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20060207 Tuesday February 07, 2006

Solaris 10/Galaxy cheaper than white box/Linux

At the Sun Analyst Summit, Marc Andreesson was up on stage (video) and put forth some statistics. What Marc's Ning team did that most do not in calculating TCO was to include the cost of real estate and power. The summary is basically that the Solaris 10 / Galaxy combination ($4,760) is literally less than 1/2 the price of the white box / Linux combination ($10,350) for 3 years. Those are Marc's numbers, not ours.

These results surprised Marc. He thought the most interesting comparison would be AMD vs Intel, but the largest cost differential was OS support. Both Solaris and Linux are free, but Solaris support is more cost effective.

Some interesting points Marc made include that Solaris zones are a big deal for them (yeah!) and that moving from Linux to Solaris is as easy as moving from Solaris to Linux.

(2006-02-07 06:40:34.0) Permalink Comments [3]

Comments:

Linux is only pseudo free these days, most of corprate america will only allow Red Hat into the datacenter, so if you look at Red Hat's pricing model at http://www.redhat.com/en_us/USA/rhel/compare/server/ You see that Red Hat is pretty damm expensive, when they only support the OS. For the prices of there premium products I can get platinum level support for most of Sun's x64/x86 product line plus OS support. Of course if you run into a problem with Red Hat linux, they may cop out and blame the hardware you are running on. Is Sun going to do that if you are running Sun hardware, considering they have the hardware support contract as well.

Posted by James Dickens on February 07, 2006 at 09:02 AM PST #

you guys need a full blown videocast with ning looking at the economics. the facts were great at SAS but the production values SUCKED... i swear to god seeing the guy that made the browser a reality for millions looking at facts scribbled on the back of an envelope. my coffee near came out my nose.

Posted by james governor on February 09, 2006 at 06:47 AM PST #

James D., good point. No finger pointing w/Solaris on Sun hardware. James G., with that comment, the coffee did come out of my nose.

Posted by John Clingan on February 09, 2006 at 07:01 AM PST #

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