Unix (Sun, IBM, HP) vs. Linux

[Riley]

What is better about Unix as opposed to Linux?

[Hayl]

fyi: sun, ibm and hp all have linux products. or sell systems with linux.

imho i don't really think that there is an advantage to unix. possibly it is more accepted because it is a commercial product.
?? :rolleyes: ??

[garskoci]

I can tell you a point that companies don't like about Linux and would turn to UX first. Sad but true, it's liability. I work for a large company as a UX developer and have talked to people about Linux. There response was "What happens if something fails or tweaks our data, which may result in millions of $$$. Who do we sue?". That was one question that I had no answer.

[HighOrbit]

Two Reasons - fact and perception

Up until very recently, Linux could only scale up to 8 processors, which limited it to low end hardware. (I think SGI rencently got Linux up to 64 processors). Unix can scale as high as you got money to pay for. So Sun or IBM can put Unix on a super high-end enterprise server that can smoke anything running Linux. Also big Unix suppliers like Sun, IBM, SGI, and HP are also the hardware suppliers, so they can optimize Unix for the hardware. The customer is buying a server, the OS comes with the server. When a company goes out to buy a 2 million dollar server, they expect to have an OS tightly integrated with the hardware, so Sun Solaris and IBM AIX or HP-UX are going to run beautifully on their respective hardware.

Another issue was the premium level of tech support that Unix companies provided and their business stability (IBM isn't going out of business anytime soon). Lots of people don't perceive this level of business stability with Linux. They ask themselves, "If I deploy Mandrake on my network, will Mandrake go bankrupt and dissapear?" There is also a perception of code maturity and stabilty that comes with Unix versus what a corporate type might see as a bleeding edge (read unstable) hacker OS. Add to this the fact that Unix has a 20 year track record and Linux has only been "ready for primetime" for the last 5 years. All of this has given Unix a better reputation than Linux amongst the corporate types.

[hlrguy]

While I think Linux and BSD are fantastic Unix's, the plain fact is, Solaris (Sun) is what I would still put the mission critical applications on. I telecommute, and simply love Linux in it's native support with UNIX, however, the HUGE difference in cost aside, Sun's kernel and native software is probably second to none. My workstation at work, that I route through and run all processes on (and then remote them to here :)) has not been rebooted in 2 1/2 years. It runs 100's of processes all the time, and at nights, hundreds of workstation, I do mean HUNDREDs are tied in for the nightly compiles of gigabytes of code. (I work for a VERY large company). You have to register if you want your W/S exluded if you are working evenings or nights.

Personally, in the 6 years I have worked here, I have only seen one kernel panic on any of our products and that was caused by a broadcast storm where the customers IT folks re-used all the same IPs for new hardware and let them loose on the network. Sun had a patch in 4 hours.

By law, we have to provide 99.999% uptime (3 minutes/year) and any outages must be reported with full investigation and resolution steps. Anything less than that, I would go Linux. Will Linux get to that level of reliability, guaranteed, but not there quite yet.

hlrguy

[bandwidth_pig]

Hlrguy I must admit I feel the jealousy welling up inside. To telecommute...oh how I have longed for that day.

I will just echo what everybody else has said. I think when a large company or a company with a serious mission critical need looks at a solution, one of the first things they examine is support. With Linux you do have RedHat. But really, if you pitch the idea of RedHat to some suit who really only counts beans all day, he will look at you and say "Red what?"

Uh...thats "Red Hat" sir.

Who is that?

It's a company that produces a Linux distribution. We can do this for a fraction of the cost.

And will these "Hat" people fix this when it breaks? Nevermind. Doesn't matter. This is far too valuable to entrust to just anybody.

Yes you do have IBM. And really, that is the only prayer in hell a person has who wants to push a serious mission critical Linux application (and get it past the suits who don't know and don't care). But then again, if it is mission critical, do you really want the source code tha t runs the platform that the bean counters are entrusting to make millions upon published all over the world and exploited? No. We want a rock solid proprietary solution. And so you go back to the Sun and the HPs of the world. And really, it's hell of a lot better than MS. It's Sun and HP in the high end market all the way I think.

[bandwidth_pig]

Originally posted by hlrguy
While I think Linux and BSD are fantastic Unix's, the plain fact is, Solaris (Sun) is what I would still put the mission critical applications on. I telecommute, and simply love Linux in it's native support with UNIX, however, the HUGE difference in cost aside, Sun's kernel and native software is probably second to none. My workstation at work, that I route through and run all processes on (and then remote them to here :)) has not been rebooted in 2 1/2 years. It runs 100's of processes all the time, and at nights, hundreds of workstation, I do mean HUNDREDs are tied in for the nightly compiles of gigabytes of code. (I work for a VERY large company). You have to register if you want your W/S exluded if you are working evenings or nights.

Personally, in the 6 years I have worked here, I have only seen one kernel panic on any of our products and that was caused by a broadcast storm where the customers IT folks re-used all the same IPs for new hardware and let them loose on the network. Sun had a patch in 4 hours.

By law, we have to provide 99.999% uptime (3 minutes/year) and any outages must be reported with full investigation and resolution steps. Anything less than that, I would go Linux. Will Linux get to that level of reliability, guaranteed, but not there quite yet.

hlrguy

By law you have to provide five nines? Are you in the telecom biz or something?

[hlrguy]

Originally posted by bandwidth_pig
Hlrguy I must admit I feel the jealousy welling up inside. To telecommute...oh how I have longed for that day.

