Those who have seen me speak to customers, know that I have a
"mantra" when asked to compare Solaris to various Linux
distributions. It goes like this:
- Solaris does more than Red Hat
- Solaris costs less than Red Hat
- Solaris is open source like Red Hat
- Solaris runs on more Intel, AMD and Sparc platforms than Red Hat.
As a result, one FAQ I get is, "How much less does Solaris 10 cost?" According to our Sun site and the Red Hat site list price comparisons for support and licenses are:
| Standard service 1 year (5 x 12) | Premium service 1 year (7 x 24) | |||||
| Solaris 10 (up to 2 sockets) | $720 | $1080 | ||||
| Solaris 10 (unlimited sockets) | | $1320 | $1980 | |||
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (up to 2 sockets) | $799 | $1299 | 11-20% more than Solaris | |||
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (unlimited sockets) | $1,499 | $2,499 | 13-26% more than Solaris |
Hmmmm.... So much for the idea that "Linux is cheap or free."
Other important notes about Solaris 10:
- It supports (in addition to our own AMD based workstations, servers and blades) those by Dell, HP, IBM and more.
- It also runs on our scalable (up to 144 processors and 2 TB of RAM) Sparc servers and workstations
- It is FREE to download and use in production without paying the license or service support contract. (Sparc or X86)
- With each update of Solaris 10 you can download the new update (which include rolled up patches) for free as well
- Solaris 10 includes a binary compatibility guarantee as well as indemnification
Red Hat touts a number of new features in RHEL 5 that Solaris has had for years including:
- Multi-level security which was first built into SunOS 4 back in the early 90s and is now included in Solaris 10 in the form of Trusted Extensions.
- Real-time processing which was first featured in Solaris 8 over 7 years ago
- Virtualization which was introduced in Solaris 10 in 2005
- Open source development model which Solaris introduced 2 years ago
- Integrated LDAP directory which Solaris 8 included in the year 2000
- Auditing features which have been built into Solaris since version 2.3
- SystemTap profiler which is a poor substitute for Solaris 10 advanced, award winning Dynamic Tracing Facility
Other advanced, open source features in Solaris 10 include:
- ZFS, an advanced, easy to manage scalable file system
- Service management facility to simpify operation and security
- Secure by default to control network services out of the box
- Predictive self-healing to provide the highest RAS available.
- A large collection of third party applications
In short Solaris is a better "Linux than Linux"
Why should you care?
If you are interested in a data center quality operating system used for years by the most demanding customers at a low price, Solaris should be your first choice.
No comments:
Post a Comment