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Since the masses are always eager to believe something, for their benefit nothing is so easy to arrange as facts. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Karl Marx |
In old days it was Solaris that dominated workstation market as Intel CPUs were still not powerful enough to compete with RISC based CPUs. Sun started as a workstation company and it is not accidental that Sun trading symbol was SUNW (Sun Workstations; it was recently changed to Java, which might be a sure sigh of company decline ;-).
But those days are long gone and with them gone is any noticeable Solaris presence in workstation market. Now workstation market is dominated by Windows with linux share stable for many years at single digits. So both linux and Solaris have difficulties of holding the ground against Microsoft assault. Also with the growing popularity of laptops the distance between Windows and linux and Solaris as a desktop OS not only do not shrunk but became more and more pronounced. In fact it is safe to state that if we are guided by the level of market penetration alone as a desktop OS linux made very limited progress for all 15 years of its existence and Solaris disappeared from the radar screen.
Web site statistics that we have access to suggests that approximately 10% hits for a Unix oriented site from linux desktop/servers. Dominant 90% hits comes from Windows workstations. And this 10% share is pretty stable for the last 3-5 years it did not fluctuate more then 1% up or down. In this sense it is clear that linux is growing on desktop but the page of growth is approximately the same as the pace of growth of windows market.
In modern environment if we are talking about workstation we usually taking about laptop. Laptop gives developers and administrators important mobility advantages. Also computing speed-wise modem laptops are actually yesterday servers in disguise :-). Dual core 2GHz CPUs and 2G of RAM are now are standard configuration of mainstream enterprise laptops with 4G of RAM becoming more and more popular.
Another factor is that Windows works with newer hardware much better then any other OS. For example dual displays a must for any professional Unix administrators work best on windows. It is possible to use dual monitors on selected linux hardware configuration but the implementation is less mature. For example, Ubuntu 8.04 supports ATI Radeon 3850 and uses a new version of X.org which allows adjusting the system to 2 monitors.
Still if you have laptop with docking station on which there is a Nvidia graphic card capable supporting two monitors (like Dell D620/630 -- a popular corporate laptop) Windows is you only reasonable choice because you lose too much if you cannot use dual monitors capabilities.
Performance-wise laptops (and close to them small forms factor PCs) have become almost complete substitute for traditional "tower" desktops; in corporate space mostly "engineering workstations" continue to benefit from "tower" form-factor as with the only difference in video adapter they are actually small servers in disguise ;-). For both Linux and Solaris the most popular virtualized environment is VMware although Xen3 and Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 grows their market shares very rapidly. Such dual OS environment became the standard professional workstation environment and as I mentioned before is now widely used for complex software demos as well as software training. For example, if you need a Tivoli consultant to do some custom development or a marketing specialist to demo you some complex application, he/she typically uses laptop with two or three virtual servers under VMware. Actually Intel Duo-based laptops are the fastest growing segment of corporate PC market.
First of all this is a quality of the hardware architecture (CPU instruction set) and the existence of SunPCi cards that can run Windows. Such a tandem is more productive then pure Solaris or pure linux environment and the cost of the card is approximately the same as a copy of VMware for workstations but at the same time distance you more from "corporate desktop" and helps to avoid unnecessary questions. Now when Microsoft virtual PC 2007 is available for free and you can get a notebook with Intel's Core Duo T2400 CPU, 2G of RAM and 80G 7200 RPM drive for less then $1000 (as of mid-2007) this option became slightly less attractive.
VMware provides more flexible solution without sacrificing Windows excellent hardware compatibility and attempt to use linux as a single OS on laptops make sense only in severe cash strapped circumstances which are beyond the scope of this paper as we are discussing large enterprise environment. The typical laptop in this environment is Dell D630 or better. Even for home use you can always buy used laptop with Windows preinstalled ( ~$500 for more or less capable used D620 with 2G of RAM and 2GHz or better CPU).
The suggest that future of both linux and Solaris on workstations is running as a sidekick OS under VM.
