"Oracle is not a friend of Linux or Solaris. Oracle is a friend of Oracle and nobody else."
Agreed. That's why I thought it was silly that a certain poster on this thread made a big deal that the "premier" OS for Oracle is Slowlaris. As if "premier" meant something.
Hey I rather like Slow... I mean Solaris..
The Slowlaris slur was coined 5 years ago when people were comparing 400 MHz UltraSPARC processors running Solaris to 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 CPUs running Linux. Today, head to head benchmarks of Solaris 10 vs. Linux on similar hardware (i.e., AMD Opteron servers) show Solaris is on par with Linux ... slightly behind on some benchmarks and ahead on others.
Assuming performance is similar, most enterprise customers then consider reliability features, an area where Solaris is leading the industry.
You have to dig into Solaris' Service Management Facility (SMF) to understand what a sea change it is for UNIX operating systems. It is the first change to UNIX which starts to bring application availability to par with mainframe operating systems like MVS and z/OS.
SMF and DTrace are simply the biggest advances in general purpose operating systems in well over a decade. DTrace is truely revolutionary. Something like SMF could have been done years ago, but nobody considered it.