Recently there was an internal poll amongst the OS Ambassadors to learn what reasons people have to choose Solaris on our own x86 hardware. As opposed to other Operating Systems like Linux or Windows. I thought it would be educational to share what's come out of this poll.
Reasons to choose Solaris on SUN x86 hardware (in no particular order):
- Technical if not superior features not otherwise available and that 'max out' the x86 hardware and peripherals. Examples:
- ZFS on SSD
- Predictive Self healing, especially the Fault Management Architecture component
- DTrace
- Zones and Containers
- One support contract (Spectrum) to cover both the hardware and the OS.
This translates into a strong offering regarding Supportability levels, and creates enough granularity to implement the right level of risk avoidance
for the customer
- No need to cross company boundaries diagnosing problems non-obviously
related to hardware/firmware/OS.
It's only SUN you need to talk to!
- The hardware itself. "Designed by Andy" (Bechtolsheim) means the hardware itself is datacenter-grade, well balanced and differentiates in the areas of powerconsumption, cooling and accessibility to the individual components.
- Hardware design innovation (ie can mix Intel/AMD/SPARC in the same Blade chassis)
- No need to install third party drivers (that is: when installing Solaris on SUN x86 gear -- check out the Solaris HCLs otherwise). At a higher-level: tight integration of the hardware with (systems)software, and with the OS
- SUN is a leader in adopting the latest Intel and AMD chips. Not only by building systems based on the latest chips available, but also by tightly integrating chip-specific features with Solaris from day 1 on. Look here for some great examples by Jim Laurent of what I mean.
- Tight integration of the pieces in a Solaris world (FMA, ZFS, DTrace,
zones, ...)
- Solaris on SPARC. Only Fujitsu can make a similar claim. The benefits to customers are two-fold:
- Solaris is being developed for two platforms, resulting in an overall better product for both platforms
- Customers running Solaris (on SPARC) have a low barrier to also use Solaris on x86. From the OS layer on, everything is the same
- Indemnification
- Low barrier to exit, i.e. Want to virtualize with VMware as an
alternative, tomorrow? They've got whitepapers on phenomenal scalability
on our gear.
- SUN runs benchmarks on SUN x86 hardware and performs finetuning to the microlevel to max out on performance and stability.
Not only can Fujitsu make that claim, but they built UltraSPARC processors, the SPARC64 VI & VII, that beat the living daylights out of the fastest UltraSPARC CPUs Sun has managed to produce.
Posted by UX-admin on November 26, 2008 at 07:34 PM CET #
Given the amount of time collectively wasted by all the people doing their own thing installing Solaris 10/Opensolaris on Macs and generic laptops using flavor du jour of virtualization or dual boot ... it defies imagination that Sun doesnt go to any one of the quality OED houses and source a quality laptop ( AB doesnt have to design *everything*) that it could sell pre-loaded with Solaris and whatever else. As for me, I plunked down for a brand new Macbook Pro, thinking that it would make a wonderfull triple-play development box. After futzing around for a good while installing VirtualBox and both Solaris 10 1108, and Express 2008.05, I've abandoned the effort for now because it is so painfully slow as to be unusable.
Come on, Sun. Having a really nice reference standard is something I'd gladly pay for.
Posted by David McDaniel on November 26, 2008 at 10:01 PM CET #