliable (particularly on higher-performance boxes) than Linux on x86 at the time, but tons of decent-sized hosting-type companies were running on Linux in the late 90s, and I worked at one. Obviously at Amazon's scale this was a massive migration, and giving up the support of Sun would be hard, but, hell, Google was launched on Linux at the time too. That said, I was supporting Sparc Solaris through the late 2000s and the Oracle workloads were the last thing to move to Linux most places. The sheer power of the Sun boxes, along with the single-throat-to-choke was fairly unbeatable. No hardware vendor to look down their nose at you for using a "hobbyist" OS and imply that the problem must be at the Operating System level. And, of course, you couldn't really replace those huge Sun Fire 6800 type servers with Linux.