If it gets to that day, PM me and I can mail a hundred expect scripts to spawn telents through telnets, remote GUIs, ssh compression of VNC, I have, because I had to, figured a way to get anything back to my local display. My latest is an expect script to rsh to my workstation, start a 1050x900 VNC session, exit, start a redirected compressed SSH back to localhost 2 where the script spawns another process that starts VNC server to connect to localhost 2. Poof, my desktop at work is local and very usable at 56K. It is an icon on the desktop. Many I love UNIX/LINUX.

[hlrguy]

Originally posted by bandwidth_pig
By law you have to provide five nines? Are you in the telecom biz or something?

Yep, I work in telecom. I work in wireless, actually, specializing in HLRs (hence the name). HLRs are the brains behind the entrie wireless network. Anything you do, all calls delivered, short message is controlled by an HLR. My company, is HUGE though. They do everything imaginable, even have 2 submarines for their own fiber optic division! Maybe you can guess, but I am still hesitant to state the name...you never know. (The firewall in me talking).

All telecom is like that though. Mandatory uptime. Everything is redundant. The neatest product, imho is the HLR. Two sides (mated) one on the east coast, one on the west coast (geographically diverse) with dedicated high speed links. Traffic can switch from the east coast to the west coast in <100 msecs in the case of an outage. Every installation is geographic diversity, although not allways 2500 miles apart and to the user, it simply looks like a single box. :)

hlrguy

[dungscooperdave]

Wow. Sounds like a fun job. :)

[stumbles]

Originally posted by garskoci
I can tell you a point that companies don't like about Linux and would turn to UX first. Sad but true, it's liability. I work for a large company as a UX developer and have talked to people about Linux. There response was "What happens if something fails or tweaks our data, which may result in millions of $$$. Who do we sue?". That was one question that I had no answer.

Since when has any software company (application or OS) included a guarantee of no data loss, damage, etc in their EULAs?

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

Originally posted by stumbles
Since when has any software company (application or OS) included a guarantee of no data loss, damage, etc in their EULAs?

I don't think anybody ever has, but with a company like Sun, IBM or HP, you could sue somebody if you could prove that some major, preventable error was caused by improper programming on the part of the company.

Aside from that, if you read the GPL, it explicitly states that the author is not liable for any data loss. So, even if a company wanted to sue the writer of a GPL database program because it crashed and lost 1.2 million customers' data, they couldn't, because use of the software constitutes acceptance of the GPL.

[stumbles]

Originally posted by Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379

Aside from that, if you read the GPL, it explicitly states that the author is not liable for any data loss. So, even if a company wanted to sue the writer of a GPL database program because it crashed and lost 1.2 million customers' data, they couldn't, because use of the software constitutes acceptance of the GPL.

I beleive there is a statement to that effect in most any EULA that the "author", such as MS, IBM are not liable for data loss, etc.

[dungscooperdave]

Yes, I think so too.

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

Originally posted by stumbles
I beleive there is a statement to that effect in most any EULA that the "author", such as MS, IBM are not liable for data loss, etc.

This may very well be true, but I since I haven't looked at a vendor such as MS or IBM's EULA in so long, I wouldn't know. But what I really meant to get at was that because of the decentralized nature of an Open Source project, it would be harder to sue somebody. I mean, if you're running RedHat, and MySQL has a bug in it that reinitializes your database, who could you sue? RedHat for putting it in its distro? The group that created MySQL? The coder who contributed that buggy code snippet?

What I really meant was that since a company is producing a product, they could be liable, even with a non-liability clause in its EULA. I mean, everyone knows cars are dangerous, yet we still drive them. Though we know that they are dangerous, some still want to sue a car company when the car injures someone. If a company's software product causes loss of data due to a bug, somebody's going to want to sue them. I'm no law scholar or anything, but I think those two scenarios draw a parallel.

[dungscooperdave]

[Semi-Tangent]
Actually, I've heard that a growing number of companies are turning to open source solutions to meet their needs. MySQL is a big example of this. From an article I read in the WSJ, it basically said that the Microsoft SQL is piece of crap and not even worth considering for most businesses. That leaves two choices, Oracle, or MySQL. Since they can both handle about the same amount of load, a lot of companies turn to MySQL because it's a fraction of the price of Oracle. Open source is the way of the future. :D
[/Semi-Tangent]

[dungscooperdave]

I wouldn't be surprised if Linux matured to a point one day where the same thing would happen to it, that is, a lot of companies would turn to it as an inexpensive alternative to Unix, without the cut in quality.

[iDxMan]

Actually, I've heard that a growing number of companies are turning to open source solutions to meet their needs.

Do you mean it meets the needs of their core systems? In some cases yes, but many times it doesn't.

Skipping telecom examples, how about a quick look at healthcare? Now its a given that healthcare systems tend to lag a bit behind today's technology, but that gap has been getting much smaller over the last 10 years. As a whole we're (the hospital I work for) are leaps and bounds from where we were just a few years ago, but open source isn't playing a big role just yet.

All of our core systems run on HPUX and AIX, although with all the Novell/NT heads in I.T there's far more M$ than open source. Its really sad how much money we waste when for certain tasks a freebsd or linux box would do just fine.

As for MySQL - that would be great if the application vendor supported it, so its oracle for now. Although to OSS's credit, I rely heavily on the various freebsd web/db servers (not to mention the amount of perl in everyday use) I have setup and so do many of my users. These machines also support some fairly important processes, so its not just for ancillary fluff.

Its also interesting how the idea of using OSS is increasing as new projects come up. Other departments, previous colleagues, etc now see what is possible without having to make a huge financial investment.