4 ms·

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed?

27 points by qhoxie 18y ago

streblo 18y ago
Interesting read. Especially considering the school of engineering at my university just replaced its last Solaris station in favor of some flavor of Linux.
- briansmith 18y ago
  There's really no reason to use Solaris on the desktop. It is even worse than Linux is.
jwilliams 18y ago
A better question is - is SPARC on it's deathbed? If yes, then Solaris (as we know it) probably is too. Answer is probably only "maybe" at this stage. The SPARC/Solaris combination (usually w/ Oracle) is a mainstay in the financial industry, so the current climate might be a significant hit for Sun.
- tptacek 18y ago
  SPARC deployments are a fraction of Solaris deployments, which are in turn a small fraction of server deployments. That's for an entire computer architecture. SPARC has also been displaced by MIPS on the high-end and PPC on the low end of "pizza-box" and network infrastructure, and the embedded market seems to belong to ARM. Financials and WebSphere farms definitely do still run Solaris/SPARC, but plenty of huge financials have also transitioned to RHEL.
  - jwilliams 18y ago
    Yeah I agree - I know they are not totally encumbered. Think it's more of a question of buoyancy. If SPARC deploys were to drop off it might be enough to drop below the waterline. I guess I should have said that Solaris is actually being eroded on two fronts - On the x86 architecture they are under growing threat from Linux (and Windows). On the SPARC front Solaris is still a mainstay, but the SPARC market is being eroded... That is to say, if SPARC goes into serious decline they are in trouble. SPARC has a good multicore strategy, but remains to be seen how this progresses. Again, a key market for this is financials (e.g. hedge funds like these architectures). Solaris/SPARC still deployed in a lot of scenarios where (1) midrange is required, (2) it's a vendor requirement and (3) where there is security paranoia (e.g. Internet Banking, particularly in the DMZ) - Not saying these can't be achieved with other architectures, just the correlated factors I've witnessed. Unfortunately, most of these are holding positions rather than growth areas. You're right about RHEL in the financial industry - particularly as Oracle is now more at home with Linux. It used to be Oracle and Solaris going hand in hand (anyone remember Oracles "Raw Iron" strategy?). Interesting times for Sun all round.
qhoxie 18y ago
I manage number of Solaris servers for a major university and we face the decision of switching to RHEL every budget cycle. We are already moving some over piece by piece. I will note that OpenSolaris is promising, and tools like dtrace and zfs, if positioned correctly, can give Solaris better leverage than they do.
- gaius 18y ago
  Solaris x86 vs RHEL is a no-brainer from a budgetary perspective.
  - iigs 18y ago
    Forgive my ignorance, but I haven't done the pricing for both. How do they work out?
    - gaius 18y ago
      RHEL is shockingly expensive for what you get. Either you do what they approve (in which case you won't really need their support, so you might as well be using CentOS) or you don't (in which case you won't get any support, so you might as well be using CentOS). But RH has the mindshare among developers; if you need to run something like Oracle on x86 then your options are RHEL or Windows. Solx86 is free and of very high quality (far better than RHEL in package management alone!). But application vendors (e.g. again, Oracle) treat it as a tier-2 platform. So in many cases, it's just not an option.
known 18y ago
Analogous to Lotus versus Excel Spreadsheet Market http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9893 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9893
cturner 18y ago
What are the advantages of Solaris and RHEL in these settings over FreeBSD? Is it all about commercial support? I've found FreeBSD to be a nicer environment from a few aspects - better man pages than the GNU world and less SysV-vs-BSD cruft than Solaris. But my perspective is based on my experience as an operator rather than any big-picture considerations.
- gwniobombux 18y ago
  Enterprise grade support comes to mind.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    Large financials that run RHEL get enterprise-grade support.
- shankys 18y ago
  Zones, ZFS, and DTrace are the main differentiating technical advantages for Solaris.
  - yan 18y ago
    ZFS is now available on FreeBSD and it features jails. I haven't kept up with it in a while regarding dtrace support though.
    - iigs 18y ago
      The version of FreeBSD I installed to try ZFS loses all data on the volume after every reboot. It's like having a 146g RAID 1 SCSI RAM disk. :/ Granted I know I picked a random version (7.0 RC1), but the differences in maturity between the platforms is astonishing. This isn't a big deal when it's something that might at worst take rebooting to recover from (say, a SMP related crash), but with filesystems it's a little more crucial that they come through.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    Zones are inferior to almost every other OS's virtualization/isolation strategy, a fact that Sun seems to be recognizing now. If virtualization is a key part of your IT strategy --- and it is for most large enterprises --- Solaris isn't your OS.
131072 18y ago
