Posted on 11/13/2002 11:23:24 PM PST by chance33_98
Unix's days are numbered, says Dell
By Andy McCue [13-11-2002]
Server OS market share has decreased by half in last five years
Dell chairman and chief executive Michael Dell told delegates at the OracleWorld conference in San Francisco this week that the days of the Unix mainframe are numbered.
Promoting his company's deal with Oracle and Red Hat to provide Linux applications on Dell servers, Dell said cost was the main reason users were moving away from Unix.
"If we look at today's enterprise customers they are concerned with how to reduce cost of IT while maintaining high levels of performance," he said.
Quoting figures from analyst IDC, Dell said the Unix share of the server operating system market had decreased by half over the last five years compared to Windows and Linux, which have almost tripled.
"In Linux we have found a Unix that is really a better answer. We think Linux is the new Unix," he said. "The days of proprietary Unix, we think, are rapidly ending in terms of that being the only platform available to run mission-critical applications."
Mobile operator Orange has recently deployed Oracle running on Red Hat Linux and Dell servers in the UK to deliver and manage multimedia services to customers, said Dell.
"Customers are figuring this out and making the switch. We see systems like Linux taking off in a big way," he added.
The Oracle, Dell and Red Hat tie-up competes with the rival United Linux partnership made up of Caldera, Conectiva, Suse, TurboLinux, Computer Associates, IBM and Intel to develop distribute Linux applications for large enterprises.
Linux will continue to grow in this market, but IT managers seem wary of converting over from Solaris or HP-UX right now in some businesses. Personally I see Linux dominating the small to mid size businesses and Unix being the mainstay of the larger corporate world - one reason being single source, we have agreements with SUN to manage all the hardware and OS and if we have problems we have one company and one OS to deal with and those are highlighted by a large, organized company backing them.
My point in that is there is a 'feeling' of security when dealing with a company where the hardware and OS are backed up with years of technology and direction, whereas many I have talked to (rightly or wrongly) see Linux more as loosely affiliated group of dedicated users and developers without a big organization to back them up when in need. If the big Linux ditributors overcome this I can see it getting more of a corporate foothold (it already has some) in the high end back room server market.
Disclosure note: I work at a data center for a bank and we deal in very high end applications to serve large companies' financial needs, as well as general population banking, and the thought of converting all those apps onto Linux machines scares the heck out of people. We run several different unix OSes, though mainly Solaris now, and windows 2000 advanced/datacenter servers for a variety of web applications. While we do have a large group of main frames still in use (and probably will for many years to come) we have been migrating some of those to high end sunfire boxes (a trend that will continue).
Indeed it is. And I for one am darn thankful for it!
Apple isn't there yet. See Comparing Apples and Penguins. They will eventually get there though. Its great to be able to run unix apps from my Mac.
If he is talking about the KERNEL, he has a bit of a point, if one generously interprets his remarks in a narrow way: SUN, Solaris, MIPS, AIX, etc (all more or less blueblood UNIX whose geneology goes back to Bell Labs v6 or before) have all seen their day and are slipping away into the SUNset (PUN of course).
However, OpenBSD and OS X are quite alive and will carry on the tradition.
I am CERTAIN that Linux has incorporated some of the code/features of OpenBSD and the OpenSource portions of the original UNIX kernel, just because Linux incorporates whatever works and is convenient, and does not try to maintain some kind of absurd "racial purity", so what Dell is saying is B**S*** in any event, and meaningless to boot.
It is Linux, and not M$ that is the BORG and even M$'s best will be absorbed by Linux (whether or not M$ best is worth keeping is subject to INTENSE debate -- VIRUSES and remote administration TROJANS anyone?)
A local effect: a year ago we were talking about converting our external WWW server from Linux to OpenBSD since OpenBSD is theoretically supposed to be more robust/safer etc. Our Linux implementation is quite robust/safe, however, staying up 6 months or more at a time and has NEVER crashed, nor been broken into. Result, we have shelved a port to OpenBSD as unnecessary
Performance wise, OpenBSD (read OS X here if you want) is not particularly faster than Linux, and the problem w/ OpenBSD is that it has FEWER DEVELOPERS and FEWER MACHINES RUNNING IT. So Linux is evolving faster and better, which is fatal in the technology game. So I'd say pure OpenBSD/OS X will fall by the wayside as well, if for ONE reason, because the big boy (IBM) has blessed Linux and staked its future on it... Go BIG BLUE!
http://www.Lindows.com
LOL.
"I liken starting one's computing career with Unix, say as an undergraduate, to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you suffer from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live within it. By the time they find out differently, it is too late. They already think that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act."
Ken Pier, Xerox PARC
I think the key word in Dell's statement was "mainframe", and since most Unices require large hardware platforms, and since Dell makes and sells much smaller boxes, this position is not surprising.
Mainframes require a helluva lot of support, and the price of keeping a "clone" around for fallover support and/or backup is prohibitive. Using smaller boxes, one can dedicate a box to a single application, cluster them or create clones for immediate roll-in if one box fails; avoiding the all-your-eggs-in-one-basket syndrome.
Also, once you've committed to run on a certain hardware platform, it's very expensive to re-tool your apps and processes to move to another. Microsoft users can be caught in this trap too, once their need for raw processing power gets past a certain point, since you don't see any IBM e-series servers natively running Windows, for example. OTOH, Linux can run on almost anything, and is very scaleable, and predictable in the way it runs. You can develop stuff on a Wintel box, test it on an e-series and run production on a S/390 VM, without a lot of adjustments between boxes.
No doubt companies with really big mainframes are forced into a narrow exit path and are stuck with expensive stuff.
It is also true that UNIX inherited the OS for these machines, luckily for the companies that have these since porting UNIX to Linux is actually relatively easy, porting to OpenBSD easier still unless one foolishly bought into some particular brand of optimizing fortran/cobol etc compiler, then the porting costs can become dreadfull...
But UNIX will run on really small hardware very well... i had 4.2BSD running on my DEC LSI-11 with only 40k of memory and a 5M winchester (it was not very speedy) !
Jeremy S. Anderson
Cute comment, but UNIX was developed at Bell Labs. Berkeley helped popularize UNIX with their version which included TCP/IP networking, etc.
The article is about how Linux is replacing Unix as the OS of choice in certain situations. The premise is that Unix is the OS in danger of being phased out, not Linux.
Don't let reading comprehension get in the way of your cheerleading, though.
They are preparing Linux to run on their 200 CPU Origin systems.
And pretty much all the new supercomputer projects are Linux-based.
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