Home / server / Questions / 189649
Accepted
Tim McNamara
Asked: 2010-10-12 01:28:06 +0800 CST

Why pay for UNIX?

  • 772

I'm fairly new to Unicies. With the advent of GNU/Linux and BSDs, what are the reasons for companies to prefer AIX, Solaris and other commercial systems?

linux solaris unix aix bsd

14 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Well some software is specifically written for AIX/Solaris etc. while some 'money men' don't trust 'free' software (I've witnessed this myself, someone told me I HAD to spend money on OS!). But most of the time it's to get 24/365 support.

    • 26

  2. Because then you have a big name behind it that you can talk to for providing a SLA.

    • 18

  3. Because you don't want to get locked into an open system.

    -- Unknown IBM executive, 1991

    • 8

  4. Adding to previous answers: It depends on what you are going to run on the server. Example: If you want to run Oracle, you go with (both hardware and) operating systems that Oracle itself says its (particular version of the) software is tested (certified by them) to run on.

    • 7
    1. Corporate and government sector clients feel safer this way. They are used to paying for software and when something is offered for free they would think it is of lower quality.
    2. Technical support. When you pay for RHEL for example you are paying for technical support and updates.
    3. Hardware vendors sometimes lock you in the situation. For example IBM has a compatibility list for their rack and blade servers and all of the UNIXes on that list are the ones backed by big companies: RHEL, SLES, Solaris, AIX, VMWare ESX etc. You can get away with running a free and open OS on those (I've been doing that) but you loose the ability to ask for support from IBM in case of hardware driver issues etc. For example, you can install drivers for their Fiber Channel cards on Debian, CentOS, VMWare ESXi (which is free) with some effort, but you won't get support from IBM in case you can't do it. Although I'd imagine the procedure for installing those drivers on RHEL or SLES is not much easier.
    • 6

  6. In terms of Solaris vs Linux I can say my eyes were somewhat opened reading the Sun published book "Solaris Internals".

    If you want to get down-and-dirty with your operating system you'll find there are considerable differences with prioritisation, debugging-hooks, process-to-CPU binding and memory model optimisation, etc.

    Some features of Solaris are:

    Of course Linux supports many of these features and evolves rapidly (although dtrace is unquestionably an advantage of Solaris over Linux).

    • 4

  7. 1, Support from a major blue chip company.
    2, Having a known operating platform. You buy a mainframe from IBM, you know that your software will work with it and have a high up time.

    • 1

  8. Well,

    There may be issues of commercialisation where a corporate feels 'safer' with a big-name company holding their hand for a licence fee (although the likes of Red Hat etc. could counter this argument for Linux).

    Some companies will prefer to stay with a 'known' name, especially if they have legacy systems with the supplier and the supplier has significant expertise in maintaining or migrating from one OS to another within their portfolio.

    There may be technical features that are only available in one specific OS or the company may prefer specific branded hardware that restricts their choice of OS.

    Some corporates have always 'done it that way' and see no need (or have no inclination) to change.

    Some corporates may have applications that are specially tuned to one OS and there may be a risk or high cost in migrating to another OS platform.

    • 1

  9. > But as we all know, Linux is only free if your time has no value, and I find that my time is better spent doing things other than the endless moving-target-upgrade dance.

    Edit - this was funny. As you can see from the top of the page, this was a quote from a 1998 interview JWZ did. He had a better opinion 2 years later in 2000, when he wrote the blurb at the top. And it's 2010 now. But it's still funny.

    • 1

  10. There's a few specific scalability reasons which make AIX or Solaris a better choice than Linux for large systems.

    For example, AIX 7 on POWER7 scales from 1 core through to 256 cores in a single operating system image, and 8TB of RAM. Solaris has similar scalability abilities.

    Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is certified up to 32 processors and 256GB of RAM (though will theoretically support up to 1TB) on x64, but the performance increase generally drops off at a faster rate as you add processors in Linux than AIX or Solaris.

    Beyond that, there's technical niceties such as the AIX logical volume manager, or Solaris' ZFS storage system, which both make working with larger storage capacities than few hard drives worth much easier.

    However, at the smaller end of scale, I'd now argue that there's minimal benefit in buying AIX over a supported Linux distributed for most organisations.

    • 1