back to article Oracle tag teams Solaris and Linux

If you want to know what Oracle's roadmap is for Linux, just watch what Red Hat does. Oracle Enterprise Linux is just a clone of RHEL. Getting a sense of what Oracle really has planned for Solaris - aside from deploying it in SMP systems and clusters - is going to take some time. Oracle's plans for virtualization and system …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Made me laugh

    "I think Solaris is way far advanced, and I love Linux, but I think Solaris is a more capable operating system," Ellison said. "I think Solaris' home is in the high-end of the data center, and it will be a long time before Linux catches up. I don't think the high end is in trouble at all."

    Firstly he doesn't seem to be able to construct sentences, secondly he talks utter, ummm, rubbish :-) I've been working with Solaris for nearly 20 years (well SunOS to start with but you get the idea) and nearly all my clients are in the process of dropping it for one form of Linux or another. I can't really think of anything Solaris does better, but its biggest limiting factor is that it runs on such poor hardware, whereas Linux runs on much faster (at least ten times faster in tests) Intel/AMD hardware.

    So Larry's strategy seems to be to repeat something hoping it will make it true, poor fellow.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      WTF?

      Don't think so...

      -Check out the guys at phoronix.com OpenSolaris runs as fast as Linux.

      -OpenSolaris runs just fine on my EeePC. Therefore it scales also down. There is even an ARM Port on its way...

      -The state of filesystems on Linux sucks. And don't tell be btrfs will be ready in a couple of months.

    2. ripratm
      Thumb Down

      Larry is right

      I'm guessing your clients are not "high end" which is where (as Larry stated) Solaris shines. The people who blast Solaris in favor of Linux are typically (not always) the same people that are running Linux on the 3 U dell hardware. Not exactly Enterprise grade stuff here. Where Solaris shines in rack sized systems that process millions upon millions of transactions each day (usually running Oracle). These are the systems where Linux crumbles. Yes maybe Linux is super fast and awesome at serving web pages up, or handling DNS requests and file sharing, but when it comes to pure I/O and load capacity (cough Oracle DB cough) Solaris on SPARC is leaps and bounds more advanced.

      Which ironically is exactly what Larry said.......weird.

      1. Jesper Frimann
        Pint

        Well

        ripratm.

        The problem is that the main install base for Solaris is in the same space as the 3U dell Hardware space. Lowend Unix.

        The last marked numbers I have seen from IDC that talks about the lowend/midrange/highend UNIX marked are from 2008

        And here 35% of the SUN UNIX revenue came from the Lowend, where as it was 11% for HP and 5% from IBM.

        In the high end it was 21% for SUN and 34% each for HP and IBM.

        In number of shipped servers 84% of SUN servers shipped in the Low-end, where as it was 64% for HP and 43% for IBM.

        And someone posted the numbers of Highend systems sold by IBM and Fujitsu+SUN:

        http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2010/01/21/sun_oracle_approval/

        "IDC Server Tracker WW Q309 - M9000 (Fujitsu & Sun)

        2008Q2 2008Q3 2008Q4 2009Q1 2009Q2 2009Q3

        183 129 221 159 165 90

        IDC Server Tracker WW Q309 - Power 595 (IBM):

        2008Q2 2008Q3 2008Q4 2009Q1 2009Q2 2009Q3

        149 211 545 246 380 328"

        So Larry has a problem in the high end, and is vulnerable i the low end.

        // Jesper

    3. This post has been deleted by its author

    4. Phil 4
      WTF?

      LOL at "Made me Laugh"

      Hey Anonymous coward-you've been working with Solaris for nearly 20 years and you believe Solaris runs on "such poor hardware"?? Which rock have you been hiding on these last 5+ years? Do you work for IBM or something?

      Solaris 10 has been supported/running on over 1,000 latest generation x86 systems for over 5 years now and is sold/supported/OEMed by all the tier one x86 vendors including IBM, HP, Dell, Intel etc. You can see the list here http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/

      Clearly, you haven't really been working with Solaris otherwise you would have realized this.

      Furthermore, if you believe Linux is so much faster than Solaris, especially on Intel/AMD hardware, why is Solaris on SPARC currently holding the current #1 world benchmark records across the leading 7 commercial application based benchmarks? These include OLTP (TPC-C), Oracle BI EE, Oracle Hyperion, SAP, Peoplesoft Payroll, SPECjApp, SPECweb. If you compare Solaris vs Linux on the exact same hardware, you will not find a single public benchmark that shows Linux superior to Solaris.

