Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

LinuxToday has a synopsis and link to Computerworld story about cbs.sportsline.com making a move from "proprietary" to "open" standards. Its interesting. This is a big deal, over a million in machines, being migrated. The story does not detail the current OS, but netcraft "whats that site running" reveals Solaris. Makes sense to me.

I have nothing against Solaris, other than its exorbitant hardware expense. And note for the record, most unix web apps (especially java ones), still run the same application server and same webserver whether on Solaris or BSD or Linux.

You can get Solaris for free, but the Sun hardware is priced in the RIDICULOUS range. Just upgrading a drive or memory, etc. is outrageous. Yes, Sun hardware is great. THE BEST, agreed. However, its priced BEYOND what the best should cost and if you are running the same software for your apps (BEA, Websphere, Apache, Tomcat, etc) then why bother?

Dont even tell me about reliability, etc, as the Sun reps will spout. For the cost of one Sun machine you can literally cluster 5 x86 (Intel/AMD) machines with more memory and horsepower and therefore HAVE NO WORRIES ABOUT OVERALL RELIABILITY. 4 ENTIRE MACHINES CAN DIE AND IT STILL RUNS. x86 hardware is also far more readily available. Sun might be great, but it doesnt add up to buy it?

So if you are already running Tomcat and Apache on Solaris, and you keep seeing those Sun hardware bills every quarter, you are negligent if you DONT consider the switch. I have been involved in several Solaris to Linux migrations. In each case it took a LONG TIME worth of discussion and expense to condition the managers that it made sense. And of course there was much apprehension at the switch, but once it was made everything went fine and said managers could not have been happier (and down the road they no longer are strangled by Sun hardware costs).

It makes sense to move from Sun/Solaris to x86/Linux. For more on the cbs.sportsline.com move see the linked Linux Today article.    Computerworld: Dell, Red Hat to run CBSs SportsLine Web Site