On 11/25/05, Nate Duehr <nate@natetech.com> wrote:
> Oh, Sun.  Yeah, gold-plated.  Sun charges too much.  Seen their stock
> price lately... down down down she goes.  Nice hardware, but much of the
> value in Sun is:
>
> a) Binary compatibility between OS releases that's better than Linux *by
> far*... releasing binaries for Linux (especially statically linked ones)
> is a hideously painful process because of all the different versions of
> glibc, gcc, etc.
>
> b) Solid hardware that just runs and runs.  Telecommunications networks
> use Sun boxes for this reason.  Downtime isn't allowed or expected, and
> is always an emergency.  When configured correctly, Sun machines in
> high-availability clusters simply don't go down more than a few minutes
> a year, or when upgraded on purpose.
>
> But if you can handle a little bit of downtime, a Compaq/Dell/HP (or
> generic) server running any other Unix'ish variant that your sysadmin is
> comfortable with can provide service *like* a Sun at a much reduced
> overall cost.  This isn't limited to Linux -- Yahoo runs mostly on BSD,
> for example.  Hotmail also -- used to be all BSD, slowly (and painfully)
> converted over to Windows after Microsoft bought them.  Last I checked,
> still using BSD for mail reciept front-end servers, but haven't looked
> in a couple of years at their SMTP HELO messages.
>
> (OpenBSD is still considered by many to be the most secure OS ever
> out-of-the box, and hardest to "un-secure" by making mistakes at the
> admin level... in Unix-like OS's anyway.  Novell isn't bad either.
> Pretty hard to hack a Novell server if it's on an internal network
> behind a firewall and is running IPX without IP!)  ;-)
>
> Nate

I used Sun machine before. I remember it was a Enterprise 450 server
running Solaris 2.6. I remember was not so fast when running SABER
circuit simulation.

My brother in China telecom tells me they are still using Sun in some
applications but increasingly moving to Linux. They are using JAVA though.
China Telecom does not want to use .Net/Windows.

I am not so sure if Nanyang Technological University still runs the
admin job using Open VMS. It is said to be very very stable.

As for Novell, I think the Novel Server business is dying and I think
our company moves to XP to prepare for the move to Active Directory.

I do not know much about BSDs and I think Linux is moving very
fast so that Linux/Windows will be the two dominant forces later.

Once Business Linux matures, maybe there will be less players
(Redhat/Novell/Debian or Ubuntu) that will enter the coporate world.
Then maybe it is easier to release software acorss major Linux
versions. Of course there will still be a lot of Linux versions available
for personal use.

Regards,
Xiaofan

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