There seems to be a lot of discussion about Solaris vs Linux as in this article about open source weblog this is quite relevant to the situation and decision that I have to make now. I need to choose what OS to use for the next 3yrs on my laptop and home computer. I will not change the type of Unix or Linux flavour every couple of months, that is a waste of my time.

Someone said that chosing which OS to run is so 1990's and not relevant nowadays. So why all the publicity and air time that this subject gets.

I want a computing platform that is reliable, has support, does not need daily weekly security bug fixes, I can understand and fix myself. This is from a domestic point of view and what I need to use commercially everyday for my work.

Corporates I assume do not care about the OS, until something goes wrong or they discover that the support costs start to become to high. Are all the Linux kernels really the same, I had as much of a change going from Red Hat to Mandrake to Suse as from HP-UX to Solaris. If you are a company running Mandrake or Suse, how easy is it really to go to Red Hat. Personally lots of things changed for me when I changed the Linux that I used. But I did it to learn about this new type of Unix. Now I have been through several Linux's what do I do next. To store pictures etc, ZFS which has the best data integrity and stops you from loosing data is what differentiates Sun Solaris, I cannot see anything new like this in Red Hat.

In the Unix area there is Solaris, Red Hat, Ubuntu, FreeBSD and Mac OS. There is also Windows, XP and Vista if you do not want to run Unix.

The battle is not Linux vs Unix but about four packages/operating systems as described above.

Sun gave the three letter acronym "ZFS" to our new filesystem. However, in reality it should really be called "CDF" (Coffin Dodger Filesystem). This is because it evades death. Due to it's self healing ability to maintain and correct integrity, it checksums everything and is therefore ideal to save things that you may want to use or look at when you are a pensioner. Like pictures of your first girlfriend, that you may have forgotten about when you have retired. Unless you are back with your first girlfriend or you never left her in the place. Need to stop now.

Logical speaking if we normalise ZFS into it's components it is coffin dodging (avoiding death) for data. The data can never die if you use ZFS, so it is a Coffin Dogging Filesystem.

NB, where I used to live the term coffin dodger means pensioner, dodger means someone who avoids things. If the English does not make sense I am afraid that you will have to look up coffin and dodger separately.

Well since IBM are going to resell Solaris as described here; http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2007-08/sunflash.20070816.1.xml as well as HP. Then I think that events and the industry are moving faster to Solaris than I am. I am running a 2-3yr old version of Sun's Linux Java Desktop System 3 (JDS 3), it is very good. But since Solaris 10 and all the new stuff, I will have to move to Solaris. ZFS is just so convincing and all the Dtrace stuff. Will put all pictures on ZFS so that we do not loose them, they can decay on CD's, DVD's and other media.

I can do this easily, I do not play games on my laptop or use it for entertainment. I upgrade my laptop approximately every 3 yrs, so I will do this by the end of the year. Looking forward to have Solaris on my Laptop, so much easier to manage.

Good design and bad design
I have always liked good design, it shows that people have put effort into a product or piece of work. My parents would annoy me when I asked them why they spent so much time gardening or making a buffet for a party. They would say it is not better, not worse just better looking. This was 20yrs before the fashionable restuarants of today. Cutting a long story short, I am happy because at Sun where we have one of the best designers (in my opinion) in the world. Mr Andreas Bechtolsheim, I do not have many people I look up to but he is one of the few. Simply put look at the following, big picture so that you can see the quality.

Good Design:

Sun has always been good at this, their workstations looked better than others, Apple and Band & Olufsen also spring to mind.
Good design and beautiful things does make your life more pleasant, nature knows this, so it is up to us to keep up with nature.
Must bear in mind that taste is divided, just like a bottom.

What better reference than customer proof, this person moved all servers to Solaris from Red Hat due to Solaris Zones features and ease of use.

Vmware = too expensive
Xen = lacks management tools
Solaris Zones = Does what is says it does

It is all here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/09/linuxworld07_ideas_virtual_study/comments/

"How virtualization is actually implemented is generally split between x86 and UNIX servers." Reading this, you could almost think the author doesn't know the difference between a hardware platform and an operating system, no less thought about UNIX on x86. Which is especially funny, because one of the most
interesting server virtualization technologies to come along of late is Solaris Zones.

My group put a fair bit of energy into evaluating paths to virtualization. VMware was out of our price range, and Xen we found to have a great core (the Xen kernel) but lacking in management tools. The story goes on, but we eventually settled on Solaris Zones, which entailed migrating our infrastructure piece-by-piece from Red Hat to Solaris.

If that sounds like a nightmare to you, consider this: The fact that Solaris is extremely robust well-documented, and behaves the way the docs say it does, has meant that migrating our Ruby-on-Rails
apps, our MySQL databases, our NFS NAS servers, etc., has actually been a breeze from the get-go. This compared to the hair-raising weeks spent trying to make Xen's mess of Python scripts workable just
so we should stick with Red Hat. On top of that, we get all the Solaris goodies like ZFS and DTrace, and even Linux virtualization for the apps that we might not feel like porting.

My point is, Solaris Zones is a burgeoning virtualization technology that should not be overlooked."

Storage Management must change.

Storage management will change, I just do not know the timescale, fastest 1 yr but at least in the next 5.

Most of us have grown up with block protocols so it is our comfort zone, we need to move forward to new paradigms such as file and object based storage, Sun is in a unique position to do this, since it invented NFS and now ZFS. I thought IBM bus-tag to FICON, to parallel scsi to FC (serial scsi using FC as a transport protocol). Were big leaps in technology, however these were just speed and feed improvements to manage more devices on a cable. They all worked well and FC SANs are excellent.

FC and SAS, block will last for a long time, but we need to simplify the management and access of data not complicate it.

Looking at transports

SAS, 3Gb, 6Gb, 12Gb (all backward compatible)
FC 1Gb, 2Gb, 4Gb, 8Gb (backward compatible), breaks when we go to 10Gb
Ethernet 10BaseT, 100BaseT, 1GigE, 10GigE, 100GigE (good for NFS & pNFS !)

Parrallel SCSI will disapper within the next 7 yrs. No more bent pins !

Looking at storage management and filesystems:

On IBM mainframe systems we started by writing to direct to the disk track ( CCHHRR cyl,trk, head), then to an access method, then manage it with a policy manager, DFSMS (System Managed Storage). On Open systems or Unix (this includes Linux) we did the same by writing 512Bytes to a LBA (Logical Byte Address), then filesystems then volume managers, then, archive filesystems, global filesystems, then all sorts of extra devices for compression, encryption, CDP and de-dupe.

From a high level architecture this protocol, filesystem, vol mgr, in-line encryption, compression, CDP, de-dupe all put together produces a hairball which is an opportunity to be repaired.

Now ZFS can do all of this, with encryption and de-dupe coming/expected.

If you do not believe me, this is how scared the storage industry is of ZFS, read the discussion.

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/30/0135218

ZFS takes us out of the add-on world that we grew up with, an evolutionary leap.

Labour and skills used to be divided into specialities, in the UK shipbuilding industry 50yrs ago we had a welder, a welders assistant and an assistants assistant. Now we have amalgamated the skills and have arc welding tools (appliances) for one person to do the work, not three.

Old methods will still remain, how many people still use raw disks. Also, many do not know more than Windows Explorer.

Sun is attacking this complexity to reduce complexity, not sure if other companies are. If you know then post a comment.