Solaris vs. Linux: Ecosystem-based Approach and Framework for the Comparison in Large Enterprise

 

Solaris vs. Linux: Ecosystem-based Approach and Framework for the Comparison in Large Enterprise

分类： 操作系统 2011-05-10 23:17 122人阅读 评论(0)收藏 举报

 

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Solaris vs. Linux: Ecosystem-based Approach and Framework for the Comparison in Large Enterprise EnvironmentsDr. Nikolai Bezroukov

Copyright 2005-2011, Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov. This is a copyrighted unpublished work. All rights reserved.

Notes:

Most of the paper was written in 2005-2006, long before Oracle acquisition of Sun and some references to this fact were added only as afterthought.

Readers with strong allergy to grammar and syntax errors should probably avoid reading this paper until later, supposedly more polished, versions. The current version is pretty raw. English is not the native language for the author. Treat it is as a preprint

This is not a scientific comparison per se but more of an attempt to formulate (and for the author to understand himself the issues involved ;-) the framework for comparison of two complex and successful OSes. This framework might be used by future researchers of this problem as well as business decision makers. 

Please pay attention to the version posted. This paper covers results of the research in progress. If you consider a particular part of the paper biased/incorrect please provide feedback. Opinions of the author change as he deeper understands issues involved in the process of this complex research. The topic is too complex and some errors are inevitable in a paper written by a single author. Actually the fact that a particular person is interested in the theme to the extent that he/she wrote such a paper is a strong argument against his/her depth of knowledge in one or both OSes that he/she tries to compare ;-).

As large enterprises are slow adopters of new technologies and as the paper is a volunteer effort it can be substantially behind the curve and most results are applicable only to enterprise versions of OSes that were current in 2006-2007. This was the time when the bulk of the paper was written. Amount of time that the author can devote to research of the topic is currently very limited and things are moving slowly (but they are moving). As of July 2008 some parts of the paper looks already outdated (the success of Oracle Linux as another enterprise edition with its own ideas (port of Suse YAST,BTRFS filesystem, etc) is not reflected in the paper;  Solaris 10 developments after the acquisition of MySQL are also not fully reflected in the current version of the paper.  Advances in hardware which increased the value of ZFS (solid state disks) are also missing. They might speed up widespread adoption of ZFS as new enterprise-class filesystem.

The paper was written with the explicit goal to serve as an antidote to primitive reviews on Linux self-congratulation sites styled like"I found old PC in the closet, dusted it off, tried to install Solaris on it; my God what a crap Solaris is in comparison with Linux". Such reviews are not only misleading, they disorient open source enthusiasts (especially among staff of large companies) conditioning them against a more stable and in several areas (virtualization is one; Java applications performance is another) more advanced server OS that has a lot to offer.  The role of paper as an "antidote" to overselling of linux in enterprise environment somewhat influenced the style  making the paper more polemic, then it probably should be.  Please note the author consider Linux and Solaris to be two best enterprise OSes out of for variants available, the tandem which can replace other enterprise Unix cocktails ;-)

 

When you open your Windows
 you'll see a light blue sky filled with clouds.
If you look past the clouds, you'll only see the Sun.
 -- Alan Orndorff

"The rumors of SPARC's death have been greatly exaggerated"
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Contents

Abstract

Introduction

The historical dimension of "Solaris vs. Linux" debateThe ideological dimension of "Solaris vs. Linux" debateTwo views on IT in commercial enterprises: utility vs. competitive advantageThe Current Status of Enterprise Deployment

Nine factors framework for comparison of two flavors of Unix in a large enterprise environment

Four major areas of Linux and Solaris deployment

Workstations

Low Level Servers

Midrange servers

High End servers

Virtualization

Comparison of internal architecture and key subsystems

Contributions of Solaris and Linux to the Unix kernel architecture

Some kernel-level differences

Networking

Filesystems

Java performance

Process Management

Security

Hardware: SPARC vs. X86

Development environment

Compilers

General level of OSS support

Scripting languages support

IDE

Configuration Management and Bug Tracking Tools

Debugging

Solaris as a cultural phenomenon

Using Solaris-Linux enterprise mix as the least toxic Unix mix available

Conclusions

Acknowledgements

Webliography

Abstract

 

