Re: Solaris: The Most Advanced OS?
Ron Johnson wrote:
On Tue, 2005-11-08 at 12:02 -0600, Mike McCarty wrote:
Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote:
Advanced implies being closer to some destination. I don't know if
everyone agrees on what that destination is. Features or complexity is
not a sign of being advanced.
If your goal is video editing, Solaris is not as advanced as other
operating systems.
Excellent answer!!!
Solaris is great at what it is designed for, and Sun's moves toward open
source should be embraced.
What is it designed for exactly?
When I used it extensively there were two areas which they targeted:
workstations
high availability apps (like banks and telecom)
Do you see clustering and Carrier-Grade Linux chipping away at
this in any significant way?
Well, I may not be the best one to ask, since I've been out of
telecom for about three years. But so far, I do not see Linux
making much if any entry into telecom. Blue Hat has made some
progress, but not much. The availability requirements in telecom
are so far beyond what most system engineers consider, that
proprietary solutions are still mostly the choice.
Back some years ago when I was making recommendations for action
in regards to OS selection for telecom equipment, I recall talking
with the president of a company, who proudly boasted that his
company's product was so reliable that it was used in fighter
planes by the military. I responded that his boast meant nothing
to me, what I wanted to know was "Will it stay up?" He didn't understand
the difference between a jet plane flight control computer which
had to stay up for perhaps 24 hours max before a reboot could be
done, and a telephone switch which was allowed to have only
5 (five) 5 minutes per year unscheduled downtime.
I don't see Linux making *any* headway as an "open source supported"
product *ever* in telecom. The only reason for telecom to abandon
proprietary home-grown OS is so that they can get out of OS
support altogether. They already have proprietary OS which suit their
needs far better than Linux does. If another company is going to do
the support, then Linux has a long way to go in availability.
The availability requirements cannot be met by reliability, even if
the OS provably *never* would crash, because the hardware can't meet
them. So they have to be met via redundancy. So far, no commercial
OS I have reviewed (and I have reviewed quite a few) can handle
the redundancy needed by telecom on its own.
We tried and tried to abandon proprietary OS and database (both
home-grown) and could not because the off-the-shelf stuff just can't
meet the availability and performance requirements.
As an example, I tried to find a database which could support
client-server architecture, client and server
on separate computers
8 million records
ten byte unique key, ~50 byte records
8500 probes per second, most of which would fail
to find a matching record, so would
plumb the entire depth of the database
automatic fail-over to another server when server goes down
fail-over must take place in 10ms or less
database can be updated at rate of 100+ records
per second while actively being probed
and could not find one. So we could not abandon our home-
grown DBMS, which met these requirements. I interviewed
quite a few people who came to me convinced that they could
meet our requirements. All shook their heads
saying it couldn't be done. I'd point out to them that I
had shown them telephone switches doing it, and they'd
leave shaking their heads, saying that they couldn't do it.
So it's not just a matter of "Linux" not meeting requirements.
There is a whole other infrastructure not present in commercial
OS. If all that must also be maintained, then the OS is not
much more work to maintain.
Mike
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