Also in case of laptops OS X is a power to be reckoned with, so linux does not compete strictly with Windows in this environment. It needs to compete for the harts of the Unix enthusiasts with OX X. And in this area it fails miserably. There is no question that as for Unix desktop linux developers including Linus Torvalds are of much lesser caliber then Apple developers. In other words they suck.
But detailed picture is more complex and along with large dark areas there are some bright spots. For example in 2007 linux recently became an official installation option on desktops for Dell and some other less well-known PC manufactures producing mini-laptops (Asus eeE, etc) with linux preinstalled (at least for now, before they are burned by support costs). Solaris also became more competitive after Sun adopted equal levels of support for both X86 and SPARC platform.
Also along with virtualization trend (in which the fairy tail of "world domination" now is replaced by harsh reality of co-existence as a minority often in a form of a "guest OS") There is another trend that favors linux in large corporate environment.
Paradoxically this is connected with the decisive victory of "Corporate IT socialism" against capitalism in large corporations :-). This term more precisely reflect the essence of the problem with misguided and hypertrophied role of central planning (often "in the name of security" or SOX compliance, no more no less; as if SOX has anything to do with IT, despite quite successful efforts of major auditor companies to prove otherwise.) and simultaneous uncontrolled proliferation of IT bureaucrats who in best "land of socialism" tradition try to enhance their advancement chances by creating clueless or openly harmful all-encompassing policies and procedures. Often they not only demonstrate absence of understanding of any technical issues, but are completely detached from the common sense.
Partially as an overreaction to SOX, partially due to the greed of auditing companies, partially due to stagnation o IT in general, IT management more and more resorts to imposing a severe limitations of Windows functionality in the best "Brezhnev socialism" style. Such restrictions are damaging to the corporation as a whole not only because they are negatively affecting productivity and morale, but also because they channel staff energy into studying and creating countermeasure to defeat those measures. Usage of linux is one pretty common reaction of excessive bureaucratization of Windows environment. Solaris and some flavors of BSD sometimes are also used if the user has an experience with those OSes.
Windows, especially with paranoid micromanagers at the helm as well as the staff at IT security department (which in large corporation is often a dumping ground for people who cannot be productively used anywhere ;-), became more and more like IBM terminal. The situation of "don't do this, don't do that" is often enforced via Active Directory. That dramatically increases attractiveness of linux and to lesser extent Solaris. and BSD (with such distributions as PC-BSD, see Linux vs. BSD, What's the Difference). To a certain extent that returns linux to its roots as a "rebel OS".
In any case, there is distinct trend that repeat "glass computing center" history on a new level but where the attach target instead of mainframes with its MVS is now Windows. Group policies are often deployed in such a way that PC became semi-unusable. If we remember situation with mainframes and growth of mainframe bureaucracy before the demise of "glass wall datacenters", one can say that this is another example that "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce".
Security is actually a very complex topic and better then average security is difficult to achieve as it requires clean, well though out enterprise architecture. In other words 20% of enterprise security that are connected with architectural issues provide probably 80% of the level of security that can be achieved.
But in large corporation architects of IT, if such group of people exists at all, are generally detached from security issues and concentrate of issues related to the mission critical applications. That creates an opportunity for security department to hijack some architectural issues, the move that is difficult and dangerous to resist as it is so politically correct. This is also stimulated by greedy and incompetent auditors from big four companies. As talking about security became politically correct and universal "good thing" in large corporate environment many otherwise incompetent IT dwellers realized that it can boost your career promoting polically correct suggestions which are actually extremely actually is damaging to the IT environment. Active Directory group policies present plenty of opportunities for such career boosting moves and as a result as a new generation of corporate desktops is rolled out, they are becoming less and less user friendly and more and more restrictive.
I would like to stress that it looks like there is a "secular" (using investment jargon) trend in increasing of the rigidity of Windows environment and proliferation of red tape in the name of compliance and security. In many ways Windows environment start emulating mainframes (BTW mainframe administrators were universally hated by users ;-).
In a very paradoxical way Active Directory instead of cementing Windows dominance proved to be the best friend of alternative OSes such as linux and Solaris ;-). Also it is really amazing how much damage one micromanager in the position of the head of security department can inflict on unsuspecting users and the company using group policies. Children should never be allowed to play with matches :-).