It is important to understand that operating systems kernels are a side show of open source movement or open distributed collaboration movementin a broader sense.  Scripting languages and applications (especially scripting languages) are the key components of the open source movement and at the same time enablers of other forms of open collaboration exemplified by Wikipedia.  So it's  Perl, PHP, Python, Apache, Jboss, bind, postfix, Postgress and MySQL that are flagships of the movement with LAMP stack (for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python) as open source one of the highest achievements. I would like to stress it again that the essence of the movement is in utilizing and, simultaneously, enabling distributed collaboration. Many Linux enthusiasts make a typical for technological utopians error. They think that their beloved OS due this wonderful thing called distributed Internet development will wipe away all traces of its predecessors — as if  when you change the fuel you change the car. That's proved to be false:  Linux is and will remain just a flavor of Unix with its own (multiple) strengths and no less numerous weaknesses.

 

Moreover, Linux kernel is just a side show, a new "SuperBIOS" on which open applications run and from the technical standpoint it has all the attractiveness of the good old BIOS (which is another way to say that it's pretty boring). Moreover,  Linux is just one of many interesting open source kernels, which (for unrelated to its technical merits reasons) gets all PR ink. FreeBSD and other BSD kernels are similar in technical capabilities, less bloated and have some subsystems (FreeBSD) or packaging (OpenBSD) that are more technically interesting. In many cases they can substitute Linux in LAMP stack and nobody will ever notice the difference. Actually the difference can be positive: FreeBSD pioneered jails -- a light weight virtual machine in 1999; OpenBSD pioneered integration of SSH and firewalls and defines the state of the art of secure X86-based Unix; NetBSD still defines the standard in Unix portability although Linux recently doing pretty well in this category too.

This article suggests that Sun efforts to put Solaris 10 on Opteron on equal footing with Solaris for UltraSparc further moved the pendulum from the Linux kernel on the technical side of the open source operating systems arena.  Period during which Solaris used to have open code and open source version was producused (OpenSolaris) enabled distributed collaboration and stimulated internal review of the codebase which was extremly beneficial and those benefots will not diassere with Oracle returning Solaris to closed source model. On Intel servers Solaris can be used instead of Linux in LAMP stack with the immeduate benefits in security. The fact that Sun aqured and Oracle now owns MySQL ensure tht it will work smoothly in Solaris on Intel environment.

All those developments makes  tandem of Solaris and Linux probably the best enterprise Unix cocktail out of other mixtures of four ingredients available for large enterprise environment (AIX, HP-UX, Linux and Solaris.   While some specialists (including the author) prefer Solaris and other Linux there is no question that this tandem is the most potent tandem of enterprise-class OSes currently available and should be treated as such. Polemical style of the article should not over-shadow this very important fact. 

From an political standpoint the assimilation of any alternative sub-culture into the mainstream signals both the success in reaching much wider audience, as well as the abandonment of radicals within the movement and dramatic watering-down of key principles leading to the identity crisis. The latter is already impacting the OSS movement in general and linux in particular. Many people now understand that while individual developers still play very important roles in open source communities, the mature communities are dominated by vendor interests and Linux is no exception to this rule. Now it's mostly about Red Hat, Novell, IBM and Ubuntu and only after that about Linus Torvalds. In this sense open source Solaris was the last nail into Linux exclusivity coffin.  Also the codebase has grown and matured (in 2011 Linux is 20 years old which is probably equal 60 in human lifespan scale :-). With aging the pace of development of Linux considerably slowed and "the guard is tired" effect became very pronounced. Due to this Microsoft managed to counter the challenge and even re-vitalize itself in the process (MS Server 2008, Windows 7).

At the same time the parallel process of aging of IT, especially trend toward excessive bureaucratization created a natural counter-trend that somewhat revitalized linux.  Despite becoming establishment OS supported by such a stalwart of IT establishment as IBM (aka "death star of bureaucratization") Linux  now again stated to play an extremely important role of a weapon countering growing dilbertization of enterprise IT, the role of a "rebel OS"  that it played at the very beginning, before being cooped by IBM. This is one important area in which the author see Linux as definitely superior to Solaris.

