Sun's Schwartz on Solaris vs. Linux

alwayson-network.com ^

[chance33_98]

Ping

[chance33_98]

(From the link above to the Orion article)

When it was introduced in 2002, Solaris 9 included volume manager software, another item that had previously cost extra. Solaris 9 4/03 updates this package, which lets a server communicate with several storage systems as if they were one, with the ability to employ a volume as large as 2,000 terabytes.

The previous limit was 1 terabyte, said Bill Moffitt, group manager for Solaris product management, in an interview. A future version of Solaris will include updated Unix File System software that also can span a 16-terabyte range, he added.

[milan]

It's obvious we have some tech peoples up this morning! This is like the 3rd Linux post.

Systems Admin here...anybody else?

[chance33_98]

Check out my profile page :)

[milan]

Looked at your web site...don't need to ask you.

[chance33_98]

LOL. Yeah, I think we have a few on here. I work mid-noon, so I am up at these ungodly hours. Happily, things are running well so plenty of time to study and post. Mostly post.

[milan]

600 servers? What size team works with you?

[chance33_98]

I work alone at night. We have some folks on call for certain apps/servers, but if they are here (as opposed to one of our other centers) I am the only one who touches them at night (unless a hardware failure, then we have a contract with the vendor for 24x7 - don't want your atm/bank account down too long ya know!).

[milan]

Wow. Yeah, I think I am getting off subject (sort of), but I gotta ask. How much clustering are you doing out of the 600?

[chance33_98]

BTW - most the problems we have are with windows machines :) Solaris runs smoothly, biggest problems with windows machines is they just lock up.

I was building two sun servers a bot ago, 1u in size, 2 hd - compared to the 450 I have at home these are pretty slick (although, I have 20 hd versus 2, mine takes up half a rack! gotta get me one of those small ones soon, running out of space at home.)

[Jason_b]

yes---AIX on two-node 7017 S80 High Availability cluster w/ non-concurrent SSA disks.
checking in, and out to get ready for work.

[chance33_98]

How much clustering are you doing out of the 600?

Most of them actually. We have 2 data centers locally, and more elsewhere. Some boxes have hundreds of millions $ flow through them daily, solaris ones of course, so we are darn careful to insure up time through clustering, backup networks, etc and so on. It's all pretty well done here.

I am finally getting into the networking side of things too, which will add to the work (most all of which I can do from my laptop). Hope to have the ccnp in august, which basically means they will find more work for me to do ;|

[Cacique]

more on linux

[milan]

I am jealous of you. I work at Georgia Southern University in the Math/CS department. Love the job (and get to work on masters for free) but I only have to deal with about 200+ machines. No clustering, if you can believe it (beowulf in the physics dept.) and only 2 servers; web and file/app/mail. We mainly deal with Windows. But, of course, the servers run Unix (Solaris) and some of the CS faculty work with Linux.

[chance33_98]

I am hoping to move out of this job and into a unix position, looking to do scripting (Korn), C, Perl and java for our enterprise clients - more stress, but I hate doing admin work, ran my own IT dept last job, but they went under like the other telcos. Networking is ok, but I have always been fond of programming (started out in the early 80's on a trash-80 model 1. 16k ram, no disk drives, 2-4 mhz speed. Yeah, those were the days - porn consited of a woman looking like she was made of all white legos....)

[chance33_98]

A note about clustering, we use win 2000 advanced and data center, and I have seen problems with it not failing over when a system locks up. Does fine if there is a reboot, but locks up just kill it. Grrrr is all I can say about that.

[rdb3]

The Penguin Ping.

Wanna be Penguified? Just holla!

Got root?

[Jay D. Dyson]

As much as I liked Sun Solaris in the past, I became seriously disillusioned with them when they axed Solaris x86 support last year (Feb, 2002). It was only after a very concerted effort (of which I was a part) to browbeat Sun into making an Intel edition of Solaris 9 did Sun reverse its position.

All the same, the whole thing just soured my feelings regarding Sun and Solaris. Last year I dumped Solaris on all my systems (Intel and SPARC) and switched to Linux.

I still miss some of the things to which I was accustomed in Solaris (having been faithful to the OS since the early '90s), but at least I know that the manufacturers of Linux will never pull the rug out from under me the way Sun did last year.

-Jay

[isthisnickcool]

What's the longest uptime you have had on a Solaris box?

I has one Slackware machine that ran nearly 500 days without a reboot. It was loaded most the time doing dbs work. Had an external DPT raid array. The only reason we shut it down was to move it across the room.