Posts by ares

Oracle, Sun speed-launch Exadata V2

Never again Solaris

We've been using both Solaris and Linux on our servers. And I have to admit, I am not impressed by Solaris. Guess what servers crapped out when power went down (the filesystem was all corrupt). I have to admin it was using UFS, but again guess on which server I saw Oracle reporting corrupt blocks (on an x86 with Solaris and ZFS). Upgrades are headache, lack of official software repositories, installation problems even on Sun Servers. We are using Oracle a lot and deploying on ASM does the job perfectly. When you want to install an application (that is not int the top 20 most pupular applications) guess on which OS you have to bang your head to compile it !? I will try to stay away from Solaris, except headaches we never got something good. And with the binary compatibility your areimpacted if you write really low level code (drivers and stuff), so zvonr dont spread you FUD around.

Smoking iMac caught on camera

Smoke Colour

I wonder if you can buy them with any smoke colour, or just black or white like the iPhone ? 3G Smoke? S Smoke ?

King Larry launches Oracle-Sun combo at Big Blue, Cisco

Unbreakable Solaris

So first, they have to make it unbreakable, at least on the x86 machines. We had in on SPARC servers and it was running very good, but I can't say the same things about x86. Either their code quality got lower, or they pushed the x86 release too fast. It's not very stable, we had crashes, boot archives corrupt, even problems with ZFS when some hard drives failed, missing drivers and I'm not taking about Open Solaris here. Our linux machines (RHEL) are much more stable, easy to update, tons of applications, nothing to complain about it. I would choose without hesitating RHEL on x86. ZFS is nice but we don't use it since most of our databases run on ASM.

Cheers

Oracle reels in Sun Microsystems with $7.4bn buy

Linux <-> Solaris

This I am curios about: What will happen in the OS arena. Going forward, how much will Oracle invest in Linux, Solaris, OpenSolaris. Can't see a clear strategy here. They will definitely support Oracle running on both, but which way will the scale tip in the future.

Sun software - Does it make diddly?

Red Hat has some things too

You don't send debug kernels, the debuginfo is an extra package that you can install any time from the repository, and the information can be used by debuggers and other tools. I think it is really rare when you have to add something in the sources (debug info) and send it to the customer. And I think that more than 90% of the time the standard tools will do the job. Also system-tap is not that bad, I bet the RH technicians can use it too. Red Hat topped customer satisfaction the last years among companies.

Also form what I remember just Open Solaris has a software repository with OS packages and 3rd party packages (Linux out-inovated them here). If you want to support the in the regular Solaris what do you do ? They are in external repositories (aka blastawave) than I'm not sure how tehy are controlled by Sun. Redhat by the way has their own repos, knows exactly what they put there, test the packages and have control over them. I think that help supporting it.

Hehe, yes, out-inovate with Time-Slider. Hey Java Desktop = GNome, remember CDE, it sucked. Linux will probably have time slider too, or something similar (it should be in Gnome, but I don't know how generic it is implemented or it is ZFS coupled) when btrfs will become main-line. Great invention time slider, heard of Time Machine from Apple ? I agree ZFS is nice (WAFL is too).

And regarding Linux <-> Solaris support, Linux is developed by many companies & community, Red Hat doesn't have to build everything, to fix all the bugs, others will help too. So I think that helps reducing the support costs.

And yes, I agree , I think Sun is under-valued on the market.