Why all the dogmatic religious stances on OS/HW?
I don't think I understand why there are so many people religiously bashing Sun or bashing non-Sun solutions for that matter. I think the compelling reasons for choosing the Niagara platform is the scalability for the application workloads that does really well on. It also runs rather efficiently from a power and cooling perspective. So at that point the price/performance discussion becomes very interesting. Do you use a box with cheap initial acquisition costs that hits the wall sooner or a slightly more expensive box that scales pretty well and offers a compelling argument in the operational costs. It all depends on what you want to do with it. We as customers have a choice, right? To continue a bit on choices, you also have the choice of Solaris, Ubuntu and Gentoo on the T2K and Solaris and Ubuntu on the newer Niagara server. People also often bash SPARC as an expensive, proprietary architecture. I'm not sure I understand that. SPARC has been kind of a consortium based standard long before x86 became a defacto standard in the server space. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC for details. Now, Sun has even open sourced (http://www.opensparc.net/) the architectures for the Niagara chips. A lot of cool stuff came out of SPARC so to simply dismiss it is to take a very parochial view on computer architecture.
A lot of really smart engineers designed these systems and a lot of sophisticated customers buy these systems after doing extended evaluations. If you say that these systems are stupid and not price/performant, doesn't that mean that you're calling everyone who designed as well as those who purchased these systems stupid or ill-advised? That seems a little arrogant, no?
I also don't get why there tends to be this anger towards Solaris. There have been a lot of cool things to come from Solaris with respect to Containers, resource management, ZFS, NFSv4, DTrace, SMF, FMA, etc. How can you just dismiss it as inferior to other operating systems? Seems rather biased, unfair and uninformed. If you look at a recent European Union report, Sun actually contributes the most to the open source community, so how can people continually bash them for being closed and proprietary? The actual report can be found here: http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf.
To be fair don't get why many Sun bigots have historically bashed the different flavors of Linux. Frankly, I think it is silly on their part to dismiss the contributions that Linux and the Linux community have made to operating system design and overall growth in computing and computer science. Both Solaris and Linux have their strengths, which can be exploited by matching the right OS/Hardware combination for the right job.
As far as app lock-in, I think that's an inaccurate statement because if you develop in Java or C++ and you develop your code for portability, you should generally be OK. If you use an application server, as long as the application server runs on whatever flavor of OS/hardware combination, you're fine. The same goes for ISV applications that are supported on different OS/hardware combinations.
I really don't understand the religious alignment toward one vendor or another because all these innovations just mean more choice for customers. If IBM, Sun, Intel, AMD, Fujitsu, HP or someone else come up with a cool processor, server, or technology, it benefits everyone because you have another choice. If I test something on these platforms and I find that one works best, great. I don't necessarily have to hate the others.
I think there is also a lot of hate from many old ex-Sun farts who go out of their way to bash their former employer. This isn't to say that all ex-Sun employees are like that. However, I've heard that Sun has historically been a good company to work for. Many people probably got used to the good life during the dot com boom. When it went bust, and these guys got RIF'd they got sour. Get over it. Lots of companies lay off people. That's the way the world works these days. Lots of organizations have high turnover depending on the industry. I guess these guys stayed bitter because they were way too comfortable and were thrown out into the real world.
Match the application workload to the right OS/Platform combination for the best return is all I'm saying. Stay away from the dogmatic religious stances.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