Linux vs. Solaris - Linux: Seg-fault in the gcc toolchain. After casting about for several days, we couldn't even find someone willing to take our money to fix it. Digging into the code (ld), it's so cryptic it may as well be written in undocumented assembler. Responses from mailing lists and forums: "Go back to Windows" "Restructure your project to avoid that problem" "Why are you complaining, fix it yourself, it's open source" etc. We couldn't submit a test case, because it would have required making public a lot of code containing trade secrets. Solaris: Seg-fault in the Solaris compiler toolchain. We called Sun, and were talking directly to dev tools engineers within minutes. They put the case on 24 hour support and had a patch for us to test a day later. We could submit a reproducible case because Sun accepted the code under NDA. Not the kind of thing that shows up in feature bullet point comparisons, but when you have 30 developers held up on one side and the clients need the code to calculate their bid for an eleven-figure project (as in this case), it makes a difference. In other words, Sun is at a disadvantage, since one of their main selling points requires an understanding of IT risks that most people, unfortunately, do not have. IT guys may think linux is 'cheaper' but they don't have their end-users' acute desire to minimise the already-remote chances of some random problem costing them millions in commission. Edit - it is also an unfortunate reality that being able to pin the problem on Sun (or Microsoft, etc) can save your career in a situation like this. There's no-one to blame if you are using open source and it goes wrong. The buck stops with you not just for your code, but for the code of any free tools you are using. I wish that wasn't how it worked, but there it is. Plus, if you stay 'on piste' doing stuff that has been proven to work (you could hardly argue against Linux + apache for example), you have a relatively small chance of stepping on these engineering landmines.
- orib 18y ago
  If you pay for support, you get support. I doubt that there would have been much difference in your experience if you were paying for a support contract with one of the larger Linux distributors, like Redhat or Novell. Linux doesn't mean you're stuck without vendor support, although that's a common misconception. I don't know how Sun's support compares to the various commercial distros, but comparing an unsupported Linux install to a supported Solaris install isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.
patrickg-zill 18y ago
No it is not. I have run both side by side, and still do run Linux for some customers and Solaris for others. Linux wins on ease of installation and apps available, Solaris wins on just about everything else (better threading, VM pager, etc). If you have the source code to your application and it runs on both platforms, Solaris will run it better.
- tptacek 18y ago
  I don't doubt that for totally standard three-tier apps with no OS-specific customization, on a J2EE stack, Solaris will run your app "better". I strongly doubt it runs it better enough to cost-justify. Many of the largest web apps today scale horizontally, instead of trying to squeeze blood from stones in the VM system and thread scheduler.
henning 18y ago
I'd be more inclined to use Solaris if there were a virtual machine image I could try out from my present platform of choice. Why doesn't Sun make those available? And without annoying promotional crapplications and trialware asking me to buy when I'm just checking stuff out.
iigs 18y ago
I know that the plural of anecdote isn't data, but our experiences with Solaris at work seem to not be unusual. Over the past ten years Sun has NOT had their story straight on the availability of Solaris x86 ISOs and support patches (formerly packaged as X_Recommended bundles). While I could download x86 and install it when I was considering trying it out for an important but non-funded project (replacing authoritative DNS servers for our domain), AFAIK the only way to install updates was to download individual patches from a FTP server and apply them one by one -- and there was no way to tell which applied or why. I think CentOS is saving RHEL's market penetration... if CentOS (or equivalent) wasn't available to cover all of those little cases that nobody would ever fund in a business, all of the Linux expertise would move on to other distros. I think Sun might have figured that out now (OpenSolaris), but if not they have an even harder road ahead as they continue to lose more market share.
- briansmith 18y ago
  RE: x86 support for Solaris: How recent was your experience? Re: CentOS: I agree, I am considering "upgrading" from CentOS 5.2 to RHEL 5.2 to get support for some servers. If CentOS didn't exist then I wouldn't probably went with Debian or Ubuntu on those servers when I set them up, and then I'd be looking to get support from Canonical.
  - iigs 18y ago
    The specific moment I'm referring to was in 2007. I believe it's still the case that you can not download patch clusters without a support account. I'd love to be proven wrong about this, though. There was a previous time (circa 2002) when I was considering it for another company but they pulled the freely available x86 ISOs altogether. This lack of commitment on Sun's part means I can't trust the free stuff for test / low end, even if they started offering everything again today, because I no longer trust that they won't do the same thing again next week.
ShabbyDoo 18y ago
Around '95, I was a college student with a brand new Pentium-90. I had read about this Solaris thingy that could run Windows apps and thought, "Hey, I'd love to try that out..I have 64 megs of RAM!" So, I called Sun to ask about getting a student copy. $600! I was a sophomore in college. When I asked the Sun salesperson why I couldn't have a copy for $50, she explained that they'd be losing money that way since they had to recoup their R&D costs! My argument that I wouldn't be purchasing a copy for $600 anyway fell on deaf (dumb?) ears? Right after that, a friend helped me install Linux -- no small feat as a kernel hack was required for network connectivity in the 0.9 kernel! To this day, I have never owned a computer that ran Solaris. However, I work on a project with over 500 Linux production servers. Serves Sun right for not being nice to me when I was nineteen.
aagnihot 18y ago
Linux Foundation is funded by IBM, HP, Intel. So I guess its just an anti-sun attack. Its just a negative-PR. >>["The future is Linux and Microsoft Windows," says foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin] Stop predicting...Start working!! Michael Dell once predicted similar thing about Apple. But look at where Apple is today!! And look at Dell!!