I think that corporate security always attracted a special type of managers which I might called "over-promoted administrative assistants" with IT skills forever frozen on the level of basic functionality of MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Those types might closet sadists but in any case they have an obsessive desire to create harmful policies and procedures :-). In case of females such types usually successfully uses their gender as a bulletproof vest.
It looks like out of types enumerated in famous Stephan Zielinski's classification of system administrators (Know your Unix System Administrator) two types flourished under Windows umbrella and have found its way into security groups. Naturally they serve as the best advertisement for alternative operating systems:
The Administrative Fascist.
Usually a retentive drone (or rarely, a harridan ex-secretary) who has been forced into system administration....
The Idiot.
Usually a cretin, morphodite, or old COBOL programmer selected to be the system administrator by a committee of cretins, morphodites, and old COBOL programmers
Anyway as the tremendous amount of damage that was done in the name of security (or standardization) by some micromanagers
And as in any socialist environment the phenomena of "corporate socialism" creates forces of resistance ("IT freedom fighters"). In other works securitization of Windows environment create a powerful "countervailing forces" that favor linux and Solaris in a large corporate environment.
While not well organized, this counter-movement aims at "restoring lost freedoms" and aims at weakening or even defeating the most absurd measures imposed by corporate brass. Like often the case in such situations, members of the "resistance" are generally technically one step ahead of defenders of status quo.
While some of this guerilla war is fought in the Windows space, the most advanced part of the users already started to realize that change of the ground of fighting to less known to the opponent is more powerful strategy. That might partially explain tremendous success of VMware in desktop environment of large corporations: in a very subtle way it became a powerful tool of fighting strangulating restrictions implemented by misguided and incompetent IT micromanagers.
While usage of second PC, dual boot or boot from USB drive can help quite a bit, as soon as you have VMware installed you can install Windows or Linux the way you like on a separate partition (or even in a file) and run it as a guest OS. At this instance you can hide your favorite application. For example is SlickEdit is not allowed because is it not a standard application for a particular corporation, but you have huge experience with this editor, this is the way to solve the problem.
While often this second "custom" instance is Window (as corporations often do not used hardware version. For example Dell supplied registration tags you have a second registration key to install a second instance of Windows without infringing corporate software policy. With 320G drives installed on many laptop (you can actually replace small drive to bigger in most cases) there might be multiple alternative "guest OSes".
Usage of linux increases the distance from the ground occupied by IT micromanagers even further. More over linux as already shares some corporate applications (for example, Lotus Notes) with Windows so you can be more productive and do not need to switch to Windows for reading your corporate email. It also has huge PR support in mainstream IT press, which makes arguing your case significantly simpler. One very powerful "politically correct" accusation against the defenders of status quo is, of course, resisting cost-saving trends and better security ;-). I think any reasonably competent IT staffer can always explain his/her manager why he/she needs linux for software development or administration in a pretty convincing terms.
Now that's discuss the topic of "classic" software development, the area where Unix should have an advantage over Windows. There are three major programming languages in this area which dominate in large corporate environment: C, C++ and Java. In all three cases Solaris on Opteron is pretty competitive with linux but that does not matter much. Windows is even more competitive: due to quality of Visual Studio it became de-facto standard for developing commercial applications.
Still intelligent developers can get some value out of Solaris in two major cases:
Linux dominates open source software development space first of all due to availability of well packaged distributions (Debian, Ubuntu) which provide tremendous amount of software development tools "out of the box". Life is short and developers prefer to spend their time developing software not installing applications. But with the developer edition of Solaris 10 it might eventually became a worthwhile contender. Actually Windows is still contender too and with the availability of such environments as Cygwin and SFU 3.5. Cygwin is actually a pretty good development environment is more contender then many open source zealots would like to admit. More and more developers are using 'tandem" of Windows and Linux with the latter either under VM or as a separate machine.
