What is the fascination of Solaris OS ?
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I know it is Oracle but it has GUI and you cant easily download it or use it.
Just cause it is old and more Unixy? I am finding alot of banks and Canada jobs that uses it... Why cause it is Oracle supported, does it come free with 10million cost of Oracle DB, dont Oracle has Centos version for free .. I dont get it
Why not RHEL then.
What can Solaris 11 do that Linux cant ?
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I think that you are missing the history. Solaris was the enterprise UNIX OS long before Linux was in the game. SunOS was its old name and it goes way, way back. And even when Linux was getting to be solid, in the early 2000s, and long before Windows was even viable, Solaris was solid, fast, and well supported. Solaris 10 came out around 2005, Solaris 11 in 2010. In the Solaris world, Linux isn't just new, it's become really enterprise primarily in the last Solaris cycle... so the time to even consider a change for most Solaris customers is only just starting to happen now. The first released of SunOS was 1982.
And some key Solaris features, like ZFS, are more advanced than on Linux and are fully licensed whereas on Linux their licensing is questionable and their feature set is behind and having them officially supported is still rare. Solaris still leads in the filesystem position and has for fifteen years. Plus features like enterprise container support essentially came from and remain best on Solaris (Zones.) And then there is DTrace.
Solaris is also the only fully supported hardware on Sparc architecture, which is a key RISC platform used in enterprise computing. While possible to get Linux for it, no mainline supported Linux option supports it. Power and ARM are the only RISC platforms getting any kind of enterprise support behind them. Sparc remains the domain of Solaris.
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Banks are using it because that was the most popular Unix years ago, with great support and hardware from Sun Microsystems, years before Oracle acquisition, and financial software was written for it.
I don't think RHEL was even around back then, it was just Red Hat, without enterprise options.
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I think that you are missing the history. Solaris was the enterprise UNIX OS long before Linux was in the game. SunOS was its old name and it goes way, way back. And even when Linux was getting to be solid, in the early 2000s, and long before Windows was even viable, Solaris was solid, fast, and well supported. Solaris 10 came out around 2005, Solaris 11 in 2010. In the Solaris world, Linux isn't just new, it's become really enterprise primarily in the last Solaris cycle... so the time to even consider a change for most Solaris customers is only just starting to happen now. The first released of SunOS was 1982.
And some key Solaris features, like ZFS, are more advanced than on Linux and are fully licensed whereas on Linux their licensing is questionable and their feature set is behind and having them officially supported is still rare. Solaris still leads in the filesystem position and has for fifteen years. Plus features like enterprise container support essentially came from and remain best on Solaris (Zones.) And then there is DTrace.
Solaris is also the only fully supported hardware on Sparc architecture, which is a key RISC platform used in enterprise computing. While possible to get Linux for it, no mainline supported Linux option supports it. Power and ARM are the only RISC platforms getting any kind of enterprise support behind them. Sparc remains the domain of Solaris.
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@marcinozga said in What is the fascination of Solaris OS ?:
Banks are using it because that was the most popular Unix years ago, with great support and hardware from Sun Microsystems, years before Oracle acquisition, and financial software was written for it.
I don't think RHEL was even around back then, it was just Red Hat, without enterprise options.
Solaris predates Linux by nine years, and that's just Linux, which predates Red Hat Linux by many years, which predates RHEL by many years, and RHEL predates free CentOS by a few years, and both took some time to get to anything close to Solaris parity even once they existed.
In the RHEL 3 and RHEL 4 days, Linux wasn't competing with Solaris at all. By RHEL 5 it was starting to, but mostly it competed by being cheaper, not more technically advanced. RHEL 6 and 7 are really where Linux pulled ahead in a lot of areas. But Solaris continues to lead in file systems, tracing, RISC support, and some areas of performance.
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I see thanks, I see my 6-8 years of Linux is not allowing me to see beyond but many thanks for the quick insight.
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It's time for Solaris to go, but it's been a great OS. Much of the 1980-2010 IT world was built on it. Solaris is easily the singularly most important OS for the first generations of IT.
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Sun did a few other notable things besides Solaris, such as Java.
Yeah, Oracle wasn't the reason Solaris was well known and good. More likely the reason it is dead.
https://meshedinsights.com/2017/09/03/oracle-finally-killed-sun/ -
@Pete-S said in What is the fascination of Solaris OS ?:
Sun did a few other notable things besides Solaris, such as Java.
Yeah, Oracle wasn't the reason Solaris was well known and good. More likely the reason it is dead.
https://meshedinsights.com/2017/09/03/oracle-finally-killed-sun/Yeah, Solaris was good in spite of Oracle. And Oracle was only around for one release. The first several decades of Solaris and SunOS were all under Sun. Oracle only killed it off, without Oracle, it would still be an amazing OS today.
