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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

> zones, dtrace, smf, iscsi and zfs were very well integrated together and lightyears beyond what was available in the Linux space at the time.

True, but did you need that? These are all high-end (therefore low-volume) server stuff. I loved that, and their high-end systems with dozens of SPARCs, but I had one customer who had one, and everyone in my company knew they made a terrible decision - they needed a web server, and you could do more with a rack of Dell boxes for a fraction of the Ultra Enterprise [very large number] price tag. They also decided they should run an enterprise application server (they went with Dynamo) instead of Tomcat, so, again, they made a stack (maybe a directed acyclic graph) of bad decisions. I think I facepalmed so much that is the point my hair started falling.

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I think you have to keep in mind how IT contracts and purchase decisions are made in large enterprises. You will almost never have an on-the-ground engineer making those decisions. CTOs collect requirements from other high-level managers who collect requirements from other managers and eventually a final list of checkboxes bubble up to the CTO. The CTO evaluates the asks and comes up with their own checklist of features they are looking for then go shopping.

Solution providers then try to check as many boxes as they can on the list. It doesn't have to make sense; you just want to check the box. When a decision is made, the chosen solution gets to the individual engineers to "figure it out". There is also a considerable amount of CYA in all of these decisions. You never want a project to get delayed of not implemented because you as a CTO forgot to check a box. The engineers using a product could decide that the box check doesn't work for them and they can then workaround it, but management (and the solution provider) get to CYA based on whether a box is checked or not.

My favorite flavor of this is when things are lost in translation, and a box gets accidently checked without understanding the actual requirement. Then it suddenly becomes a de-facto feature request because "the box was already checked".

We used it all to great success ... along with our Linux hosts. We had a stack of T1's and eventually a few thumpers (x4500's) which we ended up running a variant of OpenSolaris on. There was also some bigger iron that was humming along on Solaris 8 which provided a very stable environment (until I fat-fingered a command one day.)

Later on, we even ran an ipfilter based router from a T1 on OpenSolaris for decent IPv6 connectivity with link-aggregation+vlans when our Cisco 6509 setup was found to be inadequate for the task.

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