      So before making every one laugh at your absurdities, check your facts!

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    Facts

    -Since a long time Sun tells Customers Solaris 11 is due around end of this year

    -Nobody talked about OpenSolaris, but it is not dead. Au contraire:

    http://www.oracle.com/technology/community/sun-oracle-community-continuity.html

    "Will Oracle support Java and OpenSolaris User Groups, as Sun has?

    Yes, Oracle will indeed enthusiastically support the Java User Groups, OpenSolaris User Groups, and other Sun-related user group communities (including the Java Champions), just as Oracle actively supports hundreds of product-oriented user groups today. We will be reaching out to these groups soon. "

    -Solaris Containers are not a kind of virtual private server hypervisor, nor a Hardware virtualisation. It is OS virtualisation.

    -It's not Op Center but OpsCenter.

    Please, if you can't get facts straight, you should think about writing for El Reg or stick to IBM news...

  3. sT0rNG b4R3 duRiD
    Linux

    Cat fight

    If (open) Solaris fought (RHEL) linux... who'd win?

    discuss...

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @made me laugh

    I'm intrigued by the first post. Moving from proprietory O/S's such as Solaris, HP/UX, AIX etc is simply about cost. Linux does does not do anything better, but is certainly less robust. Way, way, way less robust. Factor that in with woeful support from Redhat or Oracle and what you get is a cheap system that is cheap for a reason - it's crap. If you want high end, highly available systems buy products that are built to do the job - Linux is not such a product yet. As for the harware argument - you're not comparing like for like products, SPARC chips may have lower clock speeds than Intel, but as with the O/S, they are way more robust.

  5. Keith Wingate
    Thumb Up

    I'll take either over WinDOS any day

    I once saw a tee-shirt which read "I'll take LA over NY any day". There was the LA skyline reflected off the Ocean.... Underneath, upside-down, was I'll take NY over LA any day", with Manhattan reflected off the Hudson... If I'd found it as a poster, I'd have bought it to hang in my Venice (CA) apartment and turn it as my mood saw fit.

    Same here. After 7 years w/ SunOS (last time I checked that's still `uname` on a Solaris box) then 7-ish years of mostly Linux (thus dating my SunOS somewhat) my observations are that:

    Linux is much more user-friendly in every possible way: easier installs, easier on the wallet, better apps, better GUI's, more convenient packaging, super-convenient flags missing from Solaris for all the common utilities (obviously all dependent on the distro). It scales DOWN better, because it seems to eek more performance for more applications out of a specific (even SPARC) CPU than Solaris.

    Solaris is more robust. The threading model is much better, hardly ever, ever crashes, has an NFS client and auto-mounter you can actually trust, and its file systems are faster and more reliable. It scales UP better, because you can take the same binary from the oldest 32 bit SPARC workstation and run it (with some overhead for emulation) on the biggest, baddest 64-bit SPARC hardware available.

    Again, most of my Solaris experience is dated, so maybe its gotten more user-friendly at the same time Linux has gotten more robust. YMMV.

    I'll take either over WinDOS anyday

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Just watch Redhat?

    Your first sentence is completely invalidated by the rest of your article. Watching Redhat would tell you that KVM is the wave of the future. Oracle on the other hand has made a MASSIVE investment in Xen. Redhat's roadmap is NOT Oracle's.

    I'm very interested in what Oracle's plans on Linux are going forward given that they bought Virtual Iron knowing full well that RHEL was headed in a very different direction. Will they continue to pull from Redhat, or will they truly fork? It would seem to me they're going to have to fork eventually, as Redhat supports Xen less and less.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    To balance the first FUD post:

    I work at a large bank/stock exchange/large telecom company/pick what you fancy, and we loooove the rock stable and ultra fast IBM Power machines! But recently, we benched one Sun T5440 Niagara server, and it was several times faster than our beloooooved POWER servers (just check some random benches). So now we are migrating to Solaris. Too bad, I love IBM Power, but they dont cut it anymore. I have worked with POWER servers for 20 years. But we can not afford them anymore. But they are the best.

    /Kebabbert

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