NYSE Moves to Linux 351
blitzkrieg3 writes "The New York Times is reporting on how the NYSE group now feels that Linux is 'mature enough' for the New York Stock Exchange. They are using commodity x86 based Hewlett-Packard hardware and Linux in place of their traditional UNIX machines. From NYSE Euronext CIO Steve Rubinow: 'We don't want to be closely aligned with proprietary Unix. No offense to HP-UX, but we feel the same way about [IBM's] AIX, and we feel the same way to some extent about Solaris. Other reasons cited for the switch were increased flexibility and lower cost.'"
Yes, but does it run... (Score:5, Funny)
Not the same as a Desktop (Score:2, Insightful)
Now I know this seems obvious, but the "WOW if the NYSE is doing it!" crowd should try and control themselves at least a little.
Re:Not the same as a Desktop (Score:5, Funny)
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Guarantee of Reliability is not Free (Score:5, Interesting)
If Linux has a bug that diminishes uptime at the NYSE and if the Linux "team" of volunteer programmers does not offer a fix within 24 hours, then HP management will order its commercial slave programmers to develop a solution -- pronto.
If a you or I encountered a bug in our Linux downloaded from the Web for free, we would have no immediate remedy to our problem. We must wait for the next release, which could take weeks.
Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free (Score:5, Interesting)
And this is different from other OSes the average person can buy...how, exactly?
Chris Mattern
Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free (Score:5, Funny)
It could take...months?
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A typical patch from Microsoft takes years, if at all.
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Most of the good IT folks in big shops know that Sun contracts are less then redhat , but the real question is what is hp using for a distro ? Is It centos ? Or redhat ? Suse maybe ? And how are they cutting the cost of support ? To be honest I don't think a support rep from india and a couple on location engineers are going to cut the mustard here.
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This is one of the advantages to FOSS. Yes, you might end up having to wait for the next release like any other package (or you might just prefer to wait, if you lack time or the bug isn't severe enough to motivate you), but you might have other options/choices.
You forgot an option. (Score:4, Insightful)
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If Linux has a bug that diminishes uptime at the NYSE and if the Linux "team" of volunteer programmers does not offer a fix within 24 hours, then HP management will order its commercial slave programmers to develop a solution -- pronto.
And the great thing is that the NYSE could (if they needed to) ask any software company to fix the bug in the free software! They don't need to rely on the original vendor :-)
The marketing crap [hp.com] says the London Stock Exchange is the world's fastest, using Microsoft software on HP hardware.
Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it's highly impressive. When it's working.
http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2203101/lse-technical-glitch [computing.co.uk]
* * * * *
I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.
—A. Whitney Brown
Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree to a certain extent 'that it would probably be no more or less difficult to switch Linux vendors/supporters than a Commercial Unix variant' in certain cases (any very large complex or heavily customised implementation) but for *most* companies that wouldn't be an issue, mail servers, network services etc.. the core of a companies IT infrastructure would be made up of common and well tested components, supportable by anyone, custom database or web applications would be more difficult to transition to a new support provider, but if they are *yours* and open then at least you *can*.
As for market share, I'm not sure. It is clear that Linux is replacing Unix in some areas, but it is also making inroads the areas where Microsoft is traditionally dominant.
Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free (Score:5, Insightful)
That's absolutely true.
Microsoft would have really liked to have that contract though. Both for the revenue and for the bragging rights.
So it, indeed, is not eating into Microsoft's market share, but it did slow their growth, however slightly.
Guarantee of Reliability is not Free (as in beer) (Score:5, Insightful)
Develop all your software and systems on one Linux. Then find out you don't like HP? Fine.. take your business to Dell. The distribution they're running on starts to suck rocks? No problem, switch to RHEL. RHEL starts to not meet your needs? Customize your own distribution.
Not being tying your business to the whims of whatever company you're dealing with is truly powerful. If you ask me, that's the real power of Linux, and open source software. Linux makes operating systems into a true commodity like grain, where switching to another vendor is low cost.
Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free (as in bee (Score:3, Informative)
They had a choice of moving from a 1,600 MIPS mainframe to a 2,500+ MIPS mainframe OR rewriting all the code and moving to a distributed setup. They chose the distributed setup to avoid hardware related vendor lock-in, not because of software.
