Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Judd who wrote (11702)	11/16/1998 3:40:00 PM
From: paul	Respond to of 64865

I dont think there is any cluster management software for Linux yet. there is a lot of hardware and tuning issues to make a reliable machine which Linux doesnt support such as hot swappability of disks, Dynamic REsourcing, alternate pathing, etc. compared to the cost of the HW - 1/2 million and up easy for a sun or dec alphaserver + the cost of the application, support - the value of a "free" OS means little. The one benefit of plentiful applications availability potentially for Linux would be lost since the HW vendors would have to have special versions of Linux for their machines - and then your back to the "old" situations of flavors of unix based upon ATT or Berkely unix which is also opensource.

To: Judd who wrote (11702)	11/16/1998 5:51:00 PM
From: QwikSand	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

Ken: you are completely right, not just partially right. There are multi-processor Linux kernels around, and there are one-off Linux "cluster" installations like Project Beowulf that are cobbled together and hand-fed by gurus. This does not in any sense mean that Linux "does clustering" or "scales" to 16 of anything. Linux today is not even in the same world with the kind of enterprise infrastructure computing that Sun offers, and won't be for quite a while. Red Hat and a couple of other companies are trying to build that capability but it will take them years to even come close, with or without Intel's token help and money. Right now, Sun is pretty much alone. It has a huge lead over other Unix systems that it can open even wider if it executes. It may indeed be the case 18 months from now that big players like HP and IBM have to turn to Solaris because NT has turned into a dry hole for them while Solaris is real (the AIX/SCO story is a joke that would be funny if it weren't so old). On the desktop, it's another story. Linux will be a more and more important player. Microsoft is the target there, not Sun. Regards, --QwikSand