Hal Stern interview on Solaris & Linux Datacenter

m3ntos writes "Hal Stern from Sun gets interviewed on Solaris and Linux pricepoints in the datacenter, among other things. What is going to replace the margin included with all those unused cycles in the datacenter?"

Sun / Microsoft relationship is a bit more clear..

[uid100]

I appreciate the pointed questioning regarding MS and Sun's relationship.

"InfoWorld: So a Windows system could show up as an N1 resource?"
"Stern: No, that's not part of the development plan."

Also interesting to note that Sun's executives position on Linux is "we will jump on it if corp. America puts their core IT budget money into it, otherwise we stick with Solaris".

I see a lot of what Sun's 2-4 year plan is in this article, or at least what they'd like it to be.

Re:Sun / Microsoft relationship is a bit more clea

[Bog Standard]

Hmmm, Sun have a ball and chain around them. Its their hardware. While Solaris definitely has its place at the moment (HA Systems especially) most apps just don't need the added sweetness that Solaris gives you. You are better off with commodity hardware/blades and Linux, which Sun just can't compete in at the moment when you factor in lifetime costs. The sooner Sun embrace Linux fully (Linux NOT on Sparc) the more they will sell - services included. IBM are getting there with P5/P4 and Linux. Linux w

Re:Sun / Microsoft relationship is a bit more clea

[turgid]

You are better off with commodity hardware/blades and Linux, which Sun just can't compete in at the moment

So what the heck is this [sun.com] and this [sun.com]?

And what about these [sun.com] workstations [sun.com]?

IBM are getting there with P5/P4 and Linux. Linux will soon catch up and overtake Solaris for the things that matter to Sun the most - HA and in chassis scalability.

IBM? Of course, how silly of me to forget.

I see that Slackware [slackware.com] now has an IBM S/390 port, but still no Opteron port. Now all three people who want to run Linux on their

Hal Stern has been around for a while ...

[xmas2003]

For those that don't know him, Hal Stern has been associated with Sun for a long time and is one of the "sharp good" guys IMHO. He's written several Sysadmin related books [www.isbn.nu] including the classic "Managing NFS and NIS" and here's a 1995 Sysadmin article [nstu.nsk.su] where he dives into adb - clearly a technical guy who knows his stuff ... although the article is more about marketing and pricing.

Most popular UNIX in business

[mnmn]

Articles like these really show what Solaris is all about, it is a corporate UNIX. The N1 grid, all the virtualization technologies (zones for ex), the advanced storage management, java application servers, all are about making management of large-scale technologies easier. This is where Solaris really shines, and thats why they cannot just take Linux and start using it. Linux's SMP is less scalable, threading less mature, and is a target moving too fast. It has major benefits on embedded systems, desktop systems, and a wide array of cpu architectures, but Solaris shines on its own turf.

I however disagree that firewalls are obsoleted with stronger authentication. A firewall protects a network from the 'outside world'. Such an outside world is extremely hostile and will take advantage of ANY bugs, some unknown to you. I've seen attacks on sendmail, ssh, samba, windows netbios protocols, bugs in ipv6 implementation, dictionary attacks on telnet and ssh, all kinds of buffer overflows etc. These problems arent miraculously fixed when your authentication goes 512-bits and requires a password at least 12 characters long. Software will always have bugs, and to protect them, we'll need firewalls which will present a face with far fewer possible bugs than the network inside it.

Re: Usefulness of a firewall

[uid100]

I agree, a firewall will have a place for the forseable future. The mail point however is to protect against mis-configured equipment or old, unpatched equipment. Most big Oracle shops I've known like to run at least one major version behind on their OS platform and don't patch the OS regularly. It's not uncommon to see new implementations of Oracle going in right now with Solaris 8 or even 2.6 running Oracle 8i. They don't even touch the /etc/inetd.conf.
This is where firewalls become very useful.

Re: Usefulness of a firewall

[Bog Standard]

Especially when you have 300000 users and you just implement a corporate policy that dictates 12 character passwords. Layered security is also something that no organisation should be without. This by definition includes firewalls, IDS, HIDS, etc. Toilet Time!

Re:Most popular UNIX in business

[uid100]

I agree, a firewall will have a place for the forseable future.

The main point however is to protect against mis-configured equipment or old, unpatched equipment. Most big Oracle shops I've known like to run at least one major version behind on their OS platform and don't patch the OS regularly. It's not uncommon to see new implementations of Oracle going in right now with Solaris 8 or even 2.6 running Oracle 8i. They don't even touch the /etc/inetd.conf.
This is where firewalls become very useful.