Both Solaris and linux received a significant boost in workstation space due to the virtualization trend. With the current dual-core CPUs in workstation environment it does not make much sense to run a single OS: modern laptops and desktops are powerful enough to run two or even three OS instances without breaking sweet. New emerging standard for workstations and corporate desktops is a virtualized environment with both Windows and some flavor of linux or Solaris. Most often virtual environment is installed on Windows as Windows is a standard desktop in most large corporations. VMware Workstation 6 is now a leader in this space but Microsoft Virtual PC also has some adherents (and it is free).
It can be stated that a new type of demos of complex software product emerged due to availability virtual machines. Often they are called virtual appliance demos and come as VMware of Microsoft Virtual PC images. That actually now permit easy demonstration and studying of applications which previously were beyond reach of most enterprise IT staffers with their typical level of overload. And it helps to avoid blunders that were unavoidable in previous years due to limited exposure to a particular application before making critical decision whether to buy it or not. All-in-all this is a very progressive development and it can improve the software selection process in large corporate environment.
For non-corporate developers Solaris on UltraSparc can represent an interesting option for economic reasons: a very decent Sun development workstation can be bought for as little as $100 on eBay. For example typical listing in mid 2006 for Ultra 60 workstation with 1G of memory and two 18G drives was $30 plus shipping:
You are bidding on Sun Ultra 60 3D Creator 1024 Ram (2) 18 Gb drives. This unit has no operating system. This unit has (2) 360MHz CPU module, 1024 megs of ram and 2 Fujitsu UltraSCSI Drives.. This unit has a DOA warranty.
And that's an excellent 64-bit software development platform for under $100 -- the deal that not that easy to match even buying Dell workstation or low end server on the same site (note that is has top of the line SCSI controller and two small but high speed (10K RPM) SCSI drives). If you really need 64-bit operations or addressing but can live with slower CPUs this is a steal.
The existence of Cygwin and SFU 3.5 gives developers a possibility to use NFS to connect to drives on linux of Solaris server or OS instance running under VMware on the same PC. Cygwin also provides more or less adequate emulation of Unix filesystem API in Windows environment, less then SFU 3.5 but quite adequate for, say, Perl development. BTW rarely used but very high quality option here is AT&T Uwin environment. It contains full NFS implementation and uses ksh93 as a shell. The latest version as of mid-2006 is 4.1. It provides much better emulation then Cygwin and in some even better then SFU 3.5.
All-in-all linux does have almost universal appeal for developers in large corporate environment its proponents claim, if only for slightly different reasons ;-). Very few among highly qualified strata of large corporations IT staffers dismiss linux (mainly as bloatware and overhyped OS; in this case FreeBSD or Solaris is often used instead). Here is the letter to Computerworld editor about an article “Don’t Believe the Hype: The 21 Biggest Technology Flops,”
[Computerworld.com, April 4, 2007] which represents this minority view:My controversial addition would be Linux. It has never lived up to the hype of seven years ago. Back then, unless you were very computer-literate, you would not be able to install it on irregular hardware or correctly configure it to provide all the services and applications Windows users take for granted. Nowadays, Linux has caught up somewhat with providing the services (read: bells and whistles) that Windows users take for granted, but it has ballooned in size to become the bloatware that its earlier proponents had derided in Microsoft’s offerings. When I installed Mandrake 8 with all the bells and whistles, it consumed over 3GB of hard disk.
And with so many variations of Linux, the user base has fragmented.
I will admit that for specific purposes, and with adequate support, Linux can be very good. But has it lived up to the hype it had back then? Definitely not!
Robert Gardner
Port Macquarie, New South Wales, Australia
That's why some users prefer simpler, more compact distributions like Knoppix.
Please note that it is generally prohibited to use unsupported and non-certified versions of linux in large enterprise environment so installing Fedora or Debian in many places would violate corporate policy. Usually only Red Hat and/or Suse are certified for the usage in large corporate environment (lately Ubuntu joined them in some corporations). Just from the perspective of good governance, enterprise desktops/workstation should have a contract in place and have access to patches and external expertise in case they need it. In most cases installing Debian or Fedora on a spare corporate PC or laptop does not lead to escorting you out of the door by security, although, depending on the boss, might bring you some troubles during performance evaluation the next year :-)
Also as for Fedora, working with alpha version of future Red Hat Enterprise is risky and appeals mainly to beta addicts. But getting a legitimate license for linux desktop distribution is not that easy and in some corporations you can run into a lot of red tape. In extreme case you probably can be better off paying your own money for supported version of desktop linux just to avoid violation of the corporate policy that prohibits running unsupported OSes on corporate PCs. Here Solaris can be an attractive and politically correct option as security patches are free.
