Thursday June 09, 2005 Solaris 10 - Cheaper than Red Hat and SuSE (and VMware)
Not my opinion, but the opinion of The Burton Group.Yesterday I sat in and listened to a telebriefing by the Burton Group on Solaris 10. I found it interesting to hear an independent analysis of how Solaris 10 compares to competing products such as Red Hat. It was pretty positive.
There were a couple of areas where Solaris 10 currently lags Red Hat. Hardware support was one, although the speaker expressed pleasant surprise at the level of hardware support in Solaris 10, being much better than he expected. ISV support was another, although this is growing all the time.
An important comment made by the speaker was that customers he talked to buy Red Hat because they want to run OSS such as Apache on commodity x86 hardware, not because they want to buy Linux. With Solaris 10 they can now run the same OSS applications on the same hardware, but with lower support costs from Sun.
He showed a couple of price comparison slides too. Solaris 10 support costs vs Red Hat Enterprise vs SuSE enterprise. Solaris 10 is way cheaper. There was also a comparison of Solaris 10 Containers vs VMware costs. Again, Solaris 10 comes out way ahead on price.
The price comparison data is just asking to be included in my Solaris 10 presentation. It's too compelling not to. 
( Jun 09 2005, 11:58:52 AM BST ) Permalink Comments [2]
Posted by ThinGuy on June 09, 2005 at 04:09 PM BST #
The key point the Burton Group speaker made was that if you can do what you need to with Solaris 10 Containers, why pay thousands of extra dollars for a VMware license? (and then have to pay guest OS license fees on top?)
I completely agree with you that it would be nice to have Solaris 10 as a host OS for VMware.
Posted by Peter Parsons on June 09, 2005 at 04:17 PM BST #