When one tries to provide a sober assessment of relative merits of those two OSes in large enterprise IT environment and concentrates on the nonpolitical, real world issues of administering multiple flavors of Unix servers one fact emerges as really startling:there is a hidden resistance of such an environment to changes to the extent that savings from the introduction of any new flavor of Unix into existing enterprise Unix flavors mix are essentially non-existent. That happens because proliferation of Unix flavors in large corporate environment has its own significant costs especially if the number of flavors exceeds two. Unless the number of existing Unix flavors are cut with the introduction (a new flavor of Unix is not added to the mix but replaced one, or, better, two existing flavors) only open source applications and first of all scripting languages can produce sizable benefits for a large enterprise from adoption of open source. Operating systems are peripheral to this issue as long as they can run of the cheapest hardware available (Intel architecture).  It is possible to capture lion share of open source benefits using Solaris X86 or even Windows (it's funny that Windows with SFU 3.5 is POSIX certified while linux is not).  As the key is open collaboration is not the availability of source code or theusage of specific license, but voluntary knowledge transfer between the members of the community, Linux is neither necessary nor sufficient for producing financial or other benefits from open source adoption, especially for system administrators who need to deal with the increased complexity of the environment due to an introduction of a new OS.  Moreover introduction of Linux in environments with strong Solaris presence might be counterproductive due to negative effects of OS proliferation and lower stability of the codebase ("permabeta effect"). Solaris 10 X86 looks like a safer bet both in terms of stability security and scalability. 

The scope and intensity of negative affects of OS proliferation might surprise many readers, especially in case when the number of Unix flavors increases from two to three or even more.  This mainly due to dilutions of sysadmins expertise, as most can support with the high quality only two distinct Unix OS flavors (that's actually three OSes as any Unix administrator who respects himself should know Windows 2003 server as the main competitor).

Increasing the number even by one turns changes the quality of work environment. Due to the current complexity (or, more correctly, overcomplexity) of Unix environments most sysadmins can master well just one flavor of Unix. Better one can survive supporting two  (with highly asymmetrical level of skills, being usually considerably more proficient in one flavor over the other). But in case they need to support three or more flavors skills of sysadmins can even deteriorate from the mental overload. 

In system administration the devil is in the details and details for each flavor are different. Additional complex issues  arise in IT infrastructure  with too many different flavors of Unix as each of them have different mechanisms for common tasks (identity management is one good example).  If those multiple flavors of
Unix require additional expensive software to be used just to make them more compatibleLinux tends to increase, not decrease the variety of Unixes in the large enterprise environment.In other words Linux is suffering from famous Unix curse.That's why positive effects of linux introduction without removing one of existing flavors of Unix are much more questionable for large enterprises then for startups. 

Not everything can be run on linux both for technical and political reasons. That means that despite having important "home field" advantage for open source software deployment, the saturation point for Linux in large corporate infrastructures exists and might be lower then generally assumed. Often Linux introduction further balkanize Unix by increasing the number of supported Unix flavors by one or two (if both Red Hat and Suse are used). There are also problems with linux stability and additional security risks: Linux is Microsoft of Unix world, flavor on which most attacks are developed, tested and used by script kiddies.  For this reason alone few IT managers want to put all open source eggs into one basket.  

The paper carries a strong pro-sysadmins and thus "counter-proliferation" of Unix flavors stance.  Excessive variety of Unix flavors can be considered as a sign of low status of It in the organization, as well as a sign is a sign of both technically and politically weak IT management.  Interests of system administrators should be a priority consideration in any new OS introduction in large enterprise environment. As the hero of  famous O. Henry story "The Roads We Take" quipped in slightly different from large enterprise IT circumstances "Bolivar cannot carry double." ;-)  [O.Henry1910]. The article warns potential adopters that it is very difficult to capture value by just adding a new rider on the system administrator horse independently of which operating system we are talking about: be it linux (with its multiple enterprise personalities: RHEL, SLES and Ubuntu) or any of the traditional troika of enterprise flavors (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX).

While limited to discussion of Solaris vs Linux in large enterprise environment, the paper introduces a generic framework of OS comparison that can be used for other Unix flavors comparison with Linux as well as between each other.  In all such discussions it is paramount to separate tremendous price/performance advantages of Intel hardware from the advantages of the OS. 

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Created Jan 2, 2005.  Last modified: March 06, 2011

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