In Solaris you can use zones which are a different, more lightweight, virtualization solution (see
Notes on five different types of virtualization). While providing less overhead it is less flexible then VMware for developers (does not permit running Windows and Linux simultaneously). At the same time activities in zones are transparent for the master zone and as such provide interesting opportunities for developers.In case of SPARC you can get dual Windows/Solaris environment using SunPCi card mentioned above. It's strange that Sun does not support SunPCi on Opteron-based workstations. Other things equal it is often better to have an additional real CPU instead of virtual if both come for approximately the same price (price of SunPCi coincidentally is equal price of VMware workstation :-).
Still despite Solaris strengths in areas outlined above, linux is more convenient for prototyping and proved to be extremely helpful in corporate environments for fighting corporate red tape. Due to its better compatibility it usually can be installed on a typical "standard corporate desktop" without problems as dual boot system.
Generally in workstation area Solaris needs some "catch-up" as Red Hat "home" advantage of being the platform on which many important open source applications are developed is very difficult to overcome. Here Red Hat plays the role of Windows of Unix world or Microsoft XENIX, if you wish. Like XENIX before it, it become the most common and the most PC friendly flavor of Unix and is probably the most common flavor of desktop/workstation linux that you can find in corporate environment.
I think that the main danger to the value of desktop linux is in fragmentation. Red Hat is currently is an undisputed leader with the largest presence in large corporations. But it received a hole below waterline with the Oracle announcing support for its own distribution. Now both Novell and Ubuntu try to shake off Red Hat dominance and they have some advantages behind them.
Novell is an old OS developer (Netware was for many years the leading networking OS) who at one time was the owner of Unix Labs and produced probably the best early X86 Unix distribution (UnixWare). Recently it made some real progress in penetration of large enterprises with Suse 10. It also helps that Novell is an old networking company which essentially created enterprise networking and Netware still have presence in many large enterprises for file and print services. Due to its past the company has an unsurpassed understanding of Windows compatibility issues and talented staff which created some products that were able successfully complete and outperform Microsoft products. It has approximately 300 engineers working full time on open source code, one of the largest amount in the industry. As I mentioned before Novell also greatly benefit form the pact with Microsoft which explicitly permits ruining Windows instance under Suse-based XEN. Also Virtual PC 2007 supports running Suse 10 workstation quite well.
Canonical has a talented leader as well as support of many developers, has vibrant community, and Google as a customer. It also benefits from the fact that it is functioning more like a charity then as a for profit enterprise with the funds of the owner able to subsidize the company for a considerable period of time. That means that it can afford being less profitable. In comparison Novell is still bleeding money and as a public company has substantial pressure from shareholders to provide the return on equity. Red Hat generally functions as a mutual fund so it is somewhere in between.
In this areas Solaris 10 has the advantage of being "the one, the only". While alternative distributions exists none can compete with Sun supported Solaris 10 distribution. As for the potential for Solaris to overtake Linux on desktop and workstation I think they are slim: Linux advantage instantly become visible if you need to venture outside a small set of "universally available" open source applications. Many potentially valuable for large enterprise "workstation space" open source applications are systematically packaged only for linux, usually for Red Hat and Debian. Recently developers started to package VMware images (virtual appliances) which dramatically simplify evaluation. That does not always mean that those applications are more stable on, say, Red Hat then on Solaris, but the effort of keeping up with the upgrades is definitely less for distributions that package most of the open source software and provide systematic packaged updates for the largest number of software products.
But if you develop open source applications yourself or perform massive customarization of existing open and complex codebase the situation somewhat changes. We will analyze this situation in more details later.
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Created Jan 2, 2005. Last modified: October 09, 2009