Even though they're saying "We don't want to be closely aligned with proprietary Unix," he said. "No offense to HP-UX, but we feel the same way about [IBM's] AIX..." their new system will be
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No, their mainframe was running OS/390.
JCL is the mainframe equivalent of bash or csh.
COBOL is the business world equivalent of C/Java/Basic.
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and:
I take that to mean exactly what I just said. If you have any references to more information to support what you're saying about hard
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Read the summary:
Does this sound to you like a naive customer who simply wants to purchase a "solution" and doesn'
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The NYSE purchased a packaged solution from HP
Which makes the phrase "commodity hardware" in the summary somewhat disingenius. Commodity hardware is whatever is commonly available "off the shelf", and certainly wouldn't have a guaranteed-six-sigma-uptime support contract available. Hell, with commodity hardware, you're lucky to get anything more than a 1-year warranty on most stuff. And that's a ship-it-to-our-Far-East-support-center-and-we'll-fix-or-replace-it-within-thirty-days 1-year warranty.
Best to stick with something like "standard x86 hardw
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Yes, we don't guarantee that but then we don't guarantee it for the NYSE either. The different with Linux and Free Software is that your bugs are treated exactly the same
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You just don't get open source and Linux at all do you? If there is a bug, we ALL have the ability to track it down ourselves and even fix it ourselves if we have the know how. I've had to fix many a bug before a patch was released and had to create work arounds before patches were released. I was able to do this because
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Re:Not the same as a Desktop (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway if this is a success (and there is no reason it shouldn't be) and since Linux excels on the server (and frankly is perfectly suited to 90% of corporate desktops) this kind of public roll out is a great selling point and a driver for others large and small to do the same, after all little 10 man operations can suddenly point to their two Linux mail servers and proudly tell their clients that they are using the same technology as the NYSE! (Not the same software or the same hardware (and definitely without the SLA's and support) but the same technology....:) ) .
For those nut bothering to read the links - salient parts are:
So they moved from UNIX to Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So they moved from UNIX to Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
NYSE, the Ivory Tower of capitalism, switching to Linux.
You know who won? Richard Stallman, that's who won. Congratulations dude.
Re:So they moved from UNIX to Linux (Score:5, Funny)
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Microsoft seems to want to control e
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entrance requirements:
Must be or be descended from a successful capitalist.
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Without scarcity, there can be no capitalism.
Re:So they moved from UNIX to Linux (Score:5, Informative)
If anything, the principles of capitalism were described by Adam Smith in An Inquiry Into the Wealth of Nations [gutenberg.org] where he observed that people do act in their own self-interest -- not that they SHOULD, merely that it is inescapable that they DO -- regardless of what rules society may try to impose, and thus instead of fighting human nature, we should harness it to make the best out of a bad situation.
Smith was pretty certain that labor and property were both scarce resources and thus the way to get the most benefit for SOCIETY was to let them be privately controlled. He never once made claims to 'infinite profit' or 'infinite growth' - in fact just the opposite where he noted that:
This produce, how great soever, can never be infinite, but must have certain limits.
and
The mercantile capital of Great Britain, though very great, yet not being infinite,
And some dimwit moderated my post as troll. Get a clue.
Re:So they moved from UNIX to Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
From what I've seen of the world, "infinite profit, infinite growth, and maximum self-interest" is a more accurate description of the goals of some/many large corporations than anything Adam Smith said. Unfortunately for all of us, greed in our society is treated as a virtue, not a necessary (or unavoidable) evil. I think this is the heart of problems caused by our so-called Capitalist system.
I am reminded of Plato's description of the fall of Atlantis [gutenberg.org]:
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Re:So they moved from UNIX to Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't kid yourself. Microsoft is also a competitor to Sun, HP, and the Linux OS. Microsoft would have killed to get the freaking NYSE, if for no other reason that it'd be a feather in their cap.
As it stands, the NYSE partially running on Linux is quite a major deal, at least to the Big Business Guys who like to follow what other Big Business Guys are doing.
Troll much? (Score:3)
Now if they had switched to/from Windows, then it'd be big news
Why? Because you have a bug up your ass about MS?
When is the nancy boy Linux crowd worry about improving their offering instead of the evil Microsoft? This isn't about computing, it's about being the biggest kid on the block.[...]
