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Commercial Unix,I don't get it
    #2841301 -

Why do people pay thousands of dollars for commercial versions of Unix and special hardware when they can run Linux or one of the BSD's on standard hardware for free?


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Re: Commercial Unix,I don't get it [Re: monoamine]
    #2842583 -

Until very recently, the free Unix flavors didn't have the maturity to survive well in a true work environment. The same can be said for the IA32 architecture.

I used to have a job where I recorded all information coming from a set of satalites. We had a mandate for 100% uptime. Not 99.99999%, but 100%. If we were down, we would loose data which could never be obtained again. We used four Sun Enterprise 4000s in a failover-cluster with two spares, one on hot standby and the other on cold standby. The cluster recorded data to a large (multiterrabyte) raid array, which was mirrored to a second array. The raid arrays could only hold a few days worth of data, so we constantly dumped them to these huge storagetek tape silos. Each tape silo was bigger than most people's bedroom with tapes along the parameter from floor to ceiling, and a large robot arm to move things around. Each silo could hold aproximately one year of data. When I left, we had four silos filled, and were having two more installed on site.

What I am getting at here is that there is usually a good reason why people are going to pay a lot of money for hardware and software. The free unix flavors still don't have the kind of high end support that some applications require... Maintaining 500 workstations for a company, where downtime is measured in the thousand of dollars per minute, is a lot different than running linux on a box for you and your friends.

Even here at the shroomery we have been bitten by the free unix distributions. The distribution maintainers will change something in a config file, which will get sucked in when we patch, resulting in stuff not working. Granted, this usually gets caught in a test environment before being pushed out to the public, but it is still a valid example.

There are a lot of other reasons as well... sometimes the cost of upgrading to something free is more expensive than paying for the commercial hardware/software solution.

Perhaps in a few more years the various free unix flavors and the intel hardware will have finally caught up to the commercial versions... they keep getting closer every day.


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Just another spore in the wind.

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Re: Commercial Unix,I don't get it [Re: Seuss]
    #2842598 -

I want a tape silo! I'm curious what the data is, since I'm studying computer engineering and the setup you described has intrigued me. Can you share some details, or is this setup a military application where you can't really say what it's for?

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Re: Commercial Unix,I don't get it [Re: Seuss]
    #2842791 -

That may be true in your situation but saying Linux can't support large corporations is simply untrue. What do you consider recent for Linux?

Many governments have switched to Linux. One of the larger auto parts stores has as well as some large companies. Google's thousands of servers run Linux.

And Red Hat has excellent Enterprise support options.

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Re: Commercial Unix,I don't get it [Re: newuser1492]
    #2842807 -

> but saying Linux can't support large corporations is simply untrue.

Please provide a quote from my statement that shows where I say "Linux can't support large corporations."

> What do you consider recent for Linux?

The last four years or so.


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Just another spore in the wind.

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Re: Commercial Unix,I don't get it [Re: pazuzu]
    #2842808 -

> Can you share some details

I can talk about the hardware setup... PM me if you have specific questions.


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Just another spore in the wind.

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Re: Commercial Unix,I don't get it [Re: Seuss]
    #2842870 -

Quote:
Until very recently, the free Unix flavors didn't have the maturity to survive well in a true work environment.


That to me sounded close enough to saying Linux couldn't support large corporations.

And btw Google has been around for what six or seven years now?

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Re: Commercial Unix,I don't get it [Re: newuser1492]
    #2842919 -

> That to me sounded close enough to saying Linux couldn't support large corporations.

You are reading a lot into my words.

1) The word can't, which is what you used in your original statement, is present tense. My first part of the sentense, "Until recently" obviously sets the time frame of my assertation to the past, not the present.

2) I never said anything with respect to large corporations. I said that the free unix flavors lacked maturity, again past tense, in the work environment. This may not be a fault of the OS in question, but rather a lack of application software.

> And btw Google has been around for what six or seven years now?

There is a lot of difference between a server farm handing out web pages, searching a database, or crawling the web and a client/server environment in the workplace.

Don't read me wrong... I am not slamming Linux or any free unix for that matter. I have been doing system admin work for close to twenty years now. I was there in the mid 90's when we tried to embrace linux in the workplace... it didn't work. We were running Banyan Vines, Novell bindry trees, Windows NT domain controllers, high end Sun servers, Groupwise email, and Data General unix workstations all together in a hetrogeneous environment. We started to replace the winnt desktops with linux, but it was not yet mature enough. It didn't work for the developers (we can't run visual c++ anymore)... didn't work for the staff (we can't get Groupwise email anymore)... didn't work with management (none of our applications work anymore)... didn't work with our end users (what do you mean it doesn't run under windows?)...

It probably would have worked today with the applications which are available. Things that you take for granted today, such as Samba, or OpenOffice, or Gnome, or KDE, were new and very buggy or nonexistant at the time.


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Just another spore in the wind.

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Re: Commercial Unix,I don't get it [Re: monoamine]
    #2853838 -

Linux is still 'new' to the business market. multi million dollar companies dont just 'swich' overnight to shit. Espeically when they have a 15 year great run with say, sun, and 2 billion in hardware..


IBM AIX is 'ugly' compared to linux. But when you get a bad ass SP frame, you can login to the RACK ITSELF and do shit. its a computer all by itself that controls all your node computers. etc.

AIX is also known for another thing. Its ROCK FUCKING STABLE. AIX boxen are known to chug for years and years and years and years and years WITH patching and high load and NOT die.

There ARE reasons for commercial unix's. Linux is not the bestest for every scenario.

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