Re: Debian on Sun box any advantage?
On Wed, 2008-10-22 at 13:18 -0700, John Bevins wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
>
> I don't know much about Sun boxes. What advantage, if any, is there to
> running Debian on a Sun box as opposed to a brand name x86 server?
As the question is phrased I think it is unanswerable. It depends what
Sun hardware you are comparing and what x86 hardware you are comparing
it with. At the higher end, Sun kit is available in 'wider' parallel
configurations (i.e. the recently released 256 way UltraSPARC T2+ based
boxen), you will also likley find more server orientated features on Sun
boxen, for example ECC RAM, more redundancy, network management
hardware, etc. But these are general trends.
For a long while Linux on SPARC hardware was (to my impression, please
do correct me if I am wrong) mainly run by Linux users who had acquired
Sun hardware second hand and wanted to make use of it. I am not aware
of many cases of people purchasing new Sun hardware just to run Linux
(althought I could be mistaken). This is beginning to change as I
believe Linux is now officially supported by Sun on UltraSPARC T based
hardware as a guest OS.
If you are looking to buy new hardware, then get the manufacturers to
give you the sales spheel about why you should buy from them. If you
have spare SPARC based hardware, are looking to put it to use and don't
want to run Solaris*, then Debian/SPARC is a good solution.
HTH
Cheers,
- Martin
*. You may find hardware support, particularly for higher end and more
obscure hardware, is better on Solaris, however, there is more the a
choice of OS than just drivers. YMMV.
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