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What Sun got wrong

692 points · 437 comments · chmaynard

  1. flanked-evergl · · focus · HN ↗
    Solaris was worse than Linux, and SPARC was worse than Intel. A lot worse.

    Even ZFS was way better integrated with the Linux kernel even while Solaris was supposedly maintained.

    1. pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
      Not in 2000, at my employer back then, our Linux server was only good as MP3 storage exposed via Samba/NFS.

      All development and production deployments was being done across Solaris, Aix and HP-UX in regards to UNIX flavours.

      1. icedchai · · focus · HN ↗
        I had a similar experience. I forget the exact timing, but it was probably around 2002 - 2003 that Linux felt "good enough." I was at a startup that finally considered putting its "enterprise" stack on Linux.
        1. pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
          Later in 2003, when I joined CERN, there were still Sun workstations being used, and I was an earlier user of Scientific Linux in 2004.

          Afterwards Nokia Networks were still deploying into HP-UX, and the first big Linux project started around late 2005, to Red-Hat.

          1. icedchai · · focus · HN ↗
            I worked at smaller companies that were more risk tolerant. At an earlier startup (late 90's), all the developers ran RedHat on Dells, but the actual production environment was Solaris. I remember going out to a customer site and deploying some massive Sun Enterprise setup. It probably cost a half million USD for the whole configuration. Multiple servers (Enterprise 450 and 250 I think, two of each), multiple storage boxes (StorEdge), Veritas filesystem software, some other Veritas HA system, several Cisco switches, some firewall brand that I forget. All this was connected to a fractional T1 (512kbit.) It never went live due to some contractual issue. All that money wasted.
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