Sun pushes Solaris 10 as Linux alternative

Computerworld - For years, Sun Microsystems Inc. ignored Linux or dismissed it as just another Unix variant. But company officials are now talking bluntly about their failure to recognize the corporate IT push to low-cost commodity systems, which Linux has helped foster.
Sun "dropped the ball" while customers rushed to Linux/Intel computing, said John Loiacono, executive vice president of Sun's software group. But with its Solaris 10 upgrade due by year's end, Sun is hoping to change that perception by adding a list of new features and adopting an open-source model that's as good as or better than the models used for Apache, Mozilla Linux and others, Loiacono said.
Last week, Sun made a slew of announcements in hopes of luring users in the financial services industry back to its camp. Moreover, the company is working with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. to build low-cost Opteron-based servers; a four-way box was released in the summer, and an eight-way system is expected next year.
Sticking With Solaris
Although Sun is supporting Red Hat Inc.'s version of Linux and Novell Inc.'s SUSE Linux, its preferred operating system is still Solaris. And some early users said they like the changes in Solaris 10.
Beta tester Eric Greenwade, chief IT architect at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, said the new version's use of containers, or zones -- a provisioning capability that isolates users and applications on a server -- is a major improvement. "I don't have to buy a box for every single group that believes they have a need for their own box," he said.
Because Solaris 10 is "lighter weight," meaning it's less intrusive on applications, performance has improved, Greenwade said. He also cited Sun's new TCP/IP stack as a plus.
The Solaris improvements are enough to eliminate cost as a deciding factor between Solaris or Linux, Greenwade said. He argued that Linux isn't necessarily inexpensive, because it often requires the addition of third-party tools to match functionality that's built into Solaris.

But the issue is complicated. The national lab in Idaho Falls also uses Linux systems. "Linux is in a lot of people's hands," Greenwade said, and all the users of the open-source operating system provide "a depth and breadth of feedback that you can't get in almost any other software testing program." As a result, features are added to Linux more quickly, he said.
Bill Morgan, CIO at Philadelphia Stock Exchange Inc., has a new electronic options-trading system that runs on Solaris 10, which he said has improved trading capacity by 36%. Like Greenwade, he credited performance improvements to the