RE @Matt and other Cowards
RE: @Matt
"....You just disqualified yourself. Well, maybe it's time to get your hands dirty instead of only talkin..." Admittedly, it is years since I had to do any serious coding, but then I work with Windows, Linux and hp-ux, where I can usually find a well-supported and tested off-the-shelf app that does the bizz for me. In the instances where we haven't had an app to hand, it seems to have been a lot quicker job with hp-ux. A simple case study for you - we had to write some management plug-ins to get hp-ux, AIX and Slowaris talking to a management suite some beancounter thought was a better idea than OpenView Operations (which wouldn't have needed the extra plug-ins). The AIX bit took six man-days of coding, hp-ux took four, but the Slowaris couldn't be done in the month available despite direct Sun involvement trying to help our Sunshiners find a solution. In the end the beancounters had to relent and we got OV Ops.
"....With Zones I need only about 30MB, and ressource management is much more finegrained..." With Zones you don't get real isolation of the OS images, which means there is very limited RASS, so no real comparison to either VMware or other UNIX solutions. 30MB for the wrong solution is still the wrong solution. Compare it to a real UNIX solution like WLM and PRM in hp-ux's VSE and you start to see how fundamentally limited, disjointed and difficult to manage the whole Slowaris approach is.
"....Oh, wait... IBM just started the copiers with introducing workload partitions in AIX6...." Cough *mainframes* cough? Ignoring that massive case of prior art, I think you'll find IBM were stung into copying Xen onto AIX to try and meet the hp-ux offerings of hardware partitioning, software partitioning, PRM and WLM which appeared YEARS before Slowaris finally got zones/containers. And that was before hp introduced the VSE suite, which still offfers much better control and management than Sun can dream of. Try again!
"...You mean that bloatware called HP Openview or IBM Tivoli? I have never seen a environment beeing happy with these monsters. And I've seen a lot..." Obviously you missed the fact that OpenView is stil the most common management platform for Slowaris envionements? That even last year Sun presales still had to admit to customers that it was their recommended management colution? Good luck in finding the Sun equivalent, it doesn'y exist. Oh, and as an aside, did you know the core of the Tivoli management tools is based on licensed OpenView code? You may have "seen a lot", but you were wearing the Sunshiner Blindfold (TM) at the time and missed the reality.
"....Maybe you should ask the guys over at Smugmug how the like Solaris....." Lol, the very first lines is "There’s remarkably little information online about using MySQL on ZFS, successfully or not...." - hardly the ringing endorsement for a thriving community or even of Sun documentation for what you Sunshiners keep bleating are Sun's two biggest products! Just searching for Linux and MySQL implentation sites I get over 11,000 hits! And a Sunshiner website is hardly a ringing endorsement, would you care to talk about serious, industry-valued analysis like Gartner Magic Quadrants? Care to shoot yourself in the other foot?
"....Come on Matt. We both know that HP hasn't had any inventions since they dumped VMS and True64. And HP/UX is dying a painful dead...." "We both know"? Well, I obviously know more than you, but then that was obvious before we even got that far in your post. And last time I checked, hp-ux was still taking market share from Slowaris in the datacenter core, and Linux on hp Integrity and ProLiant is eating up Slowaris even faster. Sounds to me like hp have invented a much better way to make money than Sun, as is amply shown by a comparison of their stock values. And as for "inventing", you mention ZFS and Zones as Sun "inventions", but the former is a copy of NetApp's WAFL (even Sun engineers admit this, patent trial or not), and Zones is a late answer to other vendor's virtualisation products. You slag off Dell for making me-too products, but that's exactly what you hold up as examples of Sun greatness! Where's the invention in Sun's me-too products? Niagara is about the only real case of Sun inventing a new product, and that has been such a limited success Sun have been forced to expand their x64 range and take on more Windows and Linux supported options. Your denial of reality is amusing, but only that.
"....A company without inventions is just becoming a box mover...just er... like Dell. And we all know how well things at Dell are...." oops - you've just hit the nail right on the head - Sun is not inventing, it is trailing the competition with poor me-too products. And tech analysts seem to think Dell has a much brighter future than Sun. You see, you may slag off Dell for not "inventing" products that make you and other Sunshiners go "wow", but then Dell make products that actually sell because they meet customers' requirements. Go ask any serious analyst which company he thinks will still be in a better position in three years time and I can guarantee you they will all think Dell will be in a better position than Sun, even if they think Sun will still be around.
All in, your post is just another example of the Sunshine Blindfold (TM).
RE: Matt - "....The one good thing about his whinging is that he whines most about something when it looks like a good thing, so he's actually becoming something of a positive indicator :) ...." Obviously the customers don't share your warped logic, seeing as how Sun's sales are in freefall. And even more obviously the investors don't follow it either, otherwise the Sun stock wouldn't be under threat of being delisted. When are you Sunshiners going to realise people aren't buying Sun out of spite, but because the products just aren't up to the competition, and we're really tired of you Sunshiners bleating that Sun somehow deserves special attention. No matter how great the company history is, today Sun's reputation is junk.