Well, you're either a troll or a shill, but I'll toss you a bone either way.
The 'nancy boy' Linux crowd will worry about improving our offering when my cd case at work, for fixing Windows desktops with a blown up registry, is full of Microsoft live cds that I can respin and burn at my will.
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yeah, more excuses. you're not going to do anything but make yourself feel that you're against the forces of evil. someday you'll wake up and wonder what you wasted your time fighting when you realize that good computing practices are worth more than even the best oss and it doesn't piss off the customer.
I am the customer; and that OSS software is the only way I can get the product Microsoft has so badly screwed up to work after it blows itself up. So, Microsoft has ticked off me, the customer. Who said anything about fight evil? I want the best tools, I don't care who creates them, so long as I can use and modify them with as little hassle as possible.
So far as IDEs go, Microsoft has the best. I've got 4 or 5 Visual Studios and Expression Studio - Granted, Microsoft screwed up the install disk on
His final comment (Score:5, Funny)
no fooling. (Score:5, Interesting)
No fooling.
I used to work on Amdhall's unix for their mainframes. Among other things it was used by brokerages to support trading and all the Baby Bells to support data collection for billing.
If a baby bell's billing system went down all the phone calls dialed, started, or completed while it was down were free. This made downtime cost something like $4 million / hour.
Brokerage support going down cost far more.
So imagine a trading system going down (equivalent to all the brokerages going down at the same time...)
Needless to say, much of the point of mainframes is to keep this from ever happening.
So the hardware is built so it performs the correct computation despite component failures, radiation-flipped bits, or on-the-fly hardware changes (adding/deleting/resizing peripherals, CPUs memory, switching out failing components), etc. And the software is built to similar standards.
This can cause problems. Like sizing event counters to stand uptime measured in decades. Or getting non-critical patches installed. (I recall a minor patch to a driver, too small to rate forcing a couple million bux worth of reboot, that had been installed on all the customers' machines to go live at the next reboot. Two years later (last I heard) they were still supporting the bug because some systems hadn't rebooted yet...)
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This made downtime cost something like $4 million / hour.
Boohoo. I mean not to sound utterly cynical, but an outage didn't cost them squat, other than whatever extra expense they would incur to expedite repair. That's almost like saying the MAFIAA loses money to piracy. You can't LOSE what you don't have.
Right I know, it's economics, accounting, Wallstreet math. Blah blah. I had those classes too. I am really not every sympathetic to billion dollar businesses potential for failure.
A) It won't happen because the Gov would just bail them out on our dime (ala the a
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Money is already an abstract concept. It's a nothing. There is *no* difference between having 4 billion dollars, losing 4 billion, and gaining 4 billion later; and having 4 billion dollars, losing none of it, but not gaining 4 billion later. This isn't blind obedience to some high school teacher. It's simply the fact that (4 - 4) + 4 = 4 + (4 - 4).
You can be unsympathetic to the losses of multibillion dollar corporations
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I call bullshit. Telco switches record the calls to CDR (call data records) files before sending the data on to the billing systems. If the billing system goes down no big whoop, the files are processed the next day.
Now there are some cases when calls could get lost - but those are due to emergency traffic through the switch during overload conditions having a higher process priority than
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As it was explained to me the CDRs were being recorded in the mainframe live, not buffered in the switches (except for network streaming).
I was on the OS side of things, not the apps, and told this by another OS type. So it's possible you're right and I'm propagating a myth.
But I do note that storing them in the switches and later uploading them to the mainframe can increase t
distributed systems (Score:3, Insightful)
Inevitability, Mr. Anderson. (Score:3, Insightful)
Openness, schmopenness (Score:4, Funny)
NASDAQ hasn't changed (Score:3, Insightful)
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation. [nerdkits.com]
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Some people seem to say that there is a lot of Windows in 2 Metrotech and 1400 Fed (Carteret, NJ data center), but I know that working for one of the big I-banks, we have little use for Microsoft outside of mail, so it'd be weird if Nasdaq ran a lot of MS.
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Congratulations, Mr. Torvalds. (Score:2)
"Proprietary UNIX"? (Score:3, Informative)
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"Proprietary" is not the opposite of "standard." Nor is it the opposite of "open." It is entirely possible, and in fact almost inescapable, to have an open, standard, product that is also proprietary.
