stephan beal wrote:
On Friday 15 September 2006 07:07, M Harris wrote:
In fact, those "proprietary" OSes are at this point nothing more than redundant. There just isn't a business case these days to pay $$$$ for Unix from any vendor while rock solid enterprise linux distros are being produced for $.
That's unfortunately not true. i spent 18 months working as a contractor for German bank between 2005 and early this year, and there's no way in hell the internals of the bank could have run solely on Linux. The bank was a Solaris house, and it needed to be. i know linux is stable and solid and fast and all of that, but Solaris is STABLE. (In almost 7 years of working with Solaris, i think i've seen 2-3 system crashes.) Not only that, but the flexibility of the SAN (Storage Area Network) was critical to keeping things running at the bank. AFAIK, there is no SAN which works as gracefully (if at all) under Linux. And an enterprise-wide backup solution... no, i'm not talking 'tar' here, but robotic facilities which handle incoming backups and outbound restore requests from the whole company, all day long. Slick stuff.
There are of course other, often more political reasons, for running a closed OS, especially at a bank where "just hack it" is NOT an option, and you aren't allowed to install any packages which have not been approved by the security team.
In 1995 i remember telling several people, "Unix is dead. Windows will replace it within 5 years." Three years later, of course, i was eating those words. How little i understood of what really lies under the hoods of many large corporations, keeping them purring on a daily basis - old-fashioned, commercial ($$$$) Unices.
I'm going to echo those words: You're out of your mind on this issue, aswell. I used to manage a FreeBSD box that had been running for upwards of 8 years whose only downtime was power issues. I've been using Linux for over ten years, and I spent a few years at a place that ran Solaris. I've seen more Solaris kernel panics than Linux ones. The "political" reason you mentioned is equally absurd. Compared to modern distro's, I'd spend more time tinkering with a newly installed Solaris machine than Linux boxes to get them securely running. You don't need to "hack" Linux anymore. Virtually every package on every production machine I've run in the past four years has been entirely package-based (rpm or deb). As far as enterprise backup solutions, the same products available for Solaris are available for Linux, stuff like Legato. There's also more advanced systems than tar, like rsnapshot. Moreover, Linux SAN is quite powerful, with dedicated SAN boxes built on Linux. The robotic tape backup devices these days are entirely self-contained with their own network interface, so they work regardless of OS.