27 points by qhoxie 18y ago

Interesting read. Especially considering the school of engineering at my university just replaced its last Solaris station in favor of some flavor of Linux.

briansmith 18y ago
There's really no reason to use Solaris on the desktop. It is even worse than Linux is.

jwilliams 18y ago

A better question is - is SPARC on it's deathbed? If yes, then Solaris (as we know it) probably is too. Answer is probably only "maybe" at this stage. The SPARC/Solaris combination (usually w/ Oracle) is a mainstay in the financial industry, so the current climate might be a significant hit for Sun.

tptacek 18y ago
SPARC deployments are a fraction of Solaris deployments, which are in turn a small fraction of server deployments. That's for an entire computer architecture. SPARC has also been displaced by MIPS on the high-end and PPC on the low end of "pizza-box" and network infrastructure, and the embedded market seems to belong to ARM. Financials and WebSphere farms definitely do still run Solaris/SPARC, but plenty of huge financials have also transitioned to RHEL.
- jwilliams 18y ago
  Yeah I agree - I know they are not totally encumbered. Think it's more of a question of buoyancy. If SPARC deploys were to drop off it might be enough to drop below the waterline. I guess I should have said that Solaris is actually being eroded on two fronts - On the x86 architecture they are under growing threat from Linux (and Windows). On the SPARC front Solaris is still a mainstay, but the SPARC market is being eroded... That is to say, if SPARC goes into serious decline they are in trouble. SPARC has a good multicore strategy, but remains to be seen how this progresses. Again, a key market for this is financials (e.g. hedge funds like these architectures). Solaris/SPARC still deployed in a lot of scenarios where (1) midrange is required, (2) it's a vendor requirement and (3) where there is security paranoia (e.g. Internet Banking, particularly in the DMZ) - Not saying these can't be achieved with other architectures, just the correlated factors I've witnessed. Unfortunately, most of these are holding positions rather than growth areas. You're right about RHEL in the financial industry - particularly as Oracle is now more at home with Linux. It used to be Oracle and Solaris going hand in hand (anyone remember Oracles "Raw Iron" strategy?). Interesting times for Sun all round.