Automobiles are based on open standards, which is why you don't have to buy Ford gas, drive on Ford roads, or even use Ford spark plugs. But Ford auto
I bet we won't be seeing this story in.... (Score:4, Funny)
What are the [real] costs? (Score:2, Troll)
The other thing is: How is the NYSE handling integration of Linux into a windows network? I am sure there are a few windows boxes at the exchange. There is this guy at www.linux.com who is claiming or alleging that Ubuntu is hard to integrate in a Windows network. Here is the link http://www.linux.com/feature/122681 [linux.com]
On a personal note,
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Linux uptime. (Score:5, Interesting)
For what it's worth:
When I went to Iraq, I had a laptop running ubuntu. I setup apache2, php5, and mysql5. We created our own "series of tubes" in our barracks area and I supplied our own intranet website (read: porn server). Oh, and America's Army server.
This thing ran for several months at a time without a reboot. The only reboots were due to other problems, like when a stray 7.62mm bullet knocked out our generator one time, but as for linux running...this thing ran like a champ. In 11 months of service, it never had a problem.
Of course, it wasn't under the same kind of load. But my NIC was usually maxed out for 40% of the day.
For consumer-grade hardware with free and open software, 0% downtime not energy related, I feel that Linux did a fine job. Seriously, 11 months, 3 reboots due to power. Nice.
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But you can't say it was bulletproof.
Re:Linux uptime. (Score:4, Funny)
Wait a sec. You fought in Iraq, and while there, during your time off, you played America's Army? Holy crap.
Or are all AA servers located in Iraq, for added realism?
maybe headline should have been (Score:3, Informative)
They might have some scalability issues (Score:2, Informative)
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Linux is not competing on high-performance computers. It OWNS the high-performance computers. Currently about 85% of the top500 super computers are using Linux:
http://www.top500.org/stats/list/30/osfam [top500.org]
Get the facts!!! (Score:2)
What a surprise. (Score:2)
NOT!
Hopefully their application developers are getting substantial percentages in advance.
Nothing New ... Check Nasdaq (Score:2)
Buy hey, glad to know the 'old boys' are finally catching up.
Good for them (Score:3, Interesting)
But the best part is the Windows migration isn't going so well. I left back in September but they had just bought new servers about five months before. They got no further than Server 2003 being installed on them due to documentation procedures, etc.
One server was to be an Exchange 2003 server to replace the Qmail server they were using. I just got email from someone there the other day and guess what, it's still Qmail.
The big push to Exchange btw was a woman named Catherine Avila, the Director of Administration. She was petrified that I.T. could potentially read her email because Qmail stored everything in the users home folder.
When I'd left the tally for hardware and software was up around $60,000. Both we systems guys loudly protested the Exchange bit. Also told them that if you were going to present an Exchange box to to world, you damn well better put something in front of it to stop the bullshit.
And of course when I left I made a prediction that within two months of my departure there'd be some catastrophic event. Sure enough, their web server crapped. The server in question was a LAMP box, and MySQL needs to be tuned occasionally to fix kludgy indices and queries. And that's what brought their web server down. There was a MySQL slave on the box that started consuming mass CPU cycles because of bad queries.
The PR guy said it was a rootkit. I call bullshit.
Re:Reliability (Score:4, Insightful)
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Voluntarily? I think that alone is enough to call the rest of your opinions into question.
I'm kidding, I'm just kidding... but I worked with Kaiser Permanente IT in Oakland, CA for 3 or 4 years, so I'm not really kidding. They were a bunch of mindless jerks, running NT 4.0 on like 50,000 end user desktops in 2004 because they couldn't port client/server apps to any other platform or migrate away from the old app. Ask me about the time when Slammer was going around and they had to s
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Re:Reliability (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reliability (Score:5, Informative)
Our digital video controllers run SUSE, our network connectivity monitors are Debian-based, our workstations throughout the company are a mix of Windows 2000, XP Pro, and Vista. Heck, our billing software runs on a Tandem [wikipedia.org]! The project I work on is a collaborative mix of the Tandem billing system, a Unix-derived OS middleware, the Solaris cluster application server, and Windows clients. It's a veritable OS soup. Thankfully, on the software side, it's all developed and supported by a 3rd party vendor. Yet through it all, our biggest headache is the Windows clients with their general operating system mishaps. They die unexpectedly, corrupting the MBR. The application suffers from a DLL error that comes and goes with different revisions of the software, etc. The Tandem and middleware have never gone down, and the Solaris cluster has a required program which springs a memory leak requiring a process restart every 30 days or so. That's all. If we could get a way to put our project into the field on a Linux-based platform, my job would consist of reading Slashdot and answering "how-do-I?" emails, not the current daily firefighting.
