Bill Moffitt's Weblog

Wednesday August 04, 2004

Expensive and Proprietary UNIX in the Orwellian world Another LinuxWorld is here, and so we are once again beseiged with all the stories of the poor, oppressed IT managers who find freedom and higher budgets by replacing their old, proprietary, expensive UNIX gear (usually Sun, since we have, by far, the most UNIX gear installed worldwide) with cheap, open x86 gear running Linux. Now, finally, their lives will be perfect: no longer held captive by a single, rapacious vendor; they'll be able to do so much more with so much less that eventually they'll be able to run entire enterprises with a rack of blade servers, sleep in until 10, and spend their budgets on conferences held in Tahiti.

The problem is, of course, that the sources of these stories are increasingly suspect; when Michael Dell is telling you that the "UNIX mainframe" is dead (what the hell is a "UNIX mainframe," anyway??) you have to wonder if he just might have an axe to grind... especially since his company has decided to cancel all their servers with more than 4 CPUs...

I used to do a lot of work as a Sun spokesperson, and I was called one time to comment on one of these stories. The reporter had a real scoop: a company that was replacing this $100,000 Sun machine with a $3,000 x86-Linux server. The truth is that their business had declined, and the Sun E3000 (a 6-way UltraSPARC II machine with multiple power supplies & other high-end RAS features) they had been running for five years was overkill. They could have easily replaced it with the new SunFire V210 server for about the same price and they wouldn't have even had to buy new software or retrain their sysadmins.

I know that was a surprise to the reporter; I suspect it came as a surprise to the customer, as well, who was told by someone that Sun machines are too expensive. And, hey, the x86/Linux vendor's rep seemed to know what he was doing...

But that's the nature of the Big Lie: tell it enough times and folks accept it as the truth. Solaris is expensive (it starts at $99, and you can use it for free for development or evaluation), it's proprietary (just like Red Hat Enterprise Linux), and it's tied to expensive, proprietary Sun hardware (Solaris has run on x86 architectures for over 10 years, and SPARC is the only major architecture based on open standards - check www.sparc.org).

I understand that it's easy to dismiss me as a Sun Solaris apologist, but I should point out that I'm writing this on my Sony Pentium III laptop running (yep, you guessed it) Linux. My real concern is about the right tool for the job: Linux has some real advantages, particularly in having a community to keep up with all the perturbations in the x86 platform world (new machines, peripherals, drivers, etc.). But when it comes to the servers that run your business, the ones that are absolutely mission-critical, technology matters - you want to have every advantage you can, and that's why we're still pouring R&D into Solaris, even though Michael Dell says it's foolish.

Ah, well... at least it's a good time to start rumors. I gotta go... some folks are taking up a collection to go buy Novell. I'll give 'em twenty bucks.
(2004-08-04 10:48:35.0) Permalink Comments [4]