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

[Christophe Kalt <sage-members@klb.taranis.org>]

On Nov 25, Brad Knowles wrote:
| At 3:00 PM +0000 2005-11-25, 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?
| 
| 	In my experience, Sun is still not committed to x86.  They 
| support it to a degree, but the drivers typically aren't there, and 

drivers on x86 are a lost battle, you can't expect them to
support everything.  Same with Microsoft, many drivers are
third party drivers.  HP for instance has Solaris drivers
for their x86 line of servers.
Hardware i care about has proper driver support.

| Sun doesn't tend to issue patches and updates for x86 -- at least, 
| not anything like they do for SPARC.

Might have been true for previous releases of Solaris,
but i certainly don't get that feeling with Solaris 10
where they actually often come out with the x86 version of
a generic patch first.

| 	I still believe that Solaris/x86 is primarily intended to give 
| people a low-cost entry to Solaris, and once they get bitten then 
| they can be upgraded to "real" Solaris on SPARC.

Sun seems to believe that SPARC still has a place.  They
acknowledge its floating point while touting SPARC for
vertical scalability.  *shrug*

Yes, Sun completely goofed when they tried to kill x86,
but they'd have to be real thick not to get the message
(from customers) loud and clear that they need to support
it properly, and my belief is that they now do.  It also
certainly helps that they're in this with AMD rather
than Intel.

And i hear more and more of customers investing heavily into
Solaris x86, sometimes all the more happy to kill Linux in the
process.  When major wall street players make such moves, it
gets noticed.

Also, why would they build their utility grid on x86 and not
SPARC if they didn't really stand behind x86?