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Of all the OSes I've ever used, Windows is the only one that would slowly eat itself over time. Current versions of it are much, much better about this sort of thing, but Windows is the only one that has ever done that at all. I've seen other OSes
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Re:Reliability (Score:5, Interesting)
I work for NASA (who coined the term "mission critical") and we think it's ready. The IBM A31p laptops onboard the Space Station were recently switched to Redhat. These are the laptops that command to the core computer system and control the vehicle, not just some random payload.
Mission Control in Houston is in the process of switching to RHEL based systems, and should be complete sometime next year.
Re:Reliability (Score:5, Informative)
Just anecdotal experience but the Windows 2000 and 2003 boxes I've administered have been rock solid other than the occasional box which was running a flaky application. It never surprised me to see a random blue screen with Windows NT boxes but a blue screen on a 2000 or 2003 server was always a surprise. Having said that, I'm not sorry at all to see a major, high visibility implementation of Linux. I hope they have much success.
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Wow, who pissed in
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It never surprised me to see a random blue screen with Windows NT boxes but a blue screen on a 2000 or 2003 server was always a surprise.
Yeah, BSODs were kind of an event when we ran NT. Everybody was used to getting them once or twice a week when we ran 95 or 98, but when we switched to NT the frequency dropped to maybe one or two a quarter. When somebody got a blue screen under NT, it was cause for everybody to come over and look and make a crack about how that wouldn't have happened if only we were allowed to run (Linux / VMS / HP-UX / SunOS / DOS 6).
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I visited the trading floor (of which not much exists now -compared to past) in August. The desktops the traders used were Windows XP - Linux in an equal split. Presumably the back-end servers is what they are talking about here which according to the story was Unix. So it is a case where Microsoft had managed to get a foothold in a Unix only shop in the desktop and failed to leverage their monopoly power to capture the Server market.
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I visited the trading floor (of which not much exists now -compared to past) in August.
Did you notice the almost complete lack of paper?
I remember visiting the trading floor when I was in Highschool and the floor was practically covered in multi-colored slips of paper. Computerization & automation has seriously changed the way stocks are traded.
This Sept 12 Reuters Article [reuters.com] talks about how they've shut down most of the extra trading rooms because the actual number of traders on the floor has shrunk so much.
They're pretty much keeping humans in the loop as a hedge, not because they're real
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Re:Hope the license doesn't give them trouble. (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, if you don't even bother to reformat your article, it really does sound like a cut'n'paste troll. Let's check...
Well, here's one. [news.com] Must be a fairly new cut'n'paste troll.
I'll have some fun with it anyway, and feel free to copy and paste my response anywhere you see this troll:
That really dates this troll, or at least, the troll wants us to think it is that out of touch. Seriously, who uses TokenRing or ext2? (Oh, and you can defrag ext2, if you really, really want to.)
Sucks to be you. Try reading the license.
That's General Public License.
Indeed it does, but only to whoever you distribute binaries to.
If you're sending free binaries to your competitors, sure. But you'd have to be retarded to do that.
Absolutely untrue.
If you're rewriting it anyway, why not give away your hard work? Worked well for id software.
And of course, no mention of exactly how that's more fair, other than this comparison to such a strawman GPL.
Except, of course, a top online investment firm kind of proves you wrong there. I'll point to Amazon EC2 and consider the discussion closed.
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Unfortunately the guy seems to have a 1999 view of which operating systems are "proprietary" and seems to be confusing "unstable APIs" with "flexibility." Also, the cost of Red Hat or IBM Linux support can easily exceed the cost of Sun support.
The NYSE still runs numerous Unix systems, especially ones with Solaris, which is Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Unix derivative. Rubinow acknowledged that Solaris has the ability to run on multiple hardware platforms, including x86-based systems from Sun server rivals