James, I totally disagree with what you said.
1. You claim that base on price/performance, NT/Linux are better than Solaris. Do you realize that when you say performance, you should specify what type of applications you are talking about? If you are talking about running WORD, Office 97, sure, NT will perform better than Solaris. But if you are talking about running a network file system, I doubt NT/Linux is better. NFS came from SUNW, they twick they UDP code to make this work fast. Different systems optimize different parts of their systems to handle different types of applications. Maybe PIII is better running floating instructions because of their hardware optimization. Maybe SPARC is better running multi threaded applications because of dedicated registers reserved for processes level threads. So it really depends on applications, and whether the application is CPU bound, memory bound, network bound... You can't generalize one to be better than the other.
2. There are more than price/performance when you are making your purchase decisions. Things like Reliablity, scalability, security are all very BIG when I make my purchase decision. I have constant contacts with Microsoft developers in the NT team. They told me that Windows 2000 has 40-50 Million lines of source code. Solaris only has 12M. If you have taken software engineering class, you know that the more complex your software is, the easier you will introduce bugs. In terms of reliability, NT is no where near Solaris. And with 50M lines of code, it's not going to achieve the reliability of Solaris in any time soon. Merced is 64bit, Windows 2000 is a 32 bit OS. Solaris 7, which SUNW published last year, was already 64 bit. Bill Gates made a very fatal mistake when MSFT decided to go with 32 bit OS for windows 2000. Solaris 8, which debutes this year, will have extensive clustering support, up to 1024 proc support. My company runs credit card transactions on dedicated phone lines. We used Oracle database using Sun Solaris on a 64 way SMP. When I talked to my Chief Technology officer and asked him whether we will switch to Windows 2000, Merced based machine. He said not a chance, he said we can't afford to go down and crash running our applications. He said it's going to take a LONG time for NT to catch up with the reliability of SUN's machine, if they ever will.
3. Comparing Linux with Solaris. I worked with a former SUNW employee, he told me that SUNW did so much extensive test of Solaris that it's scary, they do all the POSIX conformation tests, as well as kernel stress test (very rigorous), extensive, extensive network performance tests. That's why they are reliable and performs well in network applications (remember in this internet world, your applications aren't bound to how many floating point instructions you can run, but bound to your network bandwidth, network is your application bottleneck.) I know another guy out of college, he became a system adminstrator for an ISP. The ISP was running Linux. One time, the ISP he's working for experience a serious performance problem that during a busy hour, the TCP traffic throughput was only half of that during other hours. With no support available, he had to look into the Linux kernel code and found out the problem is how Linux TCP network congestion avoidance protocol works. He has to put in some hacking code to make it work well. He's a real smart guy and was able to do this. How many people can do this? When you are in this situation, with Linux, all you can do is post a message in NG and ask for helps. And in this scenario, no one can help you unless they come to your place and look at your machine. With SUNW, they have field engineers go to your place and diagnose your problems. Maybe they won't be able to solve your problems right away, but they will log your problems and have dedicated resources to solve the problem.
That's why base on performance, reliability, scalability, support, our company will continue to use SUNW's machines. And we do not have any plans to switch to NT/Linux. It has never acrossed our minds to do so.
James wrote:
NT/Linux are the contenders for the existing UNIX workstation market (soon to be the PC market). The simple reason is price/performance/variety of components and operating systems can be changed. You can spend $20-30,000 on a fully loaded 2-way Sun Ultra-2 OR spend $5-7000 on a 2-way fully loaded PIII PC. Performance wise PIII is ahead as well. By going with a PC, the corporate world has the choice of many vendors (more inovation) of software and hardware. Inovation cycles are faster as well as you have many companies competing to get their features out first. Also who wants to pay 1000 bucks for a UNIX license on their workstation anymore when Linux is free ?
The only advantage of the big UNIX vendors now is in the very high end machines ; > 16 way. This will also be leveled in the near future with clustering technology coming out now. Clustering technology makes $ sense when you have a number of relatively inexpensive machines; Linux + PC's on a network.
IMHO
|