qhoxie 18y ago

I manage number of Solaris servers for a major university and we face the decision of switching to RHEL every budget cycle. We are already moving some over piece by piece. I will note that OpenSolaris is promising, and tools like dtrace and zfs, if positioned correctly, can give Solaris better leverage than they do.

gaius 18y ago
Solaris x86 vs RHEL is a no-brainer from a budgetary perspective.
- iigs 18y ago
  Forgive my ignorance, but I haven't done the pricing for both. How do they work out?
  - gaius 18y ago
    RHEL is shockingly expensive for what you get. Either you do what they approve (in which case you won't really need their support, so you might as well be using CentOS) or you don't (in which case you won't get any support, so you might as well be using CentOS). But RH has the mindshare among developers; if you need to run something like Oracle on x86 then your options are RHEL or Windows. Solx86 is free and of very high quality (far better than RHEL in package management alone!). But application vendors (e.g. again, Oracle) treat it as a tier-2 platform. So in many cases, it's just not an option.

known 18y ago

Analogous to Lotus versus Excel Spreadsheet Market http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9893 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9893

cturner 18y ago

What are the advantages of Solaris and RHEL in these settings over FreeBSD? Is it all about commercial support? I've found FreeBSD to be a nicer environment from a few aspects - better man pages than the GNU world and less SysV-vs-BSD cruft than Solaris. But my perspective is based on my experience as an operator rather than any big-picture considerations.

gwniobombux 18y ago
Enterprise grade support comes to mind.
- tptacek 18y ago
  Large financials that run RHEL get enterprise-grade support.
shankys 18y ago
Zones, ZFS, and DTrace are the main differentiating technical advantages for Solaris.
- yan 18y ago
  ZFS is now available on FreeBSD and it features jails. I haven't kept up with it in a while regarding dtrace support though.
  - iigs 18y ago
    The version of FreeBSD I installed to try ZFS loses all data on the volume after every reboot. It's like having a 146g RAID 1 SCSI RAM disk. :/ Granted I know I picked a random version (7.0 RC1), but the differences in maturity between the platforms is astonishing. This isn't a big deal when it's something that might at worst take rebooting to recover from (say, a SMP related crash), but with filesystems it's a little more crucial that they come through.
- tptacek 18y ago
  Zones are inferior to almost every other OS's virtualization/isolation strategy, a fact that Sun seems to be recognizing now. If virtualization is a key part of your IT strategy --- and it is for most large enterprises --- Solaris isn't your OS.

131072 18y ago

Linux vs. Solaris - Linux: Seg-fault in the gcc toolchain. After casting about for several days, we couldn't even find someone willing to take our money to fix it. Digging into the code (ld), it's so cryptic it may as well be written in undocumented assembler. Responses from mailing lists and forums: "Go back to Windows" "Restructure your project to avoid that problem" "Why are you complaining, fix it yourself, it's open source" etc. We couldn't submit a test case, because it would have required making public a lot of code containing trade secrets. Solaris: Seg-fault in the Solaris compiler toolchain. We called Sun, and were talking directly to dev tools engineers within minutes. They put the case on 24 hour support and had a patch for us to test a day later. We could submit a reproducible case because Sun accepted the code under NDA. Not the kind of thing that shows up in feature bullet point comparisons, but when you have 30 developers held up on one side and the clients need the code to calculate their bid for an eleven-figure project (as in this case), it makes a difference. In other words, Sun is at a disadvantage, since one of their main selling points requires an understanding of IT risks that most people, unfortunately, do not have. IT guys may think linux is 'cheaper' but they don't have their end-users' acute desire to minimise the already-remote chances of some random problem costing them millions in commission. Edit - it is also an unfortunate reality that being able to pin the problem on Sun (or Microsoft, etc) can save your career in a situation like this. There's no-one to blame if you are using open source and it goes wrong. The buck stops with you not just for your code, but for the code of any free tools you are using. I wish that wasn't how it worked, but there it is. Plus, if you stay 'on piste' doing stuff that has been proven to work (you could hardly argue against Linux + apache for example), you have a relatively small chance of stepping on these engineering landmines.

