[SLL] Linux defector says RHEL zero, Sun Solaris hero

[Jerry Horvath]

The following article seems to be in harmony with recent SLL posts
relating increasing the volume of SLL discussion.

Regards,

Jerry Horvath


After years of Linux loyalty, a New York City-based open source
company called Sapotek Inc. switched to Sun Microsystems Inc.'s
Solaris 10 operating system with no regrets.

Sapotek develops open source Web products and applications and
provides free online desktop services to more than 200,000 users. The
company's CEO, Joshua Rand, started the company with the free Fedora
Linux distribution. That worked well enough for a small startup, but
as business scaled, Fedora's effectiveness declined. So in 2005,
Sapotek moved to a commercial version of Linux: Red Hat Enterprise
Linux (RHEL).
				
Rand purchased the licenses and support for the company's five-compute
node system -- all 64-bit Intel-Xeon based Dell 1U servers, plus an
EMC Corp. storage unit -- to include patches and upgrades, but snafus
persisted, he said.

"The problems we encountered were because Linux doesn't scale all that
well," Rand said. "We had to maintain logs and partitions, and we
devoted so much time to doing that manually. As a small team, we were
wasting time on routine tasks when we should have been able to focus
on developing."

Rand wasn't a fan of Red Hat's Global File System (GFS), either.
Sapotek used GFS to store several different system configurations
settings, such as crucial user files and its apache hosts.

"We had issues with GFS locking files at random. We couldn't isolate
the issues, so we had to look at each configuration on each server,
and every issue had a ripple effect that slowed down the system," Rand
said.

After two years of trying to make RHEL work, Rand had to move on. He
looked closely at Solaris 10 and, after speaking with Sun engineers
about a possible migration, decided to give Sun's Startup Essentials
program a try.

"Being Linux people, we were hesitant to switch," he said. "We didn't
even consider [Microsoft] Windows, because we are open source," said
Rand. "Sun set up some virtual servers for us to run tests, and we
ported all of our apps onto those virtual servers. We did load
testing, saw that it worked well and decided to go ahead with the
migration."

Sapotek now runs Solaris 10 OS on Sun 4200 servers with 64-bit
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Opteron quad-core processors, along with
Sun's x4500 storage unit.

The improvement is significant; with four compute nodes instead of
five, Rand has more computing power and 99.99% uptime, compared with
97% uptime with RHEL, he said.

"With this switch, we've gone from playing in the sandbox to getting
our doctoral degree. You can't even compare Red Hat GFS to Solaris
ZFS," Rand said. "We no longer need to do all those chores we had to
do with Linux. I can't even quantify the number of man-hours we freed
by moving to Solaris. We have so much more time to develop our
software now."

The report indicates, for example, that while Solaris x64 and Red Hat
Enterprise Linux are free and comparable in terms of implementation
cost, Solaris ultimately has a lower acquisition cost because it
includes features that users are likely to purchase separately in a
Linux environment.

Of course, the Linux camp disagrees that Solaris is more
cost-effective or performs better and points to market data as proof.

A November report by Framingham, Mass.-based research firm IDC shows
that customers are migrating from Unix to Linux. Between 2006 and 2009
overall operating system revenue for Unix is expected to decline by 5%
a year, while Linux revenue is projected to grow by 21% per year,
according to IDC's "Worldwide Operating Systems and Subsystems
2007-2011 Forecast."

The story with all links is here:
http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid39_gci1286507,00.html?track=NL-795&ad=617695&asrc=EM_NLN_2772749&uid=1757084