Sun Microsystems Federal's Jim Laurent sets out to prove that the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) does more, costs less, and runs on more SPARC and x86/x64 platforms than Red Hat EL 5, in a head-to-head comparison between the operating systems.

In a comparison chart, Laurent points out important aspects of both open source development models, including:

Supported CPU Architectures

• Solaris 10: UltraSparc, Sparc-64, Sparc-CMT, Intel X86-X64, AMD, and soon IBM Power and Z-Series

• RHEL 5: Intel X86-64, Intel Itanium2 AMD, IBM Power, Z-Series

Platform Support

• Solaris 10: Over 900 including from Sun, IBM, HP, Dell and others http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl

• RHEL 5: 329 (as of Nov 07)

Applications Available

• Solaris 10: 5855 Total (as of September 07) 3273 on X64 platform http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/apps/

• RHEL 5: 842 (RHEL 5 x86/x64 Nov 07) 3000 (RHEL 4 x86/X64)

Average Support Life Cycle

• Solaris 10: 12 years http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/lifecycle.xml

• RHEL 5: 7 years

Commercial List License Cost

• Solari 10: $0 http://www.sun.com/service/subscriptions

• RHEL 5: Requires Subscription

OS Unique Advanced Technologies

• Solaris 10: Dynamic Tracing; ZFS; Solaris containers virtualization; Network Virtualization; Resource management with fair share scheduling and dynamic CPU pools; Predictive Self healing; Dynamically loading kernel; Service Management Facility; Secure by Default; Cryptographic framework; Digitally signed executables; Memory Placement Optimization; Massive scalability; SAMFS/QFS (optional); Solaris Trusted Extensions; Guaranteed Binary Compatibility; and Microstate Accounting;

• RHEL 5: SE-Linux based multilevel security; Global File System; Distributed Lock manager; and Block level storage encryption

Many more comparative categories are listed and Laurent admits he is biased as a 12-year Sun employee. Therefore, he invites comments stating, he "...tried to be as complete as possible in collecting the relevant RHEL 5 information, (but) there may be items that I missed."

One point of contention brought by admitted UNIX geek Mike Gerdts is that "Solaris is not developed as an open source project. OpenSolaris is, but Solaris is not."

Laurent counters, "Solaris 10 is still in a transitional state in the open source process. While I will admit that not all of the code is released, it is still light years ahead of AIX, HP-UX and some other products in that the community can look at the code and contribute to advanced technologies such as DTrace, ZFS and others that eventually get back ported into Solaris 10.

"As time progresses additional product (xVM, Solaris Next, Project Indiana appliances) will be derived from the OpenSolaris code base," Laurent adds.

Another reader requests more ISV support, which Laurent states, "...is definitely on the upswing and Sun anticipates that our OEM agreements with Dell and IBM will increase our x64 volume to such a level that ISV cannot ignore it."

Bottom line, Laurent makes his point about the costs, features, and platform support on the two operating systems. Why is this important? "There are a wide variety of products on which you can base you computing infrastructure. Having the most complete and correct information can help you to make decisions based upon facts rather than religious factors," he writes.

Take a look at Laurent\'s chart and then add your comments. [...read more...]

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