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I only meant to pick on the "RHEL and Windows" remark. The OS is only a small part of the datacenter. I can't quite speak for HP-UX, but Solaris and AIX are de

I only meant to pick on the "RHEL and Windows" remark. The OS is only a small part of the datacenter. I can't quite speak for HP-UX, but Solaris and AIX are definitely not dead platforms. My main claim is that "Big Iron" is going to outlive RedHat in the application platform category. Oracle the DB is one thing, but the sprawling ecosystem of non-database applications that Oracle has accumulated over the years aren't going to keep needing heavier distros. A lot of that stuff is moving to VM image instances anyway. What a platform like CoreOS (or other ways of combining LXC with your hardware infrastructure) offers is separation of two major categories of concern. Driver interfaces and kernel versions are hardware sensitive. Application dependencies on specific library versions far less so. Your vantage point makes sense, though. Databases are really the only application left in the enterprise that haven't seen this decoupling from hardware. But that doesn't bode well for the total number of Red Hat Linux installations.

mattzito 13y ago
I realize the OS is only a small part of the datacenter, but it's most of RHT's business, so that's what I focused on. > I can't quite speak for HP-UX, but Solaris and AIX are definitely not dead platforms. My main claim is that "Big Iron" is going to outlive RedHat in the application platform category. I have a hard time seeing big iron becoming anything other than the open systems equivalent of legacy mainframe. Bear in mind that kernel interfaces aren't purely about hardware - it's about repeatable, predictable performance and behavior profiles. Watch a bunch of bank server platform engineers lose their shit when memory performance under pressure changes after a kernel patch. And remember that in the traditional enterprise, it's not just about stripping down the OS, it's about all of the other tools that get used for performance, security, backup, monitoring, remote execution, change management, privilege escalation. I actually am working on some research on things like LXC at my day job, and one of the challenges is that containers are great until you want to run a bunch of stuff inside the container. And my vantage point was at one time databases, and that's still the market segment I know the best. But I work on everything server and cloud-related, so most customers I talk to are just traditional enterprises.

mattzito 13y ago

I realize the OS is only a small part of the datacenter, but it's most of RHT's business, so that's what I focused on. > I can't quite speak for HP-UX, but Solaris and AIX are definitely not dead platforms. My main claim is that "Big Iron" is going to outlive RedHat in the application platform category. I have a hard time seeing big iron becoming anything other than the open systems equivalent of legacy mainframe. Bear in mind that kernel interfaces aren't purely about hardware - it's about repeatable, predictable performance and behavior profiles. Watch a bunch of bank server platform engineers lose their shit when memory performance under pressure changes after a kernel patch. And remember that in the traditional enterprise, it's not just about stripping down the OS, it's about all of the other tools that get used for performance, security, backup, monitoring, remote execution, change management, privilege escalation. I actually am working on some research on things like LXC at my day job, and one of the challenges is that containers are great until you want to run a bunch of stuff inside the container. And my vantage point was at one time databases, and that's still the market segment I know the best. But I work on everything server and cloud-related, so most customers I talk to are just traditional enterprises.