orib 18y ago
If you pay for support, you get support. I doubt that there would have been much difference in your experience if you were paying for a support contract with one of the larger Linux distributors, like Redhat or Novell. Linux doesn't mean you're stuck without vendor support, although that's a common misconception. I don't know how Sun's support compares to the various commercial distros, but comparing an unsupported Linux install to a supported Solaris install isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.

patrickg-zill 18y ago

No it is not. I have run both side by side, and still do run Linux for some customers and Solaris for others. Linux wins on ease of installation and apps available, Solaris wins on just about everything else (better threading, VM pager, etc). If you have the source code to your application and it runs on both platforms, Solaris will run it better.

tptacek 18y ago
I don't doubt that for totally standard three-tier apps with no OS-specific customization, on a J2EE stack, Solaris will run your app "better". I strongly doubt it runs it better enough to cost-justify. Many of the largest web apps today scale horizontally, instead of trying to squeeze blood from stones in the VM system and thread scheduler.

henning 18y ago

I'd be more inclined to use Solaris if there were a virtual machine image I could try out from my present platform of choice. Why doesn't Sun make those available? And without annoying promotional crapplications and trialware asking me to buy when I'm just checking stuff out.

iigs 18y ago

I know that the plural of anecdote isn't data, but our experiences with Solaris at work seem to not be unusual. Over the past ten years Sun has NOT had their story straight on the availability of Solaris x86 ISOs and support patches (formerly packaged as X_Recommended bundles). While I could download x86 and install it when I was considering trying it out for an important but non-funded project (replacing authoritative DNS servers for our domain), AFAIK the only way to install updates was to download individual patches from a FTP server and apply them one by one -- and there was no way to tell which applied or why. I think CentOS is saving RHEL's market penetration... if CentOS (or equivalent) wasn't available to cover all of those little cases that nobody would ever fund in a business, all of the Linux expertise would move on to other distros. I think Sun might have figured that out now (OpenSolaris), but if not they have an even harder road ahead as they continue to lose more market share.

briansmith 18y ago
RE: x86 support for Solaris: How recent was your experience? Re: CentOS: I agree, I am considering "upgrading" from CentOS 5.2 to RHEL 5.2 to get support for some servers. If CentOS didn't exist then I wouldn't probably went with Debian or Ubuntu on those servers when I set them up, and then I'd be looking to get support from Canonical.
- iigs 18y ago
  The specific moment I'm referring to was in 2007. I believe it's still the case that you can not download patch clusters without a support account. I'd love to be proven wrong about this, though. There was a previous time (circa 2002) when I was considering it for another company but they pulled the freely available x86 ISOs altogether. This lack of commitment on Sun's part means I can't trust the free stuff for test / low end, even if they started offering everything again today, because I no longer trust that they won't do the same thing again next week.

ShabbyDoo 18y ago

Around '95, I was a college student with a brand new Pentium-90. I had read about this Solaris thingy that could run Windows apps and thought, "Hey, I'd love to try that out..I have 64 megs of RAM!" So, I called Sun to ask about getting a student copy. $600! I was a sophomore in college. When I asked the Sun salesperson why I couldn't have a copy for $50, she explained that they'd be losing money that way since they had to recoup their R&D costs! My argument that I wouldn't be purchasing a copy for $600 anyway fell on deaf (dumb?) ears? Right after that, a friend helped me install Linux -- no small feat as a kernel hack was required for network connectivity in the 0.9 kernel! To this day, I have never owned a computer that ran Solaris. However, I work on a project with over 500 Linux production servers. Serves Sun right for not being nice to me when I was nineteen.

aagnihot 18y ago

Linux Foundation is funded by IBM, HP, Intel. So I guess its just an anti-sun attack. Its just a negative-PR. >>["The future is Linux and Microsoft Windows," says foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin] Stop predicting...Start working!! Michael Dell once predicted similar thing about Apple. But look at where Apple is today!! And look at Dell!!