Solaris vs Linux
- Thread starter Rich43
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Have fun! it's a good company to work for IMO, very laid back and everyone is willing to talk to you / tell you stuff.
My department are cool with me slagging off stuff I don't like too (Unlike some mates who work for company's where 'You must not speak out about the company' lol).
My department are cool with me slagging off stuff I don't like too (Unlike some mates who work for company's where 'You must not speak out about the company' lol).
Man of Honour
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I was trying to get something together but as usual I've been pulled to work on a project for a client (not that I'm complaining too much, business class flights to the US and all).
I've also just looked at the stats and discovered one of our mail relays is processing nearly 35,000 messages an hour at peak times, which makes me wonder quite how it hasn't caught fire yet...
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But solaris will also run on non sun hardware (which is component wise almost identical), so I'd hazard a guess it's no better on sun x86 hardware than on any other x86 hardware. and you get excellent support for RHEL from redhat.
When I'll be building my NAS / iSCSI box at home, I'm seriously considering using opensolaris as opposed to something like openfiler. It just seems more stable and less prone to going wrong. That and ZFS... In my testing, it does eat a bit more memory than openfiler, but memory's cheap 
At my previous job, we recieved 6 sun ultra 40's. The build quality was appauling compared to the older SPARC workstations we had. 3 of the ultra 40's didn't have their PSU's fastened inside, so they slid out of the rear of the chassis. 3 of them then refused to POST properly, and one had an intermittent problem whereby it would just shutdown (turned out to be something to do with the DVD drive!).
Perhaps the worst batch of workstations I've ever seen. Good layout inside though, pity the construction and attention to detail was pap.
Perhaps the worst batch of workstations I've ever seen. Good layout inside though, pity the construction and attention to detail was pap.
When I'll be building my NAS / iSCSI box at home, I'm seriously considering using opensolaris as opposed to something like openfiler. It just seems more stable and less prone to going wrong. That and ZFS... In my testing, it does eat a bit more memory than openfiler, but memory's cheap
Excellent choice, being able to take second/min/hour/day snapshots of your ISCSI filesystems rocks
That's a shame to hear, we have some ultra40's and they seem fine. (wonder if yours were maybe dropped/messed about in transit) ... Not saying it couldn't have been sun, did they sort you out with replacements for the broken units?
The boxes showed no signs of damage during transit, we figured it had to be a slip-up during the manufacturing of the boxes.
Yes the support was ok, engineer round next day to fix the ones he could (although he then put massive scratches down the side panels
), and replacements a week or so after.
Yes the support was ok, engineer round next day to fix the ones he could (although he then put massive scratches down the side panels
), and replacements a week or so after.(although he then put massive scratches down the side panels
Engineer would have found himself in an unlit basement room with exposed transformer busbars.... bofh style ;P
Said Engineer was well known to us, so we were quite chummy. Couldn't possibly have done that too him ......I didn't say otherwise.
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No, I was just saying that the reasons you listed aren't compelling reasons for using Solaris in their own right...
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One of my T1000s can process >300000 messages in around 6 hours. Some days it does more
I didn't say otherwise.
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One of my T1000s can process >300000 messages in around 6 hours. Some days it does more
I've no doubt they're good at it, but I can process that number with two HP x86 based servers and I suspect they cost a bit less. (and the server in question is 2 years old)
It's one of the issues with Sun in general, they make some terribly funky hardware but it's rarely cost effective. As I said I'll be looking at Sun and Solaris for some upcoming projects but they've already been discounted for core services, I can achieve the same cheaper with HP hardware running RHEL.
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No you didn't, so what was your point??
Soldato
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These are Internet messages not internal; takes much longer to do a lookup of 300000 MX records, initiate an SMTP connections and deliver the message. Secondly, a T1000 with this spec (T1,6 core,1GHz, 4GB RAM) costs around £1500 pre-discount.
I know of companies replacing huge servers with T1000s to run their LDAP. Link to story (albeit from Sun) showing a T2000 nearly doubling the LDAP authentication rates of a four-way dual-core Xeon box.
I don't doubt the power of x86, especially for C-based single-threaded applications, but for throughput of massively-parallelised multi-threaded applications (pretty much anything based on J2E such as WebLogic, JBoss, Jrocket, etc.) these servers are actually very good value for the performance.
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Mine are ISP primary mail relays, so fully external. I suspect some of the stuff we're running on there to cut down on spam means that load is even higher per message.
I've no doubt that the sun boxes are good but they do carry a price premium in my experience. I'm happy to look at them for new projects but we made our evaluation for mail relay and Sun didn't really seem to offer anything.
New x86 hardware (Likely HP DL380s with 8x 3GHz cores and 16GB RAM) will process around 80,000 messages an hour with ease (on each server - we'll likely install 8 in 4 pairs). If I need more power I'll go to Itanium is my current position.
Another concern is that when we're recruiting support guys, RHEL (and linux generally) is a more common skill set than Solaris these days.
I'm not against Sun or Solaris, my point is merely that I'm implementing systems thats are among the most critical we have (authoritative and cacheing DNS is in the same project scope) and we've look at and discounted sun in favour of x86 linux.
That said, while my HP boxes might compete performance wise with a cool-threads box I have no doubt that they consume more than twice the power. Green computing isn't important to management so that isn't relevant here but in a lot of other companies it would be today (I have several customers who've promised carbon neutral computing inside 2 years to their shareholders).
The end game for me is that I can get as good or better performance for cheaper with HP and RHEL.
If it was for one of the projects I'm involved in outside of work and I had a limitless budget I'd definitely consider Sun but a limitless budget is a rare thing indeed.