Re: [SAGE] Solaris/x86 versus Solaris/SPARC (was: Re: actual technical questions (was Re: [SAGE] Did everyone Migrate to LOPSA ?))

[Jeff Kellem <composer@Beyond.Dreams.ORG>]

On the sage-members mailing list, Adrian Rixon wrote . . .
 >  As a matter of interest, does migration to an Intel/AMD platform
 > always go hand-in-hand with a move to Linux or BSD? Why not stay with
 > Solaris/x86?

It depends on your all of your requirements.  For some, application and/or
hardware driver support are a primary driver for the choice of operating
system.

Solaris/x86 is definitely a production worthy OS and worth consideration.
We've been running Solaris/x86 on thousands of production systems in a
non-stop environment for years.

[ Note: This is even coming from someone who is generally not fond of
  System V systems. ]

Leaving out specific requirements, as of Solaris 10, I have a hard time
considering other operating systems.  Even thought Solaris 10 is
technically a minor release (5.9 to 5.10), given the feature set, it's
one of the more major changes in Solaris in a long while.  There were a
lot of good changes in and features added to Solaris 10:

    o DTrace, light-weight, dynamic, and programmable instrumentation
      throughout the OS
    o decent network stack rewrite - avoiding a lot of the STREAMS copies
    o process rights management
    o Containers (think jails and beyond)
    o smf(5) - Service Management Facility (/etc/rc, init.d replacement
      with dependencies and parallel startup)
    o ZFS (only recently released, though)

DTrace, alone, is utterly worthwhile and, for me, makes it more
difficult to consider other systems, right now.  It can help provide
good insight and troubleshooting support on production systems.

OpenSolaris is technically now Solaris 11, providing full access to the
majority of Solaris source and early access to features before they're
released in the stable branch.

Of course, there is the argument on how long Sun will stay in business.
Their announcement a while back that Solaris/x86 was no longer going to
be developed caused a lot of developers to stop their development.  Now
that Sun has come back around and is fully supporting and pushing
Solaris on x86, many of those developers may still not be supporting
that environment.

On an unrelated note, I'll be reappearing at the USENIX LISA conference
in December after a long absence.  I'm looking forward to catching up
with folk.

			-jeff
-- 
Jeff Kellem
composer@Beyond.Dreams.ORG