[SunHELP] Guys, this is not good...for Sun

Mon Feb 4 08:36:43 CST 2002

And there you have hit on why IBM likes linux; all that lovely support
revenue.

The issue, regardless of Mr Ellison says, is that courtesy of the linux
bandwagon Intel x86/unix is becoming mainstream.
It's eating into all the proprietary hardware bases and SUN's most of all.
Their problem is that unlike HP, Compaq, IBM
they don't have an Intel offering of their with which to compete. Also their
service organisation is not set up to handle much in the way of off-base
support so they can't play IBM's (and to a lesser extent Compaq and HPs)
game.

SUN's success was as much to do with marketing as with their products.
Whatever question you asked there was one product and one answer. This
instilled a feeling of security in the customer base.  Now there is a
general realisation that the same answer can be had using cheaper hardware
SUN are going to have to have a rethink if they want to maintain their
position.

-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Banniza [mailto:RPBanniz at ascensionhealth.org]
Sent: 4 February 2002 14:06
To: sunhelp at sunhelp.org
Subject: Re: [SunHELP] Guys, this is not good...for Sun

Anthony,
I like you have been running several other *NIXs over the past several
years. However, I guess I learned Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD in the beginning
b/c that was all I could get my hands on. I couldn't afford to spend
upwards of $10K on a Sun server. However, learning the commodity stuff
prompted me towards Solaris. I guess I find it funny now that the
industry is doing a full-circle from "Linux is hacker's OS that is
brought into the organization through the back door." to "Linux can do
mostly anything a full proprietary UNIX will do". Case in point, we are
currently running mainframes, AS400, AIX, Solaris and Tru64 here.
However, the mainframe group (with help from IBM) is making a big push
to put all UNIX apps on the mainframe running Linux. We are fighting
this as the mainframe group knows nothing about *NIX so there you would
have  to go through two layers of support (mainframe guys for hardware
and UNIX admins for OS support) where as you would have one layer of
support for running the apps natively on a Sparc machine or RS6000
machine. In using the different version of *NIX, the one thing that
REALLY bugs me is the flavor of the month in terms of software. Don't
get me wrong, I like Linux but I get tired of learning ipfwadm,
ipchains, iptables, etc. I think if Linux is going to succeed, it needs
to have (and use) something like the Linux Standards Base. As for
Solaris advantages, the one thing I see over Linux is that it is 64 bit
which is nice for database transactions. Yeah, Itanium this and Itanium
that but how many Itaniums have you seen? I haven't seen any.

Robert

Robert Banniza
Senior UNIX Administrator
Ascension Health
Phone: 812-228-2157

>>> agabriel at home.tzo.org 02/04/02 07:07AM >>>
I will have a really unpopular view, here goes.

I have been running linux for years, along with solaris, openbsd, and
many
more.  My Sun machines running Solaris are only as stable as my intel
machines running any other nix, including the linux 2.4 arch.  The
journaling filesystems are great.  The support is even better.  I sent
out an email the other day looking for a bit of info on doing an
ethernet
driver, I didn't get any responses - I also called sun and they asked
me
why in the world I would ever want to do that.  I like Solaris, even
thou
it is odd at points.  Most of the other free nix's are at least just
as
good.  

I want anyone who disagrees with me at this point to ask themselves
why
sun should survive.  I'm expecting to hear due to their robust servers
or
something to that effect. Do you run apache on that server?  Which
smtp
server do you run?  More than likely it will run just as well under
other
inx's.  Also Linux can be locked down.

Anyone have a legitimate answer to this?  I'm not expecting to see
much.

Flame away!
Thanks,
Anthony    

On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Jan Johansson wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 31, 2002 at 03:51:26PM -0600, Robert Banniza wrote:
> >I just saw this and it is not giving me a warm and fuzzy. I have
> >been a Sun advocate for a long time and will continue to be.
> >However, this URL
> >http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV47_STO67867,00.html 
> >and the fact that I heard today that Enron, Excite at Home and
> >Exodus were some of the largest customers of Sun. Scott McNealy,
> >I hope you can pull us through as we will continue to be
> >faithful.
> 
> I do not think GNU/Linux is stable[1] enough, but then I have never
been
> a GNU/Linux fan (I use OpenBSD instead).
> 
> For me Solaris is a necessary evil, half of the OS is broken, it
> is 2002 and they almost have a /dev/random, their ksh is beyond
> repair and /etc is symlink hell because they can't change a thing
> becuase it will brake the 30 year old app.
> 
> Solaris 9 is looking good so there is still hope and I love the
> hardware, cheap Intels do not even have a real prom, and Netra X1
> comes with a very good price.
> 
> [1] stable as in "We do not change our packet filter every
> release."
> _______________________________________________
> SunHELP maillist  -  SunHELP at sunhelp.org 
> http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/sunhelp 
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