Unix. IT should ask for it by name | Hacker News Reader

Unix. IT should ask for it by name

weblog.infoworld.com

18 pointsccraigIW16 comments

Honestly, I think anyone asking for HP-UX or AIX "because it's UNIX" should have retired at least a decade ago.

Similarly, anyone naive enough to believe that "Any skills, staff, source code, infrastructure, and solutions you invest in any Unix are portable across IBM, Sun, Fujitsu, HP, Apple, and generic 32- and 64-bit x86 hardware." really shouldn't be placed in a position where they have any say over platform choice.

> Honestly, I think anyone asking for HP-UX or AIX "because it's UNIX" should have retired at least a decade ago.

Me too. I did wonder if this was written in the 1990s, but it was actually written this year. It's silly and clueless.

I think the audience for the article is pointy haired managers.

And the language they understand sound exactly like the language we understand but is in fact not the same thing at all!

I'm somewhat disappointed that the author doesn't recall Microsoft's XENIX:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2062

Why? It's been dead for 20 years.

The author wrote that he's been writing about Unix for decades and mentions that Microsoft could "attain" the UNIX trademark; I merely thought XENIX would be worth a note in that context.

Funny, because my job at one point involved porting a piece of (C++) software from Solaris and it was actually rather more difficult than you'd think from reading this article. Why? Because the two OSs were rather different. Threading and networking were particularly troublesome and the UNIX trademark didn't help me. Methinks this guy is making things seem rather more easy than they really are.

Yea, so the open/unix way is better than windows. I thought we figured this out about a decade ago? How is this news exactly?

Did you read the article? It's about the UNIX trademark.

I hadn't read that OS X had become 'real UNIX' (trying to do a 'The Wire' reference there). That's a very smart move by Apple, as it will help them to attract OS X ports of traditional UNIX software, such as the big databases, and will certainly help establish them on the server market.

Oracle 10g (10.1) was available for Mac OS X but they've not kept up and no 11g at all. I think they just found that the number of sales for that platform was too small.

We tinkered with providing complete support for Mac OS X in our products (our products work on Mac OS X, and just about any other UNIX, but it's not necessarily easy to install and configure currently)...and found the number of people using it on web servers is vanishingly small. The cost of hardware is just dramatically higher for most users (an XServe may be nearly cost-competitive with equivalent Sun hardware, but compared to low end white-box or Dell hardware used by most hosting providers for most customers, it's just insanely expensive). It just wouldn't be possible to run a profitable web hosting venture on Apple hardware.

I think we have two customers using Mac OS X. To put that in perspective, we have over 1500 customers using CentOS or RHEL, and a few hundred using Debian or Ubuntu, and a couple dozen using FreeBSD and Solaris. Admittedly, all of those systems have full support, but FreeBSD and Solaris had a lot more users than Mac OS X even before we were supporting it properly.

Although the Linux distributions have come a long way in terms of hardware compatibility, I don't think any of them could match a single-vendor (OS and hardware) solution. I've not used OS X as/on a server, but I assume the hardware monitoring will be well integrated into the hardware and driver issues will be rare. I'd therefore say that it's unfair to compare OS X on the Xserve with the likes of RHEL on Dell, and that a comparison with Sun would be more realistic.

I've not used OS X as/on a server

Why is it that Apple fans feel compelled to defend Apple on every front, even when they have no idea what they're talking about?

I'd therefore say that it's unfair to compare OS X on the Xserve with the likes of RHEL on Dell, and that a comparison with Sun would be more realistic.

Which is exactly what I did. To quote myself: "an XServe may be nearly cost-competitive with equivalent Sun hardware". And then I explained why hosting providers don't use them (or equivalent Sun hardware), anyway. I've defined my market, and I've explained why Apple hasn't even made a tiny dent in it. Why would this make you feel compelled to argue about why an XServe is superior to a Dell or whitebox running Linux? I don't care. The market doesn't care. The reality of the situation is that a hosting provider can buy four reasonably well-equipped Linux servers, or eight crappy cheap ones, for the cost of one XServe. And they do. Which is why we have two Mac OS X using customers running a handful of XServes, and 1500+ using CentOS or RHEL on a few thousand machines.

All of that said, I have used an XServe. And I have used Dell high end servers certified for RHEL. The Dell was better in many regards, including hardware monitoring (Linux has dramatically more third party tools for this kind of task, and Dell has dramatically more Linux servers in the wild than Apple has XServes...so sheer numbers are in Linux' favor). Sun, of course, still has the upper hand in some categories, over both Dell and Apple. The XServe is comparable to the best Dell has to offer, but it is not clearly superior in any particular area. You're assuming, incorrectly, that a Dell running RHEL is the same as a randomly installed Linux distro on a random machine. It's not hit or miss when a reputable vendor builds a system for Linux: It works right, right out of the box.

Part of purchasing server hardware from a reputable vendor (even 'whitebox' hardware) is having guarantees that your server operating system will fully support the underlying hardware, especially as bulk purchases of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars are not rare.

I agree, but this does not guarantee there will be no driver issues and monitoring packages (such as the HP PSP and Dell 'OpenManage') do not come as part of third party operating systems so take time to install. In my opinion this does not detract from Linux in the enterprise, but does mean that it's not quite in the same class as OS X on Apple or [Open]Solaris on Sun.

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