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.
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.
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.
Well...
Around 1998-2000 my dad made a little business out of setting up linux servers on commodity hardware in my hometown. Primitive social networks, LAN provider servers, mail servers all worked just fine. Not without some involved convincing, and tinkering, and kernel patching but they did work.
One or two of the companies later became regional champions, running 100s of linux/x86/dell machines.
None of them would be able to afford a proper Sun server. Sun would never bother itself with these original tiny contracts.
It dont think Sun even stood a chance in this game. They couldnt even realize this happening!
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.
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.
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.
At my employer in 1999 we were maintaining home-grown binary modification to the Solaris kernel so that TCP segment send and receive were not O(N^2) where N was the number of addresses on the interface :-/ It was, as far as I could tell, an operating system that nobody had ever tried to use before. For anything where we could avoid Sun we used FreeBSD. One of the nice things about the free Unixes of that time was that process and thread creation or destruction were orders of magnitude faster than on Sun. To me, Sun was obviously in a lower category than Linux/FreeBSD/NetBSD.
The "Slowaris" nickname was there for a reason.
If time stopped in 2000 Sun would still be relevant. However, time did not stop in 2000.
The linux kernel didn't even gain SMP until 1996. Solaris was running circles around it both before and after that point. Solaris was vastly more mature and stable.
Of course, after that, Solaris just kept running in very expensive circles while linux went on to make steady progress.
And if nothing happens after 1996 then Linux would not have been better than Solaris.
it was called "Slow arse". This was because it was rather reluctant in handing out resources (memory fe). Having fought it, I remember the system APIs being really well defined and picky (which was good). At one point, the C compiler had some identity issues "am I 32 bit, or 64 bit?"
Eh, depends when. In 2005, sure. Not so much in the 1990s
Yep. Solaris was the Unix for the 90's. I worked at a couple of early ISPs and users demanded Sun Solaris shell servers. At a couple of startups, we built everything on Solaris because Linux wasn't accepted in the enterprise yet.
By the early 2000's, 1) Linux was solid, why bother with Solaris? 2) ebay and other channels were flooded with used Sun hardware from failed dot-com companies anyway. No need to buy new.
I was asked to benchmark some Solaris/SPARC vs Linux/Intel hardware in around 1997, and the price-performance of the Linux gear was easily 3+ times better. There wasn't really any comparison, especially when you consider how you could buy white box PCs from a local shop, grab a Red Hat ISO for nothing, and have an installed Linux server in 24 hours, compared to weeks to get something more expensive and worse for the Sun option. Even if Sun had been more reliable, it wouldn't have mattered because you could buy 3x the PCs and keep two in a cupboard, or more likely just replace everything with more numerous and better performing Linux PCs which was what we did.
Assuming that the PC was actually supported.
I had to survive with 800x600 on a 1024x768 monitor for quite some time.
The paucity of screen real estate in those days. Now, a 4k ultra wide monitor is less than $2